Come to Potsdam this weekend and enjoy the summer festival. I will be reading Friday at 7:30 pm at the St. Lawrence Arts Council Gallery on Market Street and will be signing (and selling) copies of A Drop of Ink.
There’s also non-stop music at multiple venues, plenty of street food, sidewalk shopping, pavement dancing and general hoopla. Comes but once a year. See ya there.
I sat down with NCPR book reviewer Betsy Kepes a few weeks ago to talk about A Drop of Ink and to read a few poems. Through the wonder of editing–the removal of many ums, digressions, brain freezes, and irrelevencies–the final cut makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about. It aired this morning on the NCPR news program The Eight O’Clock Hour. You can hear me read three poems from the book: “Afterword,” “Coyote,” and “Water Prayer.”
Interview/reading with Betsy Kepes
Old Songs Community Arts Center
Had a great road trip to Voorheesville (west of Albany) on Sunday. I read at the Old Songs Community Arts Center as the featured guest of the Sunday 4 Poets series. It being my first reading following the publication of my first full-length book, I told the gathering that I felt like I should wear a yamulke, say “Today I am a poet,” and read a passage from “The Waste Land.” Poetry humor.
Voorheesville has a great infrastructure for poets–the venue, formerly the public library, now hosts world-class music performances and was running its annual 3-day music festival nearby, to the delight of 6,000. I drew a somewhat smaller crowd. Also, there is a nearby tavern, which serves great food and reserves a “Poet’s Corner,” where the notorious discussions and disputations of the word-smacked can continue without undue disruption of the public order.
And nearby Delmar is the base of operations for my overnight host, Alan Casline, whose Benevolent Bird Press published my chapbook, The Water I Carry, in 2008, and whose Rootdrinker Institute has North Country roots itself, in the magazine Rootdrinker, printed once upon a time at my old Potsdam printshop. Alan laid on a historical exhibit of Raquette River Printshop artifacts before the reading, including work I had long forgotten, and some I wish I could.
This week it is on to Clayton. I will be reading Thursday at 5 pm at Winged Bull Studio on James Street in Clayton–the stomping ground of Greg Lago, whose wood engravings add so much to A Drop of Ink. We promise to wrap up in time for folks to grab a bite before the Orchestra of Northern New York Concert at the Clayton Opera House.
Today is the bicentennial of First Presbyterian Church, Potsdam, where I have warmed a pew since childhood. The church had a concert back in April celebrating the rich musical heritage of the congregation. Here is a poem for that occasion:
Instrument of Peace
A poem upon the occasional of the bicentennial of First Presbyterian Church, Potsdam, NY
When I was a child it was painted blue, like heaven,
trimmed in gold. Now a creamy white, who knows
how many layers of paint sandwich the smoke of candles?
And what has become of the generations of voices
singing the same hymns from the same pews, all
those prayers of plea and praise, the muffled coughs
that punctuated sermons, the babies’ cries, shushed
by pacing mothers far back in the narthex, these same
scripture lessons imparted, year after liturgical year?
And all those past choirs, children donning the robes
of departed parents, carrying the future’s anthems–
the trumpets, handbells, cellos, flutes, and pianos,
this organ that surrounds the communion table, whose pipes
cannon joy and mourning into the rafters, shaking
the roof slate, quivering the slow liquid stained glass–
of what moment are these, after their moment has passed?
Only that the instrument is said to remember the song,
is transformed over time, as the wood of the violin realigns
along the grain, better able to sing, sweeter, fuller, richer,
the longer it is played. This old envelope of corporate spirit,
this sandstone shell, the plaster and the lath, pulpit and pew,
resounds now every sound it has ever contained. Listen.
It is the grain of your bones realigning. The organ tones
shiver within your chest, as if they were your own voice,
but sweeter, richer, fuller, than just your voice alone.
Note: published in “Light Year” 2019 Liberty Street Books
I’ve neglected to give a little love to my illustrator here. A Drop of Ink contains four wood engravings by Greg Lago, proprietor of Winged Bull Studio in Clayton, NY. Greg’s work has a fantastic narrative feel. The four engravings and their accompanying poems were first published in 1988 as a suite of broadsides entitled On the River, by Jim Benvenuto of Full Moon Press in Potsdam. The poems were hand set in lead type, with the engravings printed directly from the block, in a signed edition of 75. Fans of letterpress printing will know there is no substitute for the look and feel of direct printing, certainly not in digital reproduction. I still have a few copies for sale if you are interested, email me: dale@ncpr.org.
