Photo by Vic Burkhammer

I AM GLAD to have diverse tastes in poetry and in reading generally. I experience the joy of reading when I spend time with a book by poetic novelist Jayne Anne Phillips or a book by sometimes humorous W.Va. poet Bob Henry Baber. I’ll even read the pulp at the supermarket checkout, but I am laughing at the space alien approach. I like the surprises of good writing. What books shake loose your mind?

Joy is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “vivid emotion of pleasure arising from a sense of well-being or satisfaction; the feeling or state of being highly pleased or delighted; exultation of spirit; gladness, delight.”
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W.VA. POET LAUREATE Irene McKinney reads her essay “Night Sky” on W.Va. Public Broadcasting.
Listen

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BIBLIOPHILE LINK:
http://www.librarything.com
You can make a digital record of your library at LibraryThing, the world’s largest book club. Enter 200 books, no cost. Unlimited for $10/year or $25 for life.
“LibraryThing appears poised to turn the cataloging of books into a form of communal recreation.” — Christian Science Monitor
W.Va. has 24 listings, including members porchreader, NMarieHeld, and antiquary, who has 327 poetry titles including “The Essence of Modern Haiku” by Seishi Yamaguchi and “The Sixteen Satires” by Juvenal. Her library drew comments from someone in UK who got “great encouragement” from antiquary’s catalog. There’s a reader identified only as popa who has a copy of “Bird Alphabet” by Llewellyn McKernan.
This site seems to be a kind of My Face or My Space specifically for bibliophiles. Looks like you can either mask your identity or have full disclosure, as the member rainbowlaw has done:
“Carrie & Elisia Ross-Stone, lesbian civil rights activists, life-partners and founders of RainbowLaw.com, a not-for-profit legal information website for the LGBTQ Community. We rode our bicycles twice across the country to advocate for marriage equality. We are the mothers of 3 grown children and the grandmothers of 2 grandchildren.”

They say they have a library of books “by radical feminist authors, poets and political activists.”

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Random list from my library:
“Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps” by Kees Boeke
“31 letters and 13 dreams: poems” by Richard Hugo
“Things” by Francis Ponge
“The Branch Will Not Break” by James Wright
“Black Tickets” by Jayne Anne Phillips
“A Picture from Life’s Other Side” by Bob Henry Baber

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Welcome to MountainWord. Stick around, listen to some audio, read some poems, book notes and bits of poetry news. If this is your first visit to MountainWord, please visit earlier posts.

Send poetry-related news to Vic Burkhammer. E-mail and comments are encouraged and appreciated. Announcements for poetry events are also welcome, as are links to poetry sites.

If you’d like to recommend a book of poems or read one of your unpublished short poems over the phone, just call me at 348-5184 and wait for the voicemail to kick in, leave your name and number for verification and then read away. I’ll consider posting the audio on MountainWord. I’m looking for work of under 20 well-written lines. Nothing sentimental or old-fashioned. Prose poems of exceptional quality are eligible too. The tone can run the gamut from humorous to serious.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.