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Sun & Urn: Poems
Publishers Weekly.
263.52 (Dec. 19, 2016): p95.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* Sun & Urn: Poems
Christopher Salerno. Univ. of Georgia, $19.95 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-0-8203-5049-3
In his haunting fourth collection, Salerno (ATM) <>. These poems are not about sorrow but are still sorrowful. The death of
Salerno's father infuses the poems with grief, capturing the way loss invades a life in small and often indefinable ways.
"The difficulty of sorrow/ is the way it coheres, never/ staying distant as it once did," Salerno writes. Across the three
poems titled "In Vitro," he evokes a sensation of limbo, which within the poems is where an unborn daughter plays
Chopin on . grand pianos swaying alongside the Titanic's wreck. The picture reveals a powerful mournfulness that
reflects the writer's own state of limbo, his unease in a fatherless world. As Salerno puts it, "Disquietude, that's a word/
with a dial." The poems disquietingly hum with questions of what to do after death-whether one's own or another's. For
whatever simple answers the poet seems to have for great unspoken questions-"There are ways to say die! without a
findable body"--Salerno wields just as many queries, yielding a book ripe with eerie and meaning-filled unknowing:
"Do you think it (death) is supposed to come as a surprise?/ Like the moon claiming you?" (Feb.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sun & Urn: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 95. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475324265&it=r&asid=5fcc24672875c7af2eebe62c3d1fdfa7.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475324265

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OUCH!!!

Boutique poetry
Leonard J. Cirino
The American Dissident.
.21 (Summer-Fall 2010): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2010 The American Dissident
http://www.theamericandissident.org/
Full Text: 
Minimum Heroic by Christopher Salerno
Fifty Poems by Liana Quill
Other Prohibited Items by Martha Greenwald
All from the Mississippi Review Poetry Series 2010
118 College Drive # 5144,
Hattiesburg, MS 39406-0001
60-64 pages, $9.00 each
First, thanks to the University for sending copies of these prizewinning books. Second, they are all reasonably priced at
$9.00. That's the last good thing I can say about any of them. How do I display my disgust with these books. All the
writers look to be 25- 30 years old and are "appealing." All teach at universities and have MFA's. All are thoroughly
involved in their petty lives and, all but Quill, egotistical to the utmost. Salerno could be said to have a tiny bit of grit
but basically they are all from the privileged class of new MFA's and writing professors whose idea of a difficult time is
when their child has a cold or they get bored in a faculty meeting. There is not one concrete mention of the ongoing war
in the mid-east, not one poem about the economy or suffering of others. Nothing about the millions of homeless or
those who have lost their jobs or had their mortages foreclosed, not to speak of any attempt to address the two million
plus prisoners in US penitentiaries, or the millions of immigrants. In particular, nothing about any foreign country and
the atrocities, starvation, genocide, and dictatorships in much of the Third World. Just the annoying whining of the
upper-middle class with their petty neuroses.
Not that every poem should address a situation or cause other than one's inability to feel for others, but in three books I
think there should be some discussion of current events. Not to mention that the poems are lauded by Dana Weir and
others as being "ordinary" and "daily." They are exactly that and I don't cater to "ordinary." Nothing but pettiness.
There are no other world or ethereal works, very little of any sort of metaphysics, no sense of history or a literary
framework, and hardly anything that makes me think past the most mundane of thoughts. In all, these books are
representational of the business world that US poetry has become. Aloof, pretentious, only a smattering of what could
be considered anything other than a comfortable, middle-class life with all its amenities. This is the me generation
developed and promoted by the business of so-called art - and it has little or nothing to do with art or even aesthetics.
Except for a very occasional poem the language is boring and predictable, the images equally dull and unimaginative.
The only time there is a mention of any difficulty or grief has to do with the poets lamenting their personal life of
relative comfort. No walking in the shoes of others. Occasionally Quill has an interesting image but her poems are
almost all about five lines and could be called "grammar school sketches" by a precocious third-grader. Not one of her
pieces evolves into a thought-out or complete poem.
Once in a while Salerno addresses something pertinent but he usually shrugs i t off with some stupid comical allusion
as if it doesn't really matter. His one line that envelops his totality is, "... no Eye, because the world is boring." I'm glad
for him he has the time and funds to be bored but there are billions of people suffering in this world, not to mention the
environment, and none of these three fakes can relate to much but their infantile lives in a world with little meaning to
them. I read a few poems to my brother who is a carpenter and asked him if I was mistaken in my observance of their
vacuity. He is well read and street smart and all he could say was, "Boutique poetry." These disgusting people of
immense privilege are masquerading as poets. I can't even call them writers much less poets or artists because of their
simplistic and egotistical approach which is terribly sad, almost tragic for the state of the art. And this is the situation
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with most prizewinners in the US today. The word art has become an embellishment for what can be easily passed off
and sold to the public; prettiness and pettiness, without principles or beauty or depth. If pornography can be defined as
"without socially redeeming value" then these books should be considered obscene.
Cirino, Leonard J.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cirino, Leonard J. "Boutique poetry." The American Dissident, Summer-Fall 2010, p. 14+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA233502638&it=r&asid=6446d31a571be402424f6c7412a44bb6.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A233502638

