"The Next Big Thing": An Interview, Via Invitation

For "The Next Big Thing". . . 

Or, "Perpetual Motion"

Intro

The poet and writer Alice B. Fogel—whose poems I have adored, whose beginnings and continuings include theatrical costuming and reclaimed materials, whose manuscript “Be That Empty:  Apologia for Air” brought tears and confirmation in a corner by the fire, who received the discerning praise of two past U.S. Poets Laureate, Robert Hass and Charles Simic—invited me to answer these questions for “The Next Big Thing.”  The Next Big Thing, as far as I think anyone knows, is an online word-of-mouth more or less grassroots phenomenon profiling writers, artists, and specific projects.  Having seen a couple of these, I said yes.  I'll use this "Che"/hybrid blog site to release the interview (and because this blog is linked to my site, petermoney.com).  Today is my day to answer The Next Big Thing questions, and it’s been a long while since I climbed out of the sort of treefort of my blogsphere, temporarily, to live a year while gathering material—material that brings me to you now.  To live a year while gathering material?  I know:  sounds like cover (perhaps I’ll describe the “something else” below).

Preface to the Interview

Off the bat:  Thanks, Alice.  And because The Next Big Thing also resides in the “Gift Economy” (thank you, Lewis Hyde; thank you, Bel Esprit) that flows against a cultural grain that values other “things,” I’m glad to help keep this going.  I will be inviting David Oliveira, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas and others to post their interviews.  Please check out Alice’s, and others’, interviews.  Alice’s may be found here:  www.alicebfogel.com

By way of opening thoughts:  I think of Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams; I think of Cid Corman and “the first improvised recorded poems” and his radio show in Boston. . . and his “ice cream and sushi” shops and brother-in-law’s handbound Japanese books; I think of Theodore Enslin studying with Nadia Boulanger and a dedication that lasted a lifetime, with whole lengths of wall in a Berkeley book warehouse devoted to books he published; I remember the vivid Jack Hirschman marching down the cavern of financial district streets. . . the poet shouting for labor’s sake; I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s subjects, her scanning the National Geographic for clues; I consider Adrienne Rich’s & June Jordan’s & Grace Paley’s & Joan Larkin’s convictions—much of them achieved relatively quietly; and I think about certain images (the bombed out library in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, or Robert Frank’s images from Nova Scotia, or the juxtaposition between the push-pull of fashion and status in The New York Times Style Magazine and news headlines:  a sort of “Four Dead in Ohio”—each day, featuring Mali, Niger, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Main Street, agriculture, borders, walls, and so on); I think about William Bronk and George Oppen:  poets whose work made a qualitative impact on me and I wonder if their books will survive the passages of taste, trend, time, testimony, temperament.

So, The Next Big Thing Q&A

Here we go:

The Next Big Thing:  What is your working title of your book?

I’ve had a few working titles.  For a long time it was “Yearn” but Yearning got restless after several submissions and I moved forward with the present greatly revised version of that “Yearn” called “American Drone” (at various times:  “An American Drone”, “drone poems”, “Am. Dro.”, and “Drone”).  “American Drone” has three sections with three equally significant titles:  “American Drone”, “To day --- Minutes only”, and “This Bridge Will Not Burn”.  I think at one point the whole manuscript was called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”—because this is what I feel about all of our stories, collectively.

TNBT:  Where did the idea come from for the book?

In 2002 I began corresponding with Saadi Youssef and around this time my thinking about prose and poetry changed, almost as if I found a new way to keep warm—new material or the notion of layers, or groups of words as nobs.  To go back:  In 1987 I read Lawrence Durrell’s novel Justine 
and felt affinity with what I know to be a painterly-ness, a lush slow rush of language like elaborate and un-/anticipated dressing or undressing, ripe fruit, the surprise meeting of attracted strangers.

