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Mount Vernon poet has three books due outBy PETER KELLEY Staff Writer [Skagit Valley Herald] MOUNT VERNON -- To have one book coming out is cool enough. Two is incredible. But poet Michael Daley has three books coming out early this year. It's a good feeling, he said.
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"For the past 10 years when I've been teaching, I've been submitting poems to national magazines and getting accepted, and that's felt very good," said Daley, 52, who teaches poetry and philosophy at Mount Vernon High School. "But one thing about it is, I don't know anybody who's reading those magazines."
Oh, occasionally a friend will find one of his poems in a literary magazine, Daley said. But it's different with the publication of his new works, which are in the form of small chapbooks by Northwest publishers.
"But now, to have a book come out and know that my friends who have read my other books are reading these things -- it's very exciting," he said.
Daley has written several small books of poems, dating back nearly 20 years to when he also helped publish poems through Empty Bowl Press in Port Townsend.
He now has three new works coming out all in the same season.
"Original Sin," a book of poems published by Pleasure Boat Studio press in Port Angeles, is perhaps the work readers will be able to find the easiest. Daley will have copies of the small book available at upcoming readings in the area.
"Original Sin" contains 20 or so poems, many of which center on the themes of family and personal memories from years back, when he lived in Boston. Daley said many of the poems started out in his mind as short stories he was mentally compiling for a book project. He said after several years, however, he realized the ideas worked better as poems than full stories.
"It seemed to work for me if I burned away everything that wasn't a story."
But the poems of "Original Sin," he said, are still mostly narratives, or stories told.
"The events themselves move the language along," he said.
Daley's second small book, which he just got copies of from the publisher, is "Horace: Eleven Odes, translations" (Brooding Heron Press 2000), which are new translations of classic poems for which he said he tried to update and enliven the language.
Also headed for publication is another small book, or chapbook of poems, called "The Cornmaiden" (Tangram Press 2000).Daley said this book contains some of his shorter poems, "like little vignettes," he said.
Daley has several readings scheduled in the coming weeks, including one on Wednesday night at Mount Vernon High School, where he will be joined by a student and two fellow teachers playing music along with his poems.
Asked when he thinks a poem is considered done, Daley said he often changes a word here or there even when reading a poem he stopped working on long ago.
"My gut response is that I've never really finished a poem," he said. Daley said, however, that many of the poems he's publishing in chapbooks were once intended for -- and may yet see -- publication in a larger book format.
Daley said he's content having his current publications after a several-year hiatus from publishing chapbooks. Plans for future writing include finishing a history of Empty Bowl Press, which he founded years ago in Port Townsend. That story would fit well in a book of essays, he said.
Daley said the drawing that graces the cover of "Original Sin" was done by his son, Teddy, when the boy was four years old. He said he and young Teddy used to sit in the Skagit Valley Food Co-op and draw each other's faces on napkins.
Teddy, now 9, at first didn't much want the small drawing (of Daley himself) to be used. But Daley gave Teddy $20 for the drawing, which, he said, changed the boy's mind.