Poet Mark Strand in town

Mark Strand will be at the Lighthouse Writer's Spring Studio weekend, May 3 and 4. Strand is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, former US Poet Laureate, and one of the leading writers of his generation. His work--both poetry and prose--is wonderfully nuanced, dreamlike, and reverberant. Of his work, Harold Bloom has said "These poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can," and Louis Gluck has said that his work "infuses a wry tenderness; the wit we have come to expect has developed into a wildly supple instrument, a sort of celestial shrug. Poetry at this level manifests profound wisdom."

The New Yorker has written: "A poet of commanding intellect and haunting imagery, he catches glimmers that hover at the furthest reaches of consciousness." The New York Time Book Review wrote, "Strand's poems resonate with a shimmering sense of the infinite that befits his stature... His apparently simple lines have the eerie, seductive ring of the inevitable."

Here's one of his best known poems, just to give you a taste of his work.

Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.


For more samples of his work, check out the Lighthouse blog.

My Town Monday: You call this art?

Denver has a new piece of public art. It's located at Denver International Airport, which since I am traveling often to promote my book I get to see way too much of. Our public arts folks are googly-eyed over it, but I find it hideous. Even worse than ugly, it doesn't mean anything to me. It's supposed to be about movement and power. OK. So why is it blue? Why does it have Satanic red eyes? And thick black veins going through it (which this picture spares you from)? I'm not inclined to be one of those people who think art should mean something obvious. Or should always be "pretty." But boy this mustang doesn't do it for me.

And it's not our only piece of not-so-great public art. We also have a big blue bear (we like big blue animals for some reason), which peeks into the Convention Center. It's cute. And amusing. Ha, ha, a big blue bear is looking inside at all the conventioneers. But...art?

However, my votes for the worst public sculptures are these:

These stick-figure dancers hang out in front of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Whatever planet these folks are from, can we send them back? Please. Perhaps these "big giant heads" (which Hubby actually likes) located in City Park can help them find their way home.

Anybody moved by some public art in Denver or somewhere else?

My Town Monday Mash-Up

Travis Erwin and friends are blogging about their towns on Mondays. For my entry, this week, I want to talk about some of the writers who live in Denver (and the surrounding area...stretching "my town" to include the Front Range).

It's amazing how many published writers live here. I get emails from the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers list serve. I belong to Lighthouse Writers Workshop. I'm a member of the Denver Literary Ladies. And I still don't know (or know of) all the working writers in town. I know this because one of them, J.D. Mason, emailed me after seeing the review in Essence. Here we are both sister-writers in the same city and have never met. (Though we're going to remedy that next month!)

Some of our local writers are quite famous (Diane Mott Davidson, Rick Reilly, Stephen White, Joan Borysenko) so they don't need any extra love from this blog. Following are some of the writers not so famous (though they should be!) who live in (or near) Denver. We got everything from memoirists to literary novelists to genre writers. Something for everyone!

Elizabeth Wrenn, the novel Around the Next Corner
Kim Reid, author of the amazing memoir No Place Safe (see Q&A here)
J.D. Mason, best-selling novels including, This Fire Down in My Soul
Donna Gershten, the novel Kissing the Virgin's Mouth (winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction)
Nick Arvin, the highly acclaimed novella Articles of War (see a great Q&A with Nick here)
Robin D. Owens, RITA-award-winning author of novels including Keepers of the Flame
Debra Fine, internationally known conversation expert, author of The Fine Art of the Big Talk
Andrea Cohen, M.D., editor of A Blessing in Disguise: 39 Life Lessons from Today's Greatest Teachers
William Haywood Henderson, literary novels including Augusta Locke
Marisol, The Lady, the Chef, the Courtesan
Karen Degroot Carter, One Sister's Song
Robert Greer, author of the CJ Floyd Mysteries
Mario Acevedo, author of the Felix Gomez vampire stories
Shari Caudron, author of nonfiction including Who Are You People?
Constance Hardesty, Grow Your Own Pizza: Gardening Plans and Recipes for Kids
Marilyn Raff, The Intuitive Gardener: Finding Creative Freedom in the Garden
Eli Gottlieb, novels including the highly acclaimed Now You See Him
Janis Hallowell, novels including The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn and the forthcoming She Was
Karen Palmer, novels including Border Dogs
Sandra Dallas, best-selling novels including Tall Grass and nonfiction about Colorado
Susan Skog, award-winning author of Peace in Our Lifetime and other uplifting books
John Dunning, author of the Cliff Janeway mysteries

I know there are many, many others I'm forgetting. If you know one or if you are one, drop a note in the comments.

