← “Safe were the folk words of truth would upset…”
“Oh, we won’t give in, let’s go living in the past…” →

“In between the lines, there’s a lot of obscurity…”

Some books you set out to write; others simply happen. Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles definitely falls into the latter category—and this blustery week feels like a fine time to plug it again on this blog.

This 138-page paperback includes 53 poems accompanied by black-and-white photos of the gargoyles and grotesques that inspired them. The poems are steeped in medieval weirdness and hew to traditional forms, from sonnets, villanelles, and alliterative riddles to ghazals, rubaiyat, and Japanese tanka. I posted drafts of 51 of the poems on this blog from 2009 to 2012; there’s a clickable list of them here.

You can find Looking Up at your favorite online bookseller (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s) and among the gargoyliana the National Cathedral gift shop, or you can buy a copy directly from me; just send me an email. (Alas, there’s not yet an e-book, because I have scant time for the tedium of formatting poetry for the Kindle.)

Looking Up is tantalizingly close to turning a profit. Cathedral officials graciously agreed to let their publication-shy gargoyles show their faces in print; I’ve offered to donate 75 percent of the proceeds to their fund to repair damage from the 2011 earthquake.

Friends tell me I’m too reticent about promoting my own work, so here goes: If you buy just one book of medievalism-influenced, gargoyle-inspired neoformalist verse, let it be this one!

Thanks, also, to those of you who’ve already bought a copy. Whether you’re a new visitor to this blog or a longtime reader, I’m grateful for your interest and support.

Saturday, February 22, 2014, 4:31 am in gargoyles/grotesques, looking up, National Cathedral | 2 Comments »

2 responses to “In between the lines, there’s a lot of obscurity…”

  1. # 1 - marly youmans wrote:
    Monday, February 24, 2014, at 9:32 am

    I have mine! And some of those little gargoyles, too… I’ll have to post a poem or two soon–meant to do it already.

  2. # 2 - Withywindle wrote:
    Monday, March 3, 2014, at 12:57 am

    I’m not inclined to resign to maturity.

Leave a comment:

(Comments with links may be held briefly for moderation.)

  • Quid plura?

    "Quid plura?" is the blog of Jeff Sypeck, a writer in the Maryland woods.

  • Becoming Charlemagne is available as a Harper Perennial paperback. Order a copy here.

  • cover
  • Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles is now available! Order a copy from Amazon or learn more here.

  • cover
  • Folklore! Chivalry! Mad alliteration! The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier: A Translation is available in paperback and as a Kindle e-book.

  • cover
  • The Beallsville Calendar is a yearlong alliterative poem about moving from the city to the country. Learn more about it or order a copy here.

  • cover
  • Search ten years of “Quid Plura?” here:

  • Categories

    • academic ax-grinding (10)
    • Amit Majmudar (1)
    • Appalachian Trail (3)
    • applied paleobromatology (8)
    • Arthuriana (15)
    • Balkans (7)
    • Beallsville Calendar (15)
    • Benton MacKaye (1)
    • Beowulf (11)
    • Best of 2007 (1)
    • Best of 2008 (1)
    • Best of 2009 (1)
    • Best of 2010 (1)
    • Best of 2011 (1)
    • Best of 2012 (1)
    • Best of 2013 (1)
    • Best of 2014 (1)
    • Best of 2015 (1)
    • Best of 2016 (1)
    • Best of 2017 (1)
    • Best of 2018 (1)
    • Best of the First Five Years (1)
    • Best of the First Ten Years (1)
    • bookstores (4)
    • Bulgaria (1)
    • Byzantium (2)
    • California (1)
    • Caucasus (4)
    • Celticism (1)
    • Charlemagne (52)
    • Chaucer (12)
    • Civil War (3)
    • Colorado (2)
    • Dante (5)
    • Delaware (5)
    • England (11)
    • epic poems (23)
    • F. Scott Fitzgerald (4)
    • Flannery O'Connor (2)
    • France (7)
    • galangal (2)
    • gardening (8)
    • gardens (1)
    • gargoyles/grotesques (74)
    • George Alfred Townsend (1)
    • Georgia (6)
    • Germany (6)
    • Iceland (23)
    • Iowa (3)
    • Ireland (4)
    • Joan of Arc (6)
    • John Pendleton Kennedy (2)
    • Kansas (1)
    • literature (108)
    • Lloyd Alexander (31)
    • Longfellow (2)
    • looking up (61)
    • Louisiana (19)
    • Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren (1)
    • Mark Twain (2)
    • Maryland (31)
    • Massachusetts (1)
    • medieval shark week (1)
    • medievalism (178)
    • Merovingians (1)
    • Minnesota (3)
    • miscellaneous (118)
    • Missouri (1)
    • National Cathedral (75)
    • New Jersey (20)
    • New York (10)
    • Old English (18)
    • Pennsylvania (2)
    • philanthropy (3)
    • philology (8)
    • Poland (1)
    • Polaroid Land Camera (4)
    • politics (22)
    • Rome (1)
    • Russia (2)
    • Scandinavia (3)
    • Scotland (3)
    • SF/fantasy (23)
    • Shakespeare (3)
    • Sir Gawain (5)
    • statues (22)
    • tapestries (2)
    • teaching (21)
    • Tennyson (2)
    • Theodulf (10)
    • Tolkien (7)
    • translations (23)
    • travel (11)
    • Turkey (1)
    • videos (4)
    • Virginia (7)
    • visual arts (12)
    • Walafrid Strabo (10)
    • Washington (50)
    • Washington Irving (3)
    • writing (37)
  • Contact

    • jeffsypeck -at- gmail.com


Quid plura? © 2007 All Rights Reserved. Hosted by ThatHostingPlace.com.
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).

This blog uses a modified version of the ShinyRoad 2.1 WordPress theme by Nurudin Jauhari.