Introducing our #newrelease : #Memior BORN TO FLY by #pilot Paul Misencik

Available here!

Paul R. Misencik was born to fly. 
Since he was four and tagging along with his father to air shows in rural Ohio, through his career as an airline captain with American, Middle Eastern and African airlines, Misencik spent his life doing what he loved: flying airplanes. BORN TO FLY chronicles both the inside scoop on a pilot's career as well as the exotic locations his airplanes took him, sometimes being joined by the love of his life, Sally. Highly entertaining and enormously informative. Now available in paperback right here.

Paul Misencik, native of Northern Ohio. 
Graduate University of Akron, 1963, M.A. American History specializing in Native American Culture and Colonial American History. While in high school, he was regular on Saturday afternoon TV show hosted by Jim Breslin, where Paul discussed Ohio Native-American culture and society. After college, Paul taught school and coached high school football in Akron Ohio. On weekends and during the summer he worked as a flight instructor, stunt pilot, and aerobatic instructor. He fondly recalls flying with Richard Bach the author of Jonathon Livingston Seagull, and he provided aerobatic instruction to George Peppard, the star of the WWI flying movie, The Blue Max. In 1967, Paul was hired as a pilot with Eastern Airlines and flew as a captain, flight instructor, and check-airman until they ceased operations in 1991. While at Eastern, h was artist and cartoonist for the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) Airline Pilot Magazine. After Eastern Airlines, he flew as an international airline captain with four other airlines including USAfrica Airways which was headquartered in Reston Virginia. As a captain with non-scheduled Airlines, Paul has had some of his most memorable aviation adventures. In 1996 Paul was hired as a major air carrier investigator with the national transportation safety Board and in 1998 he was promoted to his present position as the chief of the operational factors division at the NTSB. 

Spotlight on #author Nicholas DiGiovani @nidigiovanni @VCCA

Today's Friday Fellow is Nicholas DiGiovanni, a fiction writer, essayist and award-winning journalist from New Jersey. Nick is currently completing his fifth residency at VCCA (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts) and reports that he has written over 10,000 words during his stay!  

His essay collection, 'Man Has Premonition of Own Death,' was inspired by his strange tale of his great-uncle, a 23-year-old carpet-mill worker, in the 1920s -- and by the author's own sudden encounter with serious illness. Below is a sample. The complete work is available on Amazon. http://amzn.to/2BIWO6w

The old radio star Edgar Bergen had a ventriloquist dummy named Mortimer Snerd who had a well-known catchphrase: “Who woulda thunk it?” 

I’m here to say “Who woulda thunk it?” And I’m here to talk about death, mortality and a young man named Thomas Crooks.

Years ago, I stumbled upon, in an old Bible, a yellowed newspaper clipping from a now-defunct daily newspaper in my old hometown, The Yonkers (N.Y.) Herald Statesman. The headline read: MAN HAS PREMONITION OF OWN DEATH. The article, from 1923, was about the death of a 25-year-old worker at the Alexander Smith carpet mill.

It reported that young Crooks had met his fiancé for lunch one afternoon at a lovely old burial ground across the street from the mill. When the whistle blew at the carpet mill, young Thomas headed back to work. That’s when, the article reports, Thomas stopped, turned around, looked back at his fiancé and declared, “I am going in. But I shall be carried out.” 

Fifteen minutes after relaying his bizarre message to his girlfriend, Thomas “fell” into a shallow vat of acid that was used in the carpet-curing process. Workers pulled him out. Others ran to fetch the lad’s mother. She rushed to the hospital, got there while Thomas was still alive but mortally injured, and held her son in her arms. The last sentence of the newspaper article:: “Mrs. Crooks was burned about the face as she continually kissed her dying son.”

Mrs. Crooks was my maternal great-grandmother. Thomas was my mother’s uncle and my grandmother’s brother. I, of course, never knew him, but I have been to his grave – in the same cemetery, across from the same carpet mill.

I’d been working on this eclectic collection for a while when I had my very own Mortimer Snerd moment. One night, I went to plug my telephone charger into a wall outlet and toppled over as I lost my balance. After that, it’s all very vague. I remember a couple of young policemen, I remember being in the emergency room. I don’t remember getting there. An emergency CAT scan determined that I had a foreboding mass of some kind at the back of my head. The tumor was removed in emergency surgery – and so my own battle unexpectedly began.