• Sketchwriter search
  
  Word count: 3161

  Amazon.com book descriptions:

  Sun & Urn

  Christopher Salerno’s fourth collection of poems, Sun & Urn, is a book made from the wild stuff of grief and loss. Readers will find in these lyric poems a peculiar force pushing beyond the obvious. Sad, tender, whimsical, this book mines the poet’s personal journey through grief for a universal look at how we as human beings handle our greatest losses. Coursing through this work is the clarity of vulnerability. With an idiosyncratic and inquisitive lyricism, Sun & Urn examines, repositions, and makes art from the odd scraps left over after a father’s sudden death, from infertility and divorce, and from the hope of new love.

  If a poet ends a poem early in a book with, ‘And always a hellhound be,’ I keep reading. If, several poems later, a speaker is burning his deceased father's toupee in the yard, I keep reading―harder, closer. Christopher Salerno's Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice! (Tom Lux)

  In his haunting fourth collection, Salerno weaves a morbid kind of melancholia into the mundane and negotiates the experience of loss and a lack of fulfillment…The poems disquietingly hum with questions of what to do after death―whether one’s own or another’s. For whatever simple answers the poet seems to have for great unspoken questions―‘There are ways to say die/ without a findable body’―Salerno wields just as many queries, yielding a book ripe with eerie and meaning-filled unknowing. (Publisher’s Weekly (starred review))
  Book Description

  Poetry that pushes beyond the tragedies of loss to the wilder realms of renewal and meaning

  Whirligig

  Poetry. "These poems contain a wonderful capacity to incorporate unpredictability, humor, anguish, anxiety, longing, and feisty note of confusion and survival...poems that are not wedded to literal and linear meaning of experience but to the imagined and circular meanings and play. WHIRLIGIG is consistently attentive to an edgy playfulness and serious mindfulness, continuing dialogue with matters of faith through failings of identity and belief in self and others. The poems carry the musical moment with an easy sensibility. The observations ripple and pause with seduction and sensuality" -- Jason Shinder, Founder of YMCA National Writers Voice and author of Among Women.

  ATM

  Poetry. "Christopher Salerno's ATM is a decadent refutation of Robert Graves' quip that 'there is no poetry in money, either.' The material world and the natural world stand side by side: a tulip planted not beside a river bank but beside a bank machine. The bank, like a tree, has branches. 'People are getting free shipping, and all the bees are gone.' Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we're missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating."—D.A. Powell

  Minimum Heroic

  Review

  Chistopher Salerno provides us with a universe just as it is coming into being. These poems are richly layered, intricately imagined, elaborately textured, and not often tamed. What a poet thinks about poetry and what he thinks about us is apparent in every poem’s existence. This poet believes in poetry and believes in us, and that is enough, more than enough for me. Maximum pleasure. I love reading this book. —Dara Wier, Contest Judge

  Minimum Heroic moves quickly, as life does, through the possibilities of cardboard cars and soldiers wielding cologne, as “[t]he final campaign is to push your lover over.” There’s a beauty in these antic poems, or an antic impulse to these beautiful poems. It’s a mixture that is necessary, as necessary as the confessions, apologies, and tamperings that finally bring the idea of the heroic back to a South Jersey town, to where “[n]o longer playthings unalloyed, / we are the world again.” —John Gallaher

