Monty Python's Poet Sketches

Tip of the hat to the inimitable Ernest Hilbert for posting these at the wonderful E-Verse Radio blog.

Lorem Ipsum on the shoals

From BoingBoing:

Lorem Ipsum books, a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass, is up for sale. Cambridge is one of the great bookselling towns of the world, and Lorem Ipsum was founded as a project by an MIT Media Lab grad named Matt Mankins, to explore sustainable business-models for brick-and-mortar bookselling. Now Mankins has moved to NYC to be CTO of a big magazine publisher, and he's taken to Hacker News to solicit buyers and ideas for the store (which is losing money).

BoingBoing readers -- those happy mutants -- are book readers; accordingly the comments thread at the BoingBoing post contains many suggestions and observations for the new or current owners of this or any other independent bookstore:

• put in a bistro and salad bar, coffee or tea shop
• sell books for delivery on multimedia devices and CD
• RENT books for delivery on multimedia devices and CD, with limited duration and expiry
• install a 3D printing station or otherwise invest in attracting the hackerspace crowd
• "some of the best book stores I've been in -- and return to -- are small, enclosed, and meandering. It's like there's a secret waiting around the next corner and usually, there is a great book I've never read around that corner. Cozy chairs are a must too." [A nod here to the cozy -- alright, chaotic -- Diskovery Books]
• allow for increased inventory turnover without incurring additional stocking and warehousing costs, by moving stock at professional, academic, and hobbyist conventions 
• convert the store into a pay-toilet location, and offer books for sale to those who need something to read whilst using the facilities
• raise prices ("You're not running a table on a street corner, don't stock or price like you are. There's no reason to be selling used books for less than half their retail price.")
• lower prices ("Raggedy old paperbacks should be cheap, like $4 or less.")
• do not let your enthusiasm for retail innovation blind you to the barriers you are erecting between customers and a sale -- such as when you cease in marking books with prices, and instead expect the customer to calculate the price as some multiple of the cost of a locally-sold sandwich (!) or to speak with the counter staff to get a sale price
• engage with local bloggers and content providers, and rent them shelf or counter space to market custom branded products and promotional items
• rent the space for events every night of the week, at $100 a pop (staffed by a local university student doing their retail or book industry internship)
• take a fee for recommending book services freelancers to customers looking to have design, editing, production, or writing work done
• become a specialty procurer rather than vendor of mass product

That last hits home for me especially. As a book buyer I rarely had a reason to stop by Lorem Ipsum -- their inventory was too run-of-the-mill to attract devotees of the odd; too low-market for antiquarians and bibliophiles; and too static, with insufficient turn-over, to attract someone like me who has specific literary and scholarly interests, and who will be looking for titles related to particular topics. The staff, on the few occasions I spoke with them early in the store's history (and before they moved shop to their present location), were not themselves book people, and didn't command the same kind of knowledge of books and their inventory that would have made me a more committed customer. For which expertise I mourn the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo...

Maria Gapotchenko in 3QD

How wonderful to see that the blog 3 Quarks Daily ("3QD is smart and high-class."—Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate) has selected a poem from one of our Boston Poetry/Pen & Anvil publications for this week's Sunday Poem pick. The piece, "Third Person" by Maria Gapotchenko, was originally published in Clarion #15.

In Third Person

a haze a heron in a tide-pool
and for a long time out of time
two children push a giant yellow globe

coyotes come and every June the same
the unrequited loneliness the same
out-of-tune expressions herons dance
the same blue wings
                           it all made sense
the way he asked me for the Book of Job
to make some pattern make some rhyme
out of his life before he die
the way he scrutinized his patterned robe

when he did die it's simply that he sensed
there was no more to do no other dance
to be composed no present tense

Call for Submissions: MOJO

We honor the history of the struggle of Black people in America, but we still want to construct our own notion of Blackness that is separate from that of our parents and grandparents.

--Derek Conrad

Editor Mignon Ariel King has written to ask that we share the news that MoJo! -- an online journal of Black and African-American women's poetry, flash memoir, and social commentary -- is now reading  submissions for the Spring/Summer Issue. Deadline: June 15, 2012. Guidelines and past issues can be found online at http://mapsonehq.wordpress.com/mojo.

