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Hail Something Or Other !!

Though I am not generally a fan of Black/Death Metal...
Boy O Boy, do I love their logos !!!
This is a tiny smidgen of what exists!
And it all couldn't have been possible without Tolkiens' Mordor.

Thanks To You, Dead Sara

Back in 1988-90, I was on staff at Scrivener, the lit mag of McGill University.
I was one of three poetry editors my first year there and had to
endure not only the vast and incomprehensible slush pile of submissions
but also the attitudes towards poetry revealed by my peers.
One would throw out a submission because it rhymed, another because it didn't.
If only I had the foresight to not take seriously the pompous posturings of my fellow 19 year old fuckwads.
I stopped writing after the experience. Stopped self-identifying as a 'writer'. Oh Well. Here I am...

One poet who was routinely rejected and whom I tried to champion...but to no avail...signed their work Dead Sara.
The poems were handwritten (what a point of contention for the rest of the staff!)
often employing crude drawings and letters made up into math formulas.
I corresponded with this poet who thanked me...
perhaps the only sympathetic voice he encountered.
Luckily I keep every letter ever sent to me...and perhaps I'll share some of those poems one day.
I credit Dead Sara AKA Cameron Conklin of Amarillo, Texas for keeping my mind about poetry open.

BONEFLOWER

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies

I think this is sad and funny.
If I understood more about everything I would find it sadder and funnier.

Thing Makers

Once again I was in a space crowded with beauty.
Expozine, a large small press fair that I help put together, teemed with life.
There is no shortage of objects made and unique.
I still fool myself thinking that 15 years ago...
there was no such thing as a glut of indy product.
Of course there was...I was never in the same room with all of it.
Now I help invoke the glut.
Come! Bring your beautiful books!

Let us say that I wish to collect all things of this or that nature...
and I choose as my focus some obscure corner of cultural creation.
Impossible task! Too much in every direction!
One makes Two makes Four makes Eight Forever.
The poets aren't dead.

What I once held to be a rare artifact is more like 30 bucks a dozen...
Imagine the archive of every city, vast stacks of creation.

I told someone yesterday that I remember the city unstreaked with ink,
Walls empty of graf and stickers and zines...is there any going back ?
Does one rise above the din ? Listen to my album.
Come to my show. Read my book. Buy my print.
Link to my site. Have a sticker, a flyer, a tape, a button.
Do it before time stops the line we made of it and loops the loop into seasons again.

The intersection between abstract/experimental comics
and the various branches of concrete/asemic/visual poetics
has, via the recommendations of my colleagues, brought me to the work of :

Alvaro de Sa

Andrew Topel

Reed Altemus


Fun!