lit shiz...

I haven't been submitting many poems lately, I've just been writing furiously in the face of the onrushing cataclysm and concentrating on a couple of book projects that might hopefully survive the end times in a crushed box beneath the rubble:

I've almost finished writing Good Morning, George Orwell and I think it's found a very good home, to be named later. this book is a narrative group of poems that explore our current political and social climate in an imagistic and hopefully interesting way using straightforward language that isn't merely diatribe.

I'm about to begin the Morricone chap for KSE and it promises to be a dandy experiment in sound and rapid fire improv poem making. I'm really looking forward to jamming, when the weather turns bleak and the night hangs just so in my window with its one broken, taped-up pane. I'll need cold beer and fog and fast moving shadows...

also, I've heard rumors of a young, Chicago-based small press publisher putting out a collection of some of the massive amount of correspondence between Hosho McCreesh and I, though I can't confirm nor deny this.

I read a poem of Hosh's in RATTLE back in 2001 that jumped off the page and wrote him asking to purchase a chap or something. the result was seven years (and counting) of life affirming exchanges banged out on old typewriters across the american landscape. these letters are/were a place where lots of heavy ideas were tossed around and discussed by two writers desperate to find a place for poetry, art and dreams in an increasingly ugly world (and if not, then exactly where dinosaurs like us could go to die in relative peace).

I don't write as many long letters these days; more than ever, time is short, and trouble just over the horizon, there's always something demanding attention, the next tank of gas, the next hour at work. there's barely energy for carving the minimum strength required for survival out of our days, much less cosmic pondering and meditation upon the human condition (which is: terrible. or wonderful!, if you are looking forward to the complete reordering of society that's in the works). for me, letters have always been a way to get outside of the miserable working class world of college park and participate in a larger, philisopical exchange where dogs on chains are transformed into metaphors and not just a daily tragedy; where the savagery of man could be mashed and sculpted into a shape that made some kind of fleeting sense; where lost people in the haze of streetlamps, bound to wheelchairs and demons, were only thick words drawing images out of the mind, rather than some screaming nightmare to experience constantly; a way to attempt an understanding of the passage of time and the inevitability of loss outside the artform of poetry but within the framework of a life hopefully lived as art. to sort thru each day and extract meaning from the misery.

they supplied the necessary manic energy, heavy fuel to put words down while working like a stinking asshole in a hot restaurant six nights a week. they cast sparks into the darkness. I'm thankful for em and looking back over em, think they make for a pretty good read.

more as it all develops...