four haiku at Heliosparrow

Four haiku posted on 14 November at Heliosparrow.

This one, among them:

a breeze 

shades and unshades

the leaf litter

‘Autobiography of a Book’ epigraphs #5

“… Does a poem go on existing

even if it's not being read? Does its meter, let's say,

still measure? What really happens to a poem, while it

sits closed in the dark of a closed book? Do spirits

live there? Are there sperm-like, invisible strings

that stretch back from them to other poems from

hundreds or thousands of years ago that have been

lost, but which keep spawning poems?”

In these lines from his poem “Could Someone Tell Me Why” Kent Johnson touches on territory ‘Autobiography of a Book’ writhes around in, especially whether books can communicate with each other, whether one could see books as begetting other books (or poems). In Johnson’s talking about poems as entities, I also hear echoes of my ‘Fact’ series. Poems, stories, art as a new form of life. More discrete than the virus-like “meme,” a word coined to describe the transmission of ideas through human societies.

The full quote is a bit unwieldy for an epigraph, plus I’m not sure Book wouldn’t feel preempted. Anyway, it always interests me to see other people wandering around a world I’ve been lost in myself. 

source:

All Because of Poetry I Have a Big House

by Kent Johnson

2020. Shearsman Books Ltd, Swindon UK

“The Cowardly Lion and the Courage Pills,” a short story reading

 

2021 is the 50th anniversary of Oziana, an annual collection of Oz short stories published by the International Wizard of Oz Club. To celebrate, authors were asked to read their stories.

“The Cowardly Lion and the Courage Pills” appeared in Oziana 1982. Which means I wrote it when I was 16? It was fun to read. And some fellow Ozzies assure me it’s fun to listen to.

You can check out more of the readings here: Oziana 50th anniversary playlist

chapter from ‘Autobiography of a Book’ in Unlikely Stories

The chapter “in which the book observes the descent of the elevator” appears in Unlikely Stories, Mark V.  

haiku in brass bell

The theme for October’s brass bell was “numbers,” specifically editor Zee Zahava wanted Arabic numerals, that is, 1, 2, 3, etc.

This is the one of mine she chose:

on the porch
3 peanut shells
wet with squirrel spit
    Glenn Ingersoll

check out the whole issue.

Three poems in The Sparrow’s Trombone

Three poems appear in The Sparrow’s Trombone:

“Look!”
“just a putt on the green dream”
“shadows fasting in a team”

According to editor Jeremy Scott, “The Sparrow's Trombone is a surrealist literary website as well as a zine made using traditional punk/diy cut and paste lofi tech.”

Autobiography of a Book in Mercurius

Three chapters of Autobiography of a Book appear at Mercurius.

The editors write:

Mercurius Magazine was founded in May 2020 with the aim of building a community of writers and artists around the themes of “transformation” and “vitality”. The site publishes a wide range of work, from avant-garde visual poetry to contemporary surrealism and absurdism, literary essays, journalism, short stories and flash fiction. … We seek to take down the barriers between high art, literary culture and current affairs, not by forcing them together in unholy matrimony, but by providing a shared space. … Perhaps Mercurius is less a magazine than an ever-evolving social experiment, a community building project.

Two chapters of Book in GAS

GAS: Poetry, Art, and Music has posted two chapters from Autobiography of a Book, “in which the book admits to a difficulty” and “in which the book observes the translation of favorites”.