I have always “moved around” in language (maybe this was a gift of the theater, where we find characters speak in many accents, many rhythms, and melody that is found in situations).  As I’ve said elsewhere, Marsden Hartley did this in painting.  So did Picasso, obviously.  So did William Carlos Williams.  In the late 60s and early 1970s I was aware of the nightly news, in black and white.  The themes of news—as the Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying, I heard the other day—are the things that shock us.  News, per se, is not the lovely, not the satisfying, but the dissatisfying and ugly precisely because the news goes up like a red flag, a warning.  The fact that fewer citizens of our world seem to receive the news in a technically rich and instantaneous time is both distressing and a measure of recovering balance.  For centuries people absorbed other people’s realities from word-of-mouth and as information eventually made it to them.  Shocking news was dealt with community by community, one community at a time.  I tend to absorb a lot of sensory reality.  Poets and writers tend to, or else I imagine we’d struggle with content to the point of ultimate frustration.  This is my job, my lot, my being, I am comfortable to admit.  The “drone” of our culture(s) has been becoming increasingly dense and louder for decades (if not centuries).  I realized I happen to be in the middle of this apex of drone (I hope it’s an apex).  “Constant droning”—it’s the opposite of and the same as—both—that song “Constant Craving”.  Socially and inter-/nationally we’re “looking for something” amid the rush and crush of too much to possibly take in in meditative or considered moments.  (This is the nature of our life online or connected to our inter-phone-pods.)

I associate “drone” with barely heard or ambient sound, or with the nightmare we use our pillows to try to drown-out, with the general accumulation of sound in our daily lives now, and in the buzz & blur of what we must understand or dismiss.

A drone is also musical, though.  This we know from the didgeridoo, from Tibetan horns and chanting monks, from the moans of birth and conception.  But I’m so far refraining from the other obvious reference:  we live in a time of drone aircraft and the idea of “detachment” this form of surveillance or warfare “gives” us is both intriguing and upsetting.  The “drone” felt like content for this particular time in my life, maybe at the apex of living, at which point the “drones” are ever-present and either have full bearing on our lives or no bearing on how we live—but what it represents is a capacity, a capacity we don’t have to absorb all the necessary sensory information to synthesize our response to our daily and intimate understandings of continuous life on earth.  I’ve been composing written “drone” pieces for a few years now and “American Drone” collects a healthy supply of them along with new and select work to this point in my career.  The fact of the “drone poems’” presence creates the starting point (mid-point, really) of an arc to which the other two sections of the manuscript mediate and provide textual relief.

Poetry can provide textual relief within culture.  We use the senses to arrive in this place.  And a poem is like a pod that can travel anywhere, across borders, as well.  Here's our "infinite capacity"(Tillie Olsen* on Kafka, Rilke), a "bridge that will not burn."

TNBT:  What genre does your book fall under?

The book will be “poetry” but let’s not let this label limit it.  Much of the book will be approachable by exclusive readers of prose, by those interested in plays and film, and even by those who scan and skim through topical magazines.
  In some ways it is as "non-fictive" as where my mind and mood and measure goes when I re-read Tillie Olsen's *Silences ("This book is about such silences." --Andre Gide).

TNBT:  Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

If this question were posed about my novella, Che., I’d have a few answers.  Mali? Fenton? Sandy? Uncle?  So far, I have to leave this to the filmmakers (joy be bestowed!).  But I’d have a few ideas (may they get in touch!).  In “Drone” there are many “characters”—but there is certainly the narrative voice of a Ginsberg-like newscaster, an Eliot-like statesman; there’s “Peter” and there’s “Saadi” in the second section, “To day --- Minutes only”; and there are the many different “voices” within the poems in the final more slimmed down lyrical section called “This Bridge Will Not Burn”.


