Sunday, October 23, 2011

They Hate This

Just finished participating in the Canzine Hollywood Ripoff challenge where 3 contenders - an illustrator, a 'zinester' and a poet (me) had 30 minutes to come up with an image, a zine or a poem based on a movie. The movie, revealed only at the last minute, was Ghostbusters. I'm pretty pleased with what I delivered (though I sweated a bit!). Here it is:


They Hate This

“They hate this,”
he says
fingers tinkling on the keyboard
“but the ladies love it,”
he thinks.
The charm
His charm
as he lays it on thick
heaps it on
like gravy
spilling over the keys
but she’s not buying it
looks at him like he’s a crackpot
Ha!
She’s the one who called
Ghost Busters
She’s the one who called
Peter Venkman
And Peter Venkman delivers
whether its
attention to lonely old ladies
or attention to lonely young ladies
or even middle aged lady crackpots
who call Ghost Busters…

“What’s your name?”
he asks.
“Dana,” she offers reluctantly
“Well Dana. It seems ok in here to me,”
he says
“But a little messy…”
She seems displeased
Good.
That’s how it always starts
but soon
the charm creeps inside
haunts you
gets inside your bones
like ghosts
in the architecture
and at first you think
you want the ghosts out
that you want
Peter Venkman to leave
but the memory lingers
like the dear departed
and soon enough
who ya gonna call
to haunt you?
to possess you in your body
until you’re writhing in bed
longing for the keymaster
hovering five feet above
your passion
in feverish desire
until who you gonna call?
You’ll call this ghost buster
to bust your ghosts
to make your eggs pop
right out of the carton
and fry on the tabletop
until you don’t know
what’s come over you
until you scream out in lust:
“There is no Dana!
Only Zool!”

“Oh yes,”
he says
fingers tinkling on the piano
“They hate this.”
“But,” he thinks
“The ladies
love it.”

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Some Advice on Time Travel

Wow, I think it's been nearly 3 years since I've bothered to submit and actually got a piece published in a place other than my own cancerously growing hoard of lit sites. This time its in my old favourite Feathertale. I'm really proud of this poem: Some Advice on Time Travel (an excerpt from Philip Roder's Let's Go to the Future, fourth edition, 2095)

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Zues and the Sales stats

Just got the stats: 150 copies of Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea SOLD! Considering that selling 50 copies of a poetry book is pretty impressive, and that my initial (and ambitious) goal was to move 100, I'd say (ignoring all those 2-star reviews I keep getting over at Goodreads) Zues and the Giant Iced Tea is an ALARMING success!

On top of that, I may actually end up having a launch (albeit 6 months late...) in the fall sometime here in Toronto. I'll keep you up to date on that!

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Poetaster trivia!

Made some trivia for Poetaster on Goodreads. Was fun to go through an old book. Poetaster is quite a bit darker and raw than Zeus - kind of a shock to flip between the two.

Anyway, have a go at some poetry trivia! (Any poets out there interested in building a pub-quiz around poetry?)

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Encounters with the Underground - a tribute to Steve Kostecke

It is with great shock and much sadness that I learned yesterday that good friend, fellow indie writer and founding member of the Underground Literary Alliance Steve Kostecke recently passed away.

Steve was instrumental in my own involvement in the underground writing scene and had the distinction (among many more notable distinctions) of being the only indie writer and ULA member I've actually met in person.

When I started Red Fez back in 2002 it was a project born out of total isolation from any sort of writing community (particularly the insular academic/lit journal community) and frustration with the lottery-like publishing process of the status quo. Red Fez, and my writing, floundered for a few years until I came across a lovely little writeup in Broken Pencil on Slush Pile, the Underground Literary Alliance's zine. It was an awakening to the fact that I was not alone in my frustration with the system, and that there were others out there acting against it and being far more effective at it! Slush Pile, amazingly edited and assembled in Asia and then shipped back to the US to be printed, not only published a sort of raw, gripping writing I had never experienced before, but articulated a lot of what I had been unable to put into words. I wrote an email to the zine publisher about my efforts with Red Fez, asking to learn more about this ULA organization. Steve Kostecke wrote back.

A lot of Steve's personality was constructed in my mind, as with most online relationships, from emails. I never could quite get a grip on who he was. His writing was raw and both bashedly and unabashedly macho. He was, somehow, the strong, cocky, unrooted silent type, operating a literary revolution in North America from while teaching English across Asia. Steve, as Karl Wenclas puts it in his memory, had a zen-buddhist personality, straightforward, approachable, honest, unpretentious....combined with the cocky smarts of a fly-boy.

