Hey everyone,
Happy Friday the 13th. I thought today would be a cool day to publish something, so that’s what I’m doing: a new poetic broadside, following my first one back in January. It’s called “Drawing a Clock”. Click here to purchase it.
“Drawing a Clock” did not begin life as a poem. Perhaps it still isn’t one. An alternative term to describe it might be “original found text”. It’s derived, with very slight editing, from a document I maintained for around a year, maybe 18 months, into which I would paste some of the errors I would make while I was writing. Many of these, certainly, are ultimately mundane typos, but my real concern, the reason I started maintaining the document in the first place, was on word-malformations which would surface in the flow of my work which could not, I felt, be the product of a simple slip of the finger, but rather evinced some moment of breakdown or failure of my linguistic faculties. I started keeping track of these failures because they were not something I was accustomed to: obviously, I was never flawless in this regard, no one is, but these errors, ones which required typing entirely wrong sequences of letters, repeating syllables as if I had forgotten where I was in a word – these were not things I remembered having a problem with even a few years earlier, certainly not, at least, with anything like the frequency I did now. In part, I wanted to preserve these errors, these failures because I found them interesting, formally, but more than that it was because they disturbed me, they represented something that I felt was happening to me – and, to be clear, I don’t think I was wrong to feel that way. My brain does not work the same way it did when I was younger. I can feel this quite clearly. The way I’ve chosen to live my life has affected my neurological processes. This is inevitable. “Drawing a Clock” documents a phase in this process, and a phase in my coming to terms with it. I’m tempted to call it a work of autobiography, strange as that sounds for what is, ultimately, a sequence of mangled words. Certainly it is about my neuroses, my paranoias, as much as it is about language in itself. If any of this sounds compelling to you, well, great news: you can buy this text and have it in your home and look at it whenever you want.
“Drawing a Clock” is being offered in an edition of 30, signed and hand-numbered. The price is $7. This is a slight increase from my previous broadside – I’m paying New York City rent now, sorry. Domestic shipping only; if you live elsewhere and really want one, contact me I’ll try to figure something out, but fair warning, it’s probably going to be more trouble than it’s worth. Once again, to purchase, click HERE. Thank you.