Who woulda thunk it?

Read our #TuesdayThoughts as a midweek #poetic outburst

Like a Dog: available here

Slashie

Best of both worlds:

purveyor of packaged goods

just five steps from the bar,

Janus of the neighborhoods

pre-gentrification relic

bravely facing gritty renewal,

ideal place for odd occasions.

I miss your neon and smoke,

the old men ribbing me in Polish,

as the barkeep worked molasses

out of his legs to grudgingly pour

a shot while I wasted time between classes

pretended I understood the barfly’s joke,

nodded at midday mothers pushing strollers.

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

View rare #video footage of Bethlehem #steel plant #KU

Spotlight on #BHBW author Larry James Neff

On November 16th, 1990 at 8:04 AM, rigger Larry James Neff filmed his Bethlehem Steel crew working on ore bridge #1 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. Dedicated to brother rigger Pete Chando (1951-2010).

Larry's memoir, Rigger: A Memoir from High School to High Steel, is now available for Kindle and can be read for free with the Kindle Unlimited lending library!

Rigger:

This world doesn’t exist anymore. It was a time when jobs were plentiful and workers were scarce. The Vietnam War raged on, dividing the county. The sexual revolution was here, embraced with open arms. The selective service was collecting young men who didn’t wish to be soldiers. Women sought a well-deserved equality. Music was changing, giving us protest songs to help stop a war. It was a time when, with only a high school diploma, you could follow your father into a high-paying but very dangerous industry. This is a story of a young man’s quest, raised on traditional morals and values, to find his way through this tumultuous era, adhering to some of his values and discarding others.

It is also a story of survival in the very dangerous occupation of “hanging iron”. Mr. Neff, the son of a steelworker, joined the ranks of Bethlehem Steel employees in 1972, and became a rigger in 1975. The rigger crews in the Steel Company did the jobs that were deemed too high, too hard, or too dangerous for other departments to handle. They also had a certain reputation for being somewhat crazy, but able to get the job done.

This is a sometimes light-hearted and always uncensored view of day-to-day work in the Bethlehem Steel mill. You’ll read about close brushes with death, about a young woman’s quest to become the first female rigger in a male-dominated workplace, and the playful and sometimes rough antics of co-workers. This book talks of life among rivers of molten iron, walking steel hundreds of feet in the air, and the men (and the woman) who were tough enough to do it. You’ll read of “snakes”, rats, ghosts, picking locks, explosions planned and unplanned. It will illicit snorts of laughter and perhaps a tear or two, and give you a view into a world that few have ever known.

About Larry:

Larry Neff was born and raised in Bethlehem, PA, the son of a steelworker. He worked at Bethlehem Steel from 1972 until the plant closed in 1999. His love of climbing helped him earn a place with the rigger crews that did the jobs deemed too high, too hard, or too dangerous for other Bethlehem Steel departments to handle. Larry has two sons, Jared, 33, and Adam, 29. He still lives in Bethlehem, still loves hiking and climbing, and is working on his next book.

#BHBW Books you can read for free with #KindleUnlimited

Blue Heron Book Works books now available in Kindle!

Did you know you could read our best-loved books for free with the Kindle lending library program?  Here's an overview of our titles now available for immediate download:

Rigger: A Memoir from High School to High Steel

by Larry James Neff

Man Has Premonition of Own Death: An Ancestor's Strange Demise and Other Mortal Matters

by Nicholas DiGiovanni

Like a Dog: A Memoir

by Vincent Francone

Off Track: or How I Dropped Out of College and Came to be a Horse Trainer in the 1970s While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs

by Jim McGarrah

Misdemeanor Outlaw: A Memoir

by Jim McGarrah

Map of Life and Beauty

by Fanny Barry

Last Call (Memoir): My Mother's Descent Into Darkness

by Paul Heller

Have Love (Have a Life Book 1)

by Maddy Wells

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! https://twitter.com/BlueHeronBW

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK! https://www.facebook.com/blueheronbookworks/

SaveSave

#BookRelease BHBW announces new #memoir by Billy Ehrlacher!

Available here in paperback!

