Category: Words
Prose and poetry, for the most part
“Sometimes I think that there will be a place in the future for a literature the nature of which will singularly resemble that of a sport. Let us subtract, from literary possibilities, everything which today, by the direct expression of things and the direct stimulation of the sensibility by new means–motion pictures, omnipresent music, etc.–is being rendered useless or ineffective for the art of language. Let us also subtract a whole category of subjects–psychological, sociological, etc.–which the growing precision of the sciences will render it difficult to treat freely. There will remain to letters a private domain: that of symbolic expression and of imaginative values due to the free combination of the elements of language.” — Paul Valery (quoted in “After Joyce,” from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
“Many people actually like reality, and very often choose to live in it.” — Herzinger, Not-Knowing
“A man whose mouth stinks has no mistress; no woman would put up with it; any woman would find a way to let him know he stinks and would force him to rid himself of that fault.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
“People always think that a man’s fortunes are more or less determined by his appearance, by the beauty or ugliness of his face, by his size, by his hair or lack of it. Wrong. It is the voice that decides it all.” — Milan Kundera, Slowness (trans. Asher)
“[Henry] James was the most consummate artist American literature has produced. He was fastidious by nature and by early training. He had studied his art in France as men study sculpture in Italy, and he had learned the French mastery of form. Nowhere in his writings may we find slovenly work. His opening and closing paragraphs are always models, his dialogue moves naturally and inevitably,—in all the story despite its length nothing too much,—and everywhere a brilliancy new in American fiction. He is seldom spontaneous; always is he the conscious artist; always is he intellectual; always is he working in the clay of actual life, a realist who never forgets his problem to soar into the uncharted and the unscientific realms of the metaphysical and the romantic.” — Fred Lewis Pattee (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVI, Book III, Part VI., Sec. 9)
This week I’m posting copies of the poems I had published in the first decade of the Third Millennium (by the reckoning of the Christian Church and the Western post-industrial democracies). These poems were all written between about 1998 and 2005.
This is pretty much the end of my previously published work, which I’ve been posting to this site since March of this year. I have a poem, “love poem,” in the Lyrotica anthology published by Vagabondage Press, but that came out just a few months ago so it falls outside of the date range of the batch of poems I posted today. And I have a story, “Lawn,” which should be coming out in Thema magazine’s “One Thing Done Superbly” issue any day now, if it hasn’t already. I’ll probably post that to this site next year.
Next week I’ll probably begin daily postings of a longer work, High Street, which is a book-length manuscript that confused people such as myself might characterize as creative nonfiction. So much for the probabilities and the confusion, then (I could be a derivatives trader).
In November of 1975 I was 17 years old and began writing poetry. The following year I had four of my poems published in two very obscure magazines. In 1978 I had another published in another very obscure magazine. It was another ten years before I had another poem published, again in an obscure magazine, this one in the United Kingdom. And in 1990 I had another poem published: magazine again obscure.
Those seven poems are the previously published works I’m posting this week. They were all written before I was twenty years old. Nearly everything else I wrote in those early scribbling days when the Vietnam War was still freshly lost and the nation was anesthesizing itself with drugs, sex, rock-and-roll and King Disco, has long since been thrown away and good riddance to it. I would hate to think someone would have to wade through that garbage to sort it out after I die.
It had been my plan to post my earliest published poetry this weekend, but last week I found in my archives one more previously published story I had overlooked and hadn’t posted yet. That story is “Tossing Baby to the Tiger,” originally published in 2003 by Salt Hill. It is what I posted this week. It’s much more interesting than my poetic juvenilia, which I’ll probably post next week, for I have no shame and I no longer care.
The Weekly Alibi is an alternative newspaper published in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From 1996 to 2000, it published a baker’s dozen of my poems in its annual Valentine’s Day poetry contest. It also published one of my haiku in its 2000 haiku contest. This week I’m posting those poems here on my blog. I’m not all that wild about them–in fact, some of them are at least a little embarrassing–but I’m not going to try to hide them.
Next week I’ll probably post my earliest published poetry, the stuff from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. There’s not as much of that, and there’s probably not any that may be as embarrassing as “Capitano’s Romance” or “Personals: I Saw U” or “Invitation to the Ball,” the last two of which were winners in the Alibi contests’ “Why I’m a Pathetic, Dateless Loser” category.
“The Usual Story” is another of the stories I initially wrote about a dozen years ago and which was published early this year in Mad Hatters’ Review. It’s the last previously-published story I have in my inventory. Next week I’ll have to post something else. Probably poetry. There was a call some weeks back from one of my three readers for some poetry.
I’ll probably post all my previously-published poetry over a three-week period. Unless I chicken out. Some of it’s pretty embarrassing. No sense hiding, though. I thought it was good enough to submit in the first place, and it got published. Not in American Poetry Review or Poetry or The New Yorker or anything like that. I should be so lucky. It all showed up in little mags, some of which have long since passed away.
