And Don't Know It

As many of you know, I've been working on book promotion this year. You can find my books here A Subtle Armageddon here David Gideon here Michael's Story and here The Interim Generation. 

One thing about book promotion is that you begin to get reviewed. Reviews are nice; they help Amazon's Magical Algorithms drive folks to sample your wonderful prose. But some reviews are questionable. One such review which gave me pause praised my book A Subtle Armageddon for its great poems. Yet there isn't a poem in it.

Poetry is something which has never really peaked my interest. Perhaps comic poetry holds a certain appeal for me as it did for me Pops. You can read about his favorite poem here Me Pops the Poet. Yet on the whole, I find that poets are simply trying to tell us things without actually getting to the point. At least, that's my take on the vast bulk of poetry the teachers forced upon me in high school English. 

I expect now that the poetry crowd will be breaking down my door, hurling vile epithets upon me in sonnets, free verse, and odes. I should be quite interested in the haiku which might condemn me though.

Me Pops the Poet

There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold.

Bill Cosgriff was many good things, but a poet he was not. That's why I have always been impressed by his taste in poetry. First, that he'd have any taste for it at all. Second, and I suppose this is rather unsurprising, his favorite poem was tongue in cheek.

The Cremation of Sam McGee was the one poem which tickled him so much that he'd actually committed it to memory. If you have not guessed or googled it by now, you know that I borrowed the opening line of this here blog from the first line of the first stanza of that epic. It is indeed an intriguing lead-in, exactly the sort of thing which would entice a body to read on. Taken with the poem as a whole, I can see why Dad liked it.

The short, short story is that a guy cremated his friend Sam McGee. Look it up and read it: The Cremation of Sam McGee, if you would like to hear more. I'll content myself now with hearing in me mind me own Pops voice read it as I type,

"The Northern lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see,

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge, I cremated Sam McGee."