Tales from the Hot Dog Grill: The Uncensored Memoirs of a Food Service Engineer 

by Billy Ehrlacher

"The setting of our tale is Doomsdale" and Jon and Kiki's story goes downhill from there! College students, Jon and Kiki work for the OTHER hot dog stand in Doomsdale and their boss, Wicked Wilma, hires them to go underground and work for the popular competition to discover their secret ingredient....hint: it's not the sauce! A modern day Candide, Jon romps through the absurd world of fast food and concludes it's the WORST of all possible worlds.

About the author:

Billy Ehrlacher obtained a bachelor's degree in theatre from DeSales University.  SInce graduating Billy has performed all over the Lehigh Valley as well as in New York City.  Some of his past theatre roles include:  Robert in Ceiling Art, Forrest in Warped Speed Dating, Lab Tech in Women are From Venus Men are From Uranus, Ahmed in Getting Complete, Barry in Lois's Wedding, Mickey Black in Tony & Tina's Wedding, Sal in Tony & Tina's Wedding, Grumio in Babes in Toyland, Al in The Philadelphia, Snout in a Midsummer Night's Dream, Mike in Dinner With Marney, and Etienne in The Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. and Mohameed in The Tale of the Allergist's Wife among many others. He has performed his well received cabaret act at The Duplex Cabaret Theatre, Don't Tell Mama, and The Laurie Beechman Theatre all in New York City.  A civic minded individual Billy is a longtime advocate and a staunch supporterof Downtown Allentown.  In 2012 his efforts were awarded with the 2012 Downtown Ambassador Award.  Billy also  previously hosted his own radio show called, The Billy Show.  He is  presently working on developing not one but two  web soap operas.  One has a working title of The Neighborhood, and the other Dumpster City.  Billy Ehrlacher resides in Allentown, PA.

Tales from the Hot Dog Grill is available here: click here to view the paperback book

Here's Billy's author page over at BHBW: http://www.blueheronbookworks.com/billy-ehrlacher.html

Spotlight on #BHBW author Paul Misencik, Sr. #memoir

While most people scramble to keep up with one life, Paul Misencik Sr. is busy living about five. And Blue Heron Book Works is thrilled to announce that we are publishing his memoir FLYING early next year. 

This is Paul: At the age of four Paul took his first airplane ride in a 1929 Ford Trimotor, made of corrugated aluminum and lovingly nicknamed the “Tin Goose.” He still vividly remembers that first plane ride. From then on, Paul was hooked on airplanes, learning to fly before he could drive. He wooed the love of his life, Sally, at the age of fifteen by taking her on several airplane rides. Sally was blissfully unaware at the time that Paul wasn’t yet old enough to qualify for a pilot’s license.

Paul is a native of Northern Ohio. Graduated University of Akron, 1963, M.A. American History specializing in Native American Culture and Colonial American History. While in high school, he was a regular on a Saturday afternoon TV show hosted by Jimmy Breslin, where Paul discussed Ohio Native-American culture and society. After college, Paul taught school and coached high school football in Akron Ohio. On weekends and during the summer he worked as a flight instructor, stunt pilot, and aerobatic instructor. He fondly recalls flying with Richard Bach the author of Jonathon Livingston Seagull, and he provided aerobatic instruction to George Peppard, the star of the WWI flying movie, The Blue Max.

In 1967, Paul was hired as a pilot with Eastern Airlines and flew as a captain, flight instructor, and check-airman until they ceased operations in 1991. While at Eastern, he was artist and cartoonist for the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) Airline Pilot Magazine. After Eastern Airlines, he flew as an international airline captain with four other airlines including USAfrica Airways which was headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As a captain with non-scheduled Airlines, Paul has had some of his most memorable aviation adventures.

In 1996 Paul was hired as a major air carrier investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board and in 1998 he was promoted to his present position as the chief of the operational factors division at the NTSB.

Paul love of American history has resulted in three published non-fiction books that are based on his life-long research. The titles are: The Original American Spies: Seven Covert Agents of the Revolutionary War, and George Washington and the Half King Chief Tanacharison: An Alliance That Began the French and Indian War. His third book is Sally Townsend: George Washington’s Teenage Spy, which will be published in 2015. Besides compiling Paul’s memoirs, he and Sally are currently researching their fourth book on 18th Century Indian villages and trails in the Ohio territory.

