Reading Review & Fascicle

Great reading on Saturday by Adam, Tom, Cathy, and Buck. That DC scene is smoking up there.

Marcus Slease wrote up a little review of the evening here -- gracias, Sr. Slease.

Also, to join the chorus of blogs announcing the release of the new journal Fascicle -- Fascicle is here!!

It's really just about as amazing as everyone says. T. Tost has done a pretty remarkable thing here. My name is on the masthead, but most of the work was Tony's.

I've got some poems in there myself -- some of which are a part of my most recent project called A Monologue for Voices & President Letters. I'm at the point where I'm excited about the project and have finished the bulk of the writing. I'm not going to add anything new at this point, just polish and rearrange.

This project has been a new direction for me -- plain spoken, direct, actively non-poetic in some ways. (Other pieces are at Free Verse, Coconut, and in the most recent Displayer.)

I find, though, that I work like that: do a project (which usually becomes a manuscript) for awhile in which the doing gives rise to a set of formal concerns that become the conceptual framework for the piece. I finish out the piece eventually (sometimes several years, sometimes six months) and then start a new project that usually begins as an attempt to get as far away from whatever I had been doing previously.

During this process I seem to go through several stages of emotional attachment to the project. First, I'm just writing and don't know what's going on. Then I start to see the underlying framework and get excited. Then -- usually about a third of the way in -- I start thinking: "what the hell am I doing? does this make any sense? is it any good? what is this???" I usually charge on despite these fears for better or ill. As I get close to the end and done, I start feeling excited about the project again, take some time off from writing so intensely, then find myself back at the beginning of the cycle -- sometimes on purpose, sometimes not.

One other part of this process is that often the projects will spin off very, very directly from what I'm reading at the time. Not everything that I'm reading, but often I'll read a book and just have to respond somehow either by imitation or conversation.

At any rate, all three of my most recent projects are represented on the Fascicle site -- take a look, let me know what you think.

And to bookend this post with more about Slease:

Brenda Coultas & Marcus Slease!
Desert City Season IV.1!
September 17th, Saturday!
8:00 pm!
Internationalist Books!