007: In Your Blue Dream
Prologue
First, COMPILATION.
Bow Wow Kung Pao Chicken Baby Meow Meow (aka BWKPCBMM aka Kitty Baby aka Kitty aka Baby aka bb kitty) came back to Chicago with me. She was unwelcome on the farm. We're now in the "supervised time with the other cats with a spray bottle nearby" phase. Today, day one of that phase, has been very enlightening for all involved, but especially BWKPCBMM, who is attempting to assert herself in the colony by being an ornery turd. But we're making progress. Baby steps.
Rejection Day!!! (for context: this was another rejection for another book contest. as I often point out: publishing poetry sucks hard.)
Second, ON STRUCTURE AND DESIGN.
I have, to the surprise of no one who knows me, nicked most of the format of this newsletter from a combination of Kieron Gillen (long may he reign) and Warren Ellis (rest in piss (cw: emotional and sexual abuse)), two people who have had possibly undue influence in my writing. The biggest reason is Structure.
Storytelling, like most art forms, is one wherein the process can be tightly regimented or it can be completely freely slapped together, but most often it's both. But what I really like is when the structure is just visible below the surface. It's one of the things that draws me to free verse and other non-rhyming forms. In comics, though, you're bound to a certain level of convention: so many issues per arc (most often 4 or 5), so many pages (usually around 22), so many panels (from a two-page spread/splash down to 9 or 12 panels per page), and as much space as will fit in those panels for both words and pictures. There are writers who fuck around within the absolute limits of those boundaries--Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, for example, especially Chapter 5: Fearful Symmetry, wherein the issue is presented as an effective mirror image of itself--but these two really slammed out some good structuralist work. Gillen in works like Phonogram Vol. 2: The Singles Club, where he and Jamie McKelvie use each issue to tell the story of a single event from a different point of view, Ellis in Fell and Doktor Sleepless, using specific grid formats for the length of the series.*
In both these cases, the scaffolding becomes a part of the story. The reader can use the visual and/or conceptual framework to better understand the thrust of the narrative--Phonogram being about the subjectivity/objectivity of music and magic, Fell being a fairly rote police procedural (and Sleepless being about breaking from the confines of imposed order.) The form of the thing therefore becomes a part of the experience. In architecture, this is evident in works like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, who made the building materials themselves part of the aesthetic enjoyment of the buildings. In music, this is seen in things like 12-bar blues or choral voice leading. In poetry, my favorite example is blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter.
But here, in a ridiculous little newsletter that goes out to (currently) eleven people, I can take the basics of a structure, and "just" plug in whatever seems right for that section at that moment. And a huge part of the reason I like to do that is because it shows that writing is not necessarily something that only the well-practiced can do. Like Radiohead says, anyone can play guitar. Just learn some patterns, and then get as much as you can out of them for as long as you can. Then learn new patterns. Then combine the old with the new. Recombine. Repeat forever.
One day, Joseph Campbell might write a deeply flawed book about you.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo.In addition to the above Godzilla, I somehow found a first edition paperback copy of at Half-Price Books. There's a fair amount of Hugo in me. I always thought I "got" it, and then I actually went to the mountain west (Hugo was based in Missoula for most of his adult life) and it's just so much more depressing. It's hard to get that "ambivalence of the human experience" that Donald Hall cites as indicative of "good" poetry. Friends aside, I'm glad I don't have to go out there as often now. It's very beautiful, very lonely, and extremely sad.
- Gran Turismo Sport has been absorbing a lot of my free time of late. It's related a lot to my comment last week about getting back into cars, but it doesn't feed into the desire to buy cars like car YouTube does.
Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book,A Void and Cloudless Sky, which you can order here. The book itself is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com now, too! I assume they'll ship out ASAP, but I haven't seen any copies from my publishers, but whatever. Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on either/both of those sites and/or Goodreads. Let me know!
And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!
If you like what I do here and don't have the scratch or the inclination to do the above, please share this newsletter with you friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.
Finally, THE OUTRO.
Something a little different this time.
Hot Springs
by Richard Hugo
(from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir)
You arrived arthritic for the cure,
therapeutic qualities of water
and the therapeutic air. Twenty-five
years later you limp out of bars
hoping rumors will revive, some doctor
will discover something curative
in natural steam. You have a choice
of abandoned homes to sleep in.
Motels constructed on the come
went broke before the final board
was nailed. Operative still:
your tainted fantasy and the delux hotel.
You have ached taking your aches up the hill.
Another battery of tests. Terrible probe
of word and needle. Always the fatal word--
when we get old we crumble. They wave
from the ward and you creak back down
to streets with wide lots between homes.
When that rare tourist comes, you tell him
you're not forlorn. There are advantages here--
easy pace of day, slow circle of sun.
If some day a cure's announced, for instance
the hot springs work, you will walk young
again in Spokane, find startling women,
you wonder why you feel empty and frown
and why goodbyes are hard. You go out healthy
on the gray thin road and when you look back
no one is waving. They kept no record
of your suffering, wouldn't know you
if you returned, without your cane, your grin.
*I think it's important to note here that I do not, personally, recommend buying these Ellis books, unless it is secondhand. Maybe one day he can sort his personal bullshit out, but I'm currently not holding my breath. Fell, also, is co-created by Ben Templesmith, who is a turdnugget as well. I cannot in good conscience support these guys anymore, but the fact remains that they were influential on me, and, like many relatively famous men (and an absolute fuckton of geek culture creators) their influence was and is a complex subject. Hell, Mies and Wright were generally awful dudes, too. Why are men.
