So a couple of guys named Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter have created a new poetry Journal called Issue 1. It's nearly 4000 pages long and is available in PDF form here. It's been creating quite a stir among certain poetry circles lately, mostly because a quick survey of the contributors shows it to be possibly the most significant collection of poets ever assembled. With work ranging from the likes of William Shakespeare, my own 13th Great Grandfather Geof Chaucer, to Contemporary figures like Ron Silliman and Susan Howe, to less widely known but still enormously talented poets like Anny Ballardini, Amy King, and, um, yours truly.
Now, of course, none of us actually wrote any of the pieces attributed to us in the book, but frankly i kind of wish I had written my three contributions. "A Cat of Countries" (page 1248):
A cat of countries
The sympathy of darkness
Singleness
Beardless and eternal
A room of countries
Of progress
Reluctance and fun
Firing beside a cat
Like a considerable sweeping
Feeling love
"Whole as a passage" (page 2646):
Whole as a passage
Into a swept whisper a fascinating trader
arrived
The passages mumbled
Those were whole
A rapid rib, cheap rib,
useful rib of an impossible thieving
Was he impenetrable?
Let her stare
Should he have been silent?
From his difficult arm he hungered for
one, having, from his throat demoralization
waiting
That was the creek’s wilderness
Sorrow, you were
not there, making like a head
Fascinating and enthralling
He would sooner
be different,
Big and little
”I save brass,” he whispered
He was lived by a
mutter
He was thinking of the ghastly lives
of bailiffs, knocking silently beside reckless conceptions
Now the thievings filled in the breeze
And my favorite, and the one that sounds the most like me, "Changing news like intelligence" (page 3573):
Changing News Like Intelligence
To burn descending on an art
A person
His anodyne news
Beginning beside a tree
More minor than a beggar
Now, of course there are some people who think this is lame. Others who take issue, like Silliman who made some vague mention of legal action in his blog about it.
To such people, I say chill out. It's a nice piece of something. There's no damage to your reputation taking place here. Clearly the list of authors was gleaned in someway from Buffalo poetics/the kinds of magazines folks like us get printed in. And frankly, taking Rita Dove at one end, and myself at the other, of a spectrum of fame, none of us are all that well known to the point that anybody outside our little poetry world will care about this one way or another. Take it as a compliment and relax. This thing is the best piece of flarf I've ever come across and frankly, like Anny Ballardini said on the Buffalo list today, I wish I'd had the idea.