The lowest price Kindle allows me is $2.99--so that is what it will cost you. You don't need a Kindle device--just a smart phone or tablet; download the Kindle app; order the book when it becomes available (a couple of hours from now?).
Meanwhile, here's some of the introductory material ...
To my mother,
Prudence Osborn Dyer,
September 9,
1919–March 10, 2018
Who loved poetry …
Foreword
And here we are again—I’ve led you
to the precipice. Where I’m about to shove you off yet another cliff, and as
you flail your way down (in slow motion, of course), you can try to grab hold
of some lines I have tossed your way. Frail lines of verse, unfortunately. So you’ll probably hit the ground fairly
hard. Sorry ’bout that.
This volume is but one in a series
of books of light verse (sometimes very
light verse) I have published on Kindle Direct in recent years. The inspiration
for this one? Who knows? But I had just finished its predecessor (its
cousin?)—a volume honoring 101 books I have loved in my life (from boyhood to
now)—and so I thought I would do the same with 101 poems I have loved. And so
the journey began.
A few reminders and caveats … For
one, there is no hierarchy here. The poems appear in the order I thought of
them while I was working on this volume, not in the order that I value them,
not in chronological order, not in any other kind of order.
Also—all are poems I have memorized
over the years. The earliest—“A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“The Night Before
Christmas”)—is one I learned back at Adams Elementary School in Enid, Oklahoma,
in the early 1950s for some kind of classroom Christmas program for the
parents, and I recited it for them (fourth grade? I think so). Fortunately, I
don’t recall how well I did. Or didn’t do. (Even more fortunately: In those
pre-iPhone days not everyone as packing a video/audio device.) But … in recent
years I have recited it during Christmas dinner for my grandsons, and they are
now old enough (9 and 12 as I write this) that they contribute some of the stanzas,
too.
Some other poems I “honor” here
because I had to learn them for
school assignments (Housman’s “When I Was One And Twenty” is one of them), but
many of them are poems I required my own students to memorize when I was
teaching English in middle and high school (yes, a meanie of a teacher!). So … Frost’s
“The Road Not Taken,” some Shakespeare sonnets, some poems by Longfellow and
Stephen Crane and Dickinson and Millay … you know.
And then … here’s the weird part.
While I was memorizing these poems along with my students (which made the
subsequent quiz grading go much more
quickly), I found myself slipping into some kind of … habit. (Some kind of madness?)
I found myself wanting to—no, having
to—memorize poems and more poems and more poems. As I type these lines today,
I have memorized over two hundred and twenty of them—some very brief (William
Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow”), some very long (Millay’s “Renanscence”).
Right now I have almost finished learning Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Fairly long
one. And a good one for an old guy to relate to.
Finally, some of these poems have
immense emotional significance for me. I recited Shakespeare’s “Let me not to
the marriage of true minds admit impediments” at our son’s wedding in 1999 (I have
recited it again for them on each anniversary); I recited Millay’s “The Courage
That My Mother Had” at the memorial services both for my wife’s mother—and for
my own. On our wedding anniversary each year I recite for Joyce the Bard’s “When
in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do
I Love Thee?” Others I learned for very personal reasons—at moments of high
stress, worry, happiness … you know.
During the day I fill my idle
moments rehearsing these lines … don’t want to lose them, not after all the
effort it took to cram them into my
aging brain! There are so many now that I have to divide them up by days of the
week …
In addition to the “101 Poems”
there are also two other groups of lines here: some true doggerel (so light
they threaten to rise like helium balloons from the page and float away),
pieces I wrote quickly about quotidian things and posted on Facebook for my
friends to Like but not read.
There’s also a group I call
“Wolferel” (a word I proudly coined), lines that are sturdier than doggerel but
not quite sturdy enough to batter down the gates to the Land of Poetry.
May you enjoy your journey through
these inferior lines about superior lines I’ve loved and learned. I did not
reproduce the source poems, by the way (copyrights, you know?), but you can
easily find them all with a simple Google search. Which is what I did.
—
Daniel Dyer, 26 July 2018
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