Poetry Collections
2010 (rev. 2019)
I usually write my poems one at a time, each one separate from other poems (with its own imagery, sensibility, voice, theme, etc.) and without it being linked to the poems I write before or after it—except, like I said, for a certain (ineffable) artistic development I think I detect. Hereafter Landscapes, my second collection of poetry, is different. In 2008, I got depressed, and not just because George Bush was president. Post-Trump, we forget just how bad George Bush was. I got even more depressed because I thought (and think) the changing climate, and other factors meant that—to put it dramatically—the world as we know it would soon be over. The resulting poems—unified in their fragmentation—are a scattered depiction of a post-apocalyptic landscape. The book is illustrated, thanks to Brett Rutherford, the publisher of both books of poetry. Brett used John Martin’s art to illustrate the poems. It was his idea to do this—and he chose the particular illustrations: a wonderful idea.
1999 (rev. 2001)
The Lust for Blueprints was my first collection of poetry; and it contains nearly all the poems I’d published in little magazines by the time it was published. I arranged them in reverse chronological order because I think the poems exhibit some sort of artistic development. (Don’t press me on this, though.) Included in the collection is an aesthetics essay.
Published Poems with Links
1999
So this might sound kind of cold. When I heard about who this guy was, I thought: Oh wow, I can actually write a narrative poem about this — I can pull it off.
By the way, this poem was accepted by that short-lived magazine edited by Gorden Lish: The Quarterly. It was never published there because the magazine then promptly folded. (That’s happened to me twice. My short story, Sirens, was accepted by The Styles, and then that magazine promptly folded too.) Literary magazines, even before they started going extinct, were frail creatures, ones easily killed off.
I republished the poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
1994
This is a companion piece to “Making Dew.” I wrote one right after the other deliberately. Adopting in one case an atheistic viewpoint and in the other a religious viewpoint. Both slightly addled. Because people who think the rest of us need to change are usually slightly addled. Even if they’re right.
The poem was republished in my collection The Lust for Blueprints, in 2001.
1991
Dramatic poetry masquerading as confessional poetry. It’s a bit dangerous — the genre I mean. Because you get blamed for all sorts of things. One magazine rejected the poem tersely: Try a Feminist magazine, they told me. But (so I thought) the poem doesn’t express any political views whatsoever. It’s a complex expression of a particular person’s rage (and her other emotions as well). And besides, I’m male. And besides, if someone does try to read the poem politically, it doesn’t come across as Feminist, on the contrary. It comes across as anti-Feminist. (If it comes across either one way or the other, I mean.) Which some other people objected to, by the way: that I was presenting a character who was at best ambivalent about having an abortion. Not my attitude, not anyone else’s attitude either: a character in a narrative. That certainly isn’t making a political statement (about abortion or about anything else, for that matter).
So one wonders, of course, are poems read carefully? Or do people just respond to the emotion getting all heated up themselves, expressing all sorts of things they feel, most of them irrelevant to the poem they’ve read?
Annoying as it is to admit this, I have to: this is one of my favorite poems. For an odd reason, I think: Because I rarely get to say what I think in a poem. to make a poem work: to make the imagery I’ve generated fit well with a narrative and a sensibility usually means that what I think (and feel) gets left behind. But not in this poem.
Another thing that I get a kick out of is that the poem has a rather intricate “subtext” — as a pattern of images that tie together below the surface (as it were) used to be called. And it’s a subtext that I didn’t put there deliberately but discovered was there after I’d written the poem. That’s a nice experience. Because there’s an illusion generated that you’re not all on your own, that you don’t have to do this all by yourself — that something invisible is actually helping you along. When you write. It’s a nice illusion; it makes the act of writing feel a little less lonely.
I reprinted the poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
1989
Back in the 1990s there were still bookstores. (And telephones were as sedentary as barnacles — can you imagine what a strange world it was back in the 1990s?)
Anyway, way back then, I put this poem on a card. A business card. With a design on one side and the poem on the other. A print-run of about a 1000. So it would be relatively unique. A collector’s item. And I’d put them in books. In bookstores. Something extra a person would find. If they read the book they had bought.
I really was thinking: collector’s item. Like a baseball card. Or, more grandly, like art. I numbered all the cards. (For no particular reason except that now each one stood out.) And there was a postbox address on them. As well as my name. Also for no particular reason.
It was an odd thing to do. Put little business card poems in books. I was probably depressed. Or suicidal. Bad things were happening back then. To me in particular. But instead of offing myself, I did this instead. (Weird hobbies, they can totally save your life.)
Anyway, I probably deposited about 40,000 or so of these limited edition poems on cards by the time I stopped doing this. (Because bookstores, for the most part, had gone extinct. And I couldn’t think of anywhere else that I could stash poemcards. Safely, I mean.)
I got letters. (That’s right, there were letters in those days too. Along with those strange sedentary phones. And bookstores.) Which made it all kind of fun. For example, I got this letter: “Hello, I’m not sure if you are going to receive this letter but I thought it would be worth a shot. While I was in the city last year, a homeless man handed me a card with a poem called The Vampire’s Gift on the back. This poem moved me and I now carry it in my wallet.”
Perhaps I should point out that I was not that homeless man. Really. It was totally someone else.
Some people would send me stuff of their own, some people would send me the card they had found, telling me where they had found it (in what book — by title — in what store — sometimes in what country). Sometimes a reaction to the poem too. They were mostly found in NYC (which makes sense since that was the only place that I put cards in books), but people told me they also found the cards in books in libraries in South America, on books found on beaches in California, and even in shrink-wrapped books found in Baltimore bookstores.
(Someone wrote me asking how I got this poem inside of a new shrink-wrapped book on Dracula found in a Baltimore bookstore.)
It was fun: getting these letters. I miss getting letters like this. Email isn’t the same, it really isn’t.
Anyway, this is perhaps one of my most popular poems. (At least based on the feedback I got back about it.) One person — I learned later — carried it around in her wallet for years; another one put it on her office wall. Someone else made a short movie about it. Really.
I republished this poem in my collection “The Lust for Blueprints.”