THE NEXT big THING!

My Last Not Very Big Thing Self-Interview

Thank you Andrea Cohen for tagging me.  Check out her self-interview here!

The title of my book is Octaves.  It's actually a pretty small thing! (see photo)

The idea for the book came from writing more than 32 mock-triolets over the course of a summer.

The genre of Octaves is short lyric poetry. 

No human actors could play parts in a movie rendition of Octaves.  There are no parts to play in the book.  But if a movie or a film-strip version of Octaves were to be made, and if it required a voice-over, my spouse would appreciate it very much if Ralph Fiennes, Ryan Gosling, and Michael Fassbender could be convinced to record the poems, each actor taking on one of its three signatures.

Octaves does not lend itself to synopsis.  It can be described, however, as 32 short poems in the same form, each of which is deliberately but obliquely addressed to a vivid bit of language emitted in the 20^th century by a notable person (boxer, artist, writer), but in no case emitted in a poem. 

Here's a sample that was published in The Istanbul Review last year:

       "Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for him a small, bird-sized affection."

                                                —Jorge Luis Borges

       Come spring, I'll build a nest

       Of knotted hair.

       On my bare chest,

       Come spring, I'll build a nest

       That you might rest

       Forever there.

       Come, Spring!  I'll build a nest

       Of naughty hair.

The first draft of the manuscript took about 3 months to write.  If summer vacation had been longer, the book might have come out as 42 poems.  If I were able to write triolets more quickly, Octaves might have become The Octaviad.

Octaves is comparable to any book which collects a substantial number of short works which were made by following the same relatively strict rules.  Books I had in mind when I was making Octaves include: Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines, Cummins’ The Whole Truth, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

I was inspired to write Octaves by my desire to meet the challenge of the triolet to the best of my abilities, such as they are.  I admire strong triolets by Hardy and other writers, and I wanted to imagine that the form could be used to produce a particular kind of coherent book-length project.

Octaves is proudly self-published. Much of the folding, collating, trimming, sewing, and pressing-under-piles-of-heavy-art-books was done at my family dining table by Lisa Lee and Michaela Bosch.

It might pique the reader's interest in Octaves to know that it is a chapbook made with three signatures in a clever format called the  “do-si-do”:  Octaves has a front and a back, but it also has three spines!  (You can order a copy from me via email, twelve dollars postage paid.) 

Look!  A baby picture, taken when Octaves was just a few hours old.

For next Wednesday, I have tagged poets Caitlin Doyle, Eric McHenry, Christina Pugh, John Sparrow and Rory Waterman.  Click on a name when it becomes a LINK (very soon!) and read about some really big things that are on the way!