Woodcut from October, The Shepheardes Calender
Some recent publication news as projects and poems slowly come to fruition and rise to the surface:
Thrilled to be in the latest issue of Press Board Press volume 2, edited by Patrick Riedy et al. The piece I have in here, “Confessions of a Car Salesman,” hearkens back to a difficult time in my professional life, and I’ve tinkered with this series off and on in the years since then. You can download the full pdf from the link above and check out the wonderful poems and images in the journal.
TAG Journal operates by a unique editorial principle: each issue features two poets, who “tag” the next two poets to appear, thus self-editing the journal as they go. I was tagged by Dan Remein, who was tagged by Eileen Joy — in turn, I tagged Lisa Ampleman, who will appear in the next issue. For this I sent along some bits culled from my notebooks over the past year, including song lyrics, story ideas, invented band names, and some lines derived from an amusing conversation I had with Chris Vitiello and Kate Pringle about words we should never use in poems.
Jeffrey Side, editor of the Argotist Online, sent out a questionnaire to some folks on the topic of Conceptual Poetry. Even though I find myself wanting to talk more about poetry I’m excited about these days, this turned out to be a good exercise in thinking through some poetics issues (and working in ways to discuss medieval and contemporary poets I like). The results, with other respondents, can be found here.
Finally, the culmination of a year-plus effort, my essay “The Chaucer-function: Spenser’s Language Lessons in The Shepheardes Calender” appears in Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. There are so many people to thank for this, but I want to give a special shout-out here to Sara Gutmann and Nick Hoffman for valuable feedback every step of the way; Graham Hammill for pushing me to ask tougher questions; Randy Schiff for steady encouragement; and Upstart editor Will Stockton for his enthusiasm and work preparing this for publication.
I’d also like to thank Ron Silliman for blogging/tweeting the Jack Spicer talk I gave in Boston recently.