“I Thought I Ought to Number” in ubu

"I Thought I Ought to Number” appears in issue #1 of the new zine ubu. A poem in a debut issue. That’s fun. My poem appears on p.16 (or maybe 17; the pages aren’t numbered). 

ubu is edited by Lori A. Minor. She says of the ezine’s mission: 

My favorite absurdist play … Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), … uses extreme satire, foolishness, and obscenity to mock the upper middle class and overturn their social norms, [and] is a precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd … I chose ubu. for its roots in the plays … I began writing and studying minimalist poetry over the past four years. Recently I've decided to combine my love of the two by using this venue to focus on absurd, minimalist writing.”

haiku in brass bell

Editor Zee Zahava requested new haiku for this issue of brass bell, that is, poems written from 8/26 to 8/29. I felt some inspiration so had several to send. She chose:

chasing the last berry

around the bowl

morning fog

Many good ones in the issue. Look for those by Al Peat, Brad Bennett, Bryan Rickert, Joe Sebastian, Kathleen Kramer … Sunflowers! Shadows! A laundry disaster! Plus both a shooting star and a meteor. 

new year’s resolutions — so far

I just finished a letter I began a month ago. When I send a copy of Thousand out I include a handwritten letter. My writing is pretty legible, if sometimes ambiguous. A friend recently read “month” when I’d written “mouth.” I suppose I could count up how many copies of Thousand I’ve sent out. These are not paid orders. I am sending out books to people I like/admire. 

I’ve gotten out a few this year. Not a lot. Not much response. I don’t blame anybody for not writing back. I can be a good correspondent, or a bad one. Everybody’s busy. And what does one say? So far I’ve always asked before sending, so the Thousand should never be a surprise. 

I continue to send out work — to submit, goes the lingo. The process hasn’t been rip-roaring this year. But looking back over LoveSettlement posts I see twelve publications. Not nothing! 

The sense of discouragement sets in with the book length manuscripts. 

Autobiography of a Book has now been out to 18 publishers. Eight rejected it. The other ten have yet to respond. At the writing of my new year’s resolutions post Book had only been rejected three times. I have a goal of sending Book to 100 places. Are there 100 places to send it? If Book gets its 100th rejection, I will reevaluate. Maybe at that point I will just post it on the blog or upload a file to a print on demand service.

When I have energy to market a manuscript I default toward Autobiography of a Book, thus the full-length poetry manuscript is neglected. That one is currently titled Nobody You Know. It is out to one publisher. 

#keepyournumbersup … There are 30 places still considering work I’ve sent out since the beginning of July (to pick a recent date). That number includes poems, chapters from Book, and the two book manuscripts. Pretty good. It means I am not neglecting the process. 

The question with which I ended the new year’s resolution post, “I wonder how many readers a published poem gets?,” got a data point in April. 

one haiku in brass bell

The theme for the June 2021 issue of brass bell haiku is “sounds.”

The editor runs the poems in alphabetical order by the first name of the poet.

So scroll down to “Glenn” to find a honeybee.

two haiku in brass bell

The theme for the May 2021 issue of brass bell haiku is “edible haiku.”

The editor runs the poems in alphabetical order by the first name of the poet.

So scroll down to “Glenn” to find this haiku

before the trip

finishing the berries

in expired yogurt

and one more.

I wrote a batch of haiku to the theme just before we went on our Belize trip, and these were the two editor Zee Zahava picked.

“The perfect shape to drop to the earth” in Humble Pie

Humble Pie, the literary and art annual of the California College of the Arts, published my poem “The perfect shape to drop to the earth” in the Spring 2020 issue, vol. 17. Unfortunately, due to the great covid shutdown, the issue was not able to be printed at that time. I am happy to say, a contributor’s copy came in Thursday’s mail. (Thanks, Caroline!)

“The perfect shape to drop to the earth” was written in the home of Helen Luster. Helen and Paul Mariah co-facilitated a poetry group I joined a year after high school. Both Helen and Paul were much older than me. I guess Paul was about the age I am now (his 50s?); while Helen was a bit older (b. 1913). 

The poem went through some changes since first scrawled it in a notebook, but it’s still describing a particular afternoon. 

“Night Poems” in Last Leaves

“Night Poems” appears on page 42, issue #2, Spring 2021 of Last Leaves.

A reader has pointed out to me that the pdf document counts its pages differently from the numbers written on the printed pages (or Last Leaves' contents page). If you are going by the count of your pdf reader, “Night Poems” appears on the 56th page. 

Are you being read?

