The Secret Life of This Life Now #1
First post in a new section of Beachcomber Mike about the life cycle of my Lammy-nominated first book of poems, This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014)
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My first book of poems celebrated it’s tenth birthday last year. I have a lot of fraught emotional connections to the book. I suspect I am not alone, as a poet, in having fraught connections to one or more of my own books. So I thought it might be worth writing about it in this format.
Also, as of today, I have in my possession the last 112 copies of the print run that were not sold, given away, or scribbled in by me in the course of readings and so forth. I picked up the last 35 of them today from my publisher, who had them dumped unceremoniously in a pallet on his lawn after the collapse of Small Press Distribution about a year ago, along with hundreds of other books. Having every last copy in my possession is mostly sweet, like children come home from far flung lives to visit a doddering old dad near the end of something.
But I’m not going to get into the emotionally fraught part in this first post in this new section of Beachcomber Mike. Instead, I’m going to do a little bit like what I started doing in the summer of 2023, writing Substack posts about poems of mine that appeared in journals or were rejected by journals or maybe lived only in notebooks. I’m going to show you a few lines from each poem in the order in which they appear in the book, and share a bit about about the poem.
I’m hoping this series of posts will appeal to folks who are interested in the genesis and unfolding of creative projects. And may move some people to get the book from me. I’ve put instructions for unsubscribing from a section of a Substack at the end of this post, in case you do not find this concept appealing and want out ASAP.
Okay, here goes. The first section of This Life Now is called My First Ten Plague Years. The plague in question is AIDS. The first poem in this section—the poem that opens the book—is called “Variations.” The first stanza reads as follows:
A few words go a long way between us; as they must, since not much time remains for more than this.
Those lines are about Rand Snyder, “Randy” to his friends and to the numerous boys whose hearts he broke before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1996 at the age of 36. Randy was my first great love. There’s actually a whole Substack post about this poem, but I’m not going to tell you how to find it, because then you’ll NEVER buy the book to read the rest of the poem. Hint: I just found it by searching for my name, Randy’s name, and “Substack.” Not hard to find.
That’s all you need to know for now. I’m not going to go into all the personal history and poetry craft gobbledygook I did in the post about this poem in my “Rejected!” series of Substack posts. I just want to say that I loved Randy and that once when we were translating some Herodotus in the library of the CUNY Graduate Center, back when it was still on 42nd Street across from Bryant Park, Randy handed me a note written on a folded piece of paper from a letter size yellow note pad that said “I’m so stoned right now.” It may have had a smiley draw on it or not—This happened about 40 years ago, and it’s likely my memory of the occasion is less than crystal clear. If I was not already in love with him (which I was), I certainly would have fallen in love with him in that moment.
Okay so I think that’s enough for now. I mean, if I stick to this plan, there are going to be at least 31 posts like this. That’s a lot of me mooning about the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And about what went wrong with this book, or what I thought went wrong with this book, which probably did not really go wrong with this book, but that’s how poets are.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...now. The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes—Get this!—includes SHIPPING. In the US, that is; if you are elsewhere, I will probably need to get in touch with you and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
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