Local Verse- Ben (staff)

Here's a poem I wrote a while ago, when I was in the midst of uprooting myself to move, a little haphazardly, to Asia. I wasn't sure where I'd end up, but I was ready to get going.

Taking Off
Ben Bliss

Expeditionary angels,

Hear me out.

I know it’s your door I must knock on,

Your buzzer that needs buzzing.

I know it. But I’m going

Around back, past your big entryway

And all its columns. I’m going

On the side path, through the daphne

And the other fragrant plants

That grow beneath your windows.

I’ll meet you on the back porch,

Among your garden slippers.

You’ll know me by my reticence

And the racket I can’t help but make.

No doubt you’ve heard it before—

This clatter of tipped-over things,

These quick breaths that come before

You send us away.

I’m rattled. What is it that's leaving?

These days every song moves me.

The camera pans, there's a migratory surge

In the music, and out the window

For a moment we can see

Cloud-slung, darkening canyons.

Local Verse -- April (staff)

I usually write poetry that's more... well, reflective, maybe, I hope.  And I almost never write in rhyme.  This poem didn't start off rhymed, and it actually started off semi-seriously when I first jotted it down on a park bench last month in Taiwan.  When I looked at it a few days later, it seemed lighter to me, and when I poked it with my pencil it fell easily into poorly metered rhyme.  You should consider it completely unrepresentative of my actual poetic leanings.

A Simple Poem 
April Nabholz

Sitting here beneath this tree
Life feels, perhaps, too leisurely.
I'd like to lie down on this bench
But too short it is by just one inch.
So I'll stay sitting, that's okay,
I won't complain my life away.
Resting here in shade and sun,
Oh this is lovely, this is fun!
Smell the exhaust, smell the smog,
Smell the s*** of a passing dog,
Life's so pleasant, I could snooze
-- What's that in the bushes -- a bottle of booze?
But there isn't any left, it's all been guzzled,
Selfish people like that ought to be muzzled!
I'm not the first then, it's plain to see,
To indulge here so wholeheartedly.

Local Verse - Charles Goodrich

To continue with today's Poem-A-Day prose theme, we have a poem from local poet Charles Goodrich.  This is from his latest book, "Going to Seed: Dispatches From the Garden."  On Friday, April 23rd, tune in to The Writer's Almanac to hear Garrison Keillor read one of Goodrich's poems.

Click here to listen to Charles read from "Going to Seed: Dispatches From the Garden."

Mudding-in Peas
Charles Goodrich

     Courting the Muse is not like sowing peas. You can sit quietly through February, pencil in hand, quivering with attention for hours on end, and you may or may not be given a poem.  But you sure won't grow any peas.
     For peas you must leave your desk, step into your boots, and go out to the graden.  You will be on the cusp of winter, a bite to the air, the soil barely awake.  Hard to believe any seed would want to be sown this early.
     But now your faith in the muse pays off. Your long apprenticeship to whatever happens prepares you to believe in the genius of a pea.  The seed is ready. And you are ready to assist it.  And you have a pencil, perfect for dibbling the holes.

Poetry Month - Local Verse: Mica (staff)

There are many things to love about poetry, and I think what I love best is it's flexibility. 

As a writer, you can box yourself in with a rondelle, or you can have a good-ol' ee cummings go at it and trip your words across the page.  Your work can be as short as a haiku, or skirt the length of a short prose story.  Endearingly, a poet can write of sorrow and pain in one poem, and on the facing page present a light-hearted and joyous romp through words and emotion.  Poetry offers me the mood swings that prose is too temperate to provide.  

On that note, I will be sharing two poems with you today. 

The first is for my 11 year old sister, Kooky--yes that is her real name--who also goes by Kookarella, Koo, LeKoo, and occasionally, Kooks.  Like me, she enjoys wordplay (our favorite joke: What is brown and sticky? A stick.), and like me, responds with laughter to things that draw groans from everyone else. With her in mind, I present the following:

A Groaner

My little sister's
name is Kooky.  And for her
I write this: "Hi, Koo!"


