A couple of days ago, Joseph Legaspi came to campus, did a reading, sat in on a class, led a discussion of his work – it was an awesome day. It was one of these days where you realize that your students are smarter than you are, people are actually moved by poetry, and they’re starved to engaged one another.  It made me happy. It spilled into class the next day.

To my teaching friends, here’s a tip: teach Joseph’s book Imago.  It’ll get your students feeling and discussing.  Here it is:

Had a stroke of luck last week. The weather has been occasionally amazing in Brooklyn recently (especially today, which works out nicely as I’m going to my first Mets game of the year – first trip to Citi Field, which I’m approaching with trepidation). Walking home from the park last Saturday, Ginny, Nina and I popped briefly into the excellent, new comics shop Bergen Street Comics. It’s an understated bookstore-feeling place that sells lots of indies and minis, but is not too pretentious as to not to offer lots of single issues of Marvel and DC titles (although, I won’t pretend that I have any street cred and act like I buy super hero comics or appreciate reprints of late seventies Jack Kirby stuff work or get excited about the work of John Severin, etc.) Anyway, we met a guy in there who happened to be from Georgia, and had lived down in Athens and drew comics – so we had a lot to talk about.  His name is Joshua Ray Stephens and he was there dropping off his excellent self-published graphic novel The Moth or the Flame. I’m writing this to spread the word – this book is funny; it’s difficult; it feels good in your hands; it looks like some other comics; it reads like no other comic; you should buy it and read it if you feel like reading a book that is challenging the medium (without shattering the existing paradigms).

Stephens’s book is funny, presented with a polite introduction and the suggestion of a light, Noel Coward-esque parlor comedy.  Of course, once the teacup-headed Tempest, debonair playboy and huntsman, slays a mythical beast who begs for mercy, we see that this book is something much more desperate.  It is largely a love story; one the portrays the consumption of passion between two people and the inevitable violence and tragedy contained within this bind.  The characters frolic and resist each other and Stephens’s library of symbols that appear boldly throughout the panels of this book.  This book requires several reads, and there will still be questions, but the experience is well worth it.

About a month ago, Geoffrey Gatza from BlazeVOX Books contacted me to let me know that he had accepted my book The Complete Collection of people, places & things for publication. I was very excited, but I waited a while to post this until the process was well underway. Now, the innards are all laid out, the art work is rescanned and cleaned up, and I’m currently drawing a cover. It’s an image-text novel, several sections of which have been previously published (some on the internet).  It should be available this summer.

There are so many BlazeVOX books and writers that I admire, so I’m really honored to be a part of what they’re doing. Geoffrey really seems to get what independent publishing and what literature should be about.  He creates books that respect the authors’ intentions and that are easily available to readers (and will remain so as long as he can make that happen – and perhaps beyond).

I’ve got some plans for the book, included some handmade gifts for those who pre-order.  But more on that later.

I’ll let The Crash Helmet do the talking for now:

Abstract comics are a practice of comic creation that I haven’t paid enough focused attention to, in my reading and in my own drawing.  While I admire artists like Gary Panter and Richard McGuire’s (and basically everybody short of Alex Ross) ability to use abstraction in their comics, there remains a core of narrative in most of their work.  Recently, through the ideas of people like Andrei Molotiou and Tim Gaze, I’ve been exploring some truly abstracted comics, and it’s been a real revelation to me.

a panel by Ibn al Rabin

Molotiu has edited an anthology due out from Fantagraphics, titled simply Abstract Comics, which should be an amazing book to look at.  He’s recently re-launched his blog (with the same title), and there is some pretty amazing stuff up there, presentation and links to works, discussions of the work, and even exercises to use in the classroom or at the drawing table.

page by Geoff Grogan

The next issue of Action,Yes will have a good deal of abstract comics work featured in it, including contribution from both Gaze and Molotiu. (Tim Gaze has already sent us his survey of abstract comics, and it’s pretty amazing; I think it will open a lot of eyes to the possibilities of this medium that some of use spend every day wrangling with and sweating over and crying about and wondering what we can do with it next.)

No term says ‘arbitrary’ like ‘novella’ does.  Nevertheless, John Madera did a useful thing by asking more than sixty writers and editors to list their ten favorite novellas, and, most interestingly, explain their decisions. John has written a really compelling blog post about his thoughts on little long works after reading through these lists. He’s also posted all the lists.

Here’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. After reading some of the other lists there are several more fundamentally moving novellas that I forgot about, but it’s safe to say that all 10 of these affect me in profound ways. I’m not sure if it’s due to John’s sample, but I found it interesting what a small presence comics have on these lists. I don’t know if it involves  the labor of creation that goes into comics, but it’s a form that really seems to hit its stride most often at the novella length.