  Christopher Salerno’s poems are stunningly accurate and precise. Fluffier words might sound like higher praise, but there is no fluff here, and Minimum Heroic shows just how powerfully these terms, borrowed from harder sciences, can lend their weight to poetry as well. For here are poems that are both accurate in their measure of the world and precise—that is, consistently true to their mark—in every cadence. —Benjamin Paloff

  =====

  Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/09/sun-urn-by-christopher-salerno/

  A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno

  Reviewed By Scott Wordsman

  September 8th, 2017

  “I am no // surrealist but every memory / to me has a dial,” writes Christopher Salerno in his currency-worried, fetishistic gem, ATM (2014). In his follow-up and latest collection, Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press), Salerno cranks this dial of memory a few notches higher, for the poet now finds himself grappling with a matter more serious than money: his father’s untimely death. The final moments of “Furnace,” one of Sun & Urn’s sharpest pieces, exemplify the tour de force of grief toward which this collection pushes:

  We live
  with the absence of strong male metaphor,
  the empty bed
  of a white pickup truck.
  All winter
  it was so wintery
  I was lost
  in the driveway. My dad that December
  would be dead very soon.
  A woodpecker hammered at the boxwood.
  The woodpecker’s song
  was about us
  nailing something in.

  The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life. Distinct from contemporary documents of grief, which function chiefly as extended elegies (think Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture), Sun & Urn dissects mortality at manifold moments, most notably when the poet invites us to meet his recently deceased father, who “left behind marijuana / a small gray suit / of smoke” and whose garage is home to “bags of concrete dust. / Spiders living in his bicycle frame / setting sail in their webs.” Salerno, who is flirting with middle age himself, devotes a number of poems to his own fears of the reaper, usually through darker, more mordant tones. In this portion of “If You Must Hide Yourself From Love,” the poet examines and deconstructs his milieu, aware that even on social media, life and death remain inextricably linked:

  I spot in someone’s Face-
  book sonogram a tiny dictum

  full of syllogisms. One says: all kisses come
  down to a hole in the skull,

  toothpaste and gin; therefore your eyes
  are bull—your mouth is a goal.

  Dialing in on his roots as an imagist with a penchant for soft surrealism, Salerno soaks the bulk of his poems with playfulness, punchy line breaks, and, as previously seen, a fascination with the marriage between the natural and the mechanized world. Take the titular “Sun & Urn,” where, in the poet’s eyes, no animal exists independent of industrial efforts:

  With some, near the end, there is a farewell
  act of awareness—a smile, a robin’s egg

  returned gently to its nest
  in the satellite dish.

  Again, <> This becomes a recurring theme throughout the book—how death permeates life, remains its inevitable tether. As Graham Foust, one of the poet’s influences, once wrote, “We complete the process / of growing up / and begin the process of dying. / Which is much the same thing.”

  Playing second fiddle, but not by much, to Salerno’s unflinching content are his line breaks; they are swift, adroit, and lead the reader careening down the page, unaware of what’s still to come. In “Plot,” Salerno wields enjambment like a knife, slicing his stanzas with precision, extending a cheeky nod to James Wright along the way:

  I have not wasted my life
  if the moon has risen

  over my Toyota. A moon
  spectral in its rising

  above the municipal pond
  parking lot where a turtle

  on its back grapples
  with the pavement, or torpor,

  as the high-pressure sodium
  lights burn above like two TVs.

  <> To maintain the elegiac arc, however, the poet ensures we receive a healthy dose of loss-addled poems to complement the lighter ones. “Furnace,” “Bray,” and “What I Screamed Into” reflect this sensibility, are crafted with equal parts ache and wit. Yet it is when Salerno embraces total darkness that the world, according to his memory’s dial, shines through in stygian hues. Consider this portion of “Late Style:”

  From the roof of my dead father’s home
  I see with my Pre-Raphaelite eye,

  through the anatomical stillness of pine trees,
  the blue water towers of the next

  three towns along the shore. The outcropping
  of gray rocks facedown in the surf.

  I see something flit between
  two perfect waves. In here, his window drapes

  darken the entire room until my
  movements cue a sleeping computer

  from its sleep—my father’s final
  Google search: ‘pain down middle of chest.’

