Serving poetry with your pumpkin pie

Many of our Thanksgiving traditions are slightly twisted versions of what really happened. There wasn't any turkey served; the first one was probably in Texas, not Massachusetts; Pilgrims didn't dress in black or wear tall hats. But if our myths aren't really based in history, we might as well invent some new ones -- and, for example, bring poetry home for the holidays

The Poetry Foundation has collected 21 poems just right for Thanksgiving. There are those that celebrate fall -- "To Autumn" by John Keats, "The Garden of Proserpine" by Algernon Charles Swinburne -- but aren't particularly American. But there are also Americans like Robert Frost ("The Gift Outright") and Paul Laurence Dunbar ("Signs of the Times") if you'd rather keep your holiday poetry close to home.

Other poems are focused on food and its legacies: "Yam" by Bruce Guernsey, "Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo and "Butter" by Elizabeth Alexander, who read at Barack Obama's inauguration.

And there are a few that give thanks. Like Robert Herrick's "A Thanksgiving to God, for His House" the call-to-action "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson and "Thanksgiving" by Edgar Albert Guest, which begins:

Gettin’ together to smile an’ rejoice,

An’ eatin’ an’ laughin’ with folks of your choice;

An’ kissin’ the girls an’ declarin’ that they

Are growin’ more beautiful day after day;

Chattin’ an’ braggin’ a bit with the men,

Buildin’ the old family circle again;

Livin’ the wholesome an’ old-fashioned cheer,

Just for awhile at the end of the year.

Best time for reciting your Thanksgiving poem of choice: after the wine has been served yet before the food coma kicks in.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: "The First Thanksgiving," by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

Argh, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day again, mateys

It's rolled around once again, like a stray cannonball on the deck of a sailing ship. Sept. 19 is the annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, for no particular reason whatsoever.

Thank John "OI' Chumbucket" Bauer and Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summers, the two ne'er-do-wells with pirattitude for starting the tradition, and writer Dave Barry for popularizing it seven years ago. Bauer and Summers have two books available from publishers and three others they've self-published, including the children's book "A Li'l Pirate's A-B-Seas."

Not all pirate talk is fit for kids. Suggested pirate pickup lines include "Have ya ever met a man with a real yardarm?" and "How'd you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?" As for "booty" and "treasure chest"... well keep those double meanings to yourself, you swarthy knave.

Los Angeles is home to a bounty of pirate-related events today, including sexy pirate talk and a costume contest at the R Bar in Koreatown, a pirate-themed murder mystery geocache hunt, and a weekend's worth of pirates and steampunk at the Queen Mary. Shiver me timbers.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: from the Lake Forest 2008 Fourth of July Parade. Credit: tinyfroglet via Flickr

Roses are red, violets are blue: Love poem tips for you

Love poetry is as much of an old Valentine's Day standby as chocolates and red roses; delivering a classic to your beloved is a pretty safe bet. The Poetry Foundation has prepared a long list of love poetry's greatest hits. If your mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun or your love is like a red red rose, you'll find a poem there that hits the spot.

But poetry is a living art, and poetry didn't stop a century ago. Is there anything new or fresh to say about love? In an effort to counter "reams of gushy, heartfelt doggerel," Jeremy Richards talked to several young poets for the Poetry Foundation. These poets, he says, "reinvent the subject not as lace and violets but as a shattered display window, 'an ache and a kink,' 'the black pulse of dominoes,' or 'a bird/trapped in the terminal' — anything but what we’ve come to expect." An excerpt:

Craig Arnold: Let’s face it, nobody in love is original. We all feel and do pretty much the same things, make fools of ourselves in the same ways, and hopefully come through it alive and well and happily in bed with someone else. But that’s also precisely the appeal of love poetry, the intensely humbling nature of the experience it tries to describe.

Cyrus Cassels: The most pressing concern is conveying intimacy without shutting the reader out of the ecstatic feelings limned in a love poem.

Rebecca Hoogs: If there’s no tension in the love, there’s no tension in the poem. “I love you, you’re perfect,” no matter how prettily said, is boring.

Adrian Blevins: The problem with love poetry is that it must be felt and written by humans, who never feel one feeling at a time. I mean, love has fear in it. And guilt and misery and a special kind of hallucinating loneliness.... The problem for the poet is how to get such a hodgepodge into one coherent space.

A few complicated love poems made the classic list, but when I went looking for E.E. Cummings and "The Flea" by John Donne I discovered they hadn't made the cut. But they are lurking there, deeper in the archives: the Poetry Foundation has 1,233 poems about love and desire on its website.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Christina Rutz via Flickr

Happy new year!

This illustration by J.C. Leyendecker appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in late 1908. It was one of his earliest New Year's babies; his first -- the first -- was in 1906.
Leyendecker had a gift for creating holiday icons as well as portraying impossibly handsome men for advertisements and magazine covers (one was his life partner, model Charles Beach). At the top of his game, Leyendecker was America's top illustrator, throwing high society parties and renting a studio in Texas Guinan's building, where he had a dumbwaiter that ran to her speakeasy. Young Norman Rockwell so wanted to learn from Leyendecker that he moved to a home near his in a New York suburb. Leyendecker's story, along with a vast showcase of his work, can be found in the book "J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist," reviewed this Sunday.

Today is Wednesday, and the New Year is knocking at the door. May your 2009 be rosy-cheeked and carrying a big sack of books.

Happy new year from Jacket Copy!

