Made by one former student, sent by another.

Need moar.

I finished up an annotation on Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” a little while ago, and didn’t feel exhausted by the poem at all.  I don’t generally make a habit of trolling the Interwebs, looking for criticism of poems I like, but I thought, why not?  Let’s see what kind of treatment Browning’s getting out there.

I found this article, which make me want to puke.  Out of my eye sockets.

People who hate poetry– and I don’t mean have a casual hatred caused by a bad experience with poetry, usually in a high school classroom, I mean passionately hate poetry– like the author of this article, should not be allowed near it.

Consider me disabused of the notion that the Interwebs might be a fine source of lively scholarly conversation.

My initial intention for this packet was to read and discuss some Robert Lowell, but Van fired back a suggestion that was a little surprising– Robert Browning. I’m looking now at how Browning manages syntax in “Love Among the Ruins.” In some ways, this in infinitely more fun than Lowell.

The perfect music to accompany Browning– sexy and subtle: Morcheeba. I’m listening now to “Otherwise” (mp3) but most anything from Charango would suffice. Now if I only I could get this weird taste out of my mouth (unrelated to Browning or Morcheeba… I think it’s my new medication).

One of the occasional joys of running a small press is getting an excited e-mail from a customer about one of your books.  I had exchanged e-mails earlier in the week with a woman who said that she had been waiting a long time and hadn’t received a book we’d shipped a while ago.  My policy in those cases is to send another one in the next day’s mail– I’m sure that this has meant that the customer ended up with two copies the few times it’s happened, but if first class mail takes more than about 10 days to deliver, I’m assuming something went wrong.  So I wrote back immediately to this woman and told her I’d put a replacement in the mail the next day, but before I went to the post office in the morning, I had a note saying that it was a false alarm and the book had just arrived.

About three hours later, the same woman wrote back a wonderful note complimenting the book, and asked for a catalog.

I get feedback about books in person, but it doesn’t happen too often that I hear back by e-mail from customers.  I put my card in every order, and confirm all e-mail orders from my personal account… that’s really more so they can report any problems, like damage in shipping, etc.  But when someone takes the time to send a personal note about how much they enjoyed a book, it means more than the sales.  It really does.

Keep supporting small presses.