NB: If you're active in the Boston literary scene, you may have recognized King's name. In addition to her work with MoJo!, she is also the host of "A Century of Black Voices",  an annual poetry reading celebrating Black History Month; the director of Hidden Charm Press (publisher of small books of poetry and memoir by Black women), and author of the Making Poetry blog.

For updates on MoJo! Writers and other Black poets of New England, follow MoJo! on Facebook.

Lahiri on the Sentence

Draft is a new New York Times blog series about the art and craft of writing. Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies, was asked to write the first entry. She writes:

All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.

Tuesday Poem: "The Wild Bees"

Over at the Tuesday Poem blog, we see a lovely poem by John Griffin. As explains this week's TP curator, "The Wild Bees" is "really a kind of love poem, an offering of soma or salve, a nectar meant to soothe the pain of a writer (a writer-goddess in this case) to whom, or perhaps with whom, the poet is responding." A stanza taste:

Veined wings made of water lift water’s weight
and flap water’s freight improbably into flight
where it hovers now before the portals of pollen
and fans antigens, powder down and dander
with such a busy buzz the glassine scales intensify
the air, evaporate the dew and vaporize your tears.

Online at the Tuesday Poem blog.

"Casualty," a new poem by Melissa Green

Melissa Green's posting for this week's Tuesday Poem, "Casualty," is stunning. A soldier, who knows his condition, is lifted on his shield and carried away from where he fell by a party of unnamed stretcher-bearers. They might be medics, or psychopomps, or Valkyries; her poem encompasses both the real and the mythic.

The perpetual journey of those who bear the dead is chilling; a retreat from war that doesn't deny but rather speak truth against war. As they march, or more likely stagger grimly, through the surf and mud and campaign fields, Green names the places they have walked before, are walking, will walk perpetually as long as war is waged: "Bosworth Field, Bull Run, Crécy," "The Siege of Acre, the Siege of Austerlitz." There is something of Isaac Rosenberg's pathos here -- his "Earth has waited for them" ("Dead Man's Dump") her "murmuring of cypresses urging them on" -- and of his stillness -- his "None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass," her "They followed the snowy lanes through sleepy villages." I hear also Wilfred Owen's theatrical outrage -- his "each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds" ("Anthem for Doomed Youth"), her "incarnadine clotting the water."

Also David Jones, Yeats, and Whitman. Not that I see Green's poem as a verbal child of that prior art; her language is her own, and if she has woven in phrases from other sources I do not recognize them. But then, a poem needn't bring in literal allusions to the works that went into its composition, in order to claim its place among the. The peculiar color mixed from a particular integrity of emotion and the particular verbal texture, too, should be considered allusion, as much as a borrowed phrase. Or more so; often an appropriated is re-colored by its inclusion in a non-native context. Whereas a particular moral seriousness will remain recognizable (palpable, audible) in any number of differing phrasings. Call it "family resemblance."

The battles -- so many -- are listed alphabetically in harrowing abecedary. What happens in her listing is both geological and archeological: the solemn digging into history and self that reveals stratum upon stratum of conflict each laid over the one before, the graves deepened and widened to accommodate new bodies before the grass has had time to soften the earth pushed hastily into the trench. A catalog not of ships, but of the dead that were borne by those ships to their death.

"Casualty" is not just an alphabetical exercise. The poem is free of the battlefield tabering that can sometimes he heard when war is depicted in anti-way poetry. It is appropriate that we learn nothing about the soldier being carried, or what he was fighting against or for or why. Bombardment and the tread of vehicles and men create the universal, landscape of war: featureless, empty, squalid, boundless.

Beneath the gross burden of these wars and their dead, we would be right to feel while reading this as if we too were struggling with the weight of a fallen soldier, trying to reach some safer place behind the front line; as if, struggling, we'd fallen to our knees in that clammy Asia Minor mud she writes about, amid the stink and clamor and "crimson chorus of the guns."

[Cross-posted from The Wonder Reflex blog by Zachary Bos]