Hello! It’s been a while, so you may not quite remember why you’re getting this newsletter. I’m Robert van Vliet. I’m a poet and at some point you subscribed to receive notifications of my activities, hijinx, and the occasional tall tale.

I haven’t had much news this year, so that’s why you haven’t heard from me since early April.

Well, I have some news now, so let’s get right to it, shall we?

1. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back…

In August, I returned to the classroom as a high school English teacher for the first time in nearly a quarter century. I’m teaching at my old high school, where I taught and tutored and subbed back in the early aughts; many of my old teachers were still there, so it was just a little like Welcome Back, Kotter. (This time round, however, while there are perhaps a dozen teachers still there from my previous stint, no teachers remain who would have known me as a student.)

It is consuming work and as a result, my writing life has been thoroughly eclipsed. The most I’ve been doing is collating old work into manuscripts. I have a lot of old work lying around. (But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

2. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Back in September, I participated in the venerable “12 or 20 Questions” series. I probably should have sent something about this interview that was published back in September, but I simply forgot.

12 or 20 (second series) Questions with Robert van Vliet.

It’s been running since 2009, in which authors are presented with roughly the same set of questions. It is the second iteration following an earlier, more limited run (with slightly different questions). Hence the name. This accumulation makes for quite a fascinating record.

3. inventions

But the big news right now is that my next book, inventions, is coming out tomorrow, Monday, January 12th. It’s another chapbook from above/ground press. This one is a collection of prose poems composed in the late 90s and early aughts. Each prose poem is accompanied by a short poem or fragment, making the whole thing look vaguely like a haibun and also a half-hearted attempt to resemble William Carlos Williams’ early book, Kora in Hell, in which he paired prose passages with “reaction” pieces (sometimes poems, usually not).

I received my author copies yesterday morning, so I will soon be able to start taking orders from anyone who wishes to buy a (signed) copy from me.

But first! I need to see if anything has changed in postal rates. I sent a handful of copies of my previous chapbook to Canada, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. I have no idea if that’s viable anymore. Shipping within the US is probably still mostly fine, but I have a head cold at the moment, so I don’t have the wherewithal to dig into any of that research. (Hell, it took me about ten minutes just now to figure out how to spell “wherewithal”…)

There will follow (by next weekend) another brief missive from me with details on how to snag a copy of the book.

Until then, and always, be kind.