Visit my Amazon store!

Check out Copious Notes Books, my Amazon bookselling site!  

Antiques, first editions, author-signed titles, and other remarkable items chosen with the unique taste and acumen of yours truly.

I’m tackling a crazy back-up of acquisitions now, and new one-of-a-kind items will be added daily.

Meanwhile, everything in the store as of March 1 has been marked down 20-30%. Nothing has been held back!

Highlights:

• T.S. Eliot first edition
• Daphne DuMaurier first edition
• Alan Arkin first edition
• Shirley Jackson first edition
• Ani DiFranco first edition
• 1950s Catholic Girls Manual and Sunday Missal
• Cleveland Amory signed
• Robert Bly signed
• Ralph Nader signed
• Voltaire Candide limited and numbered pre-publication printing signed by illustrator Samuel Adler and editor Carl Van Doren
• Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory with illustrations by Woody Guthrie
• How I Won The War movie tie-in edition with John Lennon cover

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SunWinks! January 18, 2015: Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

Dearest SunWinkers:

Back at Week 8 of the old Gather column, the poetics topic was the symbol. I am as qualified to discuss this topic today as I was then, which is to say, pretty darn little. Somewhere on the level of, “I don’t know much about symbols, but I know what I like.” Symbolism is a complex subject, the scope of which is on the order of “mythology” or “imagery.” Thousands of books have been written on the subject.

This discussion will be free-wheeling, personal, selective, and shamelessly borrowing from the syntheses of more-qualified thinkers. For the purpose of our discussion, the symbol is an image which signifies the theme of a poem (in our case) in some way. By “signifies” we mean: the symbol is a visual image which represents an idea in an abstract way, like a hieroglyph or a heraldic symbol on a coat of arms. We know what the symbol means because it’s a widely understood element of our culture.

SunWinks January 11, 2015: Theme: Writing and Spirituality

I need a new God. I need somebody to pray to. For a few years now, I’ve been working on emancipating myself from my poisonous Catholic upbringing (a ridiculously belated enterprise which I only undertook in my fifties) and building a new kind of personal integrity, one that allows me, among other things, to be a poet with courage.

But being a human being, I share the religious impulse, the sense of the numinous. I want to avail myself of the benefits of meditation and centering prayer. But who do I pray to?

Poem: Egostatic Fluffery

Putting this up as an example for November 16th’s SunWinks! on neologisms. From Papa Doug’s Light Book of Little Verse.

Love, Doug

Poem: The Antique Store

This is probably my favorite personal ars poetica–in fact, I used it as the prologue to my first chapbook, The Caterpillar.

Poem: The TV

 

Excerpt: You Can Talk!

You Can Talk!

from The Golden Books
Copyright © 2012 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Now which way did she tell me to turn?…   Everything had been so surreal, Gus realized he wasn’t quite sure exactly what Gaia had said. Then his eyes fell upon a sign across the road. It looked like this:

“Curiouser and curiouser…” Gus grinned, amused at his literary allusion. Then, addressing himself to no-one in particular, “Well, whaddya say, shall we go to the… library?”

Story: The Honey Badger

The Honey Badger

from The Golden Books
Copyright © 2012 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Then Gus noticed something right behind Tucker. “Don’t move!” he whispered

Tucker heard the maraca sound. “It’s a rattlesnake, isn’t it?”

“Oh my God, Tucker, what do we do? I’ll get a stick.”

“Don’t you move either. Either one of us moves, I’m dead.”

“Okay.”

A minute went by. Then two. It seems like hours. Then Gus noticed Tucker had moved imperceptibly. “You’re moving,” he whispered.

“Shh.” Tucker was moving so slowly, Gus couldn’t even see him moving. It was like watching grass grow. He could only tell Tucker was moving when he realized he was in a different position from a minute before. Slowly, infinitesimally, Tucker was turning to face the snake. Gus had never seen anything like it.

Then Tucker made his fatal mistake. His tail twitched. That was enough. The rattlesnake struck.

Kree-k-k-k-kree!

Just Acquired…

As if I could pass this up!

The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate by Eugene Ehrlich
View my recent acquisitions!