denver syntax Part 2

My Blazevox print book Cheltenham was released on Independence Day, 2012. Leading up to its release, and that April, denver syntax published four Apparition Poems from the second half of the book: 540, 554, 557, and 563. The Teens were beginning to lay down the gauntlet of themselves.

Thanksgiving: The Teens & Continuance

Apparition Poems, which came out in 2010, is a pretty rich song-book. Rich enough that, through 2011 and 2012, new pages continued to appear featuring portions of the book, and/or outtakes from the initial edition (which have been included in later editions): from 2011, here is a page from Sawbuck Poetry, and from 2012, here are pages from On Barcelona and diode. Something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. Happy turkey!

Seven Corners (7C): Ode On Jazz

I met Steve Halle in Henniker, doing my M.F.A. in the Boston 'burbs. Steve shared my penchant for the new, the twisted & the avant-garde in poetry, angled somewhat against most of the New England College M.F.A. faculty. We graduated together in the summer of '06. When I visited Chicago for the first time, that December, I stayed with Steve and his wife Monica in Palatine, a suburb about forty-five minutes outside the city. We read together at Myopic Books in Wicker Park (Guyville), Chicago's answer to Manayunk in Philly, and in preparation Steve uploaded this page onto his Seven Corners (7C) blog, which includes the Ode On Jazz. The Jazz Ode as of now has, in mp3 form, become a hit on a number of sound-file sites.

Hinge Time: COR (Cricket Online Review)

In the early Aughts, I met a writer/poet in Philly named J.D. Mitchell (later J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden). J.D. had migrated to Philly from the Mid-West. We commiserated, and while he was in Philly did one important reading together: with Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and under the aegis of Jeremy's There is such noise & gravity series, we read at Villanova University, Jeremy's alma mater in the Philly 'burbs, in 2001. For a number of years, we kept in touch loosely. In the mid-Aughts, and having migrated to the South-West, J.D. mentioned to me via e-mail that he and his buddies were starting an online poetry journal: Cricket Online Review. COR ran from the Aughts into the Teens, and I published in it a number of times. Most significantly, here are Apparition Poem 1558, 1571, and Sarah Israel from the Madame Psychosis section of Beams.  

Twisted Limbs

One of the exciting things about the Aughts Revolution was the growth of internet literary publishing as an enterprise, hand-over-fist and in all directions. You could publish poems in multiple editions over comparatively short increments of time, either online-to-print (as happened to me, from Jacket to the & Now Awards/Best Innovative Writing anthology) or online-to-online anthology, and what have you. From '06 to '07, my poem Twisted Limbs migrated from Andrew Lundwall's Melancholias Tremulous Dreadlocks to Halvard Johnson's Big Bridge "Death" anthology, and was none the worse for it.

Beams in Henniker

Summer '06 marked my final residency in Henniker, NH. It coincided, more or less precisely, with my debut on the As/Is group poetry blog, which is still active today. For the length of the residency, I was writing a portion of a series of poems which would end up in the Blazevox e-book Beams: Madame Psychosis. Two of these poems, lizzie mclean and eye eye eye, were placed on the As/Is blog from the NEC library during the residency. More headiness, along with a little wistfulness. I was due at Temple in August: the Aughts fast-moving train was in full-speed-ahead mode.

Luzmag in Henniker

As of early January '06, doing a residency in Henniker NH, I sent Lars Palm in Malmo some poems for an e-zine he was putting together, called Luzmag. On the night of the 9th, I got the e-mail and saw that the page was up. I walked out of the NEC library carrying an intense sense of euphoria; the Aughts Revolution was on. And it was one of my best nights in Henniker.

Hinge Time: denver syntax

My poetry pages, even pages from many years back, which happen to be valuable ones, all must find their way onto Blogger to be hinged. It's part and parcel of a matrix-system around what Blogger is for poetry. Luckily, the matrix is a capacious one, and bottomless and fathomless the right way. So: these pages appeared in Luke Simonich's denver syntax in 2010 for, respectively, Apparition Poems 1339, 1343, 1497, and 1473. Now, they may begin to come into their own.

Twenty Years and a Song

As of twenty years ago, more or less precisely today, I was living in a West Nittany Avenue sublet in State College, writing my Song for Maria (Gingerich). At the end of November '98, I left. As is nifty, the British Library Wayback Machine several times captured the first of three versions of my Argotist Online poetry page, when all it had on it was one Beam, and Song for Maria, and as it was established in the mid-Aughts. Cheers.