May 2, 2006

Feeling a bit run down...too much going on at once...but, I would rather be too busy than not busy enough.

Tag found a couple of small things he wants to clean up on his book, so we're scheduled to do that later today. I'm stepping back, for a day or two, from my book projects...don't want to overwhelm myself.

Tomorrow is my mother's birthday. Traditionally a day for strange things to happen in my life (for instance, it is the 11th anniversary of the car accident that so many credit with my "reawakening"). Maybe I should stay at home tomorrow with a pillow over my head? Not a bloody chance. I, too, want to see what curveballs the fates have in store for me.

I am slowly, painstakingy piecing together the elements necessary for an independent arts festival, something driven, not by the well-meaning and often well-funded dilletanti, but by the self-absorbed and penniless artists themselves. More on this later.

I will be in attendance at the open microphone poetry reading at B&N in Morgantown on May 18th, despite my longstanding avoidance of open mic events. It keeps me in good with the nice folks at Barnes & Noble.

I've got to go wake up...caffeine...caffeine...caffeine...

the pretty petty animals

and all the pretty petty animals
hide under sticks and stones
to break your bones
when you don't give them what they want.
stacks of wax and facts relax
to slide between their lying thighs
and it is really no surprise
when the pretty petty animals
are not taught or caught for naught.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

Hey, it just came to me...you expect me to know what it means?

My Life as a Paul Simon song or a Steve Martin movie

"I met my old lover
On the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me
I just smiled
And we talked about some old times
And we drank ourselves some beers
Still crazy afler all these years"

-Paul Simon, "Still Crazy After All These Years"

The other evening I ran into a near-miss of mine from high school. A lovely girl whom I was attracted to, but I was so shy with women back then I ignored her and hurt her feelings. She's now grown with a husband and a daughter and a life, but she mentioned my ignoring her and I came clean about my attraction to her back them (especially her extraordinary legs...to see her in cutoff shorts was a sexual experience). Still crazy, you bet.

I received an email today from Brigit, my uber-muse. I let her slip through my fingers years ago at LAX. Every time I see the final scene of Steve Martin's "LA Story" I think of how I should've emulated him when he says to his dream girl:

"All I know is, on the day your plane was to leave, if I had the power, I would turn the winds around, I would roll in the fog, I would bring in storms, I would change the polarity of the earth so compasses couldn't work, so your plane couldn't take off. "

-Steve Martin as Harris Telemacher, "LA Story"

Sigh. So many regrets, so little time. I promised Brigit I would immediately fulfill her wish she was asking of me, which was for a 36 hour day. It was simple, I merely decreed that from this moment forward, an hour is 40 minutes in length. Now, it may take a few years to get clock makers and the National Bureau of Standards on board with this, but I've decreed it, and as the poet god, I expect it to be enforced. Voila! A 36-hour day.

There, that was easy.

Still crazy, you bet.

Make love, not war: part II: The marketing of 101GEP

As I anticipated (I did give him permission) E.J. went ahead and posted the master list of poems for 101 GREAT EROTIC POEMS, and that's fine. I decided (for once) not to run up to the deadline to select the works, and rather spend my time refining and formatting the volume. So far, I have not rethought the cover, but we shall see what tomorrow brings.

I want this thing to be a killer. I think it already speaks well of it that months before its release I have already been approached by bookstores wanting to arrange "tasteful", late-evening readings of it. They're expecting to make money off of it, and I can't blame them. They will, I will, and I'm going to raise the body temperature of English-speaking peoples everywhere by a few degrees Centigrade. It is not a perverse or offensive book, there is little in it more explicit than "The Song of Solomon" which is in the Holy Bible (people who get bent out of shape over suggestive material need to read that long-form erotic dialogue).

Make love, not war? You bet.

The marketing plan for this book will be the most aggressive grass-roots campaign to date for one of my volumes, eclipsing the very successful marketing of THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES. Readings, media access and severe pimping of individual works and tying it in to the very successful 101 GREAT LOVE POEMS, which it is sibling to.

There's a line, a definition, in my old poem "Bragi, awakening in his tomb" that reads

"love: an addiction and a venom I use and sell"

So let it be with this volume. I am intentionally "putting it all out there" with a small note I keep on my computer saying "No one finishes this book in a single reading" - as I want to be certain, in my heart of hearts, that anything with a body temperature that reads this book will be forced to put it down and seek solace from this lonely, cold sphere in the arms of another.

E.J. has gone so far to suggest the marketing tag-line that I invoked above that reinvokes decade of the 60's:

"Make love, not war"