Dear writer, are you being read? How would you know?

My brother David Lee Ingersoll scripted and drew a comic book series back in the early 90s. He writes, “I loved doing Misspent Youths. I loved the characters. Doing that book was fun and exhausting and satisfying and … unprofitable. [ellipsis in original] The publisher didn’t make any money. I certainly didn’t make any money. I did draw 160 pages of comics in about a year while working a part-time job. Brave New Words … put out more issues of Misspent Youths than any other series they printed. Cancelling the series was a mutual decision – the guy behind Brave New Words was reassessing his business plan and I wanted a break to improve my art skills.”

30 years later David got a fan letter. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been a fan of Misspent Youths for a while now–since they came out, actually, when I was a disgruntled and disaffected teenager working in a comic shop. … [T]hose comics you put out all that time ago imprinted on and have stuck with someone since they came out.” The letter writer even repurchased all five issues during our big covid year and reread them. He says the series is “just as great as I’d remembered it (and captured much of the flavour from my hometown’s punk scene in the ’90s).”

Are you being read? We look at sales figures. When I wrote to a gay historian after I’d read a volume of his memoirs, he wrote back to say the book sold three copies. … Yeah. OK. But I read it. 

We look at online stats. How many visits has many latest blog post racked up? Ooh, a few more than yesterday’s!

After the thrill of getting this fan letter David comes to this conclusion about art: “Put it out into the world. … [I]t needs to be available.”

I am publishing regularly these days. Most the feedback I get is prepublication, that is, whether the editor of the magazine or literary website likes the piece enough to publish it. After that very little. Some sites offer the opportunity to leave a comment — or a rating. And it’s nice see a smattering of likes or a share. 

I just came across a site that features a few lines from some of my poems. It’s the tumblr Bibliomancy Oracle: divination through literature by Reb Livingston. I recognize the name! Livingston ran a poetry ezine called No Tell Motel. She put out a couple No Tell anthologies, too. I suggested the library buy one (and they did). 

On the tumblr Livingston posts a line or three from a poem. “The concept is that literature contains ‘truths’ and speak to matters of great importance,” Livingston says, and she offers a link to one of these “truth[s]” chosen at random. Before clicking on the link, “Focus on your question or concern. Or for insight of a more general nature, simply clear your mind.”

“The Bibliomancy Oracle will divine a reading using a passage from literature. Consider the response you receive in terms of guidance, inspiration or fun. Consider the meaning and context this passage offers you. You may find it useful to meditate, read it aloud, handcopy the words or read the entire text where from the passage originates (Google can point you to the full text). It’s up to you to decide how to interpret and what to do with this message.”

The lines of mine the Oracle features are snipped from poems published at BlazeVOX, November 2019. 

Maybe you should focus on some question or concern and give it a go:

line beginning “give credit”

line beginning “what is fame”

line beginning “it is the unbearable”

line beginning “you will have to”

Clearly Meant presents Judy Bebelaar

On February 27, 2016 Judy Bebelaar was the second poet in the reading series. My supervisor at the library had asked me to brand it. I stared for a while at the name of our branch library, the Claremont, and it resolved into Clearly Meant. Because what else is poetry but what is clearly meant? 

I became acquainted with Judy through Katharine Harer (one of the poets with whom I worked on the Poetry & Pizza series). But the Claremont Branch is also Judy’s local library, so when she walked in the door one day to ask about some book or other, she moved up my list of possible readers. Getting local writers was a priority. I was already thinking of Clearly Meant as a neighborhood series. I knew other poets who lived nearby. A resource to take advantage of!

I ask the guest poet to provide enough poems for a chapbook, which I put together and make available free at all the Berkeley library branches for the month leading up to the reading. I prefer the poet give me poems that they can talk about during the discussion period. It’s nice to have the option of talking in depth about a poem, especially one the audience is holding in their hands. 

Judy was eager to talk about a project she’d been working on for some time, a book about the teenagers she knew in the Peoples Temple. 

