Poeta Doctus

Aside from the pages of little magazines and those of certain, indulgent anthologies, by poems really first made their way in the world in the form of chapbooks. I hadn’t yet published a full-length trade edition, when I went on a “European tour” in 1996, reading in Munich (twice), Heidelberg, and Amsterdam, two self-published chapbooks, Gloze (1995) and On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery (1995), my calling cards.

Joachim Utz, the sponsor of my reading at Heidelberg University’s Anglistiches Seminar, observed that my chapbooks reminded him of William Blake’s. This new category of post takes its inspiration from his remark. “Hell’s Printing House” will showcase my chapbooks, describing them, detailing their contents, linking poems that have already been published at Poeta Doctus, and presenting a new recording of one of their poems.

It is hoped these posts fill the lacunae between full-length collections, assuring those (apparently) few (and valued) readers who follow my production with interest that I am hard at work, going my own direction, at my own pace, trusting those intrigued might be charmed enough to tarry along….

June 13, 2013 I was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and in May, 2016 started a six month chemotherapy regimen. Some (very few) poems resulted. The late, great Ian Ferrier, a Montreal-based poet and impresario, kindly invited me to read at his Words and Voices series in November, 2017 and, for the occasion, I collated a sequence about my cancer experience to that point, Blank Song, along with five other poems. In February, 2023, The Typescript published three poems from that sequence.

The title puns on the French sang blanc, “white blood,” a reference to ‘leukemia’, the name given my blood malady (from Greek leukos “clear, white” and haima “blood”). (A native French speaker tells me the French puns, further, on ‘semblant‘). But “blank song” also nods to a stylistic development, a tendency (apparently) to the plain spoken; understated, litotic or laconic; metonymic rather than metaphoric. Despite this eschewal of present-day, poetic fashion with its tendency to certain manners of surface complexity, there remains an undercurrent of allusion and other manners of linguistic and rhetorical complexity.

The (very short) sequence “Blank Song / sang blanc” spans an initial reflection on my predicament on American Independence Day, 2013 through my undergoing chemotherapy three years later, six poems in all: “Day after I’m told,” “I’m fifty-two…,” “Instead of saying…,” “No point…,” “The Chemical Brothers,” and “Independence Day 2013.” The other, miscellaneous poems are

• “What does it mean…”
• “She admits she has no sense of humour…”
• “Chez La Chronique“
• “My Brother the Doctor Visits After Too Long,” and
• “Life can change so quickly”

I post the the sequence Blank Song / sang blanc, followed by a reading.

Next month: As on a Holiday (2021).