Of course, April 1 is not only “How to Grow a Poem’s” first birthday, it’s also the first day of National Poetry Month in the U.S.
So, here’s a gift for you, to thank you for reading How to Grow a Poem!
From Monday, April 1 through Friday, April 5, the Kindle edition of my book The Last Jazz Fan and Other Poems will be available for free on Amazon. Mark your calendars!
Find it here.
Praise for The Last Jazz Fan and Other Poems:
“Salzmann is a rare poet who can draft excellent and moving poems about nature and politics, about love and place, about old age, spirituality and friendship. You can feel in the poems the intelligence of the mind that created them and the compassion and wit of the poet.”
--Marge Piercy, author of Made in Detroit
“Here is a mind unfairly comfortable with paradox, be it intellectual, emotional or spiritual -- and a heart-breaking voice that is up to the task.”
--Lucia Nevai, author of Salvation
“The Last Jazz Fan invites us to travel through life’s earthy landscapes, corporeal and ethereal, as we fall under its rhythmic spell. And we find we are eager for this journey that speaks in the universal tongue of our shared humanity. Whether the keenly crafted lines of his found poem “The Great American Songbook,” echoing the golden voices of that era, the wry humor of the patient who seeks a doctor who has read Macbeth, or Whitman’s butterfly that pollinates the pages of other poets, Salzmann’s expansive lust for beauty carries us somewhere deep inside where melody and marrow meet—where home is home in any language.”
Diane DeCillis, author of Strings Attached
"’Like a dry martini on a summer/afternoon, a saxophone glides,’ writes Kenneth Salzmann, in poem after musical poem. He's looking for ‘the exact moment rhythm/left the room,’ something I think all poets aspire to find. He takes compost made up of ‘the insistent decay of daily lives rich/ in unread newspapers, orange rinds/eggshells’ and uses it to make poems that bloom and bloom and bloom.”
--Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems
I have lots of praise for The Last Jazz Fan and Other Poems. It lives on my nightstand and when I need a poem, I reread a page or three. It does not disappoint.
Your poem "For the Names of Things" is my favorite in this collection. Bravo on the blurb from Marge Piercy by the way!