This Tongue Wagger comes from this week’s Word Slinger, Simon Travers. I fear that my poetry critiquing may be fearfully lacking so I will stick solely to the content of Simon’s poetry collection. It’s been fifteen years since I took my poetry course at Penn State University. Mr. Perrone taught me a great deal about poetry as well as writing it– along with writing for business, creative, technical and journalism. He told me to remember a lot of things and the only points that stick out from the many courses I took with him are: how to write a business letter, that knowing Shakespeare might be the difference in getting a job and not getting one, the proper methods of critiquing beyond preference and that when interviewing anyone it is better for both parties if you talk about things that the interviewee feel invested in and that they love. All that other stuff… it went on mental dump. I do remember often wondering if he spent a lot of time in the morning getting his hair to look like it did each day too, but he didn’t teach me that. Sadly, for Simon… my memory of stylistics in poetry fails me. But I do know what I like.
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Weekly Indie Word Slinger – Simon Travers
Simon Traver’s is the Weekly Indie Word Slinger for the first week of February 2014. The author of Anatomy, a collection of poems and essays, published by Stackhouse Jones an independent publisher that Simon established himself. He’s a busy guy. Enough of me introducing him… I’ll let him tell you about himself.
Any Day that Ends in YA – Dust of Eden by Mariko Nagai
I have a very large soft spot for Asian based stories. I was very excited to read this book because although there are a great many books about the Holocaust and American and European accounts of World War II the stories of Japanese in America during the time of internment camps are few. Most people have forgotten that Japanese families were rounded up and spent years in camps with little to nothing as far as possessions in terrible, harsh conditions while many of the males were held and imprisoned on suspicion of sedition. It was a broad generalization of a nationality that punished and penalized thousands of AMERICANS who were innocent in every way but of having a heritage related to that of the Imperial Japanese Navy who had attacked the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was an unspeakable racial bias that has been swept under the rug while Americans keep alive the memory of prejudice of blacks, women and religious practices as something we have overcome.