Hahahaha--oh--am I the only one laughing?  Well.  Looks like my attempt was aptly named. 

On the other hand, everyone has a serious side.  Mine is rather stunted, and so my serious poems--when I manage to stay somber long enough to write something down--tend to be rather short.  Understandably.

However, I love to read other poet's moody works.  They get to do all the sad thinking, draw the sad conclusions, and share them with me.  Hopefully their next page has a more uplifting work, and I am again transported back to the realm of happiness. But please don't think I am immune to melancholy (nobody's perfect, after all).  Here is proof: 


Through a Cafe Window

Have you ever locked eyes with
--through a window,
into a car,
where in the front seat sits--
a dog?

It looks at you
like being alone
is the saddest thing in the world.



Thanks for reading.

--Mica

Poetry Month - Local Verse

Complementary to our Poem-A-Day emails, we'll be posting poetry from local poets on our blog each day for the remainder of April.  Later this week we'll be focusing on poems from your very own Grass Roots staff members, but today we have a poet from Nancy Carol Moody's new collection, "Photograph With Girls."  Don't miss Nancy's poetry reading (along with Quinton Hallett) on Monday, April 26th at 7pm.

A note preceding today's poem...
Last week my landlord knocked on my door and offered to mow my grass for me.  I looked beyond him at the yard, where the emerald-green, knee-high fronds were waving and bowing in the morning sunlight.
"Oh..." I said, "no, no, sorry, I've been out of town... --and the weather has been so wet lately..."
"I really don't mind," he offered again, "I'm happy to mow it for you."
"I'll take care of it," I said.

It's true I'd been out of town -- but I was also enjoying the ragged clumps in some primal way -- our little house was beginning to resemble a jungle refuge.  I spent the following afternoon weeding, mulching, and pushing the mower back and forth.  And on some deep, compulsively tidy, domineering level, I loved it.  The grass was so long and thick I had to mow it on the highest mower setting--the mowed tracks behind me stood up shorn and uneven like a punk haircut.  Here and there I swerved around dandelions and left daisies standing. I smelled the cut grass and felt immensely satisfied.

~April


FIRST MOWING
Nancy Carol Moody

The back-fence neighbor
is mowing his lawn:
seasonal slough, his
boots bogged to the ankles.
Suddenly, inexplicably,
I desire this, too.
I step up to my yard
and move into the grass.

                      Remind me
what it is I thought
I despised: the lawn's
luminous fronds, dauntless stalks
succulent from immeasurable rain.
The holy mud they thrive in.
Chlorophyll so indecent
it takes my breath.
                      How it stains,
             oh the green glorious stain.

It feels like spring!

While sitting in my home office/craft room/"Pam Cave" this week, I noticed something peculiar about the birds in the yard: they were certifiably crazy.  They dipped and dodged and flew and soared and hollered at each other.  It was perhaps not the most poetic dance, but it was clear that spring was here, and the birds were pretty darn frisky about it.  It made me a little giddy, too, because it means it's time to get out in the yard and show it some love.  Last weekend I sat behind the counter at Grass Roots and stared longingly out the window, wanting to be home with my Honey to help him work in the yard.  Yes, it's true:  I would gladly perform hard yard labor in the sun than sit in relative comfort at the bookstore.  (This is seasonal, you understand.)  Fortunately I will be able to make up for it at least slightly next weekend when I get a few days off.  (Start praying to the weather gods now!)

There's a lot of work to be done, but above all I want to have a delicious and flourishing garden.  We have a good-sized garden at home that produces a prodigious amount of strawberries, delicious sweet corn (although not as good as that from Illinois), and a surprising number of tomatoes.  All in all, it's a good thing that I like to cook.  Like any gardener, though, I want MORE. 

Gardening is pretty new to me, although I have done a little bit of container gardening in the past.  I found the book The Bountiful Container by Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey to be particularly useful and informative.  Following an introduction that brings you the story of the authors' own container gardens, the book is well-organized and full of useful information.  They start you out from the very beginning of planning your first edible container garden, to maintaining and harvesting your crop.  It is a fantastic bible for any gardener who has to rely on containers (or who wants to expand their ground space with a few containers, like me).

