Fellating the Pickle

Fellating the Pickle, a standout piece from The Great Recession, on a 2012 On Barcelona page, with some other stuff.

Plymouth-Whitemarsh: Book #2

The first book in my oeuvre to directly address Plymouth-Whitemarsh: autumn 2019's The Great Recession. As of late 2024, another missive directly from Ply-Mar begins its journey; the Beams sequel Dance Monkey, from Funtime Press. Will I  get to a trilogy? Who knows.

P.S. New Old Main

P.S. The new archive version of The Argotist Online has new-URL, salvaged versions of the AO e-books. Also notable that the poetry section has been resurrected, including this page with poems from Apparition Poems and Something Solid. 

Brand New Key

New URLs on a newly archived Argotist Online site, and a sense of semi-republication, for the e-books The Posit Trilogy, The Great Recession, and Mother Earth.

Returns

 

Conventions are difficult to work around, in poetry and in books in general. Publishers tend to publish what they know will sell in the world, and both anomalous books and anomalous authors are often stung to death by an enforced status quo mentality. That having been said, when my first books were released in 2007, I was determined to book-publish, as much as I could, my way, and against the biggest publishing bete noir in English language poetry, i.m.h.o. The bete noir in question is simple— poetry collections, the convention enforces, should not cohere around any central theme or narrative, the way that fiction, drama, philosophy, and science texts do. With some notable exceptions, poets (American, UK) are encouraged to just throw the requisite number of poems together and call the result a manuscript. That, to me, is not a real book, folks. Like me or lump me (and in rock, lump me in with Floyd, thank you very much), I have a stringent definition, and a stringent standard, of what constitutes a real book, which I have now spent almost twenty years attempting to live up to. The standard means coherence and cohesiveness, built into the text, around a narrative, a set of themes, or a formal imperative, or all three at once. Some of my books are woven tightly this way, some are, as Jimmy Page would say, tight but loose. All are the nightmare of the poets I studied under to obtain my graduate degrees. Yet that, for better or for worse, is my books standard. C’est la vie.

No surprise then, that when in the late summer of 2010, a few months after the release of Apparition Poems, I finally published a grab-bag of a chapbook with Mipoesias, no story or narrative stood behind its creation and publication that much. I had it, they offered to publish it, in a collection of chapbooks they were doing at the same time. Fair. I called the thing Returns because I was returning, in a way that I could, to a sort of beginning again, before I was possessed by the literary will-to-cohesion. The individual poems I have discussed elsewhere— Wittgenstein’s Song, written at the Last Drop in spring 2005, debuted in Henniker in a Carol Frost workshop; After Andrew Marvell, about Jen Strawser’s best friend in 1996, reprised in 2008; and now, added, Twisted Limbs, double editioned in 2006, an anthem around the potentially perceived heroism of/in carnal entanglement, apostrophe, could be, to Mary or Hannah or Abby. The important sui generis thing here, the token thing, you might say, even after a few alterations have been made, is that Returns remains my contribution to the ultimate grab-bag sweepstakes. Here I am, standing with the folks at Henniker, and (more than half the time, and more than they would like to admit) at Penn and Temple, too. Being conventional, as I try not to be. Attempting, of course, to sell in the world nonetheless. Drowning, as the new cover suggests? Sort of. Who isn’t, these days?

Twisted Limbs: Editions 1 and 2

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 being a two edition enterprise. 

Apparition Poem #1339

Apparition Poem #1339, as it was published in denver syntax #20 in 2010, is a salvage-job, even as it did also appear in the still-solvent Blazevox print book Apparition Poems. Worth noting that it covers terrain also covered in later efforts like Trish: A Romance, Something Solid, and Letters to Dead Masters.