Paul has been married to Sally Misencik since 1963, and they live in Reston, Virginia. They have two children Karen Misencik Carter and Paul Jr. Karen and her husband Tom live in Arlington, Virginia, and Paul Jr. and his wife Altamira live in Javea, Spain with their two children Diego and Mateo.

The ceremonial handing over of the manuscript! Aviator and historian Paul Misencik traveled to Alllentown to turn in his memoir, well also to do some research on his fourth book which he is writing with his wife, Sally Misencik. Of course, they didn't have to come to Allentown to turn in his manuscript, that's what email is all about, but it's a lot more fun to celebrate in person! These are tales from inside the cockpit, and really, you can't make this stuff up and we can't wait to have it ready for you to read.

Spotlight on #BHBW author @LynnieGodfrey #memoir

Sharing Lessons Learned While Seeking the Spotlight

This book includes Lynnie Godfrey’s memories of working with celebrities, including the late dancer and actor Gregory Hines, who introduced her to her husband Carl E. Lee and was the best man at her wedding; songwriters Burton Lane and Sammy Cahn; and Norman Lear, producer of “All in the Family” and its spinoff “704 Hauser.” Godfrey had a leading role in that later show. She even forgot until recently that she was in a play called “Mama Liberty” with Tim Robbins (in fairness, he wore a mask for his part.)

The book follows Godfrey’s career, including performing a show-stopping number in “Eubie!” on Broadway, right before Gregory Hines’ number and right after one by his brother, Maurice. She played Lola in “Damn Yankees,” the stepmother in “Cinderella,” and the title role in “The Snow Queen,” parts rarely or never done by black women. She even landed a role originally designed, she says, for a “Cybill Shepherd type,” playing Helen the Computer for “The New Monkees” TV show.

Connect with Lynnie online: www.lynniegodfrey.com

Connect with Lynnie on twitter: https://twitter.com/LynnieGodfrey

On Facebook: www.facebook.com/Lynnie-Godfrey

#Review of 'Songs of Ourselves' a #memoir anthology @BlueHeronBW

5.0 out of 5 starsBeautiful collection of poignant and empowering stories

Beautiful collection of poignant and empowering stories. Each author offers a snapshot of a moment in their (using that pronoun deliberately) life that transformed them and made them see the world differently. I'm going through a time in my own life when hearing others' stories of love, loss, bravery, and self-discovery help me sort through my own thoughts and provide a really wonderful connection to our shared humanity. As another reviewer noted above, the book comes in bite-sized chunks and the reader can open the anthology at any point to read. I commute on subway and found this book particularly well suited to read on my daily 30 minute commute to/from work.

Description: Blue Heron Book Works loves stories and we are dedicated to the idea that everyone’s individual story—not just those who live in the glare of the celebrity spotlight—is essential to the bigger story of who we are. It’s not politically correct to assign characteristics to nationalities, and in fact most Americans wouldn’t consider being American a nationality, claiming that we all come from somewhere else. And yet, after even one generation here—often sooner—the thing that we all have in common, the thing that makes us American, asserts itself and that is this: we look at everything with a child-like sense of the new. Nothing has associations that can’t be reworked or reimagined. That’s what Americans do: we reinvent ourselves constantly, create ourselves from scratch because all of us are starting over in some way. It’s this looking at a situation for what it is without the judgement of generations that makes us the most creative people on the planet. This quintessential American point of view is captured beautifully in journals and blogs, letters, in unedited and unreflective short bursts of observation and it is what we are celebrating in Songs of Ourselves.

5 Star Review of Nicholas DiGiovanni’s #memoir @nidigiovanni #BHBW

How strange that a book so unrelentingly about death should contain so much life. But that’s what we have in “Man Has Premonition of Own Death,” which stands athwart decay and demands to know why.

The book title copies the headline that appeared above a 1925 story in a Yonkers newspaper about a young man who uttered something of a prophecy shortly before he was fatally injured in a gruesome industrial accident. The young man was the author’s great-uncle, and it’s fair to say that Nicholas DiGiovanni, a novelist, essayist, journalist and poetry impresario, has been obsessed with the sad uncanny tale of Thomas Crooks ever since he found the old newspaper clipping in a family Bible some 35 years ago. Popping up here and there among the dozens of short essays & stories that make up this volume, elements of the Crooks story compose the leitmotif of a man who dies before his time yet somehow knows it’s going to happen. Which is not far from DiGiovanni’s own story. 