TNBT:  What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It’s hard—if not unheard of—to describe a poetry-based book in a single sentence.  In a single phrase, “American Drone” covers “[personal and cultural] reaction, response, synthesis [to daily and international events]” (these were Allen Ginsberg’s terms, through Tungpa:  reaction, response, synthesis).  But let me add:  It’s now through the density of our daily living (and gadgets) we arrive at what matters (an image, lyric, song, dance, line, skin, scent, language, landscape, meaning).  Yet through dialog we uncover what’s common among us—and ultimately we discover luminosity and intimacy within the synthesis of our daily responses (consciousness, yes?).
  You could also say the manuscript is:  “one long sound shared.”  From shout to dialog to whisper.

Joan Larkin published a book called Long Sound.  A book can do this.  Poetry infused in community consciousness has the effect of one long sound.

TNBT:  Will your book represented by an agency? Will your book be published soon?

Books like mine are different.  Maybe an agency will represent “American Drone” eventually but this would suggest we are farsighted enough.  But “American Drone” will be published soon.  No question.  It has to be, and I’m ready for it.
  Individual poems appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg, on the CD Blue Square (PAX Recordings), and in several other places over time.  The third track on the CD has a place in American Drone (from the middle section, "To day --- Minutes only", the "dialog"/"response" part of the book's arc toward synthesis:  "Snow, Saadi, nothing but snow"):  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/petermoney

TNBT:  How long did it take you to write your manuscript?


As with most things, the answer is “years.”  The next best answer we hear (and it’s always correct) is “all my life.”  The nuts and bolts of this one have been solid for three years.  It’s now a matter of finding the boldest of publishers to bring it out.

TNBT:  What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Writers (and teachers, librarians, parents, friends) have to teach each other how to read again!  (Or: How to read today's creative forms).  Culturally, we flip from genre to genre, mode to mode, in music, television, film scenes, conversation, txt messages, Facebook posts, etc. I listened to a lot of Rap while I wrote "American Drone"--and I enjoy "the syncopated" mind (or "mind jumps") that thread through narratives, and vary.

We have not, however, brought the reader along fully.

To answer the question, though, if I had to compare I’d say “American Drone” is my HOWL and Other Poems, my Cinnamon Peeler (by David Ondaatje); to an extent it’s my Capitalism (by Campbell McGrath) and to an extent, believe it or not, it’s actually my Mr. Palomar (Italo Calvino); and it is, a little bit, like my Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman), or my American Grain and Kora In Hell and Paterson together in shorter form (all by William Carlos Williams);—if I may make these comparisons, which the question uncomfortably solicits.
  These are books that assemble a distinct arc of content, in which form and content work with changing ebb and flow of voice and subjects.  HOWL emerges in what becomes an almost breathless striving to witness and yet by the end of the book we are all down to the palms, down to the measured, mindful, synthesized "The weight of the world/ is love". . . back to the intimate "yes, yes/ that's what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/I always wanted,/  to return/ to the body/ where I was born."  Allen Ginsberg ends his sustained long intense mindful witness in the eased-down fuller relaxed breathing of "This is the flower of the World."  And this is what I mean:  out of an intensity of experience, a tension of expressions and mis-/understandings, we may once again take the fuller breaths and be enlivened at a palm's length, or closer.  Books do this.  Meditation does this.  Poetry will do this.  Crisis resolved brings a community to this point.  Progress requires the synthesis. . . for we cannot all sustain the highest levels of tensions or shouting without dialog and personal resolution.  The books I mention above could be models for such a description.  To me, they are powerful.

TNBT:  Who or what inspired you to write this book?

