Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Small Press Memories

A Table Fable
[plagiarized/altered from the imdb capsule plot summary for Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories"]

A poet/publisher named Randy Fishman is a man who simply doesn't want to make goofball poems and chapbooks anymore, and it seems these lyric salads and sandwiches are all that society wants from him. He's unhappy at the moment because his first "serial" poem isn't well received by the public. He decides to stay a weekend at an apartment in Brooklyn to reflect upon his life, body of work, and relationships of the past while a festival showcasing his poems is occurring. Meanwhile, he encounters groups of his fans who ask him to publish their chapbooks, compliment him on his "youtube funnies", his style of recitation, and he encounters a beautiful woman named Darlin', with whom he falls in love.


Sherwood Anderson
from Winesburg, Ohio

"Sophistication"

...George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into his manhood and new thoughts had been coming into mind. All that day, amid the jam of people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him...


Fragment of a Poem composed at the Small Press Book Fair
(to be jointly published in an edition of 5 by presenting artists: a paper maker, a book arts designer, an illustrator/lithographer and a poet)


Jesus glass
broken with rock
at the same place wounded
by a Roman spear
while cameras flash


and salmon swim in bottle-shaped pools
cut into old encyclopediae

Smiles may be
glad hands or may be
happy thoughts
what may unfold what find:

the scale
on which is weighed some

such unmeasurable
is such as this
such that
ah

AH!

*.*

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