For the author is himself a man who more or less has come back from near death to tell us about it. A strikingly personal account of fear, despair, hope, love, and above all, family, the book amounts to a premonition of his own death. DiGiovanni, in his 60s, is in recovery from brain and esophageal cancer. As we learn, he twice came very close to dying, once from the cancer before it was surgically removed, and once from massive hemorrhaging due to the effects of mixing chemotherapy with medicine he was taking for a heart condition (which itself was just barely prevented from killing him some dozen years earlier). DiGiovanni has had to confront his mortality repeatedly and with an intensity that many of us will feel only when we’re close to the end. It is the certainty of death and our foggy knowledge of what comes after it that permeate DiGiovanni’s writing. 

But despite the grim topic and a necessarily autumnal cast, “Man Has Premonition of Own Death” is engaging as well as defiant, spirited and even light-hearted. This is due to the author’s voice, which is warm, wry, courageous and funny. DiGiovanni’s sense of humor, which only occasionally is of the gallows type, keeps these essays from being depressingly dark. Writing about those who have died among his family and friends, about his fondness for cemeteries and the celebrities and nobodies buried there, about the beliefs and indoctrination of his Catholic schooling, about how the dead are treated, considered, feared, missed — through all of it DiGiovanni proves to be an entertaining, thoughtful and perceptive writer. It is said that philosophy begins with the awareness of death, and that’s the direction in which DiGiovanni ultimately moves, although I wish his book offered even more reflection and metaphysical contemplation of our damned mortality.

Decrying how morticians mute death’s warning to the living through their cosmetic manipulations of the faces of the dead, DiGiovanni writes, “We all would benefit … if we got up the courage to look death straight in the eye.” Indeed, his book helps us do.

Nicholas DiGiovanni is a novelist, essayist, award-winning journalist, blogger and teacher of creative writing. His novella “Rip,” a modern-day parody of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” was published in 2011 by Black Angel Press. His fiction has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Identity Theory, The Caribbean Writer, and elsewhere. 

Connect with Nick online: https://nicholasdigiovanni.com

Nicholas DiGiovanni was born at the Fort Dix Army Hospital while his father served in the Air Force at Maguire AFB. His father was then assigned to duty at a base near Lincoln, Nebraska, and his parents moved with their new baby to Fremont, Nebraska, for a year. The author has spent the rest of his life being grateful that his parents did not stay in Nebraska – where he believes he would have wound up as assistant manager of an Agway franchise – and moved back to their home town of Yonkers, New York, a gritty industrial city on the lower Hudson River where DiGiovanni grew up, went to school, and absorbed the history of his family and his city – including the strange and sad tale of his great-uncle, 23-year-old carpet-mill worker Thomas Crooks, who (according to a 1920s newspaper article) had a “premonition of his own death,” falling to his death in a vat of acid just minutes after turning to his bride-to-be after a lunchtime picnic and declaring “I am going in, but I shall be carried out!”

5 * Review for #BHBW author Larry Neff's #memoir 'Rigger' #MondayBlogs

I had the pleasure of meeting Larry Neff, a fellow author, at a recent book signing. After listening to him talk to me about his book for a while, I decided I had to buy and read it, especially since my dad worked there for many years, retiring in 1980. He never really talked about his job, but because Larry Neff wanted to share his stories, and near death experiences, I learned a lot about being a steelworker.

The demands of a rigger were much more than many employees could stand up to and Larry told the stories with great passion, humor and depth. I never knew that working there was that dangerous, again, probably because nobody I knew who worked there shared their stories.

I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to know more about what working at Bethlehem Steel was like. Granted, not everyone worked like riggers, but Larry Neff's book will give you a great overview of a lot of the steelmaking process.

Available here!