“Vitrine” is another story I wrote about a dozen years ago that finally found a publisher, being one of the four stories of mine Mad Hatters’ Review published early this year.
The voice in “the talking french cat” came to me in a dream. I thought of writing an entire book in that voice, but I couldn’t sustain it, then it was gone. And would a reader really want to spend an entire book, even a slim volume, with that person and that voice? Madness and despair grow so quickly tiresome.
I wrote the first draft of “the talking french cat” ten or eleven years ago. It took me several more years to hammer it into shape, then Mad Hatters’ Review published it earlier this year.
Very few of the stories I’ve had published have undergone no substantial rewrite, “substantial” being a subjective term that, whatever it may mean, almost certainly means more than giving a story a “polish” (whatever that may mean). “Rag Doll” was first drafted about fifteen years before I finally got it into a shape a publisher would accept. Mad Hatters’ Review published it earlier this year, along with three other of my stories.
(And on the subject of first drafts, early this afternoon I finished the first draft of the project I’ve been working on for the past four months.)
“Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles and Fries” is the result of taking a handful of ideas languishing in the workshop, mixing them together to see how they might fit, and making a prose bracelet out of them. It was published in The Writing Disorder on New Year’s Eve last year.
Usually, once I’ve published a piece, I make no more modifications to it. This is a rule I abide by strictly except for those occasions when I choose to break it.
This week I’m posting “Karen and the Dropout,” a story published in 2010 in White Whale Review. Prior to publication, Randi Shapiro, the fiction editor at WWR, emailed me that she thought there was something a little off about the ending, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. I fiercely and in detail defended the choices I had made, and we let it go at that.
About six months later, as I was preparing “Karen and the Dropout” for inclusion in a collection of short stories, I saw that whatever it was Randi had seen and I couldn’t see, it did seem that if I cut the final five words from the story, the ending would be much tighter and significantly less wistful. So that is what I did, and that is the version I have posted to this site. You can go to the WWR site and see the previous version, but I wouldn’t. This one’s better (I emailed Randi after I made the cut, and she agreed).
“Casserole Man” was a story I wrote in the mid-90s. It took me the rest of that decade to get it right, and once I had, it was published in the now-defunct Chiron Review. That would have been around the same time (spring of 2002) I met the woman I’m now married to–or, to whom I am now married, if you prefer.
(NB–That “of” that you think should really be “off” is not a typo.)
This week I’m posting “Saved” to the Stories menu of this blog. It’s a story I wrote in the late 90s and was never quite happy with. I wrote it in first-person and sent it out, it got rejected, that’s okay, I rewrote it in third-person. I sent it out in third-person, it got rejected, but I didn’t mind, I wasn’t happy with it, I rewrote it in second-person. I sent it out, I still wasn’t happy with it, I hadn’t heard back yet, but that’s all right, I rewrote it again, in fourth-person for all I know.
Then I heard back. Gulf Coast had it and wanted to publish it, would I be so kind as to send a copy on 3.5″ floppy? Shit! Where was the version I sent them? Was I even sure which version it was? Could I ask them? Shit-shit-shit…. I dug deep into my backups, into the backups of my backups, cross-matched the file date-stamp with the database entry tracking my submissions, and sent them what I was pretty sure was the correct version. It was, and they published it in early 2002.
There was a literary magazine called Happy. I can find no evidence it still exists as an active endeavor. When it did, it published one of my very short stories from the late 90s, called “Shelving.” That’s the story I posted this week.
Just about every weekend since I started this blog four months ago I have posted a copy of one of my published stories. Posting my previously published work is at the center of what this blog is about, though I have posted and will post again pieces previously unpublished.
The other and almost-daily posts I make to the site are to keep the place from getting stagnant. They’re mostly quotes from whatever I’m reading, which are far more interesting than what I’m doing, except for the interesting parts of what I do, which I best not be writing about in public.
There are only about a half-dozen previously published stories left in my inventory. This week I’m posting the oldest, “My Friend!” This piece took over fifteen years to go from first draft to the draft that got published, in March of 2009, by Gloom Cupboard. It’s essentially a celebration of language.
The last of the lower-case very short stories I wrote in 1995 to be published is “latrodectus, loxosceles, lycosa tarentula,” which was accepted by Denver Quarterly in 2003 and published by them in 2006. Last week, in “mama when she’s really pretty,” I was channeling a six-year-old girl. This week in “latrodectus, [etc.],” I’m channeling a seven-year-old boy.
This week I’m posting another of those lower-case short-shorts I wrote in the mid-90s, “mama when she’s really pretty.” I was channeling a six-year-old girl when I wrote this. It was published in Chiron Review, a litmag run by Michael Hathaway for nearly thirty years before folding earlier this year.
This week I’m posting another of the very short pieces I wrote sans capitalization in the mid-90s, “the german for it, the french.” It was first published in Quarter After Eight in early 1997. As with everything I write, it is a true story. That’s why I write fiction.
