Archive
My intention is to use this digital space to share items from my home archive. Some will pertain directly to my creative life—such as drafts of poems, or pages from my journal—while other items may be of more general interest—such as posters for readings, literary correspondence, or things which bear upon past editorial or curatorial projects.
Here’s a draft of my poem “The Fountain.” Though it is about being a teenager, it was written in April of 2007, when I was 43 years old. Line four, “by the old,” eventually became, “by adults,” at the suggestion of my then student, Nick Mohlmann. Thanks Nick!
Throughout my writing career, I have periodically worked in this sort of long skinny form. The stumbling line-break work was inspired at first by Robert Creeley, later, James Schuyler.
Letter to Dan Bouchard, very early in our correspondence
The back of the flyer, where, for the first time, I ask for money to help fund The Impercipient. The most expensive part about doing a magazine such as this was the mailing costs.
THE IMPERCIPIENT “That faiths by which my comrades stand / Seem fantasies to me” —Thomas Hardy, “The Impercipient” The Impercipient is the 8 1/2 x 11 stapled magazine I edited, typeset, photocopied, and distributed from 1992-1995. There were eight issues total. The entire run can be downloaded for free on ARRAS, the website of Brian Kim Stefans. There you can also read my reflection on editing The Impercipient: Pillow Talk: A Short History of a Small Magazine. My title here refers to the Impercipient’s motto, “silent pillow of a generation,” as well as to my love of Doris Day. Some archival items related to The Impercipient A subscription flyer. Front collage by Lisa Jarnot. She playfully pokes fun at my lyric enthusiasms with “that heifer lowing at the skies.” I confess, when I first read that line in Keats’s poem, I had no idea that “lowing” was a sound, but thought it was a movement, such as lowering the head, which made the line rather nonsensical.
I love that he underlined “love” and put his last name in parenthesis!
A postcard from Joe Brainard acknowledging receipt of The Impercipient.