A Tiny Compendium

Some time ago my manuscript The Icarus Sketches was picked up by Seven Kitchens Press. I've seen some of the chapbooks Seven Kitchens has put out and been impressed, so I was quite excited to see Icarus in the light (bad pun, sorry).

The poems I devised are a sequence, beginning with Icarus the Young, taking him through various childhood issues, then letting him live (he's offered the chance to live so long as he serves as a symbol of the long journey not taken), but each poem mimics the structure of the original myth, the rise and fall. So whether he's applying for a grant from the DoD or acting as a snarky docent, he's Icarus. I think the sequence stands as a damn good chapbook.

Then I saw the sequence my friend Crystal Boson was writing. It, too, took Icarus as a subject. It, too, reinvented him in a way few writers have bothered to try. But where my individual poems are fairly simple, hers are Ashbery-dense. Where her poems are fairly similar in style and voice, mine have a great deal of variety. The two sequences do really interesting things next to each other, effectively creating a space wherein the reader can imagine a whole spectrum of new Icarus material.

And here's the happy news / kicker. Ron Mohring at 7KP is going to publish both sequences in one chabpook. We haven't worked out all the details yet, but this will be a tiny compendium, containing two distinct works by two authors. Given my love for The Scarlet Compendium by Alice Notley and Douglass Oliver, I'm doubly excited.

Details will come over the summer. Anybody who wants to pre-order and/or review and/or would like to see Crystal and me reading side-by-side, drop me a line.

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 ;-)

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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.

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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.