Letter from Iceland #66
The Little Book of Icelandic—Amazing alliteration! plus: Bookdroptour
Hæ öll!
In today’s Little Book of Icelandic installment, we examine the complex rules of prosody and how they apply to Icelandic poetry and lyrics in general. As you may know poets are regarded with high reverence in this country, and some people here feel that the old prosody poetry is the only real form and that newer, more experimental, poetry is basically counterfeit. 😁
A brief order of business: next week EPI and I are heading on a bookdroptour to the West Fjords. What is a bookdroptour? Well, I started calling it that when we had just one or two published books and headed out on a tour of the country to introduce them to booksellers and other retailers, to ask if they wanted to carry them in their shops.
Over the coming years we kept adding titles, and now we have too many to carry with us on the tour. So the bookdroptour has basically turned into a trip where we travel around and say hello to the people selling my books, replace the display copies if needed, and pop into any new shops that have opened up and that may wish to stock them. And of course enjoy travelling around beautiful Iceland and seeing the creative, fun things that people are doing all around the country (ok, real talk: that’s the main reason I do it. 🥰 Even if I wasn’t my own publisher, I’d want to do this part).
All of which is to say, I will be posting from the road next week—and I may have to hold off on a new LB of Icelandic installment that week since I likely won’t have time to make a new recording before we leave.
Meanwhile, if the ins-and-outs of being your own publisher piques your interest, get thee on my mailing list for my upcoming online course on indie publishing!
And now … on to the rules of prosody.
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