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ABOUT THAT NEW BOOK
“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”– Charles Baudelaire
I must admit I have been having a bit of trouble pulling a
press kit together to launch the marketing campaign for my new poetry book, Monsters & Bugs. My new book
published August 27, 2017 just ahead of my 65th birthday on the 31st.
I am not quite three weeks and four pages into shaping the press kit when I have a quite sinister car accident which totals my 2004 Mazada Miata convertible. The wreck of my world bangs me about a bit. Some part of me feels like it has become part of the crushing wreckage, now a burden of time. It is not in this moment but in another, the one in the gap between then and now the ghost of Baudelaire finds me. “Become drunken,” whispers his shade. It is between moments when death flashes underneath the green light at the intersection where the accident occurs, and I now, marveling that the severest of my several injuries is a soft tissue, contusion of the wrist the doctor advises will heal in six weeks, that I think of Baudelaire who suggests how to become drunken in one’s inner nature and why.
All this while ice has been my friend, I have become aware of existence and the burden of time. Rest and compression using a Spica thumb brace, then elevation of the injury are constant companions. Being a mythologist, I examined “Spica” in Greek mythology by pressing the image back into its archetypal, historical pattern. Spica is the grain of the goddess. In this September-October moment Spica reflects the Ceres sacrifice, the horrible burden crushing one into Earth, dust to dust. And one does not die, one lives.
The doctor assures me I will still be able to type but I find the constant throbbing between thumb and wrist hampers entering into necessary levels of depth that allow one of Baudelaire’s other maxims to operate. Baudelaire’s second insight suggests when one is writing one continually strive waxing poetic even in one’s prose. Thusly I recall the miracle in my transitoriness: blood becomes ink and water becomes wine and who is the poet whispers nearby, “be always drunken.”
Over the weekend I’ve begun car hunting for a new Mazda Miata convertible and this morning I have reopened the press kit to revise what I’ve written plus add some poetic touches to those lively monsters of my fancy you will encounter in Monsters & Bugs.
notes
1. Inspiration for this blog as well as finishing my press kit came to me while checking into Baudelaire’s turning of beauty. One of the inspirations for insects as soul guides was noticing how not often insects are included in images of beauty. Yet their very strangeness suggests to me they must be included. I was checking into Baudelaire’s quote on including the strange and bizarre in our Beauty Way when I found @FlynnGrayWriter blog, a very fine, fingertip source for getting at the writings of Baudelaire on line.
2. Pope, Stephanie. Monsters & Bugs: Selected Poems. ©2017, Mandorla Books.
I am not quite three weeks and four pages into shaping the press kit when I have a quite sinister car accident which totals my 2004 Mazada Miata convertible. The wreck of my world bangs me about a bit. Some part of me feels like it has become part of the crushing wreckage, now a burden of time. It is not in this moment but in another, the one in the gap between then and now the ghost of Baudelaire finds me. “Become drunken,” whispers his shade. It is between moments when death flashes underneath the green light at the intersection where the accident occurs, and I now, marveling that the severest of my several injuries is a soft tissue, contusion of the wrist the doctor advises will heal in six weeks, that I think of Baudelaire who suggests how to become drunken in one’s inner nature and why.
All this while ice has been my friend, I have become aware of existence and the burden of time. Rest and compression using a Spica thumb brace, then elevation of the injury are constant companions. Being a mythologist, I examined “Spica” in Greek mythology by pressing the image back into its archetypal, historical pattern. Spica is the grain of the goddess. In this September-October moment Spica reflects the Ceres sacrifice, the horrible burden crushing one into Earth, dust to dust. And one does not die, one lives.
The doctor assures me I will still be able to type but I find the constant throbbing between thumb and wrist hampers entering into necessary levels of depth that allow one of Baudelaire’s other maxims to operate. Baudelaire’s second insight suggests when one is writing one continually strive waxing poetic even in one’s prose. Thusly I recall the miracle in my transitoriness: blood becomes ink and water becomes wine and who is the poet whispers nearby, “be always drunken.”
Over the weekend I’ve begun car hunting for a new Mazda Miata convertible and this morning I have reopened the press kit to revise what I’ve written plus add some poetic touches to those lively monsters of my fancy you will encounter in Monsters & Bugs.
notes
1. Inspiration for this blog as well as finishing my press kit came to me while checking into Baudelaire’s turning of beauty. One of the inspirations for insects as soul guides was noticing how not often insects are included in images of beauty. Yet their very strangeness suggests to me they must be included. I was checking into Baudelaire’s quote on including the strange and bizarre in our Beauty Way when I found @FlynnGrayWriter blog, a very fine, fingertip source for getting at the writings of Baudelaire on line.
2. Pope, Stephanie. Monsters & Bugs: Selected Poems. ©2017, Mandorla Books.
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