Ruminating Poet Press

Beautiful day at Savannah's Forsyth Park. High 70s, enough cloud cover to stay comfortable. A lot of people, a lot of good conversations, taught haiku rules to three people, and sold some books.

Got to know some more vendors - Like Cecilia with her hand-crafted decorative magnets, and her friend "Moral Support."

One of my highlights was when a young boy, maybe 7 or 8, read my sheet explaining how to write haiku, and looked up and said: "You wrote it in haiku!"

Another high point was when a young couple who had bought a book came back and said that they had been reading poems to each other at lunch, and thanked me.

Last night I enjoyed a fine poetry reading at The Book Lady Bookstore. Shane McCrae read several new poems, as well as selections from his latest book, New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a book-length poem.

McCrae read well, but not excessively dramatically, and was honest and responsive in the Q&A. No bullshit.

McCrae is a formalist, preferring meter and rhyme, but primarily meter. His use of iambic pentameter is interesting and stimulating, not just a repeated and boring beat.

I bought and started his new book, and am enjoying it.

Great night Monday at the Poetry Co-Op Open Mic at the Water Witch Tiki Bar. A lot of poets and a big audience made a lot of happy noise.

Poets in alphabetical order: Anthony, Ari, Beau, Claire, Darriea, Jimmy, Juliet, Kristin, Kyle, Lila, Megan, Mia, and Trinity.

Kristin from Davenport House brought us an exciting opportunity to have a poetry event in their new event space. More to come.

We will miss Kyle as he goes off on another adventure.

And finally, the beautiful weather yesterday brought out my newest fancy shirt - but I was careful and wore two warm layers

Marketing my first two books of poetry has taught me many lessons. First, poetry is a hard sell: of the 60% of adults who read at least a book a year, only about 5% read poetry. Second, the ones who read poetry are often passionate about it. Third, a lot of poetry readers write poems themselves, though they are usually shy about it. (As I was for fifty years.)

I have some friends here in Savannah who regularly offer their art and writing in the beautiful Forsyth Park in center city. So, I decided to try to encourage both writing and reading poetry. I selected haiku as a simple form, easy to explain in a few minutes, and quick to write.

I have had my table in the park on weekends (mostly Saturdays, depending on the weather) for eight weeks now, and have had many engaging experiences in talking about poetry with people. As a side benefit, a few have donated money for one or more of my books, but this is clearly not ever going to be a moneymaking activity.

Some of my best encounters have been with young kids, so last week I added Erasmus the Reading Dragon to my setup. When the weather here warms (YES! Snow in Savannah!), Erasmus and I will take another trip to the park, and encourage more people to read and write poetry.