And Then They Were Gone: teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown by Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral was published in 2018. Recently Judy emailed me wondering who she could talk to about a presentation at the library. I posed the question to my supervisor. My supervisor said, “This is something you’d like to do?” I hadn’t thought I was going to be doing any programs during our covid days. My poetry programs were on hiatus, both Clearly Meant and the monthly Poetry Circle. Why not? I said. Might as well do a zoom. I’ve participated in a zoom poetry reading or two from home. But I hadn’t hosted anything. 

So I got the in-house instructions for librarians on how to do remote programming, and Judy and I put her talk on the calendar. April 16, 2021. I think it went well.

Autobiography of a Book at Second Chance Lit

The chapter, “in which the book keeps up its end,” appears in issue #2, April 2021. 

Second Chance Lit is a handsome ezine, each photograph on the main page a link to a poem or story. 

The site’s navigation enforces browsing — or methodically clicking on every picture — unless I overlooked a contents page or search box. Some of the pictures do seem to be captioned with the titles of the underlying poems. 

“In which the book keeps up its end” is included in the fourth section when scrolling down, the “peony” section, under the photograph of many books laid open. That image is a good match!

From their Mission Statement: “Second Chance Lit is … a place solely for previously rejected poetry and short prose - founded in 2020 by editor-in-chief David Wasserman. It is our hope that Second Chance will be viewed as a spot to showcase those amazing pieces that didn’t quite fit somewhere else and that other lit mags will point writers in our direction when they have an exceptional submission which doesn’t quite fit their current issue or aesthetic. Your work was good — is good. It just wasn't the right fit or at the right time or at the right place.”

“The Night Was White” — runner-up for DiBiase Poetry Prize

“The Night Was White” comes in at #37!

The annual Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry contest was founded in 2015. Initially primarily entered by New York poets, the contest has become increasingly international in scope with entrants from about 40 different countries each year. 

Bob Sharkey is the editor of the contest which is sponsored by his family. They decided to name the contest after Stephen DiBiase who was Bob’s best childhood friend.

The contest was designed by Bob to be unlike other contests and avoid some of the things that discouraged him from submitting to them. There are no entry fees. The $2,500 or so prize money is spread out among the top entrants with a modest first place prize award of $500. There are no line or page limits and the contest gladly reads all forms of poetry and is open to all subjects and topics. Published or unpublished work is welcome. There are no age limits and we typically receive many submissions by younger poets, some who have won prizes or recognition.

The editor reads each submission and selects from 30 to 40 poems to send to our panel of judges. Three of the judges are permanent and a fourth judge is the previous year’s first prize winner. The judges work independently and pick their top five selections as well as some honorable mentions. The resulting scores are added together to determine the prize winners. Usually, the scoring for the top four places is close and we have adjusted the prize amounts to reflect this.

The above is a trimmed version of the “about” page of the DiBiase Poetry Prize website. 

Since my poem is rather far down in the rankings that would have meant no prize money in prior years. This time, though, Bob Sharkey writes, “We had a record 911 submissions from 58 countries. Because of the judges favorable impression of the entire field of final poems and in order to demonstrate the variety of poetic expression that we receive as submissions, we have decided to publish all final poems on our website (DiBiasepoetry.com.) We have also decided that each poet should receive a small reimbursement for publication.”

The usual deadline for entering the contest is January 31, I understand. I will keep it on my radar for next year — you should too! No entry fee! Previously published work is eligible. Those are pretty sweet rules. 

Clearly Meant reading & interview series featuring Maw Shein Win

 

My supervisor at the Claremont Branch asked if I was interested in doing any library programming. I said I could do a poetry reading series. It had been a few years since Poetry & Pizza ended and I was ready to get back into the hosting business. 

