Thanks to all of the students and teachers from 8 Points Charter School for enlivening the bookstore this morning. We hope you all have a great summer!

The Artwork of Robert Atkins
Artist with Marvel Comics, Hasbro and IDW Publishing

Mr Atkins is a penciler, inker, and colorist in the comic book industry. He has worked on Amazing Spider-man, Venom, Heroes for Hire, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Snake Eyes, and GI Joe. He is originally from Jacksonville.

Mr Atkins’ signed prints and books will be available for purchase Saturday at Eclectic Art and Our Town Books.

Mr Atkins will be at Eclectic Art and Our Town Books from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday.

J.D. Proffitt
Manchester Bluff: A Civil War Novel

As informative as it is exciting, J.D. Proffitt’s first novel captures little known aspects of Civil War dynamics, including events that originated in his hometown of Alexander, Illinois.

Meet Sherlock Holmes as portrayed by MacMurray College professor Robert Seufert at 7 p.m. at Our Town Books. After enjoying Victorian refreshments & British ale at the store, we’ll stroll down ‘Baker Street’ to Hamilton’s for an evening of Sherlockian reminiscence, mystery, music & song. Join the fun! Come in Victorian costume if you wish.

Thursday, May 17th at 7 p.m.

Then there are those who would have you believe Francis Bacon to be the “real” Shakespeare. Now, that’s just ludicrous and implausible. Nay, impossible. Since he died a mere twenty years ago this coming Saturday, undue suspension of reason is required for serious (nay, comic) consideration (of this notorious twentieth century artist) as the author of over a hundred and fifty sublime Elizabethan (Shakespearian) sonnets. Famous for his “Screaming Popes,” among other tortured works of smeared genius, this London maverick could not have written anything–let alone Macbeth–centuries before his time.

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, while sharing Shakespeare’s given name, seems otherwise unlikely as a candidate for authorship. After researching the 6th Earl with the same dedication (looking at pictures) employed in the service of elucidating literary truths, as was the case in my investigation of the 17th Earl, my resolve was little diminished.

Finally, for our (my) purposes, anyway: Christopher Marlowe. Finally, a real contender. Hero and Leander, et al. ”Hum,” methinks. And then…”Nah,” thinks me again. Too many pub brawls.

William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare.

–Andy

“She,”
she said, markedly. “She
is a Red Admiral.”

It was the day after
Adrienne Rich died.
And I was thinking

I wish I knew more
about flora and fauna.
I was also thinking

of the time Rich remonstrated
John Berryman for his drinking,
how we drab ones, like moths,

are instructed. No myth
in her red-flecked skirt, she
advanced to the window,

setting down
her book of
Nabokov

(entomology
met
etymology).

Diving in she didn’t know
she would surface in this
poem,

wearing (not catching)
“the thing itself”
on the back of her wrist.

Unarmed (sans net)
she wore her fleeting
charm on a bracelet of poise.

I opened the door and backed
away to watch
this tandem face

its noisy moat
and sail across,
epaulets intact.

–Andy

One evening, while out on the town in question, I was playing — under the influence of too much Valpolicella — the provocateur. I said, “Political poetry is an oxymoron. Social activism is as necessary as any other evil that rights the wrongs committed by the right, but poetry must, rightfully, remain above this untoward fray.” Or words to that effect. Never content to quit while ahead, I went on to sing the praises of Pablo Neruda. Well, needless to say, my heedless remarks were taken to task by some perceptive member of our party. She said, “How can you claim — in one breath — poetry’s superiority to politics, and — in the next — loudly laud Neruda’s body of work, which included, among other stridently political manifestos, A Call for the Destruction of Nixon?” Or words to that effect.

Long before Nixon entered the scene, Pablo sang of love and despair. An avid collector of maritime memorabilia, he penned passionate odes to “things,” many of which pertained to his beloved sea. He lived on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. And within his unique home — a pilgrimage site for Neruda worshipers — old ships’ figureheads figure prominently. Calling for a power-abusing figure’s head on a plate, while arguably justified, seldom translates into high art. Calling spirits from the vasty deep. Now that is poetry.

Not that daffodils and nightingales are the only subjects worthy of verse. Wordsworth and Keats are in the canon for their uncommon talent, not their subject matter.

With the passing of Adrienne Rich this past week, we have lost an uncommon talent indeed. One of the most gifted and ardent voices raised in protest against patriarchal tyranny, she railed eloquently, poem after poem, in defense of uncommon sense.

Chosen by W.H. Auden, Rich received the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book of poems, A Change of World. Evolving over time, freeing her verse, and airing her grievances more directly, she progressed in step with (and often ahead of) her times. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law put her on both the poetical and political maps. The title poem of another award-winning book, it reads like a feminist manifesto, unleashing her “…Furies cornered from their prey:/The argument ad feminam, all the old knives/that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,/ma semblable, ma soeur!” Later, in the seventh section of the poem, Rich quotes the eighteenth century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley):

“To have in this uncertain world some stay
which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence.”

Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

With the publication of Diving into the Wreck, winner of the National Book Award, Rich hit her full stride. As she delved into the mess of ills and evils that permeated the late 60′s and 70′s, she seemed to strike the right balance between vehemence and eloquence.

…the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck…

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black…

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot…

With Neruda’s figureheads still in my head, I reread Rich’s allusion to one in this passage with keener awareness. Neruda counted these carved beauties among his muses, worthy of sonnets and odes. Rich, on the other hand, identified with them, suffering, as they did, the abuses of that vasty deep, at the hands of men of conquest.

By the time she had written An Atlas of the Difficult World, her best known “mature” work, Rich had lost no steam. But her originality had petered considerably. This long poem of long lines is uncomfortably reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, that seminal testament of The Beats. If Kerouac was that movement’s matinee idol — and Burroughs’ its crackpot priest — Ginsberg was its laureate. But their heydays were decades past when Rich wrote this (albeit rhapsodic) sixties coffee house riff:

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin
where any calendar’s ripped-off: Appomattox
Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon
the ex-Army nurse hitch-hiking from the debriefing center; medal of spit on
the veteran’s shoulder
–catch if you can this unbound land these states without a cause
earth of despoiled graves and grazing these embittered brooks
these pilgrim ants pouring out from the bronze eyes, ears, nostrils,
the mouth of liberty
over the chained bay waters
San Quentin…

Dot, dot, dot. And The Beats go on… and on. After reading all thirteen sections of the poem — most of which were excellent (a case of Rich doing Ginsberg better than Ginsberg) — I just had to read a poem by Samuel Menashe to cleanse my palette of such wordiness. But wait, there’s an “and yet.” And yet, I was rewarded for my reading. In the final section:

…I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.

However did she know?

–Andy

Jacksonville’s Award Video:

Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl (The Pioneer Woman Cooks)
by Ree Drummond

Food From My Frontier (The Pioneer Woman Cooks)
by Ree Drummond

We also have the paperback edition of Black Heels to Tractor Wheels and the picture book, Charlie the Ranch Dog, by Ree Drummond.

Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Book
by Paula Deen with Melissa Clark

Baking with the Cake Boss, 100 of Buddy’s Best Recipes and Decorating Secrets
by Buddy Valastro

Betty Crockers Cookbook, 1500 Recipes for the Way You Cook Today

Comfort Food Fix
by Ellie Krieger

Cake Pops, Tips, Tricks, and Recipes
by Bakerella (a.k.a. Angie Dudley)

Mennonite Girls Can Cook
by Lovella Schellenberg