Good Newses

First, the excellent South Carolina poet, former President of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and  my - I'm proud to say - friend, Susan Meyers, has won the 2012 Editor's Prize from Cider Press Review.  Her book, My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, will be published in 2013.  Don't miss it!

Second, but not second to me: my own second book-length narrative prose poem, Longevity, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015!  This is the outcome I have wished for all along for this manuscript, which is a kind of successor to the book Four Way published in 2007, Degrees of Latitude.  While not a sequel, Longevity shares with Degrees of Latitude a sensibility, some mirror characteristics - it's all about the protagonist's relationships with women, while Degrees of Latitude is mainly about  the (different) protagonist's relationships with men - and, of course, its form, a fragmentary prose poetic narrative.

I will keep you posted as I move along towards publication.  My editor has made some challenging, and exciting, suggestions for revisions, which will take some time to absorb and execute - or reject, as the case may be - and then, at her suggestion, I will work with a line editor (how rare and fortunate is that!) to ensure that the book is as clear in its intention and as finely tuned in its music as it can be.

I feel privileged and delighted to be working with Four Way again.

Hooray for Susan and Whoosh for me!  It's been a long road to this juncture: I began work on Longevity - many drafts, several titles, and 13 years ago - in 1999.  But I well remember it took Degrees of Latitude 18 years from the first stroke of the pen to the date of publication.  And - not, as Milton says, "to compare great with little" - but I think I read in the liner notes to the CD of Paradise Lost I'm listening to in the car that it took him more than 20 years from the time he conceived the poem to the date on which it was printed in 1667.  In the event, he probably wrote it, at the rate of forty lines per day, in about five years, beginning in 1663.  Nevertheless, I'm in good company!  Excellent company all around!

Thank you, everyone, for your wonderful support!