Three Things #6
Hello, it’s that time again: I seem to have a newsletter, and you seem to be subscribed to it.
Here, once again, are three things.
One
A poem of mine has just appeared as part of Dusie’s long-running Tuesday Poem series. It’s called “Leaving the Story Unfinished,” and it’s something of an “outtake” from the series that produced the poems of This Folded Path and the forthcoming Vessels.
From April 2020 to June 2021, I had a (near) daily habit of writing a poem employing a variety of chance operations. Using dice, coins, or an online random number generator (and sometimes all three), I would choose at random: five words from a very long list and a sentence (or line or fragment) from a book. Then I set a timer for ten minutes and tried to combine the words and the sentence into a ten-line something-or-other which, for the sake of argument, we might call a “poem.”
Aside from the final crop of nearly a hundred poems that would eventually comprise This Folded Path and Vessels, there were many more false starts and dead-ends along the way. I recently revisited the folder of scraps and rejects — and discovered, to my surprise, that some of the scraps from one of the dead-end sequences were much more interesting than I had originally thought. After a little editing, it became “Leaving the Story Unfinished.”
If I’d realized this poem was hiding among the dross, I would have seriously considered setting it as the opening poem for the whole thing. It certainly sets the tone, and emphasizes the monologues and dialogues already implicit in many of the poems. Oh well. Maybe if there’s a second edition?
In the meantime, think of it as a sort of non-album single.
Two
There are a few copies of This Folded Path left for those of you still pondering whether to buy a copy or simply put seven dollars in the sink and set it on fire. I get it, it’s a tough call.
Visit this Very Secret Page for details on how to acquire a (signed!) copy. Once I’ve run out, you can still buy one from the publisher, above/ground press.
(I’m also reserving some copies exclusively for local, in-person events — whenever I finally manage to schedule things like that.)
Three
And lastly, during this “Year Without a Winter,” here are some articles on local Minnesota history:
- St. Paul’s “Biblical” Flood: The Story of Highland Creek
- How a Lawyer, a Businessman, and the Mafia Destroyed Public Transit in the Twin Cities
Until next time!