There was a time when I was writing everything in lower case. Abandoning caps changed the way the words flowed together in a piece. Every once in a while I still write a lower-case piece, but it’s mostly something I did in the mid-90s.
Another thing I did in the mid-90s and still sometimes do is write very short pieces. Abandoning caps works better in shorter pieces, since total lower case is not just a little hard on the eyes, it’s also a little more challenging to the mind. Have to be careful with all that.
But going deep campo for lower case wasn’t the principal reason I wrote short pieces. I had it in mind to see how short I could get a story to go and still have a full and symmetrical piece. It seemed about 350 words was the bottom limit. Pieces also seemed to develop their own internal necessity of length, with around 450 words and 675 words being approximate “natural” lengths for my work.
My first published piece of fiction was in all lower case, and this week it’s the story I’m posting: “eleanor in uncertain way, pulling.” It was published in NuCity in July of 1995. (NuCity later became The Weekly Alibi and continued to publish my stuff from time to time.)
“Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid.” — Roland Barthes, 1977.
The Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University publishes an annual litmag called The Healing Muse. In their most recent issue (#10) they included my short piece, “The Take-Out,” which is the story I’m posting this week.
The story I’m posting this week, “The Congenital Fiance”, first appeared in Caketrain a couple of years ago. I wrote it some years back, not long before the Umpteenth World War started. The world wasn’t any younger or more innocent or necessarily safer or nicer in those days, but part of the world that ended on the bright autumn day when the towers came down–ending in the unpredictable way in which worlds end–was the world in which an American could casually engage in street photography with a 35mm SLR without being suspected of being either a terrorist or a government agent.
Which is neither here nor there and has practically nothing to do with “The Congenital Fiance”.
For two years I worked as a criminal defense paralegal. As with everything I’ve done since I was twelve or thirteen years old, I did the job with one eye on how I could milk it for stories to write. Some might call that “bearing witness,” which would be a very nice thing to call it. Others might call it things that are not so nice, but would probably be just as true.
Last week I posted “Legal Advice,” one of the stories derived from my criminal defense paralegal days. This week I’m posting “Taking Calls,” another such story. It was first published a year ago in Cutthroat.
Twenty years ago I began working in legal support, first as a data entry clerk and soon after that as a paralegal. The story I’m posting this week, “Legal Advice”, is written from my experiences in the trade. It was first published a half-dozen years ago in Ontario Review.
Words don’t often fail me. More often, I fail them. This week, I’m posting to this site a work of poetry I wrote six years ago, called The Book of Lamentations. I had previously published it to my Yahoo website in 2006, where I took it down after a week or two, and to my Joomla site last year, where I took it down after one day. It is a work which causes me discomfort. It will not leave me alone.
My background is military. I am an American. It is not my intention to make this website into an overtly political or topical site, but there were aspects of the American government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq which I found appalling. When George W. Bush and Richard Cheney were re-elected in 2004, I was moved to write what I thought would be a three- or four-page poem about the American servicemen and servicewomen, volunteers all, who were giving their lives in the conflict. I thought it would take, at most, a few weeks to write. It ended up taking nine months and going on for scores of pages. I stopped when I didn’t know what else to do.
The Weekly Alibi is an alternative paper in Albuquerque, going on twenty years old. I don’t often read it these days, as I am getting older and and am feeling the pressing need to slough off the unnecessary. But back in the 1990s and on up until the middle of the last decade, hardly a week would go by that I didn’t snag the latest Alibi to find out what movies and shows were current and tantalizing.
Besides its movie and art listings, its reviews and commentaries and other features, its personals–I looked at the “I Saw You” listings week after week, hoping to have been seen–The Alibi also ran writing contests. They ran a Valentine’s Day poetry contest I won so many times, I finally stopped entering. They also ran a short story contest every year. When they first started out, they were called NuCity, but some other publication with a similar name and more money threatened to sue them, so they changed their name. Right before the name change, one of my stories won an honorable mention in the annual contest, and was published. I was thirty-seven years old, had been a creative writer since early adolescence, but had not had a short story published until that time (because I was not naturally very good at it, and it took me a long time to get any good at it at all).
That story isn’t the one I posted this week. In 2000, I won The Alibi‘s short fiction contest with a piece called “Linear Perspective”. I was very happy. The prize was admission to the Southwest Writers something something that fall, where I got to hang around with real writers who wrote mysteries and romances and true crime and all that kind of stuff that actually sells. I got to meet editors and agents, and buy things, and watch a fellow writer get shit-faced drunk at the big banquet.
“Linear Perspective” got more hits on my old website than anything besides “The Gordon Lish Notes”. I expect that people would Google “linear perspective”, hoping to get some practical information about visual art, and end up touching upon my site by accident.
There was a different story I was going to post this week, but I got a piece of fan mail drawing my attention to “The Year Our Children Left”, so I’m posting that story instead. It was published last year in Neon, a sharp online litmag out of the UK.