I am fortunate enough to have some garden beds at home, but I have just one year of real gardening experience under my apron.  I'd really like to take it to the next level, and I think I'll be taking Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades home with me.  The book is written by Steve Solomon, founder of the Territorial Seed Company, and focuses on the particular conditions and issues that organic gardeners in the Pacific Northwest face.  It is laden with information about prepping your soil, controlling pests, and planting seeds.  Anyone can take a plant and stick it in the ground, but this book helps gardeners to nurture their plants and get the most they can from them.

Turning to look at the whole yard, my home library would be incomplete without the Western Garden Book from Sunset.  This book, the biggest of them all, features information on more than 8,000 plants.  It is practically encyclopedic.  The newest edition features color illustrations and detailed maps of gardening zones in the West.  For years I have consulted it whenever some new problem faced me in my gardening endeavors, even with the containers.  I will not be sitting down to read this book cover to cover, but when I needed to know how to prune my roses, this is where I looked.  When I wanted to know what plants would possibly avoid the destruction of deer (HA!), this is where I looked.  In a word, it's indispensable.

At summer's end, I will be faced with a booming bounty of my own fresh produce.  Whatever will I do with it?  That's when the real fun will start, because it will mean I get to cook and to eat.  Fortunately, those are two of my favorite things.  It's a good thing we have such a big freezer...

I will leave you here to fantasize about your own gardens.  In the meantime, know that I will be working hard in mine, and probably making plenty of entertaining mistakes along the way.  That's where I'll be if you don't see me here.  As ever, I'll see you in the bookstore.

Pamela.

Poetry Reading Tonight - Valley Library

Jennifer Richter reads tonight in OSU's Valley Library at 7:30pm. Here's the title poem from Richter's prize-winning recent collection.


Threshold:

where mothers prop themselves, welcoming, waving, mostly waiting.  You
are a frame your child passes through, the safest place to stand when then
shaking starts.  You brace yourself.  He draws you like this, arms straight
out, too stick-thin but the hands are perfect, splayed like suns, long
fingers, the hands he draws for your are huge. Thresh, hold: separate the
seeds, gather them back. In his pictures you all come close to holding
hands, though the fingers of your family never touch; you're in the middle
of all this reaching.


Jennifer Richter’s book Threshold was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.  Richter’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Cloudbank, and in the anthology A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry.  She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

Judging a book

Don't judge a book by its cover.

All righty then.  Working in a bookstore and seeing new books everyday, it's impossible not to judge books in some way by their cover.  Seeing a well-designed cover on a new edition of a classic novel has led me to be the proud owner of two copies of the same book in a few cases, but usually I've already read the book at least once and I know what I'm getting myself into.  I try not to randomly buy books I'm unfamiliar with based on their covers, though.

When we flip the books over, however, my willingness to judge increases.  I do enjoy admiring and mocking author photos.  Dr. Phil and the authors of computer manuals just throw it all out there on the front covers:  "BAM!  This is who I am!  Look at my confident/pleading expression!  We can help each other!"

I really think authors should give careful consideration to the image they are projecting of themselves on the back cover of their books.  In general, I frown upon Glamor Shots-like images of overly made-up women in clothes that don't belong to them trying to pose in the style of senior photos.  I also think authors should think about the content of the book they are posing for.  My inspiration today came from a conversation I had with a regular customer and a coworker.  As we discussed poetry and poets; Shel Silverstein's name came up.  He writes clever fantastic poetry and illustrates them dynamically.  The photos of himself he uses on his books, however?  They kind of creep me out.  I'm just saying.  It is definitely an instance where I have to separate the image given to me of the author from what I'm reading.

