Publications

This afternoon felt like Christmas. Except that Santa pulled up to our place in a black Thunderbird, on time as usual for her piano lesson with my wife. And instead of a red velvet sack, she came in cradling a small cardboard box. Inside were the fruits of many months of painstaking labor: sixty eight limited-edition letterpress chapbooks of my poems, each hand-bound, numbered, and signed.

The process began in September of last year, when Mary Zawacki, an accomplished graphic designer and talented amateur pianist, asked if she could use a few short poems to practice hand-set typography in a letterpress class she was taking with Gerald Lange at Otis College of Art and Design.

The thought of someone spending so much time with my poems in setting them — aligning each letter carefully, even as I had carefully chosen each word — felt like an honor. The process, and the result, were remarkable. However, because some of the tiny metal letters had been used more often in other print runs than their companions on the plates containing my poems, some letters were minutely more worn than others, producing a slightly uneven tone when inked and pressed to paper. For Mary, this just wouldn’t do.

But this “setback” only opened new vistas. Mary used a digital version of the same font¹, along with her own beautiful hand-drawn line illustrations inspired by each poem, to lay out the pages digitally. Then these designs were developed on photo film. The film was laid against a metal plate coated with a special polymer, and exposed to light. The light-exposed polymer hardened, and the rest simply washed away with water (a far less toxic option than, say, the metal-etching acids William Blake was accustomed to using). The resulting plates, containing both my poems and their well-matched illustrations, became the pages and cover of this book arts book.

The chapbook contains three poems, including the poem that was a finalist in last year’s James Hearst Poetry Prize. The settings can only be described as perfect: from the illustrations, which add to the text, to the layout, the paper, and the three-hole string hand-binding. I am deeply grateful for this act of creative generosity, and for the opportunity to collaborate with such a wonderful artist.

The March/April issue of North American Review arrived yesterday, bearing one of my poems. Yes, you read that right — the March/April issue arrived yesterday, at the end of November. Our nation’s oldest literary magazine is also currently one of its tardiest. As a subscriber (and now contributor), I wrote to them in June (when the December issue arrived, bearing an editor’s note extolling Winter reading) and suggested that they might want to say something — online or in print — about the circumstances surrounding the magazine’s delays. The production assistant said she would pass the suggestion along. None the less, the current issue arrived bearing an editor’s note about the “droughte of March” and April’s cruelty — just in time for Christmas! Still, it contains many poems I only wish I had written myself, including and especially the first place winner’s poem. In fact, it is precisely because I respect North American Review that I am so mystified — not only by the delays, but by the silence.

Contrast these ironic editor’s notes with Ploughshares, which runs a blog to engage with topics in contemporary letters as they happen, or Zyzzyva, which also runs a blog to give a peek inside the independent periodical’s “struggle day by day.” I hesitate to characterize this as simply an old-media-versus-new-media divide. But actively engaging in dialog with the literary community through blog entries and comments puts a voice (or voices) to the publication that makes me feel more loyal, and somehow connected, to their project. I am not suggesting that the North American Review start a blog. The magazine was, in fact, worth the wait. And as I said in my note to the magazine staff, I wish them all the best in their efforts to catch up. But the literary conversation seems to be happening at a faster pace nowadays, and periodicals are being published for more than just libraries. I wonder if even reputable magazines can long afford to keep their workings largely offline and opaque.

I just received my contributor’s copy of Volume Eight of Cider Press Review, which includes one poem inspired by the time I lived in central Los Angeles. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a poem by Kathleen Tyler, with whom I studied in Suzanne Lummis’ masterclass several years ago, included in this volume chock full of another year’s worth of good poems.

When my wife found out the International Museum Of Women asked me to submit a poem, she didn’t miss a beat: “You go girl!” In actuality, they are preparing an exhibit featuring the art of young men as an analogue to their recent and highly successful “Imagining Ourselves” exhibit featuring young women.

I just learned that the poem I wrote specifically for the Fatherhood part of this series has been accepted as part of the exhibit. Audio of me reading the poem as well as commentary and conversations about the work are available here. (Note: the website misrepresents my line breaks - all lines with only 1-3 words on them should be a continuation of the previous line.)

I just got my contributor’s copy of the debut issue of “Greatest Uncommon Denominator” magazine. It is bursting with good things - among them, my essay entitled “Poetry Code.” Inspired by posts and conversations on this blog, I formalized some of my thoughts on the insights to be gleaned from conflating poetry and software source code - and the editors liked it. This plus a whopping 182 additional pages of by turns hilarious, profound and chilling artwork, poems and stories can be had in an attractive book-like format for only $10 USD - or for those of you who, like me, prefer to eat your marshmallow right now, you can purchase and download the PDF version for a mere $3.50 USD right here and now.

Four of my poems appeared in the 2004 edition of Beyond The Valley Of The Contemporary Poets. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend what I heard was a wonderful book launch and reading due to a family emergency. That said, I’m happy to be in print alongside some great Southern California poets.

Read the poems (PDF format):

• “Berkeley Hills Exodus”
  
• “French Menu, English Version”
  
• “Tea Or Smoke”
  
• “Eulogy For The Star People”