New from above/ground press: my chapbook, This Folded Path.

This is your periodic reminder that I have a newsletter and that now might be a good time to subscribe.

Some above/ground author activity…

I’ve just learned the formidable Otoliths has ended its run after seventy issues.

Few lit mags have published such a dizzying variety of work while also maintaining such an unmistakable and singular vision. Its intrepid editor, Mark Young, is a wonder.

A poem of mine, “Four Lessons” has just appeared in the fabulous Guesthouse. Many thanks to Jane Huffman for including it among such excellent company.

“Four Lessons” is from my book, Vessels, which will be published next year by Unsolicited Press.

Now might be a good time to sign up for my (infrequent) newsletter, Three Things.

🎙️ I’m this week’s guest on Micro Monday podcast series.

I know, I know: fifty-four minutes isn’t exactly “micro.” Well, after the main interview, we talked for almost forty extra minutes about Until the End of the World, which we’re both very big fans of.

And “cinephile”? Oh I don’t know. I think of myself more as a song & dance man.

🔗 Ken Knabb’s situationist archive is now housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Do you live in Minnesota? Find out what’s under your house.

Bonus! Now that this rare series has been reissued on DVD, be sure to check out the bonus disc of Deleted Scenes & Bloopers: Songwriting! Sylvia Plath! Bob Dylan! Cults! Hot dogs!

1: Never rebroadcast since its original airing, it’s the genre-defying pilot, in which people say the word “accomplish” so many times it stops holding any meaning whatsoever.

4: In this week’s musical episode, Hal Holbrook, fresh off his Tony award-winning run as the Mysterious Stranger, joins the cast to sing about adjectives. (Originally performed and broadcast live!)

2: In this exciting episode, groundbreaking in its use of CGI, I answer the question, “What poets changed the way you thought about writing?” Special appearance by the late John Engman in a flashback.

5: It’s the shocking season finale!

To raise funds to save our gang’s favorite hang-out from foreclosure, I must perform a thrilling leap on water skis over a shark tank!

(And in the episode’s audio commentary, I talk about what I’m currently working on.)

And here is the third post in my ongoing poetry mini interview.

In this “very special” episode — animated, in homage to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — I wonder how I know when a poem is finished. Grace Paley guest-stars.

In the spring of 2021, I participated in the ongoing — and truly wonderful — Poetry Mini Interview series.

With summer upon us here in the northern hemisphere, it’s time for re-runs, where episodes of TV shows are shown out of order, so nothing makes sense!

Learning the Right Thing from the Wrong Person

Margaret Renkl, NY Times:

…we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.

🔗 Building Ages in NL “A Dutch data engineer wanted to find out the age of the building his son lives in and ended up creating a map, visualising the age of all of the Netherlands’ 10 million or so buildings.” (via)

I was able to determine that my father was born in a house built in 1905.

1977:

2018:

In the months since writing my response to this interview question, I’ve seen several references to extremely similar writing prompts – a typically synchronistic example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

In the Kenyon Review (from 3/2021), Michael Montlack speaks of Dorianne Laux & Joe Millar’s method of “making a list of words, throwing in a quote or fact or phrase, and taking an hour to write a draft.”

And in the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter (from 10/2020), Valerie Coulton describes Edward Smallfield’s process that “consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote. He used to pass these out in workshops, and then everyone would write for 15 minutes.”

I’m not surprised to see randomness and chance being integrated into writing prompts, but now I’m curious to find out what the provenance is for Rita Dove’s exercise, which I’ve been using on and off for about twenty years.

A reminder of one of the many, many reasons why I left Oregon. From the New York Times, 21 Feb 2020:

In Portland, a city often portrayed in popular culture as a progressive paradise, the killing of the men provoked outrage, along with reassurances that the city would not tolerate hate. But it also set off a new round of questions about whether Oregon had fully shed the legacy of its founding as a racially pure Cascadia that white supremacists still fantasize about.

Oregon was admitted to the Union in 1859 with a constitution that, uniquely, forbade black people from living, working, or owning property in the state; the provision was not repealed until 1926. In the 1920s, the state legislature barred Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. By the 1970s, extremist groups like the Aryan Nations had found fertile ground for their beliefs.

Credulous, Cowardly, and Vicious

David Bentley Hart (via):

The 2016 U.S. election proved that, even in a long-established democratic republic, just about anyone or anything, no matter how preposterously foul, can achieve political power if enough citizens are sufficiently credulous, cowardly, and vicious.

I wrote a haiku, and twenty-eight years later, I finally published it.

(Thanks to @Patti for blowing her own horn, thereby drawing my attention to the publication.)