Dan Beachy-Quick (trns), The Thinking Root: The Poetry of Earliest Greek Philosophy (Milkweed 2023) and Stone-Garland: Six Poets from the Greek Lyric Tradition (Milkweed 2020)
Anotherbookmark has turned up. Curiously, this bookstore has the same address as Blue Whale. Now, I’ve only been to Charlottesville once. Google Maps says Blue Whale is there now, so I must have visited when it was still Seanchai and the Blue Whale came to me later, tucked inside a used book.
I wrote the last poems for Vessels in June of 2021.
But I feel like I finally finished the book this week when, after reviewing the galley proof, I submitted the last edits and my final About the Author and Acknowledgements drafts.
It’s all extravagant press junkets and groupies from here on out.
This was long overdue. I deactivated it last November, but turned it back on a few weeks later to save my following/follower list. Then it lay dormant & forgotten for most of the year, except for some DMs to people who were still nowhere else & who were seemingly impervious to email. It’s time.
I was invited over to a friend’s apartment to meet her — and she ignored me the whole time. No hello, no eye contact. Absolutely nothing. She was utterly unapproachable. Instead, she spent the evening in the other room, forehead-to-forehead with her friend, discussing and analyzing a VHS tape of the modern dance concert she’d choreographed a few weeks earlier. And I could see instantly how smart, articulate, beautiful, and, most of all, strong she was.
We began dating eleven months later, and married eleven months after that. Twenty-two months that seemed, at the time, to span thirty years. And now, thirty years that seem, at times, to have spanned barely twenty-two months. Well, that’s time for you.
Some stories belong to the breath, not to the pixel and keyboard. Some stories need the counterpoint of digressions and indignant amendments, of interruptions to refill the wine glass or the bread bowl, or to choose more music, album by album. They need the bustle and patience of a long evening, the wood and steel rhythms of a well-provisioned table.
So: to hear the rest of the story, you’ll need to be seated across from us, favorite beverage at your elbow, and all the time in the world. And perhaps a story or two for us in exchange.
