Last night, terrible storms with almost constant lightning. I woke up to check that it wasn't raining in and fell promptly back to sleep. It's still sticky and a bit humid this morning though. Projects for this weekend include a serious furniture moving, floor polishing, dust bunny vanquishing cleaning, and hopefully some work on my newest collage project. They're going to be these little peep-show like boxes with holes that have various collages inside of them.
I spent yesterday messing with the unhappiness of objects, the chapbook, and think I have a cover design I can live with. It'll be on just be on white cardstock, nothing fancy, but it's certainly much more colorful than my others. I also ordered the gray paper for errata (due out in January) while I was thinking of it from Paper Source. I had purchased some blue from Office Max a couple months ago, but it's shade reminds me a bit too much of college blue books, which would itself be a cool idea for a cover, but not for this particular project. This is a deep gray called gravel, which should look good with the corset drawing I'm using. When I initially concieved the cover, it was this fancy corset blinding that you had to unlace to read the poem. Not exactly practical for mass production. I had enough problems sewing just a few copies of the new dgp chap. (The rest of the first batch, I slipped some cash to my sister and she did them--and will likely do the other 100 copies the author has ordered).
I've been rather loosely following the New Sincerity discussions, and I can understand what it's all about. I've always noticed that certain poetry, particularly what would be termed "post-avant" is usually rife with irony, or a wink-wink nudge sort of humor, lots of wordplay for it's own sake. All of which would be fine except alot of it doesn't GO anywhere. Isn't ABOUT anything. While some of it's enjoyable, some of it just doesn't interest me. I have an MFA classmate who writes poems using all three of the above, and while he's really good at this, I can never find anything to SAY about them, and not one can I really distinguish from the others, or remember anything that grabbed me. I also, on a a somewhat related bent, had another clasmate who wrote these lovely rich, well-crafted, meaningful poems the first half of the semester, and wound up switching over to making concrete poems in the shape of boats and kites, using wordplay and such, because they seemed to please the other folks in the workshop more, and were less permeable to criticism. I wanted to scream at her to stop and give me something I wanted to read. I understand her need to stretch her artistic boundaries, but I just didn't want to have to READ them when she'd been writing such great stuff initially. I also happen to think that this is what they're saying New Sincerity is about...about a new trend among more post-avants poets (I hate these labels, but I also hesitate to say "experimental") away from that ironic stance, that masking, moreso than any need to tell the truth per se, or be more honest. This is likely all moot for me, being more of a "School of Quietude" poet but with post-avant tastes and sensibilities (which is actually more of a sliding scale than two separate camps, Billy Collins on one end, LangPo on the other) I determined a long time ago that I can't quite do the irony thing well.
