Greetings Book Club!
Thank you to everyone that came to January's book club. It was an excellent first meeting and I'm looking forward to our next conversation.
On Friday, February 26, 2021 we will come back together on Zoom and talk about The War Makes Everyone Lonely by Graham Barnhart.
Registration is now open and you can sign up here.
At the author's request, please consider purchasing the text from the publisher or from an independent bookstore.
February will be poetry focused, so there will also be opportunities for us to continue to share our own poetry and creative writing.
Thanks again for all that attended. It was exciting to finally meet you all.
This collection contains 53 different poems; I will aim to discuss two per day throughout February. (Obviously, this was harder than I thought. But it's a learning moment; specifically, the complex nature of analyzing a poem and then placing it in conversation with other poems within the same collection).
As we wait to get our individual copies, I'd like to first take a second to think of the title: The War Makes Everyone Lonely and consider how these different poems could/might be unified around this theme. While this is only an assumption, I'd argue it's an appropriate inference to be made when approaching a text, especially a collection of poems.
In the acknowledgements, Graham Barnhart lists 17 different publications that first published these poems:
32 Poems
Adroit Journal
Beloit Poetry Journal
The Boiler
Diagram
Diode
Gettysburg Review
Gulf Coast
Horsethief Books
Iowa Review
Pleiades
Poetry Northwest
Prelude
Sewanee Review
Sycamore Review
Tinderbox Poetry Journal
Waxwing Literary Journal
Before digging into each poem, I'd like to share these publications with you, in order to support your own development as poets and readers of poetry. I think it is a testament to these poems that different publications decided to publish them.
As we read The War Makes Everyone Lonely, think of questions you have for the author.
I can't say I've read a lot of poetry but I'm interested in learning more. I finished reading through the collection of poems once. I think I need to read them again. I'm going to try and make it this month. Probably mostly to listen and learn.
Recently, Tyler James Carroll over at Dead Reckoning Collective sat down with Graham Barnhart, Marty Skovlund Jr., Leo Jenkins, and David Rose to do a multi-episode series titled, Veteran Writers Discussing War and Literature.
Leo Jenkins has posted here before and came to January's meeting. These videos are a good introduction to DRC, Jenkins, Barnhart, as well as multimodal texts and learning from other writers.
"Chapter 1: The Process"
"Chapter 2: Revision and Publication"
"Chapter 3: The Journey"