Celebrate alphabetical order (and win a book of poetry)
37days – 50th Birthday Year Giveaway #3: The story of the poems from Patti Digh on Vimeo.
Stars I think about, if I could fly, I could reach in a few old-fashioned days. But physicists’ stars I use as buttons, buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are—that is all the space I need. –Willem de Kooning
Sometimes the simple beauty of alphabetical order provides for us.
In a large room of tables draped in black, and women authors, and piles of books, I once happened to sit beside the woman I needed to, simply because her last name is Davis and mine is Digh.
This video tells a little of that story, but not the whole story.
The event I’m describing was lovely—beautifully done and such a powerful gathering of women writers from the Low Country (and, evidently, at least one from a slightly more mountainous High Country). But it was a difficult afternoon for me because I realized immediately it required a fundamental skill that I lack—the art of the cold sale. Because it wasn’t a reading, I was left to what I used to call “booth duty.” Having wandered through many exhibit halls in my professional career, I was always acutely aware of my pathological inability to “work the crowd” (either as a salesperson or a customer) and curious about those who could.
[There was that memorable weekend when I went with Mr Brilliant to help in his exhibit booth at a convention of 5,000 mathematicians in Cincinnati. Call me Vanna White. The two of us were strange creatures indeed in a mammoth exhibit hall of slick, commercial booths while we sat in a small 10×10 space that looked like an old European bookshop, Mr Brilliant talking to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and me wondering who the hell Dirac was.]
And so I entered this room, unprepared for the “booth duty” that would fall to me at a simple table shared with another writer. It was that other writer who wrote the book that serves as this third gift in celebration of my 50th birthday year giveaway extravaganza. Emma drew in her sketchbook just behind us.
The other writer and I talked for three hours as we navigated the people walking past our table and those who walked up to us wanting to hear the 10-second synopsis of two books about dead parents. Each of us recognized both our desire to connect with those willing to stay for the 180-second version and, simultaneously, our mutual inability to sell without some connection to the content, some dancing in the words.
Her poetry is exquisite.
The slender volume in front of her on that table that afternoon was called Psalm, a book affirming what’s most essential to ordinary life and to artistic expression: the fact that one is permitted to walk the earth and partake of its wonders.
Here’s what people have said of her work:
“Carol Ann Davis’s poems are so precise they are almost hallucinatory. And in some poems she sets hallucination free. The precision is true, creating a marvelously jarring effect. She is always studying reality, with a microscope that creates sure distortion. There is a sad pageant going on in these poems, one that breaks your heart. And then gives you your life back all over again.” – James Tate
To be entered in the drawing to win a signed copy of her book, Psalm, just leave a comment that somehow celebrates the alphabet or alphabetical order. If Her Highness can stop riding her bike with training wheels long enough, Tess will do a drawing at 5:00pm Eastern on Friday, March 13, 2009, to determine the winner of these beautiful poems!