“Get away from the hang-ups that destroy the mind” (a quotation from Dr.Dog) is one of the epigraphs to preface “American Drone”—and Sharon Van Etten’s line:  “You were high when I was doomed” (from her song “Love More” [See link on "Che the novella Facebook" page or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq8FGeQ9OTQ]); “I am I said, to noone there” is another refrain from a Neil Diamond song, from my childhood.  , that encouraged impetus for writing “American Drone”.  And, other than what I said earlier, you could say:  a life-time ongoing interest in objects, sensory and sensual reality, perspective and a sense of justice.  You could also say:  “the big picture,” what’s beyond fog, the daily news, hope, specificity, human contact, Saadi Youssef, Sinan Antoon, Oberlin, India, Ireland, Egypt, Syria, my trip to Cuba and on and on and on.   Robert Frank’s and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs have been, for some decades, influencing how I look at things I cannot reach.  Likewise is the case with various musicians.  I know there was a song by the Shins that sent me in this direction.   I’m just trying to picture for myself and breathe through, event to event, and get to some lasting joy.  There’s definitely struggle in the process if you read “American Drone”—and struggle is exactly what goes on between our assumptions and our understandings.  It’s probably what we, culturally speaking, need to do more of more often.

Victor Martinez, a wonderful writer I met when I lived in San Francisco, wrote:  “The fist you didn’t throw/ was your word.”  Well, “American Drone” contains my words.

TNBT:  What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

“American Drone” is a kind of “anti-drone” or “drone antidote” too.  There ARE individual lives within the blur and haze of an unseen mass assumption.  There IS a human being at one end of a scope and switch.  There WILL ALWAYS BE rhythm and melody within the assumption of monotones coming from our drones throughout the eons.  “American Drone” is a sort of replacement drone:  Let POETRY be the vehicle.  Let poetry deliver the news by wide angle and telephoto.  Let the drone be on the tongue, for good vibrations (SOMEONE to drive the car, as Williams wanted):  Back to “closer,” let’s reverse the cycle of ignorance at arm’s length and let the drone be the syncopation of the individual experience we may not always want to or have time to see.

But I’ll also answer this question by saying that every book is, in one way, “a modest journey.”  I had liked filmmaker Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (which I had been Freudian-ly calling “Express” [its plot is anything but express. . . but, here you have it:  poetry wades into the detours—and yet poetry “goes expressly” to it also, its subjects, “the luminous” as Allen Ginsberg also said—as well through juxtaposition).  We want the universe “to have us at ‘vivid!’”  At a key departure-point early in Anderson’s film, there’s a song I recently realized shares impetus with my “American Drone”.  Online, there’s a video that illustrates the scope of narratives I find in the song (it’s The Kinks:  “This Time Tomorrow”).  I invite you to listen, before we go on:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMw7eIIUiI&feature=endscreen

Connections, affinity, arise “out of almost nowhere” but they exist all the time.  This morning I heard Adam Cole’s NPR report about the information—the signals—flower petals give off and bees leave and it felt to me related to my “American Drone” work.  Cole interviews Anne Leonard, a bee scientist.  (We all know about “the drone bee”—yes?  Or “the worker drone”?)  Last week it was Natalie Batalha, on a different program, discussing the infinite relativeness (I prefer this over relativity at the moment) that felt salient and correlative to my experience with poetry, and “American Drone” especially.  This morning the connections are with Andrew O’Hagan’s essay “Hope in a Bottle” (subtitled, as far as I see, as “Yes, Please”).

When I watched The Darjeeling Limited for the second time I realized “This Time Tomorrow” was providing interior monolog, commentary (and social commentary), and shared allusions to many of the subjects in “American Drone”.

To my ear, the Kinks put it this way:  “This time tomorrow, where will I be?/On a spaceship somewhere sailing across an empty sea—/This time tomorrow, what will we know?/We’ll still be here watching an in-flight movie show. . ./Seven miles below me I can see the world and it ain’t so big at all. . .we will see/Fields full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets—/I don’t know where I’m going,/. . . I feel the world below me looking up at me/. . . Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by/. . . I’m in perpetual motion. . . ”

If you're in a bookstore any time after 2014, please ask for American Drone by Peter Money.  I hope, by then, it will be there to meet you.  And keep at it, through thick and thin.  From drone to song.  We'll get there on a bridge that will not burn.

www.alicebfogel.com

We Are Human, We Yearn For Text

A rainy day and now there’s hope for my piles (no need to be nimble and quick), although there’s no hope for the boxes fit to the floor of barn—a river from the dirt driveway weighing in. The lone maple (almost a pet dog, we have no choice but to greet it every day), a phoenix in a field of pasture-lawn (it’s a new decade—), has undressed half its leaves and leaves the other half—if sliding off a shoulder—a golden blaze of honey: maybe to say, “Last chance before winter. . . (which isn’t true).

