LIST POETRIES

I often begin lists hoping that they ultimately will generate some poetry project (I've also found lists to be a successful manifestation of autobiography without getting all emotionally invested on how to present -- including censor -- autobiography). Some successful list projects appear HERE, HERE, and HERE. I've also had lists that went nowhere, most recently viz a now-defunct blog I'd concocted on the theme of economy-stimulation related spending. Anyway, I just started a new list on the mundane notion of grocery shopping. So, if you nosily want to know what I buy at the grocery store (yes, I naughtily included a donut today), you can go HERE...

...and hopefully some day a poem will result.

OH HUNGRY PLANET!

And, again, if you want to keep relishing MOI, I have a new "List as Autobiography" project that I'm blogging over HERE -- the list of my daily snailmail. Among other things, it's a convenient way for you to know whether I would have received your review copy(ies) for Galatea Resurrects (though you also can always check GR's List of Review Copies).

It's interesting how some lists work and some lists don't. My Garbage List was quite fruitful (it helped generate SILENCES and POST BLING BLING); one critic out there is writing a review on SILENCES specifically because of the Garbage List section ("innovative," daw. Hee.). My POET TIC THOUGHT List, however, hasn't done much beyond its blogged self, though there's a certain poignancy that it ended with kari edwards' name....

All right. Time to relish Others. Thanks to Jack Kimball for reviewing Tom Beckett's Tiny Book, STEPS: A NOTEBOOK. Click here for his blog (Sept. 12 post), but I like his write-up so much I'ma gonna reprint it in full below:

A counterminimalist design ethos eggs on Steps A Notebook by Tom Beckett. It's one in a set of Tiny Books from Meritage Press. Publisher Eileen Tabios accompanies her poet as graphic alter ego, supplies drawings and indeed handwrites his text, a duo then stepping onto their small stage in their shared regalia to participate in what I might describe unsneeringly as an intense art dealership. The poems come inside a little page-turner, tiny even in chap terms, a 1.5-inch square thumbnail sketchbook with a cover jacket in multicolored (Navajo? Tibetan?) fabric. The poems come forward, sideways, and upside down in one or two words per line, mostly three lines or fewer to the page. They address the ambiguities of their being composed, seeming parenthetical, always germane, or as one page smack in the middle of the text inveighs: "In / the moment / (be right there)." The poems constitute a bisexuality of sketches, suave quotations, and facts on writing, both as text and process, positing that poetry writing is like composing a music made of temporary flaws ("smudged work of Arias") or like writing on a blackboard, "Looking / at blackboards / how many Ways?" Skepticism -- "Advancement / is a kind / of ____" -- abounds. If poetry is prayer, to paraphrase, prayer is programming of thought that's overexposed and torn. To get beyond the conundrum of prayer, programming, etc., the dealers work on each other and together. Tom's Eileen accommodates the torn thought idea on a ripped page and calms prayer down with a vapor of slants, blank lines, and empty boxes that enforce a silence. Eileen's Tom returns, though, with a new quiet-breaker, "A / poetry of questions / (one answer)." To clarify, he qualifies, "When / I was / a young man." Next page, "When / I was / a little girl."

The cover fabric is Guatemalan, dear Jack. And click HERE if you want info on ordering Tom's or other authors' Tiny Books!

Then, I must say that, from recent reading, Hungry Planet is the most enjoyable work of nonfiction I've read. (And according to its survey, which is not scientific but still enjoyable, Germany spends more on food than any country.) And here are the others in my latest list of Relished W(h)ines:


PUBLICATIONS:
COMPLICATIONS, poems by Garrett Caples

AMIGO WARFARE, poems by Eric Gamalinda

WORDFLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Michael Heller

MILLENIAL HARVEST: THE LIFE & COLLECTED POEMS of Charles Greenleaf Bell

WANTON TEXTILES, poems by Reb Livingston &Ravi Shankar

FREE, poems by Amanda Laughtland

from I MEANT TO SAY, postcard poem by Amanda Laughtland

NO MATTER, poems by Joel Chace

SELECTED WRITINGS, poems by Cedar Sigo

APOSTROPHE, poems by Elizabeth Robinson

FINALMENTE / FINALLY, English poems by Hugh Fox translated into Portuguese by Glenna Luschei

ARMORED ELEVATOR, poems by Ryan Daley

) ) ), poems by Samar Abulhassan

SEDNA, poems by Michael Helsem

HOMEMADE TRAPS FOR NEW WORLD BRIANS, poems by Evan Willner

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITHOUT US? THE VOICE AND VISION OF KENNETH PATCHEN, monograph of picture-poems by Kenneth Patchen with an Afterword by James Laughlin

THE PASSIONATE SPECTATOR: ESSAYS ON ART AND POETRY by John Yau

"BURNING INTERIORS": DAVID SHAPIRO'S POETRY AND POETICS, critical study Edited by Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease

PUBLIC ACCESS #1, literary journal edited by Nicholas Grider

TEENY TINY, March 2007, Series #10 edited by Amanda Laughtland

HUNGRY PLANET: WHAT THE WORLD EATS, photographs, essays, recipes written or edited by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio

A PIG IN PROVENCE, memoir by Georgeanne Brennan

THE TREMENDOUS ADVENTURES AND THE MIGHTY DEEDS, RISE, DOWNFALL, LIFE AND DEATH OF A. JACKS (1855), novel by Henry W. Faxon and edited with a brief commentary by Jesse Glass

