Month: October 2021

This short book of poetry, 39 pages, contains, what, a single poem or prayer spread over the 39 pages with a spiritual theme that presents the One as a female figure, so it’s not a Christian spiritual collection. Given that each page or poem faces a mandala, the poetext might be to support the mandalas instead of the other way around.

A mandala, as you might remember, gentle reader (not that I’ve ever mentioned it here before), is an Eastern art form that uses geometric shapes and whatnot designed as a meditation aid for Buddhists, Hindus, and whatnot. The mandalas in this book are not so geometric as much as abstract art with an Eastern flavor. I guess the author would make mandalas for people–her bio says that she was divinely guided after a near death experience and that she wants to help everyone just get along like Susan Polis Schultz. The author’s Facebook page was active until 2015, so she was probably creating mandalas for people well into our century.

So, the poetext, meh, but the mandalas are interesting. Given that I got this book in one of the dollar bundles of chapbooks available at the at the library book sales, I think it was worth the 18 cents I probably spent on it. After all, I counted it as a whole book in my annual goal of reading 100 books.

This is a large-sized Crescent book covering the design styles of art deco which were early 20th century design and architectural movements around the world, but notably the United States. I say styles and were in the plural because really Art Deco includes subdesign styles called the Aztec, zigzag, and streamlined styles. The book breaks things up into sections on Architecture, Furniture, Art, and whatnot. Each chapter has a page of text that name drops people who popularized the style, and then includes photos and illustrations.

You know, I like Art Deco, at least in the design and the architecture–we have some Fiestaware at Nogglestead–but not the art-art, which has a bit of Sovietism to it. A lot of it comes from the WPA and NRA programs coming out of the New Deal, so that’s probably appropriate.

However, Fiestaware aside, I like to look at it, but when it comes to design that I like to have around Nogglestead, I go more for classical looks and cheap pressboard. Not stylized modern things, or at least how modern was envisioned a hundred years ago. Even though it’s cooler than what a hundred years later would generally produce, particularly in architecture.

So that’s what comment you get from me in this regard. You want depth in discussion of design, go seek your Lileks and Driscoll.

These are two more chapbooks, or short books of poetry, that I bought bundled recently. Actually, the Shultz book was in a bundle, but I bought the Javan book alone for a buck. It seems that I’ve seen a lot of books by Schultz and Javan around, and then I thought it might just be at ABC Books, but my recent trip showed that the poetry section there was not rife with either of these poets. So I don’t know where I’ve seen so many of them before that I thought I should finally give them a try.

I have grouped them together because they both suffer from the same thing: Too much abstraction with line breaks, announcing a feeling or thought without poetic imagery to back them up.

Javan’s poems are of a personal nature, with musings on relationships and some “Hey, Girl” kinds of poems. The Schultz book deals with macro themes of reconciliation between different peoples and “Can’t we all just get along?” More than that, though–can’t we all just love one another for our differences? Reading them together is a little like listening to a U2 song: First, we get the personal, which is more relatable (although U2 is generally more poetic), and then all of a sudden in the third or fourth verse the personal relationship morphs into a song about feeding the world or something.

The stories of the poets is more interesting: Javan self-published his books in the days before computers, and he didn’t have the Internet, so he drove around, bookstore to bookstore, to get his works carried. Given that I’ve seen and now bought one of his works far away from his native Georgia, it seems to have worked. Schultz, on the other hand, is a mommy poet of some note who then put this book out as a public service such as it was. She and/or her husband founded Blue Mountain, whose early Internet greeting card company they sold to Excite in 1999 for $780,000,000, so she had some money and time to write a bunch of poetry, and she’s the mother of the current governor of Colorado. So she probably did not have to drive widely to disseminate her work.

At any rate, they both come out of that 70s poetic tradition like, say, Rod McKuen or Jon Francis or James Kavanaugh. The wording is conversational and not very self-consciously poetic. Which is probably to say not poetic at all. But, hey, some people might go for it. I prefer more poetic, but perhaps not self-consciously “We’re doing poetry!”