  Dolorous and dreary, this poem illustrates Salerno’s mission for his book: he wants to invite you into his world, but he doesn’t want you to take your shoes off. Worthy of additional mention are several “In Vitro” poems, in which the poet dedicates three quasi-elegies to “the daughter I thought / I would have had.” The tightness and candor of these pieces, reminiscent of an early James Tate, accentuates the sad fact of mortality: not only must we accept the gradual aging of our parents, but we need to confront the irrevocable decision of whether or not to leave progeny. Now in his forties, Salerno queries the necessity of test tube fertilization, recognizing that however absurd it is to “sit in the room full of porn,” he is not above it, for these poems are indeed written “to the beat of a lullaby / titled Father of No One.”

  In present-day America, where a volatile political landscape and a questionable tomorrow loom with insistence, it feels almost selfish to lament anything except the shortcomings of our beleaguered nation, democracy, and collective sense of identity. How, then, to address a personal loss, especially that of the gravest nature? Perhaps Christopher Salerno is best equipped to provide that answer, for <>, and thus one’s poetry, at the hands of the world’s indifference.

  =====
  Kenyon Review
  https://www.kenyonreview.org/reviews/sun-and-urn-by-christopher-salerno-738439/

  “Father Of No One”: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno

  Jeff Nguyen

  Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 80 pages. $19.95.

  Vengeance is Macbeth’s reaction to the curse of childlessness and the wrath of the parent brigade, but what pushes one man to toxic violence may lead another to the virtues of indolence. Having settled into suburbia and his forties, New Jersey native Christopher Salerno asks whether a “fist in the air” is still a “punch / if it fails to inflect your luminous destiny.” His fourth volume Sun & Urn, which won the inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, presents the wondrous story of a man finding his second wind after the grief of infertility, divorce, and falling out of favor with the father.

  Salerno writes from the conviction that last place is a fine place to be. In mock-heroic poems, he observes with dismay how the rug rats lose their tenderness through their regimen of warlike hobbies. Harassed by skater boys or orange belts, he meets their contempt with preemptive self-deprecation, as in the poem “Foreshortening”: “behind the bakery they will fasten / to one knee tourniquets / made of limp baguettes, then ride.” Always behind the goofy details, like this Gilbert and Sullivan rhyme, is the pathos and persistence of the deflated baker man.

  The elegies to the father, with his “bulletproof book / about the Four Noble Truths,” suggest the adult version of this tragedy and add up to a portrait of impenetrable game face. His eagerness to conceal his bald spot or failing heart seems to coincide with his love of money, sports, violence, and property. In the remarkable “Bray,” an outing to the racetrack unleashes the equivocal feelings aroused by the dead father who loves winning and the son he deems a stinker:

  Why
  do all hearted creatures stink?
  I am asked by my brother’s
  youngest child, Is horse your favorite
  or least favorite mammal? I say
  don’t beg the Lord if the sky is
  a gray roof beneath which
  you have waited all day to see
  gallop something graceful, swift.

  Through generational contrasts in diction, heightened by comparatives, Salerno’s poems spotlight the failures of sympathy that result from men’s impulse to size each other up. Here is the nephew’s harmless awkwardness and the father’s damning folksiness; the latter slips into the son’s voice the moment the nephew’s question dredges up the memory of that uglier contest judged according to the grandkids one can send swiftly out the gates. This final home stretch of the poem counters the moral judgment attached to action through the congestion of (guttural) syllables, inverted word order, and delayed line breaks that bring the gallop clopping to a stop.

  As we watch the son “lob” the ashes at the finish line or light the toupee on fire, we feel the twinge of one exhausted by his father’s horse race. For Salerno, withdrawing from the pressures of manly competition means owning the course of indolence. Indolence, for Wordsworth and the Romantics, signified the opposite of the epic and heroic mode, a hiatus from exertion that connoted in more positive cases the pursuit of leisure and in more negative ones a paralyzing torpor (a fuller treatment of this topos may be found in Willard Spiegelman’s Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art). Wallace Stevens’s drowsed outdoorsman and James Schuyler’s endearing cripple update the same legacy to assuage depression or effervesce illness.

  So too, Salerno cherishes the low key of indolence to relieve the ongoing limbo of being a “Father Of No One,” which sessions at the sperm bank have not yet resolved. From the ache of childlessness as a drama without a dramatic arc, Salerno flattens the steepness of the passions and de-escalates action or adventure through his circular movement or languorous rhythm (“a canoe / packed with snow, / a thing you only row / with your eyes”), all the while quipping that “Sedentary Is Tiring Too,” that his favorite “Plot” is a parking lot.