Poetry & Pizza was a reading series in downtown San Francisco sponsored by Paul Geffner, owner of Escape from New York Pizza. Paul is a poet himself. But he didn’t feel like he knew the scene well enough to invite good readers, so Paul asked his friend Clive Matson and Clive recruited Katharine Harer and myself to help run it. Poetry & Pizza took place once a month and we coordinators shared out the calendar. I booked four readings a year, two poets per. It was a good scene. Money was raised for charity (all door donations went to a charity of the readers’ choice). Pizza was eaten. Poetry was thrown against the walls and windows. And some of it stuck. 

The Claremont Branch is a small library and the events room is also small, so I needed a program that would tend to be small. One poet. No open mic. The Bay Area literary scene is crazy active. There are a lot of good poets out there. But what would make this new series different? An interview and discussion with the poet. There were plenty of opportunities for poets to address an audience. But not much interaction. You had your turn and gave way to the next person. 

For the first poet I wanted someone who was ambitious and active, with a local following and happy to chat. Of course I also wanted to be a fan of their poetry. Maw Shein Win was the first person I asked and she said yes. Since the reading on October 3, 2015, Maw has gone on to being El Cerrito Poet Laureate, has published two full length poetry collections, and has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, among other things. Active and ambitious, no? 

A poet’s reward is typically a few ahs and a round of applause. But for this I was given a budget. Guest poets got paid! 

Gathering an audience for a poetry reading can be tricky. If there’s no open, poets looking for audience for their own work won’t show. Much depends on the poet. Do they have a fan base? Friends? Copious relatives? Over the course of four years our audiences ranged from a room exploding 70 to a friendly and attentive one. 

I had never conducted interviews, and I can seize up when on the spot, but I like talking about poetry and there are always a few questions I have about it so I figured I could string enough of those together to fill twenty minutes. I announce that the poet will read for 20 minutes, sit for an interview for 20 minutes, then participate in an audience discussion for the remainder of the hour. As I assure the poets, it’s not an interrogation, it’s a conversation. Occasionally the interview or the discussion can be hard. The poet needs to be talkative! But the hour usually flies by. 

At Clearly Meant the poet gets paid. The poet’s work is listened to. The poet is taken seriously as an authority. I think of Cleary Meant as a small town series, friendly, focused on locals (so far most of the readers have been actual users of the Claremont Branch library), and low key. 

A month before each reading I produce an 8-page promotional chapbook which is made available free at all Berkeley Public Library branches. So I get to be a publisher, too.

Thousand - reviews at Goodreads

There are now two reviews of Thousand at goodreads.com. 

The review by Steve Masover appeared October 25, 2020. Steve wrote a review that would make a great cover blurb:

Exuberant! Unbounded! Inexplicable, but why would you want to? Hilarious! Disconcerting! Lascivious! Delectable! You can't make this stuff up, but Glenn Ingersoll did, one hundred words at a time.

The review by Jim Murdoch appeared March 2, 2021. Jim’s review is generous and thorough:

When, in 2013, I reviewed Fact, Glenn’s tiny (i.e. physically small) collection of short poems, I said it wouldn’t be for everyone. The same proviso is true of the, by comparison, gargantuan Thousand. To be fair that could be said of every book ever written so let me drill it down: if you got lost on the second page of The Unnamable or found your head spinning after a few lines of ‘Howl’ then Thousand is probably not for you. To be honest I’m the kind of person who finds the word “epic” off-putting no matter what you’re talking about but an “epic prose poem” just sounds like hard work and that’s exactly what this book is which is not a bad thing in itself unless you’re afraid of hard work; hard work can be rewarding. 

We could argue about the fine line between poetic prose and prose poetry all day long but I couldn’t find many books that chose to call themselves “epic prose poems,” and, at 476 pages, Edgar Qunitet’s Ahasvérus is the only one that came close to matching Thousand’s 100,000 words. 

