Corey Mesler got his first typewriter the Christmas he got Abbey Road, he writes in a poem in his recently released A Troubling of Goldfish. “I knew then only that something/was supposed to happen.”
High school was when the poems started. “And of course, they were terrible,” he says now. “You know, I was 14, but it’s something along the way, I kept doing it and kept doing it.”
Nearly sixty years later, Mesler has written numerous collections and novels. Over the past few months alone, he’s published The Sylvi Poems (Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press), Tom Lake Gretchen Meadow (Bottlecap Press), and A Troubling of Goldfish (Big Table Publishing). On Thursday, August 14th, 5:30 to 7 p.m., Mesler will sign and read from these books at Burke’s Book Store, which he runs with his wife Cheryl Mesler.
The Sylvi Poems, he says, are dedicated to his granddaughter, while Tom Lake Gretchen Meadow is a chapbook filled with prose poems. A Troubling of Goldfish, with cover art by Martha Kelly, has over 100 poems written over the past year-and-a-half or so.
The poems vary in topic and theme, from reflections on grief and love to worries about democracy. “Those are generally my themes,” Mesler says. “Probably the self-reflection and the worry are a little heavier in this volume because of what’s going on and because I just turned 70.”
Yet writing is therapeutic in these moments of worry, Mesler says. “I do it every single day.”
Novel-writing takes up the bulk of his time, and poetry, he says, “comes in the creases where I’m not sitting down editing or creating new chapters. I write poetry in the off time, between times.”
Inspiration comes in flashes for his poems. “If I’m sitting doing nothing and there’s a pen and paper,” he says. “Very rarely do I sit down and say I’m going to write one. Rarely. I do sometimes, but generally, a phrase pops in my mind.”
“Always,” he adds, “I feel better after I’ve written a poem. I always feel good about myself, the first draft, and then I go back and work at work until I think it’s right. But in general, it’s that flash that I’m looking for that maybe illuminates a little part of my life, which, in turn, maybe illuminates somebody else’s. … I guess all writing is, you’re looking to explain your life, and explain Life with a capital L at the same time.”
Join Burke’s Book Store (936 South Cooper) for a reading and signing of The Sylvi Poems, Tom Lake Gretchen Meadow, and A Troubling of Goldfish on Thursday, August 14th, 5:30 to 7 p.m. The reading begins at 6 p.m. All three books are available for purchase at Burke’s.