The uni-verse

Tag and I sat down last night and discussed future publication strategies...some good material came out of it. Most I can't discuss now, as we want there to be some surprises.

It was funny. Yesterday evening I gave him a call and got no answer, so I figured he was busy and I headed up to the local Barnes & Noble. Their iced tea is passable, I want to get the feel of the place for the signing next month and they have this one server in their Starbucks whom I find very attractive (Tag has a crush on a different one there and we sometimes will call one another up from there saying "Hey, your future wife is here...")

Midway through my tea I tried him again. He answered this time and told me he was at Books-a-Million. After a discussion of the various merits of the two places it came down to the notion that he had dug in at BAM (Meaning he was toting around a lot more material and it woud have been more troublesome for him to reolocate...) so I headed over there.

Once there, I did look around for a manager who'd clued me into what would be required for them to carry my books. Nowhere to be found. Basically, to be carried by the local BAM store, I'd need to fill out some paperwork for their third party distributor and give them two copies of every book I wanted them to carry (as evaluation copies, not for resale, or so they say). B&N, on the other hand, volunteered to carry my books and set up a signing.

Like I said to Tag, imagine there are two women. One is very intriguing, one is fairly intriguing (if you are going to stick around me much, you have to learn my terms for things...by "intriguing" I mean that combination of factors that stir my fancy, which is a combination of personality, style and attractiveness...). The "Fairly Attractive" one (we'll call her Bachelorette #2) has let you know that, in order to go out with her, you need to run it by her best friend and give her best friend some presents to evaluate. Then, she'll get back to you. Then, maybe, she'll have lunch with you sometime.

Bachelorette #1 (who is more interesting anyway) calls you up, asks if you are busy Friday nght, volunteers to pay for dinner and tells you to bring an overnight bag and to make sure to pack condoms.

Hmmmm...tough choices. The conversation at this point largely dissolved into a comparative discussion of what the two women would ask from you, rapidly descending into the gutter.

But we somehow got back on track discussing book plans, until we got sidetracked by a disucssion of poetic form...he confessed he'd never written a villanelle before, which led me to run to the reference section and get him a copy of 'The Idiot's Guide to Poetry" which lists several form requirements...it wasn't a bad book, although it does take an assholish attitude towards poets on the web and is five years old (culture, like science, advances swiftly...paying full price for a five year old book that addresses cultural issues should be a crime...thank God we didn't buy the book). Our main humour focused on the notion that the author is a poetry professor who said that one should not "lecture" in one's poetry.

Um. And what does she do to her classes? Face the wall and mumble shopping lists? Some of the best poetry is in one's face about issues and beliefs. There is a challenge in throwing punch to the frontal lobes with grace and style and skill. Feh, academic poets. Again, I say, "feh". Actually, there are many fine poets of that ilk, but since the public seemes to want to create a distinction between "street poets" and "academic poets" (both sides say I am of the other) I will abuse my free-agency status and crap on them both.

Street poets need to commit. Academic poets need to quit masturbating.

Street poets rarely put out books, sometimes because they don't understand the process, sometimes because they view the written word with a strange suspicion. Academic poets abuse the "poetry welfare system" we call the university presses, so that their writings are inbred and are often published based not on the merits of the work, but the grant proposal they submitted to get the book funded.

Street poets are about "cred". Academic poets are about "tenure".

Historically, great street poets include...em...er...um...

Great academic poets include...er...um...er....

Grow up, kids, stop subdividing your turfs. Remember Occam's razor..."entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". If the only way you can feel good about yourself is to be the "best left-handed albino poet with a PhD in Home Ec from Boise State who writes about penguins popping caps" you have a real self-esteem problem.

It's like denominations in religion. The more times a "faith" has to subdivide to support the whims and wills of the people in it, the less legitimate it seems. We are all sisters and brothers in the uni-verse, the sphere of poets.

But, again I digress.

So we discussed issues around our existing book projects, and future ones. THEOCRICIDE is very much in flux right now, as it is in the shaping stage. Comments made by various readers have made me rethink some of my longest-held notions about the contents, size and format of that volume.

We shall see,