That said just because a book’s big doesn’t make it a tome and just because a poem is long doesn’t make it epic. What makes a poem epic in the traditional sense? The Bedford Introduction to Literature describes the genre as follows:

An epic poem is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily involving a time beyond living memory in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary men and women who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants, the poet and their audience, to understand themselves as a people or nation.

 and as much as I didn’t expect to be writing this that’s not a bad description of Thousand (only prosier) since much of the action takes place out of time and across multiple dimensions. All that’s missing is a tardis. What I expected to find in the above description was talk of the hero’s journey and although there are heroes in Thousand—a Jesus Christ for one although not any Jesus I recognise—there isn’t a central heroic figure, an Odysseus, Beowulf or even an Alice to follow through these many wonderlands. Most of the characters are ordinary-ish folk when they’re not leprechauns, river goblins, seventeen-armed angels, three-headed giants or transcendental butlers. 

Why a prose poem though and not a novel? I don’t have an answer for that but this comment from Glenn raises some interesting issues:

I understand that many readers wish words were invisible, that their meanings would instantaneously and without ambiguity translate to their minds the important stuff—the story, the scene, the conflict. That sounds like a philosophy of prose. Poetry wants you to notice the way it’s being said as well as what it’s saying. – Fact: an introduction to the poem poems of Glenn Ingersoll

There is a story here—many stories—but the stories, if you’ll forgive me, aren’t the whole story. Thousand doesn’t follow a traditional linear narrative. Sometimes you notice the transition but often not. One minute we’re jogging along nicely in the third person then POW! a narrator appears out of nowhere and PFFT! vanishes as mysteriously. One minute you’re reading about two sisters, Emily and Eula, then the story veers left and the next thing you know it’s inside a radio that Eula turns off. Or sometimes the narrative just arbitrarily jumps to a new story, like someone changing the TV channel on you without asking. Usually you know when this is about to happen because Glenn helpfully begins the new storyline with “Once upon a time there was a…” a dog (most often it’s a dog and sometimes he’s called Prince or Sir) or a cat or a boy or a chimneysweep or a caiman. 

This continual switching of stories—none of which are brought to a satisfactory conclusion—reminded me of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller which I gave a rather mean-spirited 3 stars when I reviewed it not because it wasn’t well written but because I felt cheated and I realised this was going to happen again and again. The same goes for Thousand. You’re continually getting short-changed and what’s more annoying is there isn’t an obvious thread (none I picked up on) linking the stories. Yes, characters do reappear like the sisters but they’re not developed. The same with the dogs, the angels, the leprechauns… we spend a few pages following them then something shiny catches our narrator’s eye (I use the term “narrator” loosely) and he’s off again which is really annoying because there’re so many good ideas here crying out for development and resolution. My favourite begins (sans the helpful ‘Once upon a time’):

The girl pulls open the door and steps into the white room. She steps around the naked figure and kneels on the floor before a white box. From the pocket of her

         Thousand: Six Hundred Six

jacket she takes a small gold box. She pops the lid on the box and dips a finger in. An ant climbs onto her finger and walks rapidly around it. The girl puts her finger into the keyhole of the white box. When she removes the finger the ant has stayed behind. “I don’t know why people don’t talk to you. You’re standing there and somebody comes by and doesn’t say anything to you. It’s like you weren’t even there. That’s rude. I hate rude people. I won’t talk to them. They can just go to hell, that’s what I

         Thousand: Six Hundred Seven

think. They can just go to hell.” The girl pushes herself up, slaps imaginary dust from her pantyhose, and straightens her cap. She’s not wearing a cap. It’s something else. […]

         Thousand: Six Hundred Eight

The girl is wearing tan slacks, no cap, a button-up shirt. Yes, it’s clear now. There are no bats or purses. White room like a doctor’s exam room. A table covered with white paper, a white stool with wheels, a

         Thousand: Six Hundred Nine

couple white cabinets. Everything white. Including the figure in each room’s center. White like a worn out hospital sheet, maybe, not white like a white person. Not person-like, the girl tends to think, if she hasn’t managed to ignore it completely, letting each voice play like a slight variant of the same bad radio program, advertisements for the Way of Anxiety. […]

         Thousand: Six Hundred Ten

The girl pushes herself up, slaps imaginary dust from the knees of her slacks and centres their carefully ironed creases. With measured steps she passes again around the complaining creature, closing the door as she leaves the room. In the next room there is another white box beside another naked figure.

