Well today it is a little fun being me. On Friday my friend Barry Seiler sent me a note congratulating me on having "Fun Being Me" picked by Bob Holman on About.com as one of the years ten best books of poems. I'm not usually comfortable with bragging but this kind of made me feel very, very good. Here's what Bob said about the book:
7) Fun Being Me: Poems, by Jack Wiler
(CavanKerry Press, Ltd., 2006) The joke, of course, is that Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun. The fun is no irony. It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book, in his face, in his decision to live it straight, not fancy. Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. The bleakness, the searing truth of it, stops you cold. But, as he says about his brother (us) in “The Taste of Beer in Late Fall,” “He needs to know. / I need to tell.”
And here's a link to the page so you can see all the other books he liked and hopefully buy one or two.
http://poetry.about.com/od/poetrybooks/tp/bestbooks2006.htm
We all need the dough and all of us need the shot in the arm. So thanks to Bob for his kind words and for honoring the work. I'm deeply grateful and honored. Thanks also to About.com for even having a page and place for poetry.
Hopefully now I'll write more poems to justify this hype:)
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