Heading Back to the Press

Kings, & Saints, & Knights, my latest book, has just received a minor revision — I cleaned up a few typos and I inserted an illustration by the great M. Grant Kellermeyer.

The title poem of the collection was weirdly the title piece of Swords, Snakes, and Shipwrecks (back in 2016 when it had a different title), and I felt that the poem had been damaged by being separated from the original drawing.

Now everything has been restored.

You may follow Saint Carannog into the cave at great peril, but fully illuminated.

Socratic Dialogues

A friend caught me by surprise today and asked me to say something about my new book.

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A post shared by Thomas Olivieri (@lens_of_a_neer_do_well)

This originally appeared in the Blue Unicorn Magazine.

After Avalon

The long awaited After Avalon anthology got back from the printer yesterday.  This is a special joy to me because I wrote the piece Paste-Bones and Ragdolls many years ago and never thought that it would find its way into print, in spite of it being one of my favorites.

The anthology itself is about the world after the king left Camelot, and what happened to its survivors, and those who tried to find it again.

My own story is of Gawain and Bleys — an old memory of an old time far removed from the buying and selling of the world — the sort of thing that might serve on a rainy day. It is a strange piece, but perhaps a good one, at least if you are open to it — and to tales of the old days, and to the old style, and to the belief in wonders.

Leonard Cohen: Working Steady

NOTE: this is an unrevised version of an entry from my old blog from August 26th, 2016   

Leonard Cohen just published an unpunctuated poem with the following lines:

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I was always working steady

But I never called it art

I was funding my depression

Meeting Jesus reading Marx

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I assume he means:

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I was always working steady,

But I never called it art.

I was funding my depression,

Meeting Jesus reading Marx.

.

Rather than:

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I was always working steady,

But I never called it art.

I was funding my depression,

Meeting Jesus, reading Marx.

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The ambiguity in the poem, in a few places, is Cohen’s little joke on us (if you can’t see it look in the kitchen).  But it’s satisfying that the man we have long thought of as an old troubadour is doing the proper troubadour thing.  The poem was just published an hour or so ago, but I already like it.

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I may post about it again when I have had time to think on it a little.