The combinations are never easy to separate.

The mountain is a mystery in a thin sheath of misty nightcoat. Water saturates—grass, ground, pond; in such haze, we could be inside the fortieth floor looking out conference room windows in many similar cities, straining to see the street below (no such doing) or (give it up—) to identify the building yesterday had standing across the short vista of a sidewalk. And where windows looked no farther, on such a day of molecular curtains, the gray walls of the traveling universe log-jammed at the height of some lazy top-brained vortex drawing pathos and recognition from a staircase at the summit—remind us that we are human, and that we yearn for text.

I returned to Che. pages 148 – 153.

"Catch Back The Quantity": Our Prose Now, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and the Poetic novel

"The tear of wine is still in his cup to catch back the quantity of its bereavement" wrote Djuna Barnes in the Watchman, What of the Night section of Nightwood. That single fragment catches me (to speak of "catch back the quantity". . . ) and the layers of implication in this combination of words astonishes me. I will not go into these layers here. I will offer that, while parts of Nightwood (the Plainfield book sale edition I now have touts Nightwood's successful run at twenty-eight printings [so far]) are not in my normal line of content, the language does tell me a lot about where I know my roots to be.

As some readers will in Che., I have picked through Barnes' text pages at a time. For me, reading is about what's potent there. (The physical object of the original book [small and thick for a side pocket, purple--but with minute splatters of ink] is another thing to behold, aroma and care. . . something that grace gifted age and handling; even that book I have opened sparingly, perhaps a bit like a special garment, with purpose.)

As a side note, it's liberating to identify the still-present typo [page 82, "And why. . . "] in New Directions' twenty-eigth printing (as if the minor technicalities of production don't matter: Let us bring your attention to the content, beneath and inside the word.)

Try giving your ear and tongue to this, by--of all fluidity!--Mr. T.S. Eliot: "One is liable to expect people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. . . What one can do for other readers. . .is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation. . . For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole." This, remarkably, is from the New Directions introduction to Barnes' Nightwood. He begins to clarify: "In describing Nightwood for the purpose o attracting readers to the English edition, I said that it would 'appeal primarily to readers of poetry.' This is well enough for the brevity of advertisement, but I am glad to take this opportunity to amplify it a little." Here's how the master poet Eliot continues, in prose, about Barnes' "prose":

"I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language [blogger's aside: perhaps this is where I got the "astonishing"--though it feels apt] covers a vacuity of content. Unless the term 'novel' has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this book is a novel. And I do not mean that Miss Barnes's style is 'poetic prose.' . . . A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give. To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." This was thoughtfully composed in 1937.

What happened to the reader between 1937 and, say, now? The reader of popular fiction in 1937 faced many of the same overwhelming choices readers confront (or ignore) now. The reading population since the industrial printing press has been sold and educated on a mass market of theme and type, character and rhythm, text and context, content and form. But here in Nightwood, another century forward, there are voices and perceptions--phrases and words--in the tribe that spark, astonish, echo, repeat. . . and pick for their instruments and tune a vibe that is potent, that is now, that we enliven (even in our pause to accept it) ourselves and each other to the blast of reality or to the sublime of a reverie and insight we have found there. May the goodness continue.

