New Chapbook by Buck Downs

PG's chapbook series has a new website. Check it out at www.chapbook-genius.com. And to celebrate the new face, we'll be releasing "Another Helping" by Buck Downs first thing tomorrow morning. To harvest your anticipation, here's three questions for Buck about his collection.

1. How do the poems in "Another Helping" interact with your other books and projects?

"Another Helping" is the first third of the second part of a three book sequence. I call the whole thing Pontiac Fever and it comprises the three books black peppermint, You Can't Get Enough of What You Really Don't Need, and always materialized. Each book has three sections of 23 poems each. So "Another Helping" is one of nine 23-page subsections of the whole work.

The 23-page section has been a useful building block I decided to use on this project. It seems like a congenial interval; a good place to pause, check out what's happened, and reset. It seemed like it would be just as useful an ordering principle for the size of a book as it is for the writing of the poems, but I don't think that's absolutely the case, and I'm tinkering with it in the book I'm writing now.


2. "Proximo Exito" is written in Spanish. How's that work?

I keep a long, multi-volume open file of source material for the poems, collectively called the Hopper. You can find out more about that on buckdowns.com. A couple weeks after writing the poem "little sucker one hit", I was reading through a volume of the Hopper and I found the phrase "proximo exito", and it led me to a thought experiment that went something like, if "little sucker one hit" had been written in Spanish instead of English, it would have been called "proximo exito". Not entirely to translate it but to use the function of translation to reconvert the finished poem into the kind of emergent hubbub of thought that it was before it got finished, and then to refinish it in an alternate language.

"proximo exito" then is the product of working through the experiment, via my two years of high school/college Spanish and phrase-testing through an online translator. I thought that there was just enough actual overlap in the two poems, like the word 'memphis', that reading them on consecutive pages would cause a double-take kind of reread, which would be cool: to get you linger.


3. Your poems are funny in the way they warp familiar expressions, or if not expressions, expectations of language (like, "lost to thought-/killing time," and "you shave it,/I'll suck it" to name the first examples I see as I pick a poem at random). What comes first for you, the language, the idea, the sounds?

I want to say it all three comes in a clump, but I suspect that being serious about that could itself be a departure. It seems like everybody eventually has to come down on one side or another; how shall ye be counted?

In the jargon I got schooled in, it's the triad of logopoeia, phanopoeia, melopoeia, or what it means, how it looks, and how it sounds [my translation]. I visualize these three priorities as a largish, triangle-shaped tablecloth. It has three corners, and I have two hands, so one corner is always not going to be in my hand. By habit I tend to keep the how it looks and how it sounds corners in my grasp and let the what it means corner flap in the wind. I think maybe once every ten or twelve poems, I'll start with an idea, a line, or an image that I want to get in or get to, and get my hand on the idea part.

Who Cares Though Right

It's all just like I mean is it any good.

Local Boy Makes Good

Best New Book by a Local Author

Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young

Microfictionist Joseph Young has whittled the short story down to a few sentences—and often fewer than 50 words. What’s disarming is how effective these stories are in Easter Rabbit. You expect something so terse to feel incomplete, a mere piece of some greater whole, but the stories, moments, relationships, and feelings in these 100 pages end up saying all they need to in an artfully precise use of language.

Thanks to the City Paper! Get your copy of Easter Rabbit here.

We Are All Good Giveaway

I'm really enjoying the entries for what I've decided to call the "Misunderstanding Campaign," which is the htmlgiant contest to win a copy of Mike Young's book of poetry. To enter this week's giveaway, you just have to leave a comment there about a miscommunication.

Many of the entries are funny and some are like, whoa, sad. Give it a shot, and spread the word.

Free Mike Young.

* * *

Went to a ballgame with Steph on Friday:

It was a great game, though the O's lost on the last strike when Alex Rodriguez hit a 3-run homer.

On Saturday I went to a ballgame with my friend NYC Joe.

This game was sold out with Yankees fans so we had to buy standing room only tickets and find a seat up front. Terrible game, O's lose 11-3, but Sabathia got his 20th win this season.

* * *

I think there was a carnival on Saturday night. I wrote this song:

I never wanna live without you
I'm never gonna live without your face
It's 1999 and I'll never change
And I can't live without you.

Best of the Web Announcement: It's me y'all!

