HALLOWEEN: A POETICS

Meritage Press is featured, along with Momotombo Press, No Tell Books and Omnidawn in an "Indie Publishing" article by Barbara Jane Reyes over at the Poetry Foundation Blog. While I am fine with what I said -- I, after all, said it -- having to summarize Meritage Press (which I consider more to be a project space rather than a print-press) does make me feel a bit in Halloween costume [Pause for a brief pat on back for Moi's timely segue into the current holiday].



To wit, some presses have a vision or goal and they do things to manifest such. Meritage Press has a vision, too, but it's fluid enough to facilitate approaching publishing in the same way I approach the making of a poem, organically with radical flexibility. Which is why I could not have predicted, when I began Meritage Press, how the press would unfold to have done what it has to date (just as I rarely know what my poems will say ahead of their being written).

I don't have the usual submissions-then-assessment/judgement system in Meritage Press. Most of its activities arise organically as a result of at-the-time poetics (meaning, among other things, that much of its projects have ended up being conceptualized and/or commissioned). I'm rarely going to be satisfied with, say, submissions of (finished-ahead-of-Meritage Press' involvement) poetry manuscripts because that process by itself is rarely multi-layered enough to allow the inclusion of other aesthetic/political/cultural elements that far transcend the manifestation of a published book. (In fact, I think, if memory serves correctly, that the only submitted manuscript I've ever published was Bruna Mori's and Matthew Kinney's Derive, which says something about the powerful charm of this collaboration for being plucked offa the transom.

Anyway, speaking of Halloween [Pause for another pat on back and wide grin], our Galatea family is actually commemorating it this year. It falls into the category of previously-ignored activities but which now must have our attention because of our engagement in kid culture. So, this year, our family carved pumpkins for the first time. Yes: first time! That's Michael's first pumpkin up top -- isn't it brilliant!

The hubby had to carve a pumpkin as well in order to show Michael what it is that we U.S.-Americanos do with vegetables when Halloween approaches. Here's the summary photo with Achilles and Gabriela:



If you wish, click on pic for larger image: Don't the holes-instead-of-eyes on moi puppies' faces sorta bespeak Halloween? Whooooo....

Mama Moi proclaims: May yours be scarey...but safe!