This scene is repeated with slight variations several times and reminded me of Beckett’s late prose and also his play Catastrophe. Predictably we learn little about what’s going on here. Later we’re told her uniform has the letters ORO stitched in gold on all the “labels” (lapels?) which stands for Official Rotunda of the Others but that’s it. The next thing we know she…

finds herself standing on the hard packed clay of a desert highway. “Knock knock,” she says. The tables are gone, the chairs are gone, the

         Thousand: Six Hundred Seventy-Nine

walls are gone. The stars are so bright she can see by them. More or less. She scuffs her shoe against the road and raises a puff of dust. The arm that rounds her shoulder and the kiss that touches her cheek should surprise her, she will think later, trying to remember everything. Wouldn’t that be one reason it makes sense to regard this all a dream? One of many reasons, that is. “Welcome to the place between places,” the voice says, a voice sleepy as a kiss. “I am an angel.”

The angel leads her to a settlement of tents outside a city. The residents, although they don’t speak her language, take her in and appear friendly. They bathe her, supply appropriate clothing and let her spend the night. In the morning she finds she can understand them. It turns out the tent-dwellers are waiting to queue to gain access to the city which may or may not be a place of education. Anyway she gets in and meets a dragon who offers to be her teacher:

         Thousand: Seven Hundred Twenty-Seven

“When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come,” the dragon says, holding up a claw. Impaled on the claw, the girl sees, is one of the dried ticks. “No,” she says. “Then never mind,” the dragon says, tucking the tick back into the fold of its ear. The dragon lays its head on the floor, tucks forefeet under chin, and closes its eyes.

And then we’re off at a tangent and, apart from a brief mention later, we never learn of her fate or, indeed, the dragon’s.

The book began life as an exercise. Glenn determined to produce one hundred words a day every day for a thousand days. Quite a feat. Of course other writers have worked like that before, the Australian Gerald Murnane for one. Glenn began in May 2010 and wrote on his blog, “There is, so far, no plot. A plot of some sort may begin to accrue. I suspect it will. In my writing I tend to pull all the parts together, even if I am also trying to push them apart.”

The work that appears on the blog is not written ahead of time. I write it. I post it immediately after writing it. This is not to say the posts go up completely first draft. I write, read the work over, revise (occasionally extensively), reread until it works for me, then post. But I do not write ahead. – thousand explained some more

The final entry was on January 21st 2013. Over the three years there are several entries tagged thousand process but none, sadly, tagged thousand explained. So what is it about? Does it have to be about anything? Can it not simply be the sum of its parts? I have mixed feelings on this. By all means expect your readers to bring something of themselves to the work but how much is fair trade? Five percent? Ten? Towards the end of Thousand meaning is discussed and it’s worth sharing a bit of that:

         

Thousand: Nine Hundred Eighty-Eight

Understanding is overrated. Have you ever watched a foreign film without subtitles? Or read a modern poem? If it really doesn’t matter whether you understand you can appreciate other things. The music in language, say. Birds sing in the trees and we’re told they do it to attract a mate. Is that everything? It’s a lot, sure; everybody knows that who doesn’t have a date for Saturday night. But singing’s probably a pleasure for the singer, too. Maybe birds are sending sophisticated messages, messages we have yet to decode. I’m not saying we shouldn’t bother seeking meaning. Except sometimes.

         Thousand: Nine Hundred Eighty-Nine

Indeed, sometimes you need to let go the frenzied grasping after meaning. Take pleasure in mystery. Live in it undispelled. Ignorance as sensuous experience.

He acknowledges that we’re all “meaning-making animal(s)” and it’s hard “taking your hand off the wheel of the relentless inner drive and shedding the fear that meaninglessness will hurt you.” He’s right. I found it immensely hard.

