Busy week. Well, more productive than busy. Finally ticked off more check marks from the to do list.
Set up the Smashwords account and finished formatting Urban Legends of the Future. Which is now uploaded and available for more than just Kindle at last. Following the Smashwords style guide was an experience that was easy in execution, but demoralizing to my "artistic spirit". Which really means that I had to wreck my original formatting and press enter and backspace a lot. At least it worked out for the better.
Also finished formatting and uploading my second book. A collection of my poetry from 2000-2015 entitled Pretty Words for Hateful Bastards. Official release date is 8/4/2015 in print and eBook. It's currently available for pre-order here.
Since this is my page, and I guess there's no better to talk about my own inner workings with candor than here, I'm going to talk poetry.
My first introduction to poetry was thankfully through Shel Silverstein. Since the internet didn't exist in the public forum when I was a child, and my parents were rockers, not hippies, I missed out on his work writing hilarious drugged up songs. But my mom's favorite book was The Giving Tree, so she shared with me such greats as Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic when I was a wee lad. The mixture of artwork with looping, whirling, and topsy-turvy words sparked my young imagination about how language could effect people. Reading about how Captain Hook has to be careful shaking hands and should never pick his nose made me think about things in a brand new light besides the ways they're presented to me.
As I got older, the first poetry book I bought from a school book fair catalog was a collection of Edgar Allan Poe poems. Having recently seen The Simpson's first Treehouse of Horror with their take on The Raven, I wanted more macabre readings at the tender age of eight. I didn't really quite understand most of the meanings behind the works, but I kept reading and rereading that work and attempted my own poetry.
Learning poetry in school was a different experience that would have turned me off for life had I not bothered to read ahead in my English book. In seventh grade, we had a brief poetry section where my teacher drilled in the essentials of rhyme and meter, and little else. We wrote sonnets in the style of Shakespeare, rhyme schemes till AABBCCDD meant nothing, and counted out iambic meters tri, tetra, and penta. One day, wondering whatever happened to the poetics of Poe (decried by my teacher for being too dark and morbid) I thumbed to a poem that fell across the page in such an unconventional manner from the rigid lines and rhymes of everything that came before.
in Just by e.e. cummings.
Everything was chopped up, barely punctuated or capitalized, and the imagery was so bizarre and rushed for a poem about spring. After learning all of this boring ass dead white guy shit, there was something written within the same century I was living in. It was fresh, and jarring, and I kept it to myself for the time being. I actually took my book home instead of leaving it in my middle school locker and poured over that cummings poem. I read everything proceeding it, and none of that has stuck in my memory. In class the next day as we were wrapping up the poetry unit, I could tell my teacher was going to blow right past this gem. So I raised my hand to ask about it, and to my surprise, she actually talked about the beat movement. The little bread crumbs that she dropped were enough for me to seek out the rest of the canon and keep my interest in poetry.
Beat poetry, reading song lyrics in album liner notes, my main men Shel & Edgar, and a growing appreciation for the romantics, influenced and inspired me as I transitioned into bad teenage poetry. Thankfully, scholastic leanings only gave me more fuel for the engine. The lesson I learned from e.e. about reading ahead paid off. For one reason or another, there was always some oddball poem in each of my American English textbooks. I found every one I could. While everyone was reading along about Robert Frost's road not taken (which the irony of teaching that en mass seemed to be lost on the rest of my classmates), I was reading Brautigan's All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (which caught my eye all thanks to Machines of Loving Grace's appearance on The Crow soundtrack).
This history has been chewed, swallowed and puked back out onto the pages of Pretty Words for Hateful Bastards. My style comes off as formless and amateur, but it's deliberate. I sure hope it comes across as such. Or maybe I just suck at everything and this is all just bullshit and people will see it for what it is. Or maybe I'm just overthinking again. I do that a lot.
Deuces,
-CBB
No comments:
Post a Comment