Poetry kicks ass, but it kicks mine, too.

Mark Halliday on Mary Ruefle's "Perfect Reader," from his essay, "The Arrogance of Poetry," from The Georgia Review (but I don't know which issue):

"The satisfactions of imagining a lover's embrace, imagining 'fucked-up beauty' in a tree, imagining a man who describes a flower in comically abstract language: such satisfactions may put a swing in one's stride but cannot become the same as having a lover. The summer of imagining will subside into the winter of isolation, and the speaker will return to awareness of her own lack of a spiritual home.

[. . .]

"The poem turned out to be good, so I'm not ungrateful; indeed, my life is enriched by the poem--but now where am I? I'm on the first page of Post Meridian, a book containing more than seventy poems; and one of the many other books around my desk is Ruefle's more recent Among the Musk Ox People. How much can I respond to? What will become of me? When can I have lunch?

"Standing at the beginning of a book, "Perfect Reader" seems a warning: It is beautiful to try to be a perfect reader of poems. And you are fated to try. But your imaginative efforts will be tiring and endless, and they could bring you to a condition of overexposed vulnerability, with newspapers as your only blankets."

Every Christmas, I recieve at least five books of poetry. Every semester, I buy at least five books of poetry for class. I fully intend to read all of them. But there's no way I can adequately expose myself to the inherent meaning of all of those poems.

A poem is so short and yet demands so much scrutiny in order to be properly understood and enjoyed, that each good poem--and I stumble into so many worthwhile, if not necessarily good poems--requires at least an hour to itself. I can't do it. There is no human way to be an adequate reader of poetry.

And yet I try. And I live for the trying.

So There's This Book of Poems I've Written, and They're Mostly For or About You

So I'd like you to have it.

Thus began my big serious high school dating relationship.

I'm gonna have some poems for sale next week. If you're in Muncie, you should drop by and try to get one of the 16 broadsides I'll have for sale as part of the Manifesto Mart, which consists of the sale of handmade projects from Dr. Rai Peterson's ENG 347/Manifesto Poets class.

Mine are not about girls, explicitly. They're collectively referred to as the Type series, and deal with the intersection, interplay, and interference between notions of text-as-visual and text-as-content.

Sound pretentious? When I put it like that, it is. But it's also about best friends, zombies, anthropodermic bibliopegy, sexualized architecture, the way birds don't get out of the way of your car until the last possible second, reanimated Roman emperors, booze, Chicago, Noblesville, fireflies from Thailand, and--yeah, okay, you're right--girls.

Looking at it now, that's a lot of things for four poems to be about. I mean, seriously. I read a lot of current surrealism, and maybe that's why. Dean Young, Tony Hoagland, Gabriel Gudding, and David Berman have all changed/are in the process of changing my life. So expect that kind of thing.

The series, as it stands right now, includes the poems "Ligature," "Futura Medium," "Times New Roman," and "A Colphon."

It's possible that something else will be swapped with "Times New Roman," because I really hate that typeface. (I hate Georgia, what this blog is set in, but it is, sadly, about the best option Blogger provides.)

Four beautiful, screenprinted broadsides of each poem will be available. Though they are a series, they'll be sold individually, at $5 a piece. Collect all four.

The picture above is from my Flickr Stream. Flickr Terms of Use require me to link to Flickr. So here you go.