LOOK FOR THAT PELICAN DREAMING!

Very excited finishing the proofing of Meritage Press' next book:

PELICAN DREAMING: POEMS 1959-2008 by Mark Young
Selected and with an Introduction by Thomas Fink

Tom Fink obviously is one of the best contemporary poet-critics out there (his latest critical book effort on David Shapiro, co-edited with Joseph Lease, is reviewed by Galatea Resurrects HERE) None of which prepared me to see -- though I was highly amused by -- this excerpt from his introduction

In U.S. poetry, such intricate meta-representational poetic discourse is found in abundance. Think of the work of Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, David Shapiro, John Yau, Charles Bernstein, and Eileen R. Tabios

Always nice to be able to feminize and brown-up a list of male poets (beloved though their poems are to me as well).

Oh, but wait. Though this is moi blog, this is about Mark Young, not Moi. So, yes, I'm very excited to release this book -- historically significant and 412 pages (it's a BRICK!!! Moi loves moi some brick!) worth of just fabulous fabulous poems! Wooot! More details to come! Until then, please to enjoy this apt sample below -- it's not representative of Mark Young's body of work (which, as Tom Fink sez, is one of "many mansions featur[ing] a variety of architectural modes"). But it is a poem quite clearly earned by its author:

So what

if
Miles Davis
came on "…all
purple & shit"
which is what
Amiri Baraka wrote
in When Miles Split.

&
so what
if, as someone else
bitchily brewed,
decrying the "lack
of creative effort",

he took pop songs
& played only
slight variations
of the melody
over & over
above
an electric rhythm section.

I mean
if you've spent
forty odd years
laying down
real ground-
breaking stuff

then surely
you're entitled
towards the end
as you reinvent
yourself
once again

to have a bunch
of young guys
do the moves
behind you
while you take it
a bit more easily
out front

Fuck it, that's
what life's all about,
it's what we'd all
like to be doing. &
aren't the songs
that most
of this shit
is about
called
Time after Time
&
Human Nature

anyway?