Week #51 Poems for New York Times Headlines from the First Decade of the Second Millennium - Poetry Book

Here’s a project I’ve actually been working on for years but for some reason took me this long to post to the blog.

The title pretty much says it all. I’ve been writing short poems based on the headlines of the New York Times for the past nine years or so.

I figure this will be my last year since I wrote the first one in 2001, here it is:

6/4/01 “New York Greatly Altered By AIDS”

No more dancing in the streets

No more fucking at the turnstiles

Now all we’ve got is the straight dope

Hookers who faint at the sight of blood

And the soldiers who love them for it

I want to have one poem for every season of the last ten years. An even forty at the end. A perfect size for a book.

I’ve given up on this project a few times then picked it back up so I’ll have to go back and fill in a few seasons. Good thing we have the internet!

Week #18 Bay Area Alphabet - Poetry series and book

For the past few years I’ve been working on a series of poems, one for every letter of the alphabet. Much like my past Subway Poems (published as Crippled by Depression #1) these are all little snapshots of people I see as I wander around. Unlike the Subway Poems these aren’t exclusively girls and there all people from the Bay Area.

All the poems are based on alliteration here’s a few examples:

F
Four foreign girls
Heading for the beach
Too frilly and fresh
For the F bus

S
Silly sleeping girl
Slightly seems like she might
Be giving herself
Scoliosis

T
Tired two-year-old toddler
Trying to tell me something terrific
But she doesn’t know how to talk

I’ve got at least two of most letters and more of some (and no x’s or z’s). I hadn’t really thought about these in a while but recently a new magazine asked me if I had any locally themed stuff and I thought of these. Taking a look at them now I’d love to finish them, all I really need is someone to help me edit and someone to illustrate them. Maybe I could get 26 different artists, one for each letter. That would be awesome!

Week #9-Mishap Poetry Contest

A few years back I’d started writing taking my poetry more seriously. I’d started submitting it to contests and magazines all over the country. I noticed after a while that so many of the contests seemed like sort of scams where everybody would send there entry fee and the people who won would get a small amount of that money as a prize but most of it would just go straight into the pockets of the people running the contests.

It occurred t me that it would be interesting to have a contest where you got a little more back if you won. Where the money sent as an entry fee really went to something real. Me and Ryan Beebe of the Gomorrans came up with an idea to have a poetry contest where the top five winners get there poems recorded as songs on an album we then released and sent out to all the entrants. We could try and do like one a year.

I’ve always really dug poems put to music like Elvis Costello’s “drunk man’s praise for sobriety” and the one Ryan did a while back from the Emily Dickinson Poem “My life closed twice”. I think it would be a really good way to bridge the gap between the literary hipsters and the music hipsters.

In modern times I guess music doesn’t really exist in a physical form as much so it would probably make more sense to make it a website rather than a CD. I’m still into the idea of CD’s so I may just want to make a few for sentimental reasons if we ever do this thing.

This idea came to me and Ryan about four years ago and we never really progressed with it. Writing about it now it actually seems like a pretty cool idea. If anyone out there wants to partner up with me on it all I’d need is like one persons help to get this thing going.