Dzanc just announced their call for nominations for next year's Best of the Web, and also that I will be the guest editor. Whoa. I am excited like crazy and honored like sane. The yearly anthology is important as a roundup of what's happening in literature, and since I think that the most consistently innovative stuff is happening online, then naturally the Best of the Web is a leading point in these trends. I think BotW also used to be a key player in making online literature "legitimate," but that battle is over and won, as Matt Bell made clear in his introduction to the 2010 edition. There is cheering in the cloud. Here is the announcement in full:

Dzanc Books' Best of the Web series is a yearly anthology compiling the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction published in online literary journals. Previous editions have been guest-edited by Steve Almond, Lee K. Abbott, and Kathy Fish, and have published award-winning writers such as Chris Bachelder, Robert Olen Butler, Dan Chaon, Kim Chinquee, Elizabeth Crane, Brian Evenson, Amelia Gray, Stephen Graham Jones, Ander Monson, Christine Schutt, Terese Svoboda, and Kevin Wilson, as well as many of today's most exciting emerging fiction writers, poets, and essayists.

I'm happy to announce that this year's guest editor will be Adam Robinson, the founding editor of Publishing Genius, a small press based in Baltimore, and the author of two books of poetry, including Adam Robison and Other Poems.

What I try to do with my poetry is make it look like the soccer team wrote it

As so:

Saturday Giveaway: Toll and Downs

Because I'm excited about the front-back-front book coming out from A. Minetta Gould and Amber Nelson, I'm going to give away an extra copy of another back-front book from Chris Toll and Buck Downs. Chris Toll is one of my favorite poets. His side is called Be Light and features great poems like "Edward Hopper at the OK Corral." The poems in Recreational Vehicle, by Buck Downs, are shorter than other poems by Buck Downs that I read, but as funny and smart as the ones he sends out on postcards to people who ask him for them. Here's one of them:

myself contains multitudes

and some

of these fuckers

have got to go

Just like with the Nelson/Gould book from PG, both sides of the Toll/Downs book are the front. When you flip it over, you flip it to the front cover.

So, if you want to be considered for this book, put your favorite backfront word or phrase in the comments. Interpret as you wish between palindromes or whatever. I like "Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog," but "dog" would also be acceptable and so would "dickbutt" I guess. I'll decide on my favorite on Monday, Sept 13.

Amber Nelson book half book A Minetta Gould

I am working hard, nose down, reading a manuscript of poems by Amber Nelson called "Your Trouble is Ballooning." It is so good, so rewarding, to wrap myself in the blanket of these whatsits. What initially grabbed me, and still mainly grabs me about the poems, is the sounds. Sounds are only part of poetry, and usually not enough to hold my attention, but in this case they are more than enough to get me to the next thing that is in poetry.

The next thing there isn't meaning, but a basic sense of humor about what comes out of the sounds and a format.that prioritizes sound. I am a meaning-centric poet lately (starting in about 2006, I guess), so I'm surprised that Publishing Genius has taken on this manuscript (ie. that I accepted it). Surprised, but grateful because every time I start digging into the poems, I feel like I'm getting an education. This might be the addition to the house of me that I was looking for.

Here's a random line:

It costs bigger to smile on streets of the
city of outrage than without any garbage at all.

There are bigger samples from the collection at H_NGM_N, and a note from Amber about their form and composition.

These poems will be 1/2 of a split-side book, shared with A. Minetta Gould. The way the book came about was that I met Gould at a Hobart reading last may and she sent me some of her poems which I think it turns out I had already read in Caketrain. It was a chapbook and I was looking to do a split side chapbook like one I'd seen done by Chris Toll and Buck Downs, where both sides were the front cover. So Ashley sent me some other chapbook length manuscripts from her pals and I read them and went camping with my family last summer and while camping read Amber's and decided that was the one (because of all the sounds, like I said above).

So yeah. I just saw the cover art for this project, too -- it's by Kelly Packer. Things is coming together and I hope that when this book comes out, it will make a new sort of sense to readers like me.

Lumberball

Matt Jasper on ARAOP

A review of my book! It's over at Gently Read Literature, a great and thorough review site helmed by Daniel Casey, one of my favorite review sites actually because of its thoughtful and well-pointed reviews and its approach to small presses. Big thanks to Matt Jasper, who obviously put a lot lot lot of thought into Adam Robison, and even did some research about how many hands Brahms had.

Here's an excerpt from the review, which I don't mind admitting pretty much exactly outlines my intentions:

Throughout the mix of poems about philosophers and artists and relatively marginal figures and Robinson’s own family and friends, a trace of Robinson himself emerges, and the poems become almost a memoir of the things half-learned by a fallible, regular but interested dude.

It’s hard to say how good of a book ARAOP is, because there are so many mistakes in it. And maybe that’s what’s fun about the book—the reader is granted more authority than the author.

 Woo-hoo!!! Really. I mean, this review made me remember my book matters.

Everyday Genius from August to September

Luke Goebel has finished up a great month of Everyday Genius and handed the baton to Phuong Pham, who has a multimedia jamboree planned, including posts that feature art, literature, music, video, oddities, evensies, and more.

The whole thing seems so fun that I decided to take the reins again for October. I'm currently accepting submissions, with happy excitement. I think what I am looking for lately is surprise endings.

Good thinking.