Labor Day at Venice Beach

Before this blog goes all out in promoting Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth, I should take a moment to mention something that got lost in all the excitement of last autumn, something that for me caused part of that excitement.

In a good way.

The season marked the publication of my third collection of poetry, Labor Day at Venice Beach. A previous post mentions where some of the poems in the book originally appeared. This is probably a good time to note as well that the collection's title poem, also its last and longest, is based on actual events at Venice Beach on Labor Day of 1998. (For full details you may have to buy the book.)

I had the great good fortune of giving the debut reading at my first choice of venues, the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California. Along with my wonderful wife Paula Van Lare, the audience included several poets who could  easily have replaced me at the podium: Kevin Durkin, Leslie Monsour, Frank Osen and Timothy Steele, all of whom have shown me kindnesses too numerous to mention in this space. The audience also included debut author (and friend since the late 1970s) John Sandrolini, whose novel One for Our Baby will be published in April by the legendary Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press. The reading was videotaped for the Beyond Baroque archives.

As Don Marquis once noted, publishing a book of poetry is like throwing a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Which, of course, I am doing. No reviews have come out so far, and there is no guarantee that any review will be what I want to hear. Then again, as Hyman Roth told Michael Corleone, "This is the business we have chosen."

Labor Day at Venice Beach is available from the bookstore at Beyond Baroque and from major online sellers, as well as some minor ones. It might find its place on a bookshelf near you.

AWP 2012 in Chicago, or, Why Do We Do This?

This blog has been silent for a while, and generally for very positive reasons that I will mention in later posts, but that is not the matter at hand.

More to the point, tomorrow I will be joining several thousand writerly types in one of the great annual rituals like the migration of Monarch butterflies or the spawning of horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay.

In other words, I will be attending this year's conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Chicago, where I have lived and near where I grew up.

With airfare and hotel paid for, and no-cage boarding arranged for Roo the Rescue Dog, the only question remaining is Why am I doing this? With plenty of company I can ask Why Do We This?

It's not for the money. No one I know will be turning a profit. A few in academia may break even if their departments fund them, but such funds are increasingly hard to come by.

Yet money is far from the only currency exchanged. Like other fine arts and some performing arts, writing depends on other economies. One is the prestige economy of publications and professional activity that may eventually turn to tenure and grants, though for relatively few. Even in these cases the amounts of money involved would seem bafflingly small to a financier circa 2006. Presenting papers and giving readings, though, can yield a slice of that small pie. Sometimes overlapping with the prestige economy is the gift economy of networking, favors exchanged and trading in books, journals and swag of usually modest dimensions; this serves as the framework for no small amount of conviviality.

Even without a quid pro quo, more than a few genuinely enjoy advancing the professional and creative development of others and/or buying a broke graduate student a drink. The term for these feelings in economics is "warm glow altruism effects".

While I took no action toward the proposals noted in this space last year, I will come in with a plan, as discussed in detail by several other bloggers. The centerpiece of mine will be the event shown in the flyer above, an offsite meet-and-greet (and signing) by poets affiliated with WordTech Communications, the publisher of my 2005 collection Settling for Beauty and my August 2012 collection Labor Day at Venice Beach. With any luck I will also have the opportunity to visit the fine people of Accents Publishing and American Book Review (and that leaves 25 more letters to cover). I also hope to stop in with Salmon Poetry, publisher of the anthology Dogs Singing, the proceeds of which go to two dog rescue organizations.

Another distinct pleasure will be attending a few readings and panels to get off my feet for a little bit and, more importantly, to remind myself that we are there for the art.

This could be fun. Please feel free to introduce yourself if you see me, assuming my badge has the right side showing.

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Acceptance of Third Poetry Collection: Labor Day at Venice Beach

Now that National Poetry Month is over, and I have learned that the answer to the question "Where's my cut?" is "nowhere", I can share some good news I learned of in mid-March and formalized in recent weeks.

To wit, my third book of poetry, Labor Day at Venice Beach, has been accepted for publication by the Cherry Grove Collections imprint of Wordtech Communications, which also published my second collection, Settling for Beauty, in 2005. Publication is scheduled for August of 2012.

While not all of the poems in Labor Day at Venice Beach have been published, the majority have. The title poem and another, "Four Fires", nominated for a Pushcart Prize, appeared in the Los Angeles Review, the periodical wing of Red Hen Press. Other poems appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including the following:

32 Poems

Alimentum

Arkansas Review

Babel Fruit

Gargoyle Magazine

The Helix Magazine

Hiss Quarterly

The Innisfree Poetry Journal

Lilliput Review

The Pedestal Magazine

Poems Niederngasse

Terrain

Umbrella

Verse Wisconsin

I am grateful to the editors of all of these journals, and I am pleased to have met several of them following the publication of my poems. If other individual poems in the collection are published in journals I will update this space and my acknowledgments page accordingly.

Some have said that writing is the easy part, though I'm not so sure about that. At any rate, now begins the part that's more than a little challenging for a dreamy introvert, such as many poets are. I have to obtain blurbs and locate venues for readings on whatever my book tour may turn out to be. I also have to cast about and see which journals are willing to review the book. In fact, I might even gear up for a launch party and a house reading or two.

Suggestions on these issues are welcome in the comments or by personal message.

In contrast to 2005, though, in 2012 I will not be planning a book launch at the same time as a wedding. With some lead time and a lot more knowledge than the last time out, I might get more recognition and maybe even some more sales.

This space will feature many more updates on book preparation and launching, but in the meantime, you read it here first.

Coming in August 2012: Labor Day at Venice Beach.