         Thousand: Nine Hundred Ninety-Two

A dream doesn’t mean what it presents as nonsense. It really means really profound shit. There’s a good reason you dreamed that. Right? Well, that’s your mind. Working away. Coming up with gods and symbols and finding faces in burnt tortillas. That’s your mind.

I said at the start this is not a book for everybody and I stand by that because not everyone—and I include myself at the head of that list—can unlearn how to read the way they’ve been reading for the past, in my case, fifty-five years. It’s like the first time you heard microtonal music. It just sounds wrong. Like a piano badly in need of tuning. And yet an out-of-tune piano has a flavour that isn’t unpalatable. It can even be comforting especially if you grew up with a piano in a house that never, or hardly ever, got tuned. This book plinky plonks along quite merrily and doesn’t take itself too seriously. As Glenn himself concedes:

As a story it’s probably more frustrating than rewarding. I’ve enjoyed writers like John Yau and Clark Coolidge who write things that seem to be fiction sometimes, but the words refuse loyalty to any single narrative. The reading is fun for the sounds and the surprises and the wit rather than the what-happened-next of a plot. – thousand in thirds

Meaning, of course, doesn’t only indicate a level of understanding but also a degree of appreciation, an emotional as opposed to an intellectual, connection. This I do have. Reading Thousand was something I went through, something I experienced and although I’ve already forgotten much of the specifics the overall experience will stay with me. That means something. You cannot read this book and not be affected. You might not understand it or be able to grasp the bigger picture but that shouldn’t be regarded as a loss. When Beckett was overseeing Jessica Tandy’s interpretation of Mouth in Not I he told her he hoped the piece would work “on the nerves of the audience, not it’s intellect.” Thousand has a similar logorrhoeal feel to it. Although it was written in bite-sized chunks I think it was a mistake to publish it with breaks. It’s a single paragraph, a wall of words that ideally, to my mind, should be read in a single sitting although who would have the stamina for that I’ve no idea.

At time of writing the book is free to download at Smashwords and I would encourage you to give it a go and not be like I was the first time I started this and quit after five hundred words. Gird up your loins, grit your teeth, pee before you sit down to start and don’t even think about reading it if there’s background music on or the kids are still awake and acting up. 

“Autobiography of a Book” at fresh.ink

Three chapters of “Autobiography of a Book” at fresh.ink:

“in which the book reviews its positions”

“in which the book, awake at last, revisits other readers"

“in which the book asserts a certain capability and exercises it”

The editors describe their mission: 

“We see fresh.ink as the gateway into a whole universe of great literary writing. … [S]tories have been selected from print and online magazines all over the world, [and are] reprinted [at fresh.ink] for your rediscovery. By giving them new life, we hope to help you find new authors to follow and more magazines to explore.”

The chapters originally appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review. 

[fresh.ink appears to have ceased publication and is offline. -- 12/22/23 update]

another possible epigraph for “Autobiography of a Book”

“Every book longs to tell its story. From the moment they’re bound, they wait for fingers to open them up.” — Cornelia Funke

This is from The Book No One Ever Read, a children’s picture book. 

I've posted three other possible epigraphs on my Dare I Read blog:

#1 possible epigraph

#2 another possible epigraph

#3 possible epigraph for Autobiography of a Book

"Yes" in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal

“Yes” appears in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, v. 36 n. 1, 2021

“It Is Better to Be Angry” in Chronogram

“It Is Better to Be Angry” appears in the poetry section of the February, 2021 issue of Chronogram. 

“It Is Better to Be Angry” is the sixth poem on the page, so click on the "poetry section" hot link above and scroll down. 

Chronogram is a lifestyle magazine of the Hudson River Valley, distributed free in its target area. If, like me, you live beyond that area, you can subscribe or buy copies at $5 a pop. 

“Him with Wings” at Soul-Lit

“Him with Wings” appears in the Winter 2021 issue

of Soul-Lit: a journal of spiritual poetry

haiku in bottle rockets #44

bottle rockets #44, 2021