Some above/ground author activity…

Now playing:

Last, next.

96: Nat’l Parks (Yellowstone)
97: Autumn Trilogy (Scarlet Oak)

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.

Last, next.

95: Great Lakes (Huron)
96: Nat’l Parks (Yellowstone)

Fool. The reason why the seven stars
       are no more than seven is a pretty reason.
Lear. Because they are not eight?
Fool. Yes indeed. Thou wouldst make a good fool.

• Norman O Brown, Life Against Death (Wesleyan 1959)
• Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage 1986)
• Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations (Copper Canyon 2023)

• Andrew J Angyal, Loren Eiseley (Twayne Publishers 1983)
• Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (Bantam 1980) (reread)
• Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (Penguin 2006) (reread)

Last, next.

94: Kraft Plus (Wednesday Red)
95: Great Lakes (Huron)

Now playing:

Another bookmark just resurfaced, this time from Blue Whale in Charlottesville, where I spent some time in the summer of 2000.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

Last, next.

93: Signs of Spring (Ghost Flower)
94: Kraft Plus (Wednesday Red)

• Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment (Harper Perennial 1994)
• Adriaen van der Donck (trns Diederik Willem Goedhuys), A Description of New Netherland (University of Nebraska Press 1655, 2008)
• Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry (Norton 2018)
• Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006)
• Claire Wahmanholm, Meltwater (Milkweed 2023)
• rob mclennan, the book of smaller (University of Calgary 2022)

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What? A newsletter? Does the world really need another one of these?

Don’t worry! Mine is obscure, sporadic, and utterly vacuous! You will never feel any pressure to learn anything, be challenged in your beliefs, or even entertained. So go ahead! Subscribe here: “Three Things”

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Oh look, that’s me reading some poems at the above/ground press 2023 AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) reading.

Twenty Years

On March 3rd, 2003, this quote by Walter Ong was my first post on a long-dead Textpattern blog I installed at a long-gone domain:

The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.

There were some lost years and there were some silent years, but I’ve always tried to have some sort of blog percolating quietly, like a sad little aquarium in the corner. Even if the fish died from time to time, there were at least a few snails working their methodical way along the glass, and a patient deep-sea diver gazing out impassively from behind its mossy visor, awaiting, like all of us, for a renaissance of wonder.

I have at times heard people, perhaps in an attempt to be clever, point out that the TV show M∗A∗S∗H ran for 11 years when the entire Korean War only lasted three.

Sure, okay.

But all 256 episodes, back to back, only run about 110 hours, whereas the war lasted 27,072 hours.

Now Playing:

Oh look, it’s Bandcamp Friday again.

• Matthew Gabrielle & David M Perry, The Bright Ages (Harper Perennial 2021)

Happy 50th to Gravity’s Rainbow.