Here is a pale reflection of one of my favorite Lago engravings, which accompanies the poem “The Poachers” in A Drop of Ink, followed by the text of the poem.
The Poachers. Wood engraving copyright Greg Lago. Used with permission.
Me and mine have lived along this shore
since ten years before the dinosaur. Got enough
relations in town in fill a church and a graveyard.
I guide the summer-folk a little. Someone’s got to,
the damn fools. They blow each other away, rip up their boats
in the shoal water, drunk. But I live for when they’re gone.
You can almost forget the Seaway and the ugly new hotels
in A. Bay. It’s quiet, wide and smooth in the evening. Mallard
and teal, goose and heron ghost in to light on the backwater.
You have to latch up the outboard and pole back into cattails,
watch the bats that skim the evening hatch, smoke, talk,
and sip a little beer, waiting for the sun to go low.
They come out of the northwest, dark against a mackerel sky,
straight into the guns, then silence, just the v-wake
from the retriever’s nose, like the reflection of southbound geese.
You make the run back upriver with no lights and no wake,
the motor muffled low. The dog sits in the bow seat.
You toss him bits of offal under the jacklight moon.
Copies of A Drop of Ink arrived in my mailbox on Saturday, giftwrapped in blocks of ten. It was just like Christmas, except frustrating, because all the local stores were closed for the long weekend. But copies can now be found at The Birchbark Bookshop and the St. Lawrence County Arts Council in Potsdam, and at SLU’s Brewer Bookstore in Canton. I also have a stash at my office at North Country Public Radio in Canton, if you want to drop in and cadge a free cup of coffee along with your bedside reading. In coming days and weeks, I will get copies out to other locations, including the Adirondacks.
I tried to get books into TAUNY’s Folk Store in Canton, but they are renovating the space all summer, and into the SUNY Potsdam Bookstore, but they’re renovating until June 6. All outlets, including stores stocked by the publisher, will be listed on the book orders page.
I have three readings sheduled so far, where copies will also be available for sale. See the readings page for details.
If you have already bought and read a copy of A Drop of Ink, please take a moment to review it in a comment on this site.
In the time since I was sixteen, I have disseminated poetry in newspapers and little literary magazines and anthologies, on broadsides and in slender chapbooks. I have declaimed poetry in the back rooms of liquor resorts, from pulpits, in bookstores and coffeehouses, standing on park benches, and sitting in radio studios. I have written poems on dollar bills and slipped them into circulation, and I have scribed them onto pottery and sunk them in the river. I’ve blogged them and tweeted them and shared them via Facebook.
But the one thing I have never done is had them published in a full-length volume, much less by someone who isn’t my cousin or heavily in debt to me. In my life plan–as constructed in the early ’70s–my first book would have been a Yale Younger Poets selection, but I passed their age cutoff decades ago.
This has been in the works quite a while. Here’s an excerpt from the New Year’s resolution poem I wrote for the December 2007 broadcast of NCPR’s Open Studio:
And if my book-in-progress remains
unprinted, still, it grinds on toward
publication at a steady glacial pace.
One can see how, given inexorable pressure
from new work behind, it must calve off
eventually from the vast shelf
of unsolicited manuscripts to join
the other bergs of words that obstruct
the sea lanes of contemporary literature.
That day has come. And now I’m just waiting for the mail. The first copies of A Drop of Ink shipped from Foothills Publishing in Kenona, NY today. Check back shortly for sale outlets, readings and signings, and much more.
Here’s the poem from which the book title and section titles come, the last poem, as is fitting for an Afterword:
Afterword
I have come to you in the way that poets do—
up from paper, out of ink, into the inner eye.
Now you have seen these rivers and mountains, if dimly,
the way they would emerge from morning haze.
And you have met me and mine, strangely familiar,
as those you almost recognize in dreams.Look up from the page, from this world into yours,
tinted now as a drop of ink will stain a quart of wash.
I look up from the same page and see you,
aflicker, across a fire in the dark.
Here is a video of me reading two poems from A Drop of Ink, “Your Near Immortal Beard” and “The Bus to Common Center,” at the Hookah House in Potsdam, NY.
