You’ve already heard, of course, that fewer people are reading anything anymore. And when they do, they want it to be short, if not shorter, or the very shortest it could possibly be.
There’s truth to that with poetry, as well. Few people buy poetry books. Nonetheless, many people seem to be writing and publishing poetry these days. And the Internet is thick with online literary magazines accepting poetry (along with submission fees), contests seeking poems of various types and lengths (with entry fees), and people just flat-out writing and posting their poems in hopes that someone somewhere will see them and maybe buy one of their chapbooks or longer collections of poems.
I will mention, by way of horn-tooting self-promotion, that I have some cheap chapbooks of poetry (and more) available on Amazon, in ebook and printed format. I also have a few unpublished poems of various types and lengths that I need to send out to potential publication sources. But no more on that for now.
Mister Speaker, I rise today to bring my puny spotlights upon two books of poetry by poets that I like and am happy to recommend to anyone who still bothers to read and remains at least a little bit curious about poems. Good poetry can tell intriguing, thought-provoking, and even frightening stories, typically in just a few words. (Lengthy “prose poems” seem to be a current range at many poetry outlets these days. But more on that–maybe–someday later.)
The Two New Works I Recommend
When it was published in 2024, Proverbs of Limbo by Robert Pinsky, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) was the first new book in eight years from one of the best of America’s former Poet Laureates. Pinsky, who has taught in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University, has published ten other works of poetry and numerous nonfiction works. His poetic voice is clear, and he tells absorbing, thought-provoking, and sometimes startling stories in just a few lines.
As just one example, I especially relish these two stanzas from his poem “Beatitudes”:
Thank god for boredom, the great
Eventual deflater of all fads
And spurious elevations,
For without it we would be suffocated
By centuries of baloney,
And have nothing.
I also recommend Zen Poems, a new work from Roy Hamric, a beautifully crafted, self-published book with illustrations by artist Jim Crump. Hamric’s poems are a delightful and soulful blend of Asian and American Southwestern imagery, sometimes in the same tightly structured, smoothly worded sentence.
Disclaimer: Decades ago, Roy and I worked at the same small-town newspaper, the Denton Record-Chronicle, in Denton, Texas. We were young photographers and reporters still searching for what seemed to be good pathways into our futures. Later, briefly in my case, we also taught classes at the University of Texas at Arlington. We had both been early participants in the Vietnam War–Roy in the Army and me in the Navy. And we had done somewhat similar jobs that required secret clearances. Roy had come back from the war fascinated with Thailand and its people; I had come came back an emaciated victim of seasickness and PTSD and realizing that I was more than a quart low on education and needing to finish college. Long and convoluted story short, Roy eventually married a Thai woman and moved to Thailand. Then they came back to the United States and later they moved back to Thailand.
One sample image drawn from a quiet, compact poem, “Walking Mountains in the Big Bend”:
Dramas appear
On the faces
of mountains.
Roy has amassed many writing and photography credits from publications all over Asia, as well as the United States. We are seldom in touch these days, but I recommend him and his works without reservation. A few weeks ago, I was entertained by his eye-opening and informative nonfiction book, Searching for Hunter S. Thompson in Laos.
— Si Dunn
(Si Dunn, now a Massachusetts freelance writer, is a former reporter, feature writer, photographer, and book reviewer for newspapers in Texas and currently reviews books for The Progressive Populist Magazine and Lone Star Literary Life.)
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