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2022 TITLE
by Jeffrey Betcher
Foreword by Annie Finch
Publication date: June, 2022
Diagnosed with a terminal cancer, poet and community activist Jeffrey Betcher spent the last months of his life crafting an extraordinary crown of sonnets. Filled with grief, humor, truth, and triumph, singing with powerful rhythms and unforgettable words, this is poetry at its best.
Although Jeffrey had never written in meter before, at his mentor Annie Finch’s suggestion he began a crown of anapestic sonnets that developed into the gorgeous and unstinting testament of a courageous soul navigating illness and facing death. Perfecting this extraordinary group of poems became a focus of the final months of Jeffrey’s life. Now they offer all readers a rare poetic gift, adept and searching, shot through with honesty, wit, and courage. This memorial chapbook is the first publication of the sonnets.
AUDIO BONUS
Jeffrey Betcher and Annie Finch discuss poetry and death…
This is the conversation described in the Preface to Whistling Through.
Jeffrey Betcher (1960-2017) was a writer, educator, advocate for the prevention of violence against women and children, and a grassroots community organizer who founded the Quesada Gardens Initiative. Jeffrey was born in rural Ohio and lived in San Francisco for 30 years, gaining national attention as a pioneer in the guerilla garden movement by turning his dangerous street in the Bayview neighborhood into an urban oasis. His writings, often centered on LGBTQ themes, include short stories, journalism, and The Fucking Seasons, Selected Poems 1986 to 2016.
“Whistling Through” is an odyssey into the cancer machine and death itself.
—Chase Dimock
“Whistling Through” is a major poem, an important contribution to anapestic poetry in English, to gay literature, to the form of the crown of sonnets, and to the literature of mortality.
—Annie Finch
Betcher’s crown of sonnets is an alchemical transmutation where his ordeal becomes a no-holds-barred odyssey that’s profound, funny, terrifying, and utterly dazzling.
—Lex Nover
OPENING POEM FROM WHISTLING THROUGH
- Diagnosis
Diagnosis is terminal. Life finds its shape
A few feet from the ground as it tries to take flight
In a fog of dead air, with a load of dead weight,
And a pilot who’s just lost all feeling and sight.
I can hear the unknowable next whistling through …
… Through bright holes in a scan, through my fingers and bones,
Through the cracks in my plans … whistling right through.
It’s the sound of a song I must sing, but don’t know.
Life can syncopate: music, familiar but strange,
As the rhythm of spirit and flesh swells and fades,
Innuendo from angels that gravity waits
For this tangle of melody … death … to unbraid.
In the time it takes sunrise to free the day’s light,
“It’s not good news,” can sum up the faint sounds of night.
2021 TITLES
Publication date: October 31, 2021
W. H. Auden awarded Helen Adam the New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award for “excellence in craft”; Richard Howard described her ballads as “glittering sorceries”; and Robert Duncan referred to her as “the grain of living poetry that saves me at times.” Adam’s magical ballads, the core of her poetry, are collected here for the first time with her own thoughts on the ballad and commentary by Annie Finch and Kristin Prevallet.
Hail the singularity of Pixie Pool! Hail the doyenne of golden monstrous hair, devouring our hunger for wild ballads both ancient-rooted and shiny new as only she can do! —Lee Ann Brown
The luminous balladeer Helen Adam was an anomaly who dropped into the most experimental scenes of contemporary poetry. Her unique orality has been engraved on many generations of poets. She now enters our contemporary consciousness through the reprint of these ballads, playing out as they do the timeless battles of the psyche. —Anne Waldman
SIng Doun the Mune Poetry Sample:
Excerpt from I Love My Love by Helen Adam
By Helen Adam.
“In the dark of the moon the hair rules”– Robert Duncan.
There was a man who married a maid. She laughed as he led her home.
The living fleece of her long bright hair she combed with a golden comb.
He led her home through his Barley fields where the saffron poppies grew.
She combed, and whispered, “I love my love”. Her voice like a plaintive coo.
Ha Ha!
Her voice like a plaintive coo.
He lived alone with his chosen bride, at first their life was sweet.
Sweet was the touch of her playful hair, binding his hands and feet.
When first she murmured adoring words her words did not appall.
“I love my love with a capital A. To my love I give my all.
Ah, Ha!
To my love I give my all.”
She circled him with the secret web she wove as her strong hair grew.
Like a golden spider she wove and sang, “My love is tender and true”.
She combed her hair with a golden comb and shackled him to a tree.
She shackled him close to the tree of life. “My love I’ll never set free.
No. No.
My love I’ll never set free.”
Whenever he broke her golden bonds he was held with bonds of gold.
“Oh! cannot a man escape from love, from love’s hot smothering hold?”
He roared with fury. He broke her bonds. He ran in the light of the sun.
Her soft hair rippled and trapped his feet, as fast as his feet could run,
Ha! Ha!
As fast as his feet could run. . .
To be continued in Sing Doun the Mune . . . .