UPDATE: I discovered when I was entering this book into my library database that I’ve read something edited by Susan Polis Schultz before: A Friend Forever also published by Blue Mountain–which means they’ve been at this for a while.

 

This book is from Faith over Fear Productions, so I expected some faith-based poetry, but there’s nary a mention of Jesus in it. Instead, it’s a collection of street poems, almost raps, dealing with relationships and whatnot. The poems have short lines with a bunch of chatter and not the distinct imagery but rather rhythmic, sometimes, abstract conversation. Less formal than grandmother poetry or decades-old greeting cards and not quite as poetic as more literary poetry of the 21st century, but probably not the poets’ goal.

Each poem is paired with a vivid abstract or abstactish piece of painting in color with full bleed to the edge of the pages–kind of like the cover image–and the layout is very good. As one reviewer said of my collection of poetry, the poetry is meh but the design is very good.

So not my bag, but your mileage may vary.

I got this book from one of the bundles of chapbooks I bought at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale (he repeated).

This book is a more modern entry in the series (compared to these decades-old cards). They mostly deal with, of course, being young and a woman in the 21st century, relationships and the like. Growing older, learning, and so on. A cut above most of the things I read, actually, with longer lines and some good imagery, but some inchoate images and poems that didn’t speak to me.

A number of the entries are erasure poems, wherein she took another text and eliminated words, sentences, and presumably paragraphs to carry elison (ahut) into a new work with meaning. It’s an interesting exercise, but somehow seems less than writing something from scratch. However, I am sure it keeps the creative juices flowing, and here I am waiting for the muse to strike me at the exact moment I’m sitting at a coffee shop for thirty minutes with a notepad. Which happens sometimes, but not often. Perhaps I should get to coffee shops more.

At any rate, this chapbook was all right. Of course, Ms. Anderson doesn’t need my validation; her copyright page indicates she’s getting her work out without my blog’s linking to her work, which is just as well since it’s not on Amazon, and you guys don’t use the handy links when I provide them anyway.

These two slim volumes came in the bundles of chapbooks that I bought at this autumn’s Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. As I have mentioned often and will continue to mention every day or so for a couple of weeks, they bundle a small stack of chapbooks and pamphlets together for a buck, and I cannot help but buy many of them. Something about a grab bag appeals to me–it’s like when the old record store would bundle ten 45 rpm singles fresh from jukebox duty or remainders and mark them $1.99; I bought a lot of such bundles and sometimes found something interesting (such as Madhouse). So it is with the chapbook bundles. Plus, it gives me something to look at between plays whilst watching football on Sundays–and, let’s be honest, watching football on Sundays is a pretext for me to read during the day, not purely to watch football.

At any rate, these two slim volumes are not so much chapbooks as they are holiday cards with several pages of poetry in them. The first is by Ideals magazine (See also here and and was given as a Thanksgiving greeting from Mother and Daddy in 1970. It collects a lot of poetry and photography with harvest, autumn, and Thanksgiving themes with some Christian content thanking God, not just being mindful and grateful. Given that I have Ideals magazines dealing with Autumn and Thanksgiving, I have to wonder if I’ve read some of this material before.

Prayers and Meditations is a Christmas card signed by Norm and Jan in 1988; it collects nine poems by Helen Steiner Rice, religious-themed prayers and musings about the meaning of Christmas. It’s an exclusively religous card, with thoughts and prayers about the birth of Christ and its meaning, and nothing about sleighs and family. Handy, I suppose, if you can’t find only one card with a single poem that expresses what you want about Christmas. Less expensive than a full little gift book, perhaps, and a keepsake a little more than a card. I mean, thirty years later, I read it and counted it toward my annual total.

The two of them remind me how far we are into the year already, another year almost passed, and the fact that they’re fifty-one and thirty-three years old, respectively, reminds me how far I am into life already. Bittersweet, for sure.