Rigger: A Memoir from High School to High Steel

This world doesn’t exist anymore. It was a time when jobs were plentiful and workers were scarce. The Vietnam War raged on, dividing the county. The sexual revolution was here, embraced with open arms. The selective service was collecting young men who didn’t wish to be soldiers. Women sought a well-deserved equality. Music was changing, giving us protest songs to help stop a war. It was a time when, with only a high school diploma, you could follow your father into a high-paying but very dangerous industry. This is a story of a young man’s quest, raised on traditional morals and values, to find his way through this tumultuous era, adhering to some of his values and discarding others.

It is also a story of survival in the very dangerous occupation of “hanging iron”. Mr. Neff, the son of a steelworker, joined the ranks of Bethlehem Steel employees in 1972, and became a rigger in 1975. The rigger crews in the Steel Company did the jobs that were deemed too high, too hard, or too dangerous for other departments to handle. They also had a certain reputation for being somewhat crazy, but able to get the job done.

This is a sometimes light-hearted and always uncensored view of day-to-day work in the Bethlehem Steel mill. You’ll read about close brushes with death, about a young woman’s quest to become the first female rigger in a male-dominated workplace, and the playful and sometimes rough antics of co-workers. This book talks of life among rivers of molten iron, walking steel hundreds of feet in the air, and the men (and the woman) who were tough enough to do it. You’ll read of “snakes”, rats, ghosts, picking locks, explosions planned and unplanned. It will illicit snorts of laughter and perhaps a tear or two, and give you a view into a world that few have ever known. 

Read more about Larry James Neff, #BHBW author

Welcome Fanny Barry, #BHBW author of Map of Life and Beauty #MondayBlogs

I am Joanne Fanny Barry, a yoga teacher, artist and engineer who lives in Tulum, Mexico. I am also a cancer survivor who found that yoga and my love for writing, drawing and painting were the things that helped me survive cancer and then build a life from the ground up in Tulum, Mexico. You can see it and feel it in my cancer booklets, I Wish I Knew. Now, you can read about it in my memoir, Map of Life and Beauty.

Map of Life and Beauty

This is the story of a woman who falls in love in Tulum, Mexico—before the maddening crowds descended and made it a hip destination. Fanny fell in love with Tulum but mistook it to be part of an interesting, dysfunctional and violent relationship with a beach bum she met the day she arrived in 2004. He introduces her to all the wonderful things about Tulum: the pace, the nature, the lifestyle. And, as she falls in love with Tulum—the new feelings, places and experiences—she thinks she’s falling in love with him as well. He begins to control her and help her move her life from straight-laced Boston to a pre-discovered Tulum: savagely beautiful, raw, amazing and intense. Before electricity, before hip cool restaurants and people, before it was the tourist destination that it is today. But as her relationship gets increasingly abusive and achieving her dream life in Tulum increasingly impossible, the question becomes: how can she leave? In this wonderful story of love and discovery, Fanny Barry conjures the magic of a place that enticed her to abandon the secure life of a professional on the rise to start anew in a jungle hideaway on a beach she thought was worth dying for, or at least worth dying on. She lets go of her traditional life and jumps into the deep end with this man and this place. Her story is riveting and captures the essence of a paradise that is quickly fading. Tulum 12 years ago, before Johnny Depp, before Meg Ryan, before all the hipsters could hack it, Fanny built herself a little bungalow in the jungle with no electricity where she could practice yoga, detach from hostile men, ant, and scorpion invasions while she healed from breast cancer treatments, lost loves and opportunities. She turned her life upside down and inside out and came out on the other side of Tulum: at the beach, alive and willing to share her story.

Connect with Fanny online: https://thatbarrygirl.com

#BHBW author Vincent Francone: #reading poetry is a spiritual quest #MondayBlogs

“Why I Read Poems When They Are Often Quite Bad”–guest blog post by Vincent Francone

I just finished Rosemary Tonk's posthumous collection of poems, Bedouin of the London Evening.  I wanted to read Tonks ever since I saw this quote: “The main duty of the poet is to excite – to send the senses reeling.”  I quite agree.  Sadly, I disliked the book.  The poems have some flashes of brilliance, but Tonks’s work is a bit callow and ultimately dispensable.  The experience left me bummed.  I’d been looking forward to these poems for quite some time, had searched for them in bookshops in Chicago and San Francisco, only to be very disappointed.

