Local author Joseph F. Persinger has published a new book entitled “A Sacred Pledge — folk poems & lyrics.”
Copies are available at jfpersinger.com, Amazon.com, and IngramSpark.com as well as at the Magic of Books store, 212 W. Second Street, Seymour.
Persinger will discuss his writing and read some of the poems in a presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 2, at the Magic of Books store. He also will perform some of his lyrics with the original guitar accompaniment with which they were paired.
Signed copies of the poetry book will be available for purchase, as well as his collections of short stories: “Catfish John and Other Stories” and “Henry and the Night Sky and Other Stories.”
The presentation is free and open to the public.
In announcing release of the book, Persinger said that, only recently, it occurred to him that lyrics to the songs he has been writing could be viewed as poems.
“In sixty years of songwriting, I never thought of myself as a poet, mainly because I have never seriously studied poetry. And yet, songs in the American folk tradition are definitely poems set to music.”
However, he noted, some critics argue that, separated from the music, those poems are somehow inferior to those written specifically to be printed on a page and read in solitude.
“My contention,” he explained, “is that they should be viewed as folk art and designated as ‘folk poems’ in the same way we speak of folk paintings or folk pottery or woodcarving or other Americana roots creations. More recently, he also has written some short pieces in the more contemporary style known as “spoken word poems.”
In all, the new publication features 28 works selected from six decades of writing.