The same discussion lead me to pick up a copy of Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor.  We were looking for a particular poem that had come up("Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, if you're keeping score.  I was easily distracted by the sound of geese flying overhead outside.), and my hand alighted on the copy of Good Poems sitting on top of the case.  And then the book flipped open, and staring menacingly at me from the inside of the back cover was Mr. Keillor.  EEEEK!  I know he's an odd-looking fellow, but Mr. Keillor looks more like a serial killer in this photo than the affable, Midwestern host of a weekly radio show where humor features significantly.  Please, Garrison, keep your gift for dramatic rendering to your reading, and not your portraits.

I can not discuss my obsession with author photos (yes, I'm afraid this is just the tip of the iceberg, but I'll spare you...) without mentioning Robert B. Parker.  Parker authored over 70 books throughout his life, mostly crime novels.  (Unfortunately he died of a heart attack while writing at his desk this past January.  What a way for a writer to go...)  It's been interesting to see how his image has changed on the backs of his novels throughout my bookselling career.  As a writer of crime fiction, I first noticed his photos depicting him in a leather bomber jacket, wearing sunglasses and a hat, glowering as one of his large dogs poised beside him.  Yeah, don't want to meet him in a dark alley.  Later he seemed to go for more of a "warm and fuzzy" look, as he posed, head perched tenderly upon his hand as he lounged in a wing-back chair, a charming and boyish smile on his face.  "Sit here with Uncle Bobby, kids, and I'll tell you a story!" 

Finally he seemed to reach a happy medium, as he leaned jauntily against a picket fence, an expression on his face that's at least non-threatening.  And his dog doesn't look like he wants to take a bite out of your hand.  It's as if he's inviting us to his next backyard barbeque.

Someday the question will be, how do I want to present myself on the back of a book to my adoring readers?  Whatever I decide on, I hope it will be welcoming enough that people will want to read what I have to say.  I also hope it will be true enough that the people who know me won't mock me too mercilessly.  Regardless, I'm sure I'll fall under the scrutiny of some harsh and judging eye.  That is just the nature of the book business I guess.

I'll be at the desk at Grass Roots pondering that in the meantime.  See you in the bookstore--
Pamela.

Fleshly Poetry Section

The poetry section has been fleshed out and is awaiting your eager eyes!  Challenge yourself this National Poetry Month and introduce yourself to a new poet.  We've been hard at work scrutinizing our poetry shelves and have gathered -- as collies gather peripherally roaming sheep -- the best of the best, the famous and the obscure, the celebrated and the overlooked.

Come delve!  Come dive!  Immerse yourself!  Dangle poetry books on strings from your ceiling! Write love letters to your favorite poet, dead or alive!  Send poems in the mail!  Tattoo a poem on your buttock!  Place a prank call and read a poem to the person who answers! Rent an airplane and write a poem in cursive across the sky!

A sampling of our recent acquisitions (and a few re-acquisitions)...

Hardcovers: 
The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems by Robert Hass, $34.99 
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (United States Poet Laureate), $24.00 
A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W. B. Yeats, $9.95
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems by Edward Hirsch, $27.00 
Frost: Poems by Robert Frost $12.50 
Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, ed. Robert Pinsky (CD included) $29.95

Softcovers: 
The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova (dual Russian and English translations), $15.00
Erotic Poems by e.e. cummings, $12.95
Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams, $12.95
Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas, $14.95
The Crooked Inheritance by Marge Piercy, $17.00
Leaves of Grass (the original 1855 edition) by Walt Whitman, $3.00

Local Recent Releases:
Photograph With Girls by Nancy Carol Moody
Refuge from Flux by Quinton Hallett
Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden by Charles Goodrich

Come on in! Go wild!  The poetry is here for you!

Charles Goodrich event Friday, April 9

Corvallis poet Charles Goodrich will be reading from his newest book, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, on Friday, April 9 at 7:00 p.m. at the Troubadour Music Center.  The book is a collection of 52 prose-style poems, one for each week in the garden through the year.  Books will be available for purchase at the event.  Don't miss this opportunity to meet a local poet!


The Troubadour is located at 521 SW Second Street in Corvallis.  Please call us at Grass Roots if you have any questions.  We hope to see you there!