Lew Watts's Blog

My deepest thanks to John Balkcom for this review of my novel Marcel Malone that appeared on Facebook:

Poetry as Protagonist: Marcel Malone by Lew Watts
Of all the novels I’ve read since the turn of the 21st Century, this one ranks first as innovative, engrossing, and satisfying. The three leading characters include the book’s namesake Marcel, his therapist Vera, and the poetry composition, recitation, and reflection that drive the relationship between Marcel and Vera. This is a daring piece of fiction, and only an accomplished poet could have written it. This first novel of a published poet and accomplished scientist deserves a slow, careful reading and rewards patient attention.
Knowing that I was reading a man’s composition of a woman’s first-person point of view, I found the author’s leading female character persuasively female and attractive, even compelling when the story called for it. This dynamic brought to mind the musical production The Club, with its all-female cast, all playing male club members performing a holiday play of all female characters. Here Watts gives us Vera in first person speaking of and to men who love her, provoke her, bore her, or engage her in challenging exchanges of newly composed verse, or classical pieces, or variants of iambic pentameter, sonnets, and haiku, whether long or short, old haiku or new. These exchanges reveal the men and, in the end, the woman.
Watts specifically uses poetry to unveil the emergence of meta-cognition both in therapy and in verse composition and performance, reminding me of how Yeats’s “A prayer for my daughter” many years ago informed my protective instincts with my own two daughters in the face of the "storm...howling."
Marcel Malone is intimate, reflective, and poetic, the last of these both in its verse and in its prose. The boundary between the verse and the prose in this novel has a certain quantum character to it, seeming to move precisely when this reader looks for it. Marcel Malone is wonderfully puzzling at times and deeply satisfying.

Marcel Malone is on Small Press Distribution's bestseller list at no.10. Dead chuffed!

My thanks to Kenneth Gurney for including a haibun, a selection of haiku, and a Rubaiyat in his "3 Poems" series in Watermelon Isotope, followed by an Interview:
https://watermelonisotope.com/2016/12...
https://watermelonisotope.com/2016/12...

As a male author, I feel honored to read the word "feminist"...
"A dense and loaded work of fiction, this cerebral novel should certainly appeal to intellectuals and fans of feminist literature."—Kirkus Reviews

Auctioned off 10 copies of my novel, Marcel Malone, and raised $4000 for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an 75-year organization that aims to warn the world of man-made existential threats. Check out its website at www.thebulletin.org.

First run sold out, and so thank you! The new print run should be available very soon from http://redmountainpress.us/order-book... and http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780...

I've become immune to rejections from The New Yorker (haven't we all), and even though I bear no malice to Paul Muldoon, its poetry editor, my heart often sinks (actually, my blood pressure rises) when I open a new copy and read another indecipherable poem by some famous poet. But now and then, a lesser-known poet brings me to my knees, and I realize just how underserving of acceptance my latest submission was. So, for any of you suffering from New Yorker-Rejection-Syndrome, check out the magnificent poem by Maria Nazos that appeared recently (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...). Pantoums are hard to write fluidly and this one is simply magnificent.

My (wonderful) publisher, at the last minute, insisted I not include a Bibliography in my novel, Marcel Malone. For those interested, here is the complete list of books cited in the novel:

Bly, Robert. Leaping Poetry: An Idea With Poems and Translations, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975.

Boland, Eavan and Edward Hirsch (Eds). The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, New York: Norton & Company, 2008.

Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop, London: Vintage Books, 1990.

Corn, Alfred. The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody, Revised Edition, Ashland: Story Line Press, 2001.

Duffy, Carol Ann. The World's Wife, London: Picador, 1999.

Hall, Donald. To Read a Poem, Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1992.

Hall, Donald. White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006, New York: First Mariner Books, 2006.

Hall, Donald. Essays After Eighty, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

Higginson, William J. and Penny Harter. The Haiku Handbook -25th Anniversary Edition: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2009.

Jordania, Joseph.Why do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution, Tbilisi: Logos, 2011.

Jung, Carl. Essay in: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, Princeton University Press, Fourth Edition, 1978.

Kinzer, Stephen. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War, New York: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc., 2013.

Lehman, David (Ed). Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, New York: Scribner Poetry, 2003.

Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York: Washington Square Press, 1997.

Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

MacLean, P. D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions, New York: Springer, 1990.

Maurer, Christopher (Ed). Selected Verse: A Bilingual Edition, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2004.

Maxwell, Glyn. On Poetry, London: Oberon Masters, 2012.

Ortiz, Simon. Woven Stone, University of Tucson Press, 1992.

Panache Partners, LLC.Spectacular Wineries of Oregon: A Captivating Tour of Established, Estate, and Boutique Wineries, Dallas: Spectacular Wineries Series, 2015.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged, New York: Signet Classic, 1999.

In the late 1990s, I wrote a poem entitled "Who are you?" This was in response to the imminent announcement that a 'rough draft' of the human genome (project) had been completed. I thought I was being clever, even insightful, by speculating that there was a mysterious donor of this genetic material. In due course we heard there were a number of donors—the principal one being an anonymous man from Buffalo, New York. A few years later, I spent a month scanning through pages of the published sequence of the bases Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine. I was convinced that, in the rows of seemingly random A, G, C, and Ts, I would find a sonnet (rhyme) sequence—since there are only four rhymes, it would have to be Petrarchan, like AGGAAGGA CTCTCT. If anyone ever finds one, let me know. Of course, I could have saved myself the trouble if I had read Richard Power's "The Gold Bug Variations," not because it deals with genome identity or hidden sonnets, but because it so gloriously original and poetic that any attempt to follow would be exposed as pathetic and shallow.