037: Above the Bridge

AN EMAIL LIKE A PLAY (IT HAS SEVERAL PARTS)

First, Tha NEWS.
This email is largely adapted from my most recent Patreon blog post.

Been a while. As you might imagine, things have been busy, and so I've been away. A small sample of things that have been going on: my sister got married; my kid had their first college campus tour; my partner was screened for, diagnosed with, and just received surgery for, thyroid cancer; I started work on the new season of the podcast. That penultimate thing is actually what is most recent, as I'm currently in her apartment writing this.

In more writerly stuff, one might even say "work-related" news, I've spent the last several weeks going back and forth with the editorial team of Poetry Magazine, who have been kind enough to set some pieces of THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT in the December issue of the mag. There's a quote long attributed to Oscar Wilde: "I spent all morning taking out a comma and all afternoon putting it back." That's sort of the stage we're at here--they asked me about some capitalizations, whether a cited statistic was factual, about whether or not the way they were dividing the sections was acceptable. Individually, these decisions took maybe an hour on either side of the conversation, but the email thread is now going on two weeks old. It's very slow-going work even after it's already been "done" and is into the production phase. This is why I thank all of you so profusely for being patient with my output. It's not that I'm not working, it's that it's fucking hard.

Second, INTERMISSION.

This field is the beginning of my native land,
This place of skull where I hear myself weeping.
~ James Wright

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Watching a lot of movies and TV I haven't had a chance to watch: Birds of Prey, The Suicide Squad (that's the second one), Peacemaker. I haven't hardly watched any of the DC Comics movies, so, catching up I guess. At least it's largely the good stuff that hasn't had all the color sucked out of it by Zack Snyder's ego.
- Our Flag Means Death. I get it now.
- Season two of Loki. I'm still royally pissed off at both Jonathan Majors and Marvel's handling of the situation. The show itself has been okay.
- Still reading Jerusalem. Roughly 2/3 of the way through the first volume.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
First and foremost is my most recent book, confessions from a drainage ditch, which was released on Sept 1st through Amazon, and is available in ebook and paperback formats. If you haven't picked it up, it's a great introduction to my more concrete and mainstream work.

If you're looking for something weirder, you can check out A Void and Cloudless Sky, a chapbook, which is also available from Amazon, as well as most other retailers. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here.

If you're liking this whole project, from the newsletter to the book writing to whatever else I do, and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. There are lots of little benefits you can get there, from access to a subscriber-only Discord to poems written to your specifications to subscriber-only limited-edition chapbooks.

Fifth, THE OUTRO.
It occurred to me also that maybe I'm not the sort of poet people expect. I mean, I'm absolutely unemployed (and arguably unemployable), and poor as hell, and maybe a little too much in love with life and people, but I don't have that sort of madness. I only know a few types of formal poems and those are the sort you'd read and write in middle school. Few of my few poetry books have notes in them, let alone bookmarks. As Moore put it in Jerusalem, "[Perrit] wasn't sure that he was any sort of poet in the current sense, that was the secret dread." Being a published poet maybe isn't all it's cracked up to be. And so, maybe we crack up a little. I'd certainly like to have to borrow money from people less often.

In any case, this is all to say that I still have a large amount of work to do, and all I need to do is Do It. But also, the world is right here, begging or demanding to be seen and addressed. Given the limitations of one body and spacetime and the human experience of both, though, I can only but do one thing at a time. I'm told the inability to effectively switch tasks is a symptom of ADHD, but I wonder if it's more the fear of looking down through the grate and seeing the abyss and its terrible infinity of possibilities. It's not just poems down there. It's river stones and the corpses of loved ones and pulverized stone from hundreds of miles away. It's blue mica paint and motor oil. It's podcast guests accidentally hitting too close to a nerve and grief. It's the hands and the head being disconnected and autonomous.

So you see, all this time I haven't been writing in the past, because I've been writing in the present.

BONUS: Sixth, POSTSCRIPT.
I actually put this together a couple days ago, but my "remote rig" I was using was my Samsung tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard and these worked great for the actual writing portion, but the mobile version of Chrome I was using didn't seem to want to probably parse the TinyLetter editing UI, so none of my links were linking. But now they are, since I'm back home on the desktop, so now you're getting it. I guess that's one failure point of the ultra-lightweight writing rig. Ah well, live and learn.