I wonder what happens to that much love
if it curdles. ~ Kieron Gillen, Phonogram
if it curdles. ~ Kieron Gillen, Phonogram
First, COMPILATION.
Bow Wow Kung Pao Chicken Baby Meow Meow (aka BWKPCBMM aka Kitty Baby aka Kitty aka Baby aka bb kitty) came back to Chicago with me. She was unwelcome on the farm. We're now in the "supervised time with the other cats with a spray bottle nearby" phase. Today, day one of that phase, has been very enlightening for all involved, but especially BWKPCBMM, who is attempting to assert herself in the colony by being an ornery turd. But we're making progress. Baby steps.
Rejection Day!!! (for context: this was another rejection for another book contest. as I often point out: publishing poetry sucks hard.)
Second, ON STRUCTURE AND DESIGN.
I have, to the surprise of no one who knows me, nicked most of the format of this newsletter from a combination of Kieron Gillen (long may he reign) and Warren Ellis (rest in piss (cw: emotional and sexual abuse)), two people who have had possibly undue influence in my writing. The biggest reason is Structure.
Storytelling, like most art forms, is one wherein the process can be tightly regimented or it can be completely freely slapped together, but most often it's both. But what I really like is when the structure is just visible below the surface. It's one of the things that draws me to free verse and other non-rhyming forms. In comics, though, you're bound to a certain level of convention: so many issues per arc (most often 4 or 5), so many pages (usually around 22), so many panels (from a two-page spread/splash down to 9 or 12 panels per page), and as much space as will fit in those panels for both words and pictures. There are writers who fuck around within the absolute limits of those boundaries--Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, for example, especially Chapter 5: Fearful Symmetry, wherein the issue is presented as an effective mirror image of itself--but these two really slammed out some good structuralist work. Gillen in works like Phonogram Vol. 2: The Singles Club, where he and Jamie McKelvie use each issue to tell the story of a single event from a different point of view, Ellis in Fell and Doktor Sleepless, using specific grid formats for the length of the series.*
In both these cases, the scaffolding becomes a part of the story. The reader can use the visual and/or conceptual framework to better understand the thrust of the narrative--Phonogram being about the subjectivity/objectivity of music and magic, Fell being a fairly rote police procedural (and Sleepless being about breaking from the confines of imposed order.) The form of the thing therefore becomes a part of the experience. In architecture, this is evident in works like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, who made the building materials themselves part of the aesthetic enjoyment of the buildings. In music, this is seen in things like 12-bar blues or choral voice leading. In poetry, my favorite example is blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter.
But here, in a ridiculous little newsletter that goes out to (currently) eleven people, I can take the basics of a structure, and "just" plug in whatever seems right for that section at that moment. And a huge part of the reason I like to do that is because it shows that writing is not necessarily something that only the well-practiced can do. Like Radiohead says, anyone can play guitar. Just learn some patterns, and then get as much as you can out of them for as long as you can. Then learn new patterns. Then combine the old with the new. Recombine. Repeat forever.
One day, Joseph Campbell might write a deeply flawed book about you.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo.In addition to the above Godzilla, I somehow found a first edition paperback copy of at Half-Price Books. There's a fair amount of Hugo in me. I always thought I "got" it, and then I actually went to the mountain west (Hugo was based in Missoula for most of his adult life) and it's just so much more depressing. It's hard to get that "ambivalence of the human experience" that Donald Hall cites as indicative of "good" poetry. Friends aside, I'm glad I don't have to go out there as often now. It's very beautiful, very lonely, and extremely sad.
- Gran Turismo Sport has been absorbing a lot of my free time of late. It's related a lot to my comment last week about getting back into cars, but it doesn't feed into the desire to buy cars like car YouTube does.
Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book,A Void and Cloudless Sky, which you can order here. The book itself is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com now, too! I assume they'll ship out ASAP, but I haven't seen any copies from my publishers, but whatever. Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on either/both of those sites and/or Goodreads. Let me know!
And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!
If you like what I do here and don't have the scratch or the inclination to do the above, please share this newsletter with you friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.
Finally, THE OUTRO.
Something a little different this time.
Hot Springs
by Richard Hugo
(from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir)
You arrived arthritic for the cure,
therapeutic qualities of water
and the therapeutic air. Twenty-five
years later you limp out of bars
hoping rumors will revive, some doctor
will discover something curative
in natural steam. You have a choice
of abandoned homes to sleep in.
Motels constructed on the come
went broke before the final board
was nailed. Operative still:
your tainted fantasy and the delux hotel.
You have ached taking your aches up the hill.
Another battery of tests. Terrible probe
of word and needle. Always the fatal word--
when we get old we crumble. They wave
from the ward and you creak back down
to streets with wide lots between homes.
When that rare tourist comes, you tell him
you're not forlorn. There are advantages here--
easy pace of day, slow circle of sun.
If some day a cure's announced, for instance
the hot springs work, you will walk young
again in Spokane, find startling women,
you wonder why you feel empty and frown
and why goodbyes are hard. You go out healthy
on the gray thin road and when you look back
no one is waving. They kept no record
of your suffering, wouldn't know you
if you returned, without your cane, your grin.
*I think it's important to note here that I do not, personally, recommend buying these Ellis books, unless it is secondhand. Maybe one day he can sort his personal bullshit out, but I'm currently not holding my breath. Fell, also, is co-created by Ben Templesmith, who is a turdnugget as well. I cannot in good conscience support these guys anymore, but the fact remains that they were influential on me, and, like many relatively famous men (and an absolute fuckton of geek culture creators) their influence was and is a complex subject. Hell, Mies and Wright were generally awful dudes, too. Why are men.
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