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: American Illustrators Gallery NYC / 2008 © by National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, R.I.

Elmo, Jon Stewart, Dan Brown and more plug books as gifts

The Assn. of American Publishers has shot video of some of publishing's biggest names to tell all of us, this holiday season, to give books. Almost all the participating authors begin with "Books make great gifts, because... " Oddly, it's Elmo who kicks the whole thing off -- isn't he supposed to be three and a half? Is he telling little kids to go shopping? Anyway, there are plenty of adults authors, I suppose: Mary Higgins Clark, Dean Koontz, Dan Brown, Frank McCourt, Maya Angelou, Julie Andrews, Jim Cramer. And there is some irony from the reliably dry Jon Stewart -- "they are an amazing way to kill time while your website is buffering."

If you like the idea of giving books but don't know where to start -- in which case, you're probably new to the Jacket Copy blog, because we've been rife with book recommendations lately -- there is a website with books-as-gifts ideas from the AAP.

But truly puzzling is Alec Baldwin. He says, "Book make great gifts, because you don't have to plug them in." What does that mean?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Be an indie lit Secret Santa

The independent literary blog HTMLGIANT has set up a Secret Santa literary gift exchange. It's a small operation that hopes to spread the cheer of small presses and independent literary magazines.

You send them an e-mail with your name, address and the subject line SECRET SANTA between now and Dec. 5. Then they send you the name and address of someone else who's signed up (and send yours to someone else). You purchase a literary gift and send it off, then send an e-mail to the HTMLGIANT folks telling them about your gift.

Why do that? Because on Christmas, they'll post a big list revealing who got what from whom.

You may be concerned that if you give "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," your gift recipient will already have gotten three other copies. Well, regifting would be in the spirit of the project. But they suggest that you try for something your recipient might not have, like a new book from an independent press, a subscription to a literary magazine or journal, or a work in translation.

Don't worry too much about having different taste than your recipient -- if you give a collection of poetry and your recipient likes manga (or vice versa), maybe this will be the reason they give poetry a try. The people who sign up for this like books and stories and are probably happy to read whatever arrives on their doorstep.

I know this is true because I've signed up. And I'm game.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Caleb Jacobs via Flickr

Tuesdays with Snicket

Mr. Lemony Snicket, chronicler of unfortunate events and penner of "The Lump of Coal" and "The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christamas Story," will be doling out holiday advice at Amazon's Omnivoracious on Tuesdays in December. But not just any old advice -- advice in response to your questions.

Readers can submit their questions now, in advance, in the comments of the blog post. Questions like:

Why does it always have to be coal? Why shouldn't a concerned parent give their ill-behaved youngsters something more accessible for modern times, say, a stick of firewood or a dried lump of mud?

What holiday traditions do you hope die with your generation? Which ones would you like to see passed on?

So far, there are only nine questions in total. Sure, that's more than two for each week that he'll be writing, but doesn't a character of Mr. Snicket's estimable talents deserves a plethora of holiday questions? If he doesn't get many more, that would be quite an unfortunate event.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of "The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming" by onefish2 via Flickr

Penguin authors share holiday give/get lists

Penguin got 37 of its authors to share the books that they plan to give -- and hope to receive -- this holiday season. Geraldine Brooks, Stuart O'Nan, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Gilbert, Leonard Maltin and Karen Joy Fowler are among those who've revealed the books they like to read. Who would expect actor/director Winkler, a successful children's book author, to be fond of crime novels?

One book that appears multiple times is "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz. Khaled Hosseini ("The Kite Runner") finds it "Hilarious, engaging, and profoundly moving and sad. A feast of language." But if you happen to be friends with Hosseini, Laura Dave ("The Divorce Party") and Michael Pollan ("In Defense of Food"), be warned -- you might find yourself unwrapping "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" three times. They're all planning to give it as a gift.

The list is the most fun when an author provides an explanation for what they're giving. It sounds almost like they're sitting there after you've opened their package, explaining why you should love this book. Nick Hornby, for example, is pretty convincing:

I'm evangelical about Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution," a loving, brilliantly-researched account of the five movies nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar, from conception to ceremony. It's not only one of the best books about film I've ever read, but one of the best books about any artistic process.

Elizabeth Gilbert, who chronicled her spiritual journey and international travels in "Eat Pray Love," says she'd like to get stories of "great adventurers like Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton" because "with travel as expensive as it is these days, I'm looking forward to spending much of 2009 at home, reading about other people's magnificent journeys!" If an author whose book spent more than 50 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list can't afford to travel, the economy is really in trouble.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Your choice of a McSweeney's freebie

For the holidays, McSweeney's wants to give you a book: Nick Hornby's "Shakespeare Wrote for Money" or Michael Chabon's "Maps and Legends." You decide which.

There's just one small catch. You've got to spend $60 or more at its online store before Dec. 17; details and coupon codes are here.

The independent publishing house founded by Dave Eggers has many books for sale, of course. There is the strange and meditative "All Known Metal Bands" (300 pages of band names, bound beautifully); "Where to Invade Next," a political anthology edited by Stephen Elliott; a collection of new poetry and novels by Yannick Murphy, Robert Coover, Deb Olin Unferth; and much more.

There are many T-shirts, illustrated stationery and McSweeney's Issue #11 DVD, with Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman and Dave Eggers interviewing Denis Johnson. There are also subscriptions for sale, to the DVD magazine Wholphin, The Believer and McSweeney's itself.

 

-- Carolyn Kellogg