Over the next few months, I'm going to post some work from my first book of poetry, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Predicting, from here on out, to stave off carpal tunnel). Since the book came out, I have received some intelligent questions (and a bunch of wtf's) and I thought this would be a good way for me to address these questions (the intelligent ones and the wtf's), while also investigating for myself where the work's been and where it might want to head to next. In this post, I'll make a few general comments about the book and provide a pair of "characteristic" poems. In future posts, I plan to provide more detailed anlysis of the poems or remarks on what I had in mind when I made a given piece.
Predicting was published by Coteau Books in 2006, with George Elliot Clarke having served as the editor. A majority of the poems were written after 2002, though a few come from way back in 1999. The book is divided into two sections, "Views from the Gallery of Recent Lives" and "For as Long as Their Looking Lasts." The poems in "Views" essentially look at how the lyric voice is deployed through different contemporary forms and peoples and discourses as a way of seeing and hearing the shapes the lyric voice's absences take. "Looking Lasts" does the same, but in a more directly elegaic mode.
Though "Metro" (from "Views") and "AB" (from "Looking Lasts") do not as obviously characterize their respective sections, they do demonstrate how received poetic forms are encountered by received (popular) cultural forms, in this case the movie trailer and the MAD Fold-in.
Here's "Metro" (in two pages):
And here's "AB" (pre- and post-fold):
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