  Even exoticism can seem like too much work in Salerno’s signature mode: “No hollow / bamboo noise or subtitles / . . . to memorize.” Where Stevens throws the celestial fiesta, Salerno unveils the offish and marvelous in the local and near-at-hand. “The Evening Report,” a forecast of divorce, illustrates his indolent and hyperrealist approach to romance:

  I wake up remembering that words are tries.
  You want me to check your head for ticks.
  There are multiple crickets in the laundry room.
  I have a new plan to rid the moisture from my watch.
  We are matter-of-factly not pregnant.
  The neighbor’s having trouble with his Chevy
  Silverado. I am falling in love with the material world.
  I tried to crush a tick with two Bayer aspirins.

  The desire to demonstrate care and commitment in the absence of consummation animates many of these lyrics. Salerno breaks the pattern of the unenjambed list poem to introduce that hardly exotic “Chevy / Silverado.” Yet the vehicle lights up like a silver moon that makes lovable all the other stubborn machinery that has trouble starting up. With no kids in the picture, the icky act of picking ticks speaks beyond the crickets of the sexless night: these excessive and effete admissions estrange intimacy in terms of how we clear each other’s brains of irritation.

  The flaw Salerno perceives in his own body makes him receptive not to the sublime aspects of Nature, but to the casualties of the natural and social jungle, “half a songbird” or the “knocked down nest[s]” who are “unassailable only insofar as we produce / . . . something beautiful.” In his poems, the chip on one’s shoulder and the desired freedom from judgment condition the production of light and relief in the absence of combustion.

  Shunned by the reproductive country club, Salerno goofs up gender roles à la Will and Grace. He and his post-divorce playmate live on “with the absence of strong male metaphor,” salvaging scraps from the construction zone to make each other gifts or mocking the jockstraps over cocktails, as in these saucy penta-syllabics: “forty turns mother- / hood off,” “I flex to make my / fake tattoo move. You / spit-take your daiquiri.” Follow the menopausal automobile and faux-machismo f/k-ing to the fake finish line, and you can see how Salerno garnishes his bitters with zest.

  By the same token, he depressurizes the grave situation, as in “Plot,” which describes the commiserating embrace between divorcé and widow, daughterless man and the mother who has survived her son:

  as the high pressure sodium
  lights burn above like two TVs.

  I am held together by wire
  my grandmother confides in me

  as we slow dance on
  a roadside full of edible flowers—

  You can infer the bloody cause and place of death from the lighting alone. Yet beneath the “high pressure” lamps, we find delicious indolence and the electricity of mutual relief. Even in his dazed moods, Salerno writes with more spunk than the dutiful elegist.<< His poems explore how the playbook of game face destroys the fathers and how going off-script may save the sons>>. Bittersweet and radiant, Sun & Urn shows how to fall out of a horse race and into the arms of a slow dance. You don’t need a plot to fall in love with this story.

  =====

• skechwriter search #2
  miscellaneous data about whirligig
  Word count: 2985

  http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/whirligig.html

  Whirligig
  Christopher Salerno
  ISBN 1-933132-26-4 $10.00 66 pages

  Salerno couches his wisdom on indecision. The reader on the other hand, knows better. Salerno isn’t picking one thing or the other from poem to poem to “charge right into,” but both. Because Whirligig gives us the sense that there is nothing Salerno will avoid, we can only hope that his are “the laws that [will] govern our listening” for decades to come.
  Chris Tonelli, Redivider Magazine

  “Make it new” Pound said, and Christopher Salerno does, though the playfulness, wit and surprises in these poems remind me of the “mid-career” poets I most admire: Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young. . .“We're alone in our best visions” Salerno says but, as always, the best visions of the poet offer readers new ways of seeing. Whirligig is one of the most distinctive first books of poems I've read in decades.
  Ed Ochester, Editor, Pitt Poetry Series