ASTRID & VERONIKA, novel by Linda Olsson

SIGHT HOUND, novel by Pam Houston

VOWS, novel by Lavyle Spencer


WINES:
2004 Grifolo Poderi San Lazarro Marche
2005 Kistler chardonnay
1999 Robert Hunter Brut De Noirs, Sonoma Valley
2005 Monticello Estate, Pinot Noir, Napa Valley
2004 Matchbook Syrah, Dunnigan Hills
1999 Tokaji Aszu, 5 Puttonyos, Royal Tokaji
2003 Longwood Shiraz "The Sheep Shearer"

Speaking of Whines, Karri Kokko guesses at The Secret to Happiness. Is it, he asks,

               SOAVE

What a Cheeky radiant Finn.

PAGE 228 POETICS

Just finished proofing the final proof of The Light Sang....there was one last typo in the manuscript, but I decided to leave the error in. It's something that's interested me since POST BLING BLING to incorporate in books: the poetics of wabi sabi.

Or how Native American blankets offer patterns include a deliberate discrepancy and Anasazi pots have slightly shattered bases to leave room for the "spirits". Or, in poems, facilitating the readers' engagements.

So Nota Bene, Moi Peeps: when The Light Sang... is released, if you catch the error, email Moi and you'll get a prize!

MOVING FROM ONLINE TO PRINT

I'm fascinated by the aborted issue of HCE: And Here Comes Everybody, Eds Lance Phillips with Geoffrey Gatza (Blaze Vox Books, 2007). This is a print anthology based on a project put together on the blog HERE COMES EVERYBODY . But within 48 (if not 24) hours of receiving word of its release, I learned that the publisher and editor announced that they were forced to cancel the book anthology; there seems to be a dispute as to whether some participants had agreed to be in the book in addition to the online site.

Because of the dispute -- which caused a poet(s) to threaten to sue the publisher/editor -- I won't be able to see the book HCE and see how it relates to a larger issue of anthologies created from online websites. Because I'm lazy, I'll just cutnpaste an excerpt from a review I'm writing on one such anthology, to share my thoughts on this larger issue which is relevant to other projects besides HCE:

REVIEW EXCERPT:
As a blogger, I've set up individual blogs related to presenting works-in-progress as they progressed. Some of the contents in these blogs later ended up in books. So I've long been interested in the difference between the "same" material presented in a blog versus a book.

I believe all of the materials in my blog can stand on their own. But I sought to have a reason to move them from blog to print. For examples, the material in my former garbage blog was recontextualized to be part of a poet's fictionalized autobiography in my most recent book SILENCES. Some of the material in my former poem blog was recontextualized to become a novel in my book ENGLISH. The material in my former shopping blog came to generate POST BLING BLING, a book project addressing commodification. And the material in this now defunct poetry-in-progress blog was recontextualized to exemplify a Filipino poetics in my fothcoming book THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES.

In other words, I've been very conscious that there has to be a reason why material that's already available in the internet (viz blogs) would come to cut down trees to form books.

The challenge is ably met in, say, the anthology E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: the first XI interviews, Ed. Tom Beckett (Otoliths, forthcoming 2007). Full disclosure requires that I note that I am one of the interviewees in this first volume -- but being part of the anthology has offered me a behind-the-scenes look at what will be in the print volume. In addition to the interviews which already are available online, there will be sample poems by each interviewee which are good to have in terms of presumably exemplifying the poetics discussed in the interviews, as well as an Editor's Introduction by Tom Beckett whose astute editorship is known (Beckett edited The Difficulties (1980-1990), a now legendary critical journal)

This is all a long introduction to noting my disappointment with ________, which puts in book form an anthology of poems culled from its ___website. Their Introduction offers no aesthetic/editorial rationale for their choices ...

In recent decades, enough anthologies have come out so as to enable a lively dialogue on what makes an anthology successful or not. (As an editor or co-editor of five anthologies of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, I've been attuned to this matter, too.) But the ____ anthology barely makes it into this discussion arena with its basic claim that its existence simply manifests the editors' claims to present what's representative of the web site's content.
[end of excerpt]

As you might glean from above, my review basically is critical of this new anthology created as a result of its online presence. I won't reveal the name of that anthology yet as I'm still mulling over whether I want to come out publicly against the book (or any poetry project. Note that I say publicly -- privately, I bash a number of poetry projects to the dark angels, but to make my criticism public is an extra step which I am loathe to do for numerous reasons, not because I wanna be a Polyanna but due to how my poetics unfolds).

Prior to HCE's cancellation, I thought that HCE may be an example of a print anthology warranting its print-ness as it doesn't just repeat material on its blog. If you go to Blaze Box Book's web site regarding HCE, you will see an excerpt from the Editor's Introduction that presents a context as well as expansion of the initial blog-based concept. But I won't know for sure, now that the book has been yanked.

Anyway, the confluence of print-on-demand technology with blogs/websites is facilitating print versions of online projects. But on behalf of the trees, I hope that editors/publishers of such future anthologies do something besides making print replicate e-content -- if only, too, to respect the intelligence of your readers. At a minimum, mere replication is abuse of the technology that has allowed many to expand their use of the internet.

Meanwhile, my condolences (is that the right word) to Lance Philipps who I know has worked very hard on HCE and on behalf of poetry.