Wednesday, April 23, 2014
IN THIS PLACE: SELECTED POEMS 1982-2013
GOES TO BOOK DESIGNER THIS WEEK
I have been working at it for more than a year now, In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. Well, the manuscript goes to the book designer this week. It hasn't been easy, working that initial fourteen inch stack of poem-crammed pages down to 392 book pages, to preserve the best of what I produced between 1982 and mid-2013. I had to kill a lot of my lovelies.
I'm proud of what remains. Some of them you may have seen in these pages over the years (and a lot of those you've seen here will be missing from the Selected). I am expecting the cover of this book to echo the cover of Middle Ground, which by default has served as my early selected poems.
What will be missing from In This Place are any of the poems from The Big Book of Ben Zen, which was published in 2003, and any from The Old Poet Says, which I will be putting together over the next year. In addition, only a small selection of poems from my Plain Days project will be included here, with the idea that maybe I'll get back to that neglected work and see it to completion.
I expect to have finished copies in my hands by August, perhaps. If any of you out there, friends or devoted readers, would like to have a copy of In This Place when it comes out, please send me your mailing address, either by e-mail (tmmontag AT centurylink.net) or by snail-mail and I'll get a copy off to you when books arrive. If you have suggestions for places I might send review copies, please get me that information as well.
We push on!
I'm proud of what remains. Some of them you may have seen in these pages over the years (and a lot of those you've seen here will be missing from the Selected). I am expecting the cover of this book to echo the cover of Middle Ground, which by default has served as my early selected poems.
What will be missing from In This Place are any of the poems from The Big Book of Ben Zen, which was published in 2003, and any from The Old Poet Says, which I will be putting together over the next year. In addition, only a small selection of poems from my Plain Days project will be included here, with the idea that maybe I'll get back to that neglected work and see it to completion.
I expect to have finished copies in my hands by August, perhaps. If any of you out there, friends or devoted readers, would like to have a copy of In This Place when it comes out, please send me your mailing address, either by e-mail (tmmontag AT centurylink.net) or by snail-mail and I'll get a copy off to you when books arrive. If you have suggestions for places I might send review copies, please get me that information as well.
We push on!