And here’s a discussion of the lists over on HTML Giant.

My old friend Danielle Sellers just launched a brand new online poetry journal, The Country Dog Review. It includes one of my “poems.”  I think it’s the first thing I’ve ever published that the editor has called a “poem.” Which is very kind of her.

When we lived in Baltimore, Danielle had a sweet pad in Saint Paul’s Court, which is like the Melrose Place of Baltimore, which you can imagine it pretty amazing – young wannabe Hollywood starlets living in Baltimore. Danielle was not one of them.  She was always a damn good poet.

She then moved downtown (or maybe she lived downtown first and then moved into the Court), closer to Baltimore’s well manicured Inner Harbor. And she had a big party. My friend Angshuman brought my friend from high school Jim (who was visiting from New York) to Danielle’s party, and they must have had a really good time, as they had neither the wherewithal nor money to get a cab home.  So they walked the two or so miles through central Baltimore back to my apartment at four in the morning arguing the validity of Dennis Quaid’s acting career versus that of his funnier but far less handsome brother Randy.  Angshuman was scandalized that anyone could suggest that Randy was the more accomplished Quaid brother. I have no opinion on this matter, and I suspect that Danielle Sellers does not either.

And now Danielle’s living in South Carolina with a beautiful baby and a poetry journal that’s set to blow up (despite my inclusion in its first issue).

Oh, and Rockbottom Dan Groves, the Pope of Prawvidence, has some bang-up verse in this issue too.

Davis Scheiderman was good enough to send me a copy of his and collaborator Don Meyer’s CD, Memorials to Future Catastrophes.  This is sound-work to create to.  Davis’s words are distracting me as I write this.  I’ve been drawing to it all week.  I’ve just started yet another collaboration, and I’m ready to draw some really ruined drawings for this one, but I needed new stimuli to do that in a new way. What better than a series of sound collages that describe a series of catastrophes yet to come? Work that honors a tragic foregone conclusion? Davis’s poems are narratives, and Meyer’s music is rhythmic and suggests goofiness, makes you just comfortable enough to get slapped by the world they’re describing – sometimes by the words, sometimes by the sounds.

It works nicely with the comics I’m drawing too, they are a series of long-story atrocities, that I’m referring to as “The Origins of the Genius Child Orchestra.”

You can listen to most of the collaboration here.

You can buy it here.

And keep an eye for these two on Apostrophe Cast later this year.  We’re going to feature their further collaborations.

let’s go mets

(At least they’re not scheduled to play Florida on the last day of the season.)

We hosted these three poets at Nassau on Monday and it was a terrific experience, especially for my students.  Laura and Dolores presented their work in Spanish, while Jen presented her translations (which I’m glad she described plainly and without apologies as “a political act” – it addressed some of the ideas I have been discussing with my students). I hope we can find ways to have more fully multi-lingual events on campus, and in the English department.  The work is difficult, from a language perspective, particularly Laura’s – which is not something my students are always quick to work with and integrate patiently – but, because of the feeling behind the presentation, I found that my students were quite affected by it.  They launched right into a discussion about what they had seen when I walked into class on Wednesday. They wanted to know where the pain was coming from in the work.  It was exciting to see them embracing pain, wanting to explore it and not back away.

It was enlightening to hear Dolores discuss living in Juarez, Mexico. When my colleague asked her how she felt about Juarez, she said it was wonderful, that she loves it, without hesitation.  There is a great deal of life apart from the well-publicized violence. She rides her bike around town, which may be dangerous, but that danger is something she feels she can’t be cognizant of if she wishes to live and get things done in her city.  It was particularly interesting to hear about Dolores’s work with the Border Crossing Project (which I believe is the name of the organization). She offers autobiography classes for women, women who are largely marginalized and have never been given a forum for their voice. Dolores sees Mexico’s history as half-missing; it’s record is one that has not been created by women.  She is hoping to begin to fill this gap with her work with these women, and to create a record in a way appropriate to them, not in the image of the previous historical model.

Jen was also kind enough to give me a little handmade book, Tangelo, featuring one of her collaborations with Patrick Durgin. It’s made from repurposed office paper from a former nuclear testing facility in New Mexico. Their notes on collaboration at the end are particularly useful. They ask the necessary question, “Is all writing collaboration?” Answering ‘yes’ to this question requires that we, as creators, ask whose “blood is in us,” whose lives and work are creating ours.

Shanthi sold me a great rocking chair when we were both living in Baltimore. That rocking chair was ruined with water damage before I ever got to experience it (in my own home). I blame that on Josh Parkinson.

Now go to Apostrophe Cast and listen to her excellent reading. Shanthi is one of the truly good ones and we should all be giving her respect.