And on another note, thinking about best-selling rankings and the Who's Who of local writers made me think about the best books that nobody knows about. When I was a book-seller at the Tattered Cover I used to hand-sell I Asked for Intimacy: Stories of Blessings, Betrayals and Birthings by Renita Weems. I would place the one copy the store stocked on the staff recommends shelf. It would sell and the store would order another and as soon as it came in, I'd put it back out on the staff recommends shelf. I took it as my personal duty to share this slim volume of lovely, moving essays.

What would you recommend as the best book that nobody else has heard of?

Tattered Cover

Killing a couple of birds with this one (hmmm, sounds like a metaphor created by my cat!): taking care of My Town Monday and hint, hint my book-signing tomorrow when it's supposed to get cold and rainy/snowy. Grrr. On Wednesday it's supposed to be back sunny and in the 50s! Not that I take weather personally, or anything. :-)

Anyhow, back to Tattered Cover, one of the best independent book stores in the country. TC (as we friends of the store call it) has 3 locations. The store I'll be signing at is the LoDo (Lower Downtown) store.

The other day I was at a meeting and someone commented that after I do my signing at TC, my life would change. Getting published and doing signings is great and all, but...I've done 3 signings at TC already. It doesn't exactly change your life.

I actually worked at TC for about 2 1/2 years. I used to (very lovingly!) call it the home for the vocationally challenged. I know I was when I worked there. It's a good place to go when you need to lick your wounds or dial down the stress in your life. You'll never meet a bunch of kinder, smarter, more interesting people anywhere. I worked with a former judge, a former ER nurse, a former nun, a former monk, and a lot of good writers. Many of my coworkers had more than one advanced degree. It was hard not to laugh in the face of people who wanted to apply for a job when they tried to impress me with their BA, JD or MFA. I used to think, "Yeah, get in line." (Not that I was hiring, but sometimes people would ask me for an application and take the opportunity to point out just how cool they were and how lucky the store would be to have them.)

I started about a year after my first book, Walk Tall, had been published. I actually had the opportunity a couple of times to sell my own book. Once a customer approached me and asked if I knew where she could find it. I thought a coworker had put her up to it. But no. Just right place right time. Another time, a man was buying it along with a stack of others. As I rang up the book, I turned it over to reveal my photo on the back. We both had a good laugh, but I always wondered if those customers left thinking, "Book must not be any good or would she be working in a book store?"


Which leads me back to my point: in terms of fame and fortune, for many, many, many of us writers being successfully published means about as much as any other job I've had. You could fill the Grand Canyon with writers who've published multiple books and been reviewed in newspapers across the country and yet they're not household names, they don't get on Oprah, they don't have a million dollars, nobody recognizes them in the grocery store.


Having said all that, being a published author is much cooler than any other job I've ever had! And for all you out there working on your first novels I hope you get to find out just how cool it is. I'll be posting pictures from the launch party sometime later this week. I've got relatives and friends coming in from 4 cities for a few days of celebrating (I'm taking 7 of them to Idaho Springs on Wednesday). I'll be back to the blog when the champagne wears off!

My Town Monday

Travis Erwin came up with this great idea. On Mondays we blog about our home towns, or where we live or about some town. I'll be blogging about Denver.

Travis blogged about (yuck!) Dr. Phil. I'm blogging about Hattie McDaniel. Most of y'all know her as "Mammy" from Gone with the Wind. McDaniel wasn't born in Denver, but moved here when she was a little girl. Now, all this I've known for a while. What I didn't know, is that her family (her father was a freed slave) was lured here just like white folks were by the idea of striking it rich. There was a black prospector named Jeremiah Lee (former slave of Gen. Robert E. Lee) who hit the mother lode and was living it up in Central City.

During this time, 1890s-early 1900s Denver was very welcoming to blacks (y'all remember I pointed out that Madame C.J. Walker had started here in the early 1900s). The city had African Americans in city government and on the police force.

But as the black population grew, the white citizens became less hospitable. (Denver actually has quite the Klan legacy.) McDaniel's family struggled quite a bit, but Denver is where her career began. Her family's history and continuing racism is what led McDaniel to famously declare she'd "rather play a maid than be one."

McDaniel, of course, was the first black person to win an Oscar (and the first black person to even be invited to the ceremony--though she was made to sit at a different table). That means in one generation, her family went from slavery to Hollywood. I'm sure she took a lot of shit (from whites who were racists and blacks who saw her as a sell-out), but what an achievement!

And, good to know: Clark Gable was a good friend to her and advocated strongly on her behalf in Hollywood. I knew I always liked Rhett (especially more than ole wimpy Ashley!).

Source: Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, by Jill Watts