Word & Ear: Beckett, Markson, Olson, Louis Armstrong, Calvino, Argueta, Kafka, Cid Corman [by suggestion] & Miss Pond's Oyster. . . ,

There's a lone sentence in the novella Che that speaks from the forest and the tundra in the same moment: "To realize, of course, is to give word." The line is its paragraph's only voice, so to speak (there are also other one line paragraphs in the novella but they are the rarity). I suppose, in this context (one word, one breath; one space of time), I've been thinking about David Markson (his brilliant and lovely, I think, This Is Not A Novel)--and Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar (a favorite of mine since roughly 1985). With these, I've been re-reading passages of William Empson's opposite-of-critical Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson "states a case" in the way inventive novels do, in the way most poems do; the way a garden does! When a person pursues his or her own construct(s), a person enacts the daily renewal that would seem to sustain their thinking, engagement, sense in place. I've been editing the next Across Borders journal and I came across this line, in a musician's assessment of Louis Armstrong's writing using Charles Olson's perspective: "verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisition of his ear and the pressure of his breath" and "of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listening." This last part interests me the most and refers to something else I had written on this blog ("on" this! --as if this is the deck of a boat, yes?) but which I cannot exactly call to mind without having two computers before me (one can only "jump" back and forth so much in one mode, one mind, one time-frame). So we listen to the hand, the hand remaining, the slate given and to wipe clean.

When we listen to what we read we read it again, instantaneously with slight echo, and we hear the breath of the voice--not only the artifact of the word.

Lately I've been reading passages of the novella "in Irish," in my Irishness, realizing a fluency--or maybe a result of a tendency, aural inclination, propensity--from an influential time in my life. Teaching, to the extent the writer teaches, Beckett brought the joy of the realization of each word (as a lengthy music, in each breath, bearing--) back, entirely. The emotional lyricism, the traveling melody within the smallest units of narrative, the breath-pause--which is the mental-emotional-ontological pause--become fully comprehended only as a listener. The writer is a listener, choosing her or his words sound by sound--and not unlodged from the sound of bay, the solid of mountain base, and yet willingly giving that up for the sake of getting on, to travel in the line or the narrative, to tell the parts of it--in melody and refrain--as a body with eyes and ears and lungs does. This is the kind of text I mean. If text had skin, brain, chemical; it "gives" if we are open to listening for that. Like Kafka's hunger artist below the straw, barely heard and--until then, at the end the whisper confirmed--completely unseen (in fact, thought to be disposable).

While a listener (and reader) at a cello lesson, I found a book I'd not seen or opened before: One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. What I was able to read there, in the moments of music, were these (and I certainly hear their breath): "The dog is my brother." "A cloud is wrestling with the sun." "Until you appeared. . .you have brought fresh air."

You have to get and bring fresh air. You do it in living, why not do it in reading.

I listen to the lungs of text.

I was stopped in "my tracks" when I read Markson's lone line (among many there), repeating history--without any feeling of being dated: "Please, sir, I want some more."

The words ask a simple request. The writer lived-dying in this simple moment of request, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, sound by sound, breath by breath.

In this morning's paper a person writes to complain about children using "frozen trout" for an art project (prints) at a local public library. "In this economy!" the citizen chides. I have to admit to admiring the letter writer's name. It is "Pond." I want to write to her, via the paper, saying, "Dear Miss Pond, The word is your oyster"--(["hoist ear!"]; Why not world and word at the same time? It's possible!); and a painted fish is an opportunity in a child's imagination. This will feed nations, eons, even the embers. And so, we take a breath. Breathe, and listen to what breathed. Make a life of this. Discover text, breathing.

Che the novella is a small press fiction Best Seller

Readers, I thank you for making Che.: A Novella In Three Parts a fiction Best Seller.
http://www.spdbooks.org/Pages/Item/229/fiction-bestsellers.aspx
I count Leslie Scalapino and Jane Unrue as especially friendly shelf mates.

We can encourage literary--and herefore cultural--evolution by challenging those we know to read writing that is itself the writer intensely-reading passages of attention anew. (There's a good bit about Borges' writing-as-reading in today's New York Times Book Review I recommend.) I'm grateful to the intrepid readers and writers among us, who bear in it what's human and most lasting.

