Some Days Are Mostly Maintenance, by Lou Orfanella

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Epic moments are not required to prompt epic poems. The most epic of all poems might just be those that have their roots in the ordinary moments that shape a lifetime. The pervasive unpoetic teaching of poetry encourages the excavation of a poem by telling the readers to unearth hidden meanings and to reach agreement on the symbols thought to have been buried by the poet, rather than learning to rely on one’s own internal and external reactions to the words on the page. Some Days Are Mostly Maintenance does not pretend to solve the world’s problems or to capture the foundation of the human condition. Rather, it offers some random thoughts and some individual reactions to the simple observations and feelings that can, at least momentarily, illuminate the value of comparable experiences in others. Lou Orfanella, a New York based teacher, writer, and workshop facilitator who has also worked as a broadcast and print journalist, is the author of more than twenty books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, and drama including most recently Some Love Poems Have Happy Endings, Others Not So Much: Poems, Single A Serenade: A Novel, Radical Acceptance: Poems, Unexpected Guests: Poems That Arrived Without Warning, The Fundamental Things Apply: A Novella, and New York Dispatches: New and Selected Stories. He has published over 100 articles, essays, columns, reviews and poems in numerous regional and national magazines, newspapers, and journals including The New York Daily News, College Bound, English Journal, World Hunger Year Magazine, Discoveries, Teacher Magazine, and New York Teacher. He holds degrees from Columbia University and Fordham University. He has presented scores of public readings of his work and offers individual and group writing workshops.