Steve lured me in to the ULA, first as a Canadian correspondent, and then as a full fledged member. In my opinion he was probably the group's strongest writer (among strong writers) - a sort of modern day Hemmingway, but better, in my opinion. (Seoul in Slices is a great example.) There was an elegant, unwashed  honesty to it - Steve shared everything as it was, as he felt it and didn't feel the need to explain it. His work was documentary like: "travel writing", as Jeff Potter put it in his tribute over at Out Your Backdoor (who published Steve's novel, Wasted Angels), which is accurate, but Steve's writing far too little credit. Karl Wenclas, another co-founder of the group, states that Steve was the ULA member he least expected to leave this early because of his cool-headed nature. I'd add that his openness and non-judgmental attitude also made him seem like the member least likely to have helped found the outrageous activist group. Steve would associate with almost anybody (a habit that is the genesis of some of his creepier tales of the far-east) and perhaps what frustrated him most about the lit scene was its inability to do the same for indie-writers, it decision to pinch off the water supply and mire itself in a snake-eat-snake's-tail circle of handouts, backscratching and phoney relationships.

Steve was a huge reason why the group was founded and why it lasted as long as it did. Even after the group exploded in the end, spewing out a number of battle hardened writers and spawning groups like the Guild of Outsider Writers and a much stronger Red Fez, Steve declined invitations to join new ventures, believing in the base tenets of the ULA and feeling they were still right. Long after our group relationship had ended I would get updates from him on a number of great back-boiler projects he had going, ready to launch as soon as the ULA got over its squabbling. Pat Simonelli described Steve as the mother of the group and perhaps was too patient with its unruly roost in the end. Steve had the great ideas, the great writing, the smarts...but he wasn't going to bother wrestling anyone to the ground to make them listen. It was a strength and a weakness and it was all Steve.

In the Summer of 2005 I traveled to Japan to meet some friends and had the opportunity to meet with Steve and stay with him a few days in Tokyo. I had always been a bit intimidated by Steve I suppose. His writing was so worldly and macho, but countenanced with that confident, motherly appeal. I spent about three days with Steve and his personality suddenly made so much sense when I met him in person. If you haven't met him, I can't describe it, and it's too late to get a chance to do it now. But he became whole for me in that moment and I was able to finally conclude (there were some doubts!) that Steve was a really amazing guy with a natural love for writing and human expression, particularly in literary form. The world had a lot to learn from Steve, but as the world is, you know, it wasn't really ready to listen. And like Steve was with his writing, he wasn't going to be bothered to smack it around a little to make it pay attention. It was and is the world's loss for it, and a loss for those of us who knew him.

I fell more out of contact with Steve after that, and hadn't heard from him in the last year or two, though I thought of him often, wondering which bar he was sitting at in Japan, or which new girlfriend he was bunking with these days, and always meant to get back in contact with him once things slowed down for me. So it was with a lot of shock and sadness to learn that his travels had ended. But if you weren't out there asking, Steve wasn't going to stand up and slap you in the face with it.

Steve left behind a lot of great work, great ideas, and fond memories. The world lost a great writer and literary thinker this year and doesn't even know it.Rest in Peace, Steve Kostecke. I look forward to hearing about your wild adventures beyond the grave someday.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea trivia questions!

Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea: PoetryHey...this is cool. I can make trivia questions about mine, or other people's, books! Now that's promotion I can get behind!

Try out the ones I made for Zeus! Never before have questions been so trivial! Can you get 100%? Can you get 5%?

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Youch!

Wow, I never realized how good Goodreads is for stalking your fans! Too bad I found this out by getting my first Goodreads rating for Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea: 2 out of 5 stars! Ouch!

So I did some digging and see that this particular reader has set this book on the quality shelf among such peers as Wrestling Superstars II, I Was for Sale: Confessions of a Bondage Model and The Satanic Rituals: Companion to the "Satanic Bible". Zeus was rated lower, in this person's opinion, than Bomb Queen Volume 3: The Good, The Bad And The Lovely and Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection. Even poetry books by Jewel and Billy Corgan fared better than mine!

Oh well. At least it's nice to hear what people think! The reader is obviously a wrestling fan - I wonder if The Muscle pissed them off?

Onwards and upwards (or downwards!)