I happen to be presenting some sort of seminar in alternative forms of publishing, as this reading will be the more or less official release of three different weird things.
The first is this chapbook on Ugly Duckling Press, my translation of Manuel Maples Arce's City: Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos. This was written in roughly 1923, in Mexico, where Maples was the "leader" of a really interesting avant-garde group called the Stridentists. It's an excellent poem, first and foremost, and also of some tangential interest for its role in the life and work of Roberto Bolaño.
David Jou, who edited the book, did an excellent job extracting notes and an afterward from me, and those things are in the book, for those interested in such things, such as me.
The second is this non-standard chapbookesque thing, Stereo Daguerreotype, which Ben Winkler published on Splitleaves Press.
The poem is longish, by my own standards, and it's made up of five sonnets alternating with more loose pieces. Ben was like, "Let's do it on postcards and bind it with twine," and that sounded great to me. The cards aren't numbered, so things could get mixed up in there and that would be excellent.
And the third thing is this thing that I think is called an "echap" though its a pretty crude version of it. It's called "Nobody's Birdland, the barely Sahara," and it's a collaboration between myself (I wrote the words), Nadia Berenstein (who took the pictures) and Bela Shayevich (who's the person in the pictures). I stuck the images into a word file and saved the whole thing as a pdf. Not very technological, but it'll work. I put the thing up on Scribd, and you can read or otherwise bother it here.
All these things are pretty short, so I'm going to read them all at Blend on Thursday.