  A reader's observations regarding the nature of these poems is that they contain a wonderful capacity to incorporate unpredictability, humor, anguish, anxiety, longing, and a feisty note of confusion and survival...Poems that are not wedded to literal and linear meaning of experience but to the imagined and circular meanings and play. Whirligig is consistently attentive to an edgy playfulness and serious mindfulness, continuing dialogue with matters of faith through failings of identity and belief in self and others. The poems carry the musical moment with an easy sensibility. The observations ripple and pause with seduction and sensuality.
  Jason Shinder, Founder, YMCA National Writers Voice and author of Among Women

  In these tight, powerful explorations of the intersections between perception and creation, Chris Salerno is looking for ways to insinuate value into our lives. The poems in Whirligig are informed by intuition, grounded by intelligence and moved by poetic skill. Salerno explores freely and bravely the possibilities of emptiness and longing but never abandons hope or confidence in language’s ability to give us more than we can always understand. This is an important new voice.
  Tom Lisk, Author of Aroma Terrapin

  [Christopher Salerno was born and raised in New Jersey and currently lives in Raleigh, NC. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as: Colorado Review, Jubilat, Electronic Poetry Review, AGNI-online, Spinning Jenny, Forklift Ohio, LIT, GoodFoot, Barrow Street, River City, Carolina Quarterly, and in the anthology, “The Bedside Guide To No Tell Motel." He currently teaches in the English Department at North Carolina State University.]

  TOC from LOC

  CONTENTS
  I.
  A COUNTY
  BURYING A ST. JOSEPH IN THE BACKYARD
  A KIND OF CAMERA
  ON THE LAKE
  COLLECTED MARGINALIA
  SMOKE ON THE WATER
  SINGLE FAMILY HOME DETACHED
  WHIRLIGIG
  TONIGHT WE¿RE GOING TO PARTY LIKE IT¿S 1799
  MUSICALLY SPEAKING
  PRE ELEGY FOR AN ABSOLUTE SUPERIOR
  CRYPTOBIOSIS
  AUSTRLOPITHECUS INTERRUPTUS
  OCTOPUS
  CLOSING THE BOOK OF NURSERY RHYMES
  II.
  EAST
  SOUTH
  YOU¿LL NEVER GET TO SLEEP NOW
  ALTAR BOYS OF THE SACRED HEART
  HOMESICKNESS
  WITHIN THE STORY
  TWELVE BAR BLUES
  MOTHERGIG
  EXACTA
  THERE, THERE, BALTIMORE
  I BORDERING YOU
  EMPURPLED
  SON OF A JUMPER
  VISCERA
  TRY LOVING SOMEONE WHO DOESN¿T LOVE YOU
  BETWEEN THE LIONS
  THE END OF WINTER
  NOTES ON THE DANCE
  COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL
  AT THE SEMI ANNUAL ANIMA RETREAT, I GO LOOKING FOR
  MY FEMALE SIDE
  LYRIC
  ANOTHER LIFE
  III.
  THE REPUBLIC, BOOK X
  CRAYOLA PASTORAL
  OCTOBER
  DURING A LONG SPELL OF FLOOD
  MADONNA AND CHILD WITH HELICOPTER
  SOMETIMES FINCH
  AS THE YARD DARKENS
  ROOSTER FROM THE ROMANTICS
  THE PAINTER¿S WIFE
  LAME DUCK POPE
  CHANGING BACK
  COCCYX
  GIRLIGIG
  MEMORIAL ACCLAMATION
  NOT DYING
  NOTES

  =====

  http://www.kickingwind.com/82406.html
  24 AUG 06

  How has your first book changed your life?

  26. Christopher Salerno

  cover of Whirligig

  How did your manuscript happen to be picked up by Spuyten Duyvil?

  I had been living the "always a bridesmaid" scenario before placing Whirligig, with a half-dozen contests or presses calling the manuscript a finalist or semi-finalist in the previous year, and a few other presses writing kind little notes. So I had begun believing that it might actually happen in the foreseeable future, that the arc of the book perhaps had been realized to some degree through revision, and that maybe this validation meant that the manuscript was reading now as a book and not simply a collection (one can hope). Anyway, I was getting weary of sending my hard-earned money off to all those contests, knowing that even if the manuscript gets into the final rounds for, say, the Walt Whitman or whatever, that someone like Mary Oliver might never dig it--or, at least, the final judge was always going to be a wholly different, subjective entity than the pre-judges (naturally).

