Three Kinds of Braggadocio

Ron Mohring over at Seven Kitchens Press has given the go-ahead: The Icarus Sketches will appear in 2009 as the third chapbook in that press's Editor's Series. You can see the forthcomingness over in their sidebar.

I recently received two of 7KP's chapbooks - Underground Singing by Harry Humes and Still by Deborah Burnham - and the production value was quite good. I have Icarus poems out at various journals, and some have already been published. We'll see how nice I can make the acknowledgments page look by mid-2009 ;-)

---

In related news, I finally have time to hunker down and work on diluvium. The recent feature on visual poetry in Poetry is heartening. I also think of the wonderful job Jessica Smith is doing to bring visual poetry out into the light. On the other hand, I have doubts any of the pages in diluvium will appear in a journal. It's just going to be too dependent on sequentiality and linking pages.

If I haven't talked to you about it recently, think of the love-child of Ed Dorn's Languedoc Variorum and Steve McCaffery's Carnival, and that's what I'm trying to do stylistically. Pair the two types of poetry that most depend on a burst of energy/imagery - that is, visual and lyric - and then extend them into an 80+ page poetic sequence.

---

If you've been reading, you'll recall a previous post about me trying to freestyle. Well, I really liked the bit about boomerangs and elephant pelvises, and every once in a while I think of something that flows. I think this is going to turn into some kind of mock epic. Or mock rap epic. Or rap mock epic. Or epic rap mockery. Or something. Tentative title is "Attack of the 50 Foot Ideologies." These lines presumably will belong in the middle somewhere:

"From an elephant's pelvis I
fashioned a boomerang
that laid to waste and raised up cities
Then he came at me with a shank

shaved from an obelisk
stolen from Egypt
screaming, "I'm an objectivist!"
But I left his penis in pieces-

deflecting it with a shield
made out of Beowulf's contradictions
all the while replying, "Syncretism
derives energy from convictions' frictions."

Yeah, I get carried away. Sound does that. Haven't yet decided whether to choke it back a bit. It's a hell of a lot of fun to say out loud, let me tell you. I actually picture the line breaks somewhere else, incidentally, but there's a definite four-line rhyme box - I like carrying the energy from a set of rhymes into a new set of images.