As Love Poems comes to a close, Fridge Poetry is on the way (Jan 31st).

Over the next week, my poetry collection, Love Poems, will be wrapping up. How times flies, huh? When I started writing the collection last year, aside from knowing I wanted to write about looOOOoooOoOoOove, I didn’t have any ideas about what it would look like; it couldn’t be cutesy and lovey-dovey, that much I knew. More or less, I feel I succeeded at that. How good any of the poems were, I don’t know; that’s not really for me to decide. I enjoyed writing the collection, and *gasp* I even enjoy reading some of poems. I’m not sure I love all of the work, but that’s life, isn’t it? Over the last couple of months, I’ve been hacking away at a new poetry project, though my day job hasn’t allowed for as much committed writing time as my year off allowed; part of that has been my being lazy, and part of it has been my day job is physically demanding and leaves me pretty drained when I get home. I know, I know: the hustle; the grind; work when others are sleeping, and work harder when everyone is awake; there’s always time; I’ve heard it all, and I don’t disagree with the sentiments, but there’s reality and I, more or less and fortunately or unfortunately, reside therein. I have been craving time to zone out, to read comic books, to play my games, to keep my mind right, and that’s what I’ve been doing. The good news is the new writing is happening, at least with poetry. Prose has been another matter entirely; where I take some solace is in the ideas keep coming, the notes keep getting written, and projects keep piling; once I get some of the repetitive motion issues dealt with, hopefully we’ll see some ink to paper.

To some, I’m sure, these sounds like excuses, and maybe they are. Maybe it’s 3-ish years of plague exhaustion rearing its head. Who knows. Whatever the case might be, my poetry series about space and aliens is taking a bit longer to complete than I anticipated; I think I am about 50% of the way through the writing process, and I feel good about that. I could be 25% of the way through, you know? While I do love the writing, I’m really looking forward to the editing. That part always feels so much easier to me; the work is already there and already done, and it’s just about chipping away, about refining, about finding the angel in the marble. Through the writing process, however, there are a few themes emerging with which I am struggling to connect; fairly common tropes with alien/sci-fi fiction, for example, like invasion and abduction aren’t manifesting themselves in my head as being common tropes. Invasion and abduction aren’t just things, so I am really working on trying to pay homage to the depth of those actions and experiences; after all, we live in a work perverted and poisoned by acts of imperialism and invasion and colonialism, so to water down those ideas into OMG ITS THE ALIENS COMING doesn’t sit right with me. I may end up scrapping all the poems that touch on those aspects, who knows; whatever the case is, what I thought would be a fun, sci-fi writing experience is much bigger than I anticipated and there’s no way to not do some personal work as I write.

Now, with the above stuff out the way and the lede sufficiently buried, it is exciting to announce the pending serial release of Fridge Poetry; if there’s one thing I am, it’s clever when it comes to titles. Fridge Poetry is something I’ve, realistically, been working on for the better part of ten years and have shared off and on through various social media channels, but never with any real focus or consistency. In late-2013 and through most of 2014, I was living in an apartment with a long galley kitchen that featured a big piece of countertop across from a fridge. I was living with someone who I would wager identifies/identified as a real minimalist, so the fridge and counters were bare. I was relatively recently single, and one night I was digging through some boxes of mine (because I lived out of boxes for the better part of seven years) and came across some fridge poetry magnets my mother had gotten me for Christmas at some point; I’d never opened them and thought, what the hell, why not open them up and see what happens? So, I opened the box up and saw what happened. I threw an album on, fired up a bowl, cracked a beer and went to work. What I thought would be a fun little way to kill time became something I spent a couple of hours most nights doing; it was a little bit performance art, a little bit of mental exercise, a little bit of creative work, and a lot of fun.

The first poem, pictured above, didn’t turn out great. I don’t love it, but I also kind of love it. What I found (and find) really fun about working with the fridge magnets is the words I have are the words I can use, so there is a constant editorial process occurring, and a clear focus on economy of language. It’s a really interesting experience to have a limited number of words. As the nights went on and the weeks went on, I got better and better in terms of process: organization and setup of magnets, as well as execution on the fridge. I became happier with the results, even if the results weren’t very good. I became less focused on what anything meant, because who cares what something means? I thought a lot about Roland Barthes and his notion of the author being dead and found it really appealing. At the end of the day, whatever I intended a poem to mean was irrelevant. I also thought a lot about a favourite singer of mine, Chino Moreno of Deftones, who I’d heard comment that his lyrics were just about words sounding good together; I’ve heard the immortal Mike Patton comment on the same thing. I’m sure there’s some underlying meaning I had in mind, or some message that comes out when I finished a poem or poems, but I also grew increasingly comfortable with it all just being the process. Call me Jackson Pollock, I guess. After a few nights, maybe a week or so, I would end up with my fridge looking like this:

When I had a full fridge, I would break down the poems and start all over again. Of course, I took (bad) photos of the poems to keep a log of them, because I really liked some of them. I didn’t get photos of all the poems, and some of the photos I got ended up looking like dogshit and are totally unreadable, so I have no idea for some of them, and that, as they say, is life. What I’m happy to report is that I did manage to save (at least) 50, and have been able to transcribe them onto the typewriter and then into the computer, and THEN onto this here website. I've tried to edit as minimally as possible, with any editing being resigned to commas, periods, line breaks, replacing an ampersand with ‘and’, and similar technical components. With the heart of this writing existing within 2013/2014 for the most part, I thought it was important and honest to try and keep that energy as untouched as possible. Maybe the poems are no good and I should have done more editing, but the heart of the artist will do what the heart of the artist will do, right? Or something?

So, with that in mind, for those of you who’ve stuck around and read all of Love Poems, I hope you’ll stick around for Fridge Poetry.

Thank you, as always.