from The Onion

National Poetry Month Raises Awareness Of Poetry Prevention
April 27, 2005 | Issue 41•17

NEW YORK—This month marks the 10th National Poetry Month, a campaign created in 1996 to raise public awareness of the growing problem of poetry. "We must stop this scourge before more lives are exposed to poetry," said Dr. John Nieman of the American Poetry Prevention Society at a Monday fundraising luncheon. "It doesn't just affect women. Young people, particularly morose high-school and college students, are very susceptible to this terrible affliction. It is imperative that we eradicate poetry now, before more rainy afternoons are lost to it." Nieman said some early signs of poetry infection include increased self-absorption and tea consumption.

Matrix & Emeritus

I was thrilled to see the new Matrix magazine, which has a special section on "Fan Fiction" -- to which I contributed a short story lovingly poking fun at the style & subject matter of the late great Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The story is called "Guy and the Thing From Another World" and is my first fiction publication in a national journal.

I was likewise delighted to discover that my poem "Salvador Dali Lama" was selected for the third Emeritus Press Handbill publication. This is a series published by Dr. McGillivray at the University of Calgary, who hand-set the poem "in traditional lead type" on a hand-press. It's very cool but unfortunately I only have a single copy... he forgot to notify me about the publication previously. But he says he'll be doing some more at some point in the future, and when he does I'll have a bunch to distribute. This puts me in good company... if I am correct, handbill 1 was by Chris Ewart (author of the recent novel Miss Lamp), and handbill 2 was by the effervescent Natalie Zina Walschots.

So there. Pick up Matrix 74 ... it's got a GREAT COVER and it's also got the aforementioned Ms. Walschots's love poems for Dr. Doom, in addition to my story and lots of other fun stuff.

for the poets

i'm at my parent's home in Ontario, visiting, and i was nosing through my boxes of books here... found an interview with Dennis Cooley in an issue of CV2 that i reread, and especially enjoyed the following quote. one of the things i love about Cooley as a poet (and a person) is this enthusiasm and this interest in the potential of poetry, coupled with an insightful awareness of the artificiality of such writing:

"The thing is you can never know what a reader will do with what you write. You try to work 'in' some things, or you are aware of ways in which what you encode might be made available to a reader. You also realize that what you write may be meaningful in ways that may not have occurred to you. But I hope always for readers who will be attentive, generous, willing to discover. I count on those who are patient to possibilities. I hope for readers who know a lot about poetry and who respect it as a developed form of activity. I imagine all poets wish for the same. What poetry never can be, I've come to believe, is a naked expression that speaks from the core of a person to the very centre of another person, or that refers unproblematically to the 'real' world. It can appear to do this, but it is always a mediation and always an artifact. It's an extremely heavy mediation, as a matter of fact. In one of the profound contradictions of our culture, many of us want to believe that what is perhaps the most intensely mediated language act, poetry, somehow speaks transparently and unproblematically to immediate experience. All of us born speaking sonnets, and in English, too. Just as God intended. As Nature speaks." (Cooley, CV2 26.4)