Introducing Three Books for this Season

THANKS and PRAISES, Poems and Songs + ARC 1950-1974 + Ramon Took Off Friday Again and Earlier Stories

Nov 13 2025

Since early October this year I’ve worked at Final Drafts for a Book that’s titled THANKS and PRAISES, Poems and Songs, Book One.

It’s been a good run, I feel. About 20 are done now, and about 20 (most of them first written since my last collection, Animals Are Always Making Music, 2015) are in line to be finished soon.

In June 2024 DPRAM (Don Paul and Rivers Answer Moons) performed several poems in our Set at the Marigny Opera House. I’ll include performances of ‘Suzanne Corley’ and ‘José Cruz’ with the greatly singular, sensitive and accomplished musicians of DPRAM in the next Post today.

This Autumn into Winter—coming into the Holidays’ Season full-on—should also see the publication of two more books for access at least Online. Both will be of a physical heft weightier than THANKS and PRAISES, Poems and Songs. Both number over 200 pages.

One is a book of Stories, titled Ramon Took Off Friday Again and Earlier Stories. It contains seven, wrought out on Underwood and Royal typewriters in Hotel Rooms of North America between 1970 and ’76, including the near novella of seduction, murde and suicide, ‘A Fine Lawn on Which to Lie and Wait for Chickens’, that won a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford when I was 20, May of 1971.

Accompanying the book of Stories for online access at the least is a remembering of three decades, titled Arc—1950-1974. The Chapters of Arc trace from Brandon, Manitoba circa 1955 (“Hockey Nights in Canada’) to growing up in Bellingham, Washington (‘The Silver Beach Beachcombers’, ‘ “Wot-Kom” Junior High’, ‘High School’) to my roller-coaster year of 1974, which traveled from Freeway Construction in Houston, Texas; to the Yaddo ‘artists colony’ of Saratoga Springs, New York; to Logging again in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State between lodging in more Hotel Rooms that featured slow-drip radiators, all the while plagued by Body and Head parasites that just wouldn’t leave (‘Bearing Lice to Lester’).

Arc—1950-1974 is a generally happy book. It relates many passages of being finely alive over that span of decades and it reflects my gratitude and wonder at having survived several “accidents” whose violence should have meant crippling injuries, if not death…. Just as I’m glad, grateful and wondrous at having reached this current year 75 with a Whole Lot of personal blessings.

Now, on to those great, giving subjects, based out of New Orleans and its WWOZ, ’Suzanne Corley’ and ‘José Cruz’!

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