  I first heard of Spuyten Duyvil a few years ago while browsing the bio notes of some anthology of younger/new American poets. I've always tried to trace poets and presses back, especially in the days of thinking about placing a manuscript. I'd really admired the small Indy presses that I'd seen, especially vibrant ones like Spuyten Duyvil. It's not a name one forgets. Anyway, a little investigative work and soon I realized that they had an impressive and capacious catalogue of different genres and wide-ranging styles. I had known a few Spuyten Duyvil authors, actually, and was excited about the possibility of being in their company. Tod Thilleman (editor) is a force, by the way. I sent him the manuscript and he wrote me a wonderfully perceptive response to it after a just a few weeks. Things went from there. I'm excited to be (finally) meeting him and reading with him at the Bowery Poetry Club in September.

  What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?

  I returned to my apartment one afternoon to find a knee-high box in front of the door. It had been shipped straight from the distributor, and of course I knew what it was immediately. I carried it in, opened it, and I remember making a sort of high-pitched sound as I lifted the first one out of the box. Then I did the robot. Then I breezed through the pages to look at the layouts of some of the poems which were meant to be more "by field" than others. That stuff always worries me, and since it had been several months since seeing the galleys, I was unsure how we'd left things. In the end, it definitely had all ten fingers and toes. Funny, it's one thing to get the book in your hands; it's another to get 100 books all at once. The cover looked so shiny and glossy.

  Before that day, did you imagine your life would change with its arrival?

  I had no delusions, of course. I assumed any change would perhaps be in the form of more access and credibility in the small but tight-knit world of poetry journals and readings, though mostly in other locations. Living in North Carolina keeps me at a slight distance to the book's publishing house and local network. Most of the journals in which I placed individual poems from Whirligig are in New York. I'm hoping, however, to get more involved around here with readings and other local poets as well.

  Personally, I was already as serious as I could be about doing the work, and I didn't think I would suddenly have to get new tweed outfits or wear a monocle or anything like that just because I had this glossy book with the ubiquitous earnest author photo. I'm always prepared for relative obscurity, and always surprised and delighted by its opposite currents.

  How has your life been different since?

  Life hasn't changed too much, post-publication, although I've increasingly been spending more time in the email zone. I've also had some good connections: invitations to read here and there, an invitation to take on an associate editorship, a few new mail correspondences, a complex status amongst local friends whom I've never told I write anything (let alone poetry). It's only been a month since the book has been out, so I suppose I can be optimistically brief on this one. But I think that in the year before the book was shaping up, I published almost half the book's poems in a smattering of different journals. I tend to choose journals I admire, many of which publish a number of authors I had been reading and recognizing already. The result of this I suppose is a kind of minor recollection ("I think I've heard of him, sure") amongst people who read or publish in these places. All told, that's probably the best feeling. I hope I get to meet them and buy their books and ask them to sign their books for me.

  It's been nice to get emails from strangers about Whirligig. It's also surprising to hear which poems people have liked. Poems I suspected were B-sides have connected with certain people. Who knows? Meeting other poets and selling copies after readings is rewarding as well, even if I don't always appreciate all readings (at the risk of being uninvited to my future reading engagements, I'm starting to wonder if there isn't too much emphasis on getting yuks). All told, I think I'm OK at reading publicly, because I try to avoid the pitfalls of the "poetry voice" or whatever, which gets on my nerves. I like to read slowly and matter-of-factly.

  Were you involved in designing the cover?

  My ex-wife Robin is a freakishly gifted graphic designer always winning awards, getting her work in PRINT magazine, and so I always knew that my book would be well designed. Thankfully, Spuyten Duyvil let her do the cover. The funny thing for me is that while I'm not always certain if the poems are any good (because they're mine) I always knew that the book design was tight. I was literally kneeling next to her computer chair for the entire design process. We broke up shortly afterwards.

  What have you been doing to promote the book and what are those experiences like for you?

  I've been doing some readings here and there, and am gearing up for some fall gigs. I've got three or four in NYC in September that I'm very excited about. I recently read at the Burlesque Poetry Series in D.C. which was very enjoyable--it was my first reading from the book. Otherwise, I'm not a great promoter. Most poets probably aren't, all told. Spuyten Duyvil has been great about sending out review copies, and their beautiful catalogue/mailer, etc. They also have a strong website. There are a handful of reviews coming down the pike, and that's always exciting, and one hopes it will spark some interest. I still think readings are the key, though, however ambivalent I might be about them. I also have a blog.