But here’s the thing: I don’t regret the money I spent on the book ($26.00 plus tax).  I’ll likely not read any of the poems anytime soon, but the day I spent laboring over lines like “My gutter—how you gleamed! Like dungeon floors which / Cobras have lubricated” and “Those evenings you were mutinous / Against the tyranny of kitchen tables where / The flat iron cools its mirror of blue ore” was not wasted.  I take a lot of chances on poetry, and most of the time they don’t pay off.  Poems should, indeed, blow the top of your head off, but often they are dull, affected, over-wrought or, worse, dashed off and trite.  Yet I still search through them looking for the one poem—hell, the one line—that will remind me that the effort is worthwhile.

Writers often speak of the struggle to produce one goddamn line that is close to good.  Hours spent in front of the computer, booze within reach and eyes near tears, all in vain when nothing much comes.  But when it clicks—oh, what magic!  What a thrill.  There’s nothing like it.  I know full well what writers mean when they rhapsodize about their specific form of self-abuse.  But the same can be said of reading poems, which requires a level of focus rare in today’s tech-obsessed culture.  I’m often left feeling empty and unengaged by the poems I read, but when I do stumble on that rare wonderful creation, the search is more than validated.

I liken this process to what Dostoevsky seemed to be up to in many of his works: the struggle to understand what it even means to be a soul in search of god.  Reading poetry is a spiritual quest, a meditation of the unnamable entity that fortifies us against the collection of absolute crap accumulating just outside the door.  How to sustain sanity against it all?  Some look to god.  Others look to poetry.

This is not to say that I find comfort and meaning in Yeats on par with what the average Christian gets from the New Testament.  But I do see something beautiful and mysterious in his best work that does suggest a force greater than my understanding.  I am probably not anywhere close to explaining it here, but I am often invigorated by a poem to the extent that I can face whatever hell awaits the moment I set foot out of the apartment.

But again, this is rare.  Most poems are bad or dull or good in a sense, sure, but nothing that really stays with me.  My tastes are fairly specific.  I am all for ambition and experimentation, but the trend today seems to be toward coded poems that rely so much on their playfulness that they fail to convey anything worthwhile and, thus, seem hallow. Keeping in mind that the primary audience for poetry in the USA is other poets and academics, I understand why so much poetry written today is full of turgid, dense language. (Though I’m aware every generation has produced good and bad poems.  Surely there was a lousy, pompous tale being told by the campfire alongside Beowulf.)  This is why I’ve been gravitating to Yeats and Kavanagh and a score of more contemporary Irish poets who value the felicity of language but rarely at the expense of a worthwhile subject.  Content is as important as language in a Seamus Heaney poem.  Ciaran Carson never sacrifices either.  The balance is impressive; the effects astonishing.  I’ll take that over whatever John Ashbery is up to.

If one is going to write a poem that is more concerned with language than content, fine.  Sometimes these are the poems that are so intriguing they border on the rhapsodic.  But they are few compared to the majority of obfuscated, image heavy curiosities. Sifting through them requires patience and faith.  The search is worthwhile, even if it’s never ending.  Maybe in death we will understand the secret of poetry.  Maybe the afterlife waiting for us is built on rhyming couplets.

Who can write challenging, obscure poems that are simultaneously engaging?  It’s a tie between Medbh McGuckian and Cesar Vallejo, though they can come from E. E. Cummings, Joyce Mansour, Mina Loy, William Blake, Guillaume Apollinaire, Vicente Huidobro, and Coral Bracho as well.  All of these writers have penned at least a few visionary, bizarre, compelling poems that have consumed a good amount of my days.  I spent most of a plan ride from Washington DC to Chicago trying to get my head around Paul Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”; much of June 2012 saw me puzzling over Huidobro’s book length poem Altazor.  Still, I usually return to Philip Larkin when I wish to be reminded of the daily truth on which poetry can, and should, focus.

Today, I read a poem that awed me: “Aubade” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.  I read it once, then paused at the end, unsure of what I’d just encountered, then reread it and saw the simplicity of it leading to a conclusion that floored me.  Go look for it—it’s really grand, as is much of her work.  This is why I pore over poems, in the hope of finding one that takes me to a place I couldn’t have imagined before.  Ironically, poems like “Aubade” do it best, poems lacking testing, obvious ornaments.

Vincent's memoir is available here: Like a Dog

Vincent Online: VicentFrancone.com