The page almost quivers (I don't blush saying so) to be film, to be dance, to be love loved and given to. The breathing thing, uplifting, to be part & entire. Summer night. . . and even the bedamned skunk musk is almost perfume. Refuge, hunger, thirst. A drop placed where it belongs. You who are reading it now. . . I thank you.

Wolfgang Borchert & Williams' "perpetuum mobile" expressed

I find // in Williams' notion of "perpetuum mobile" by expression & text (and day to day: Ginsberg's the ordinary made extraordinary). . .and today, while reading more Wolfgang Borchert, the expressionism "in perpetuity"--necessarily layered (and whittle down) is the language to which I was always attracted and which evolved. "Sometimes Otherness is just the point where human happiness merges into a human dream" wrote Stephen Spender about Wolfgang Borchert's work ("Is it dream? Is it reality?). It is Borchert's "of sun, of sea and honey" or his--necessarily by contrast--"Horrible, the snow crunches exactly the same, just exactly the same. He lifted his feet up and stalked through the snow like a bird, purely to avoid the crunching." This kind of consciousness, grateful present-past-in-future combined; a celebration, a lament, a meditation. . .amid fear and enlivening. The grateful word, the telling, the loved moment and the moment loved. And here it is "for ever."

I listened to a concert of violin and cello in my field. The mountain turned red--plums & peaches--in the late day, blushing, under a moon, exactly under the one ceiling light of emerging evening, this pyramid & triangulating spun a moment's perpetuity.

Soon to be published, finally, the Underground novella Che.

It's a foggy morning in Vermont.  My head is in this too, waking.  The fog--a mass from San Francisco it would seem, a screen ready for a daytime movie, is set now on top of my mountain behind me and shows only a strip of trees like footlights (remember footlights?) around the bottom--where ankles would be if the mountain were human.  The California coffee I had this past hour is too strong, a rare thing, for this body did not take in enough water yesterday, while proofing Che.  Now I'm watching a documentary on Iran, from Link TV--vital to me, over these past years, since 2001 (in part this connectivity set me on my international journey, and the bridge from poetry to fiction--which you'll feel, I hope, in the landscapes or threads of Che.; but, also, I am easily reminded of my own travels, just out of college, when each glance held a word, words, and all was sensual before it was intellectual).

Trails From The East, this is called (the film I've got on).  I have another book (other than Che.) I need to get back to, new poems by Saadi Yous[s]ef.  Sinan Antoon and I have passed these poems back and forth.  We hope, with Saadi's encouragement long established, we'll bring these poems to you soon. And it is Saadi, and "the East", that brought me to Che.:  A Novella In Three Parts in the first place.

Traveling to India and Egypt, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, and many places near and between, I knew the world "out beyond" my borders was an essential world (in language, drama, "punctuation")--and one layered with experience that was kindred, tempting, and alluring in both sad and gorgeous ways.  In Vermont, the mountain in my town "rises"--like a stranger, or a location to the traveler (think Calvino)--"out of nowhere."  My traveling, then, is always present:  the mountain is a pyramid, it's a tsunami, it's an altar, it's as it was this morning a blank screen--an obliteration, a bride's fabric, closed eyes, a sheet of paper.

The underground novella that emerged in 2006 with twisted paperclip bindings and then became a tiny perfect bound paperback in an edition of only a hundred is now being brought out--in all three sections (for the first time) by BlazeVOX Books.

Che. is friendship(s) through language.  Not controversy but content.  Visceral in subject and a daydream among intimates.  

If poetry were fiction this is what it would look like, in which the possibilities outlast the barriers.

Look for Che.:  A Novella In Three Parts by Peter Money this fall from BlazeVOX Books (www.blazevox.org)--soon.

Thanks, and please spread the Lit.

Archived info & interview:  http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/PeterMoneyinterview.htm