  What was the best advice you got?

  Honestly, any advice I received was in the "how-to" part of placing a book. Post-book, I have had some particularly savvy friends suggest I ignore the Amazon sales ranking (I agree, it's useless, and not a strong indicator of anything). Some other good advice has been to find the people you like and make sure they get review copies. There are some key places, and those places are probably online these days. I also recommend some personal online activity, whether a simple blog or a website where you can connect with other poets and let people know what's up.

  What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?

  About a week or so after receiving my copies of Whirligig, I sat down and read it. There's this scene in "Cool Hand Luke" where Luke's mother tells him about the moment that a mother dog ceases to recognize her pups. I had been waiting for that moment. As precious as that sounds, it took having the book in that form (as object) for me to finally appreciate some of the poems, and to see them without seeing my own hand.

  At the same time,<< I have been trending in a different direction>> since before the book was accepted for publication. <>. My work and process are both a bit different these days. I wrote a bunch of experimental poems last year while waiting for the book to be published, because I felt that freedom, but I've recently found something I'm more comfortable with. <> That said, I find that I'm always tripping over my old conventions or ways, and of course I'm slightly worried about writing "Whirligig! Part Deux." And I'm slightly anxious about BOOK as BOOK now, and about having an overarching "project." Shouldn't I have a PROJECT? Don't you have a PROJECT? You have to have a fucking PROJECT!

  As of now, I have about 40 pages of something new, and I've recently placed some of the poems from it, which has been encouraging. On the other hand, the poems I'm writing now are so vastly different from each other; I may be starting five different books. Otherwise, I've learned that I'm a reviser, and most of a book's realization will undoubtedly come when I write INTO a full draft, coloring it then with whatever the hell I'm into at that time.

  Do you want your life to change?

  I'm one of those typical fellows who are so in love with Poetry that they want to make it their job to discuss it, to "teach" it, and watch other people discover it. Will the book bring me this? Probably not, but it might help me get there. I teach currently at a local university here in Raleigh, but I only get to teach a workshop once or twice a year. It's a big department, and suspect the establishment and creative writing department would probably go on ignoring me even if I had won one of those hot contests.

  Is there something you're doing now that you think will bring about a change that you seek?

  I'm just going to keep writing at my normal pace, and trying perhaps to poke my head into the job search scene here and there. Maybe I'll start schmoozing a little bit, making a point to touch elbow with left hand while shaking hand with right.

  Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

  I'm thinking of a bumper sticker that reads, "Art is Not the Answer." I'm also thinking that, while probably not a consistent driving force of social change, poetry MAY get to hop in and steer the bus a little bit from time to time. Now would be a good time.

  I do think that one answer is to start exposing junior high kids to the poems they deserve. No more 17th century for them. No more lock-and-key poetry lessons. How about we start them on Russell Edson, give them that piano making a huge manure! Then, by the time they get to high school and college, they'll be hungry to find out where the late 20th century poets came from; but most importantly we'll all find them less intimidated by poetry and more willing to track it all the way back to the 17th century. I'm shocked every semester to face a number of students with a strong aversion to poetry based solely on a past experience of intimidation and confusion.

  On another level, I think the small press spirit and community might change the poetry world, which in turn might affect the broader consciousness in some way. As soon as one realizes that all poetry is small time, then it becomes much more realistic to turn to and (also) support the presses and communities that aren't all about the contest and the big advertisements with the gauzy curtains and the postwar typewriter (as stamp of approval). This isn't a new argument by any means.

  Don't get me wrong, I do think it's important that every young writer (with a first book) go through that stage of thinking big, of taking their cues from their academic situation, of sending the wrong work to the wrong places, of sending work to the desks of absolute strangers. And why not try to win prestigious contests? You certainly will be read with more frequency if you win, and your book will probably deserve the attention. However, it can be an immense distraction to live with this mindset exclusively.

  That said, the beat-down of rejection one gets in that world can be enlightening if you let it, especially if you have the right community of poets around you when you do open your eyes to the broader scene. I live near and around the Lucifer Poetics group in NC, and hanging with them and digging into their work took me immediately out of the post-MFA haze I was in. It's suddenly like, "Oh, I had no idea this was going on...how fucking stupendous!"

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