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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Jul 21, 20222 min read

Oh, Dear! Publication Pushed Back Again!




Wow! Was I ever excited this morning when I got an email from the publisher around 8:30 with words in bold and all caps FINAL PROOFS! There were papers for me to sign, requests for a professional looking picture for press releases, etc., and, in the production manager's email text, she said, "Please take one last look at the text to make sure that it is exactly as you want it." 68 pages into my review, I am thinking "Okay, everything is going to be right this time," but then at the top of page 69, two lines of verse were run together with more than 3/4 of the second line on the same line as the previous one. Maybe I could live with that one issue, right? To keep publication on schedule? (If there really is such a thing.) 26 pages later, an "s" is missing after the apostrophe in the title of the poem A Postmodern Poet's Complaint. Oh, my! I am not sure that I can live with that issue. The missing "s" makes it look stupid.

Too make a long story short, two hours later, I had found a total of eight typographical editing issues that I could not allow in the book, so I carefully explained the errors in an email, and I really wanted to cry as I hit "Send" to return the still-needs-editing text back to production at Austin Macauley. The last time I received "final proofs," there were twenty such typographical editing errors, and I didn't hear back from the production team for two months. I hope that the editing of my proofs is expedited because I am nearly two years into the publication of this book. I am almost beginning to feel like I am not even the person who wrote it.

Anyway, editing the proofs did give me a chance to "connect" with my poems, some of which I had not read carefully since I revised them myself over two years ago. I imagine that, if I have any success with the book, I will get to connect over and over and over again.

I haven't mentioned THE BOOK Atheists and Empty Spaces in a while. I just thought I would let everybody in on the news about where it is.

The picture at the top is a photo taken of the PDF copy of the publication cover. I do not believe that it will be changed, so it should look just like that. Apparently, my book will cost $13.95. I have not seen the bar code and price until today.

Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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