Wednesday, January 18, 2006
1/18
Though today was without question my most productive yet, I have not much to report. Some appropriate correlation there, I’m sure. With few distractions presented (besides being up with Aleatory, who had a fever, for an hour in the middle of the night), I was able to get through all but the final chapter and the bibliography in terms of manuscript prep. There’s a small list of sections that have to be further reviewed, and I am awaiting the publisher’s evaluation about the diagrams, but otherwise all is A-OK. I am getting the hang of all of the formatting foibles and things are going quite smoothly. So I should be able to begin to focus on other endeavors before long.
The only extracurricular activity I engaged with at all was helping Richard Loranger submit his recently published We Press title to a several poetry contests back in the states (Paterson, Devil’s Kitchen, Binghamton). We Press is the poetic arts group that I co-founded with Ted Farrell in 1986, and over the years we’ve published Richard’s work in magazines, on CD, chapbooks, and video. Poems for Teeth, a hefty and potent book of poems (one for each tooth in Richard’s mouth), was a project we worked on for a couple of years that finally saw the light of day last fall. It is a tremendous book that, for some odd reason, has thus far received absolutely no critical attention in print (you can find a few mentions in other blogs if you look hard enough, and Bob Holman did list it as being one of the top 10 poetry books of 2005 on his WWW site). Though we tried to play by all of the rules for a change, such as sending out advance copies to industry reviewers (like Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal) months before the book was publicly available, and also sent out at least three dozen review copies to other poetry/media outlets, not a single word of response has been uttered in print. I wouldn’t be so dismayed by this if it was an average book, but it is far from that. To share my subjective view on the title, here’s what I wrote as a description of the book in the press release: “In addition to extraordinary poems, the book contains calligraphic representations of each poem prepared by the author and visual artist Eric Waldemar; it also contains musical scores and notations for songs within the poems. A diagram that charts the identity of each tooth appears at the outset, so that the book functions hypertextually as well. The volume, while lacking a CD-ROM, is nonetheless what poetry should be: a multimedia tour de force.” Not that sales of the book are lagging, mind you—Loranger is an awesome performer who always captivates an audience, who then want to take the words home with them—that’s not what this digression is about; we’re actually already making money on the book (how many small press titles can boast that?). I just wonder why no reviews? Are potential reviewers too busy writing poems? I think not, as journals seem to keep printing reviews. Perhaps they are confused about what to say about such an onslaught of language (which sometimes gets really weird)? Tell me, what does it take to get reviewed these days? How about a public plea: if anyone who reads this is interested in seeing the book and would consider writing a review, please drop me a line and I’ll get a copy to you. ‘Nuff said…
Tomorrow a.m. will sit in on the MMU FCM portfolio reviews, which should be interesting, then will continue plowing through the project at hand. Interesting conversation tonight with Amy, as we plot how I spend my time intellectually/artistically integrating here.
I’ll have more to say anon, for sure. Ciao, CF
Though today was without question my most productive yet, I have not much to report. Some appropriate correlation there, I’m sure. With few distractions presented (besides being up with Aleatory, who had a fever, for an hour in the middle of the night), I was able to get through all but the final chapter and the bibliography in terms of manuscript prep. There’s a small list of sections that have to be further reviewed, and I am awaiting the publisher’s evaluation about the diagrams, but otherwise all is A-OK. I am getting the hang of all of the formatting foibles and things are going quite smoothly. So I should be able to begin to focus on other endeavors before long.
The only extracurricular activity I engaged with at all was helping Richard Loranger submit his recently published We Press title to a several poetry contests back in the states (Paterson, Devil’s Kitchen, Binghamton). We Press is the poetic arts group that I co-founded with Ted Farrell in 1986, and over the years we’ve published Richard’s work in magazines, on CD, chapbooks, and video. Poems for Teeth, a hefty and potent book of poems (one for each tooth in Richard’s mouth), was a project we worked on for a couple of years that finally saw the light of day last fall. It is a tremendous book that, for some odd reason, has thus far received absolutely no critical attention in print (you can find a few mentions in other blogs if you look hard enough, and Bob Holman did list it as being one of the top 10 poetry books of 2005 on his WWW site). Though we tried to play by all of the rules for a change, such as sending out advance copies to industry reviewers (like Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal) months before the book was publicly available, and also sent out at least three dozen review copies to other poetry/media outlets, not a single word of response has been uttered in print. I wouldn’t be so dismayed by this if it was an average book, but it is far from that. To share my subjective view on the title, here’s what I wrote as a description of the book in the press release: “In addition to extraordinary poems, the book contains calligraphic representations of each poem prepared by the author and visual artist Eric Waldemar; it also contains musical scores and notations for songs within the poems. A diagram that charts the identity of each tooth appears at the outset, so that the book functions hypertextually as well. The volume, while lacking a CD-ROM, is nonetheless what poetry should be: a multimedia tour de force.” Not that sales of the book are lagging, mind you—Loranger is an awesome performer who always captivates an audience, who then want to take the words home with them—that’s not what this digression is about; we’re actually already making money on the book (how many small press titles can boast that?). I just wonder why no reviews? Are potential reviewers too busy writing poems? I think not, as journals seem to keep printing reviews. Perhaps they are confused about what to say about such an onslaught of language (which sometimes gets really weird)? Tell me, what does it take to get reviewed these days? How about a public plea: if anyone who reads this is interested in seeing the book and would consider writing a review, please drop me a line and I’ll get a copy to you. ‘Nuff said…
Tomorrow a.m. will sit in on the MMU FCM portfolio reviews, which should be interesting, then will continue plowing through the project at hand. Interesting conversation tonight with Amy, as we plot how I spend my time intellectually/artistically integrating here.
I’ll have more to say anon, for sure. Ciao, CF
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:40 AM 
