15. ROMANTIC COMEDY

‘Romantic Comedy’ started out as a short narrative poem and, years later, ballooned into a 5,000-word story. I included it in a poetry zine I put out—probably around 2001—called XVII Ghost Stories. Its production was flawed on several levels: I alternated folios between standard photocopier paper and mylar transparencies, a concept that proved to be not only prohibitively expensive, but also resistant to staying stapled.

In 2004, I re-designed the zine to eliminate the need for transparencies. Here are scans of the cover and ‘Romantic Comedy’ from that later edition:

In 2007, in the midst of my fiction MFA at Mills College, I decided to turn the poem into a story. At this point, it felt like an outline just waiting to be fleshed out. The biggest change I made to the piece’s overall structure was adding another character: the supervillain. He joined the hairdresser, the drunken mayor, and the second-person Eros.

Click HERE to pre-order The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, my forthcoming fiction collection that includes the expanded version of ‘Romantic Comedy’. 

WE ARE THE THERE Tonight at Rise Above!

Oakland's Rise Above Gallery shows off the work of Miriam Klein Stahl this month, and the opening is tonight from 6-9. It includes collaborations with Gabby Miller and Scott McPherson, as well as the Together Occupy project. Together Occupy began with a design by Miriam, which she silkscreened with her class. Then Gabby coordinated the printing of variations on it with me at Mills College and again with Blake Riley at Arion Press. Now a variety of artist have used the poster's blank space to produce a series of imaginary propaganda collaborations. 

My own collaboration focuses on San Pablo Avenue, and includes a fold-out essay in pencil. The essay touches briefly on the street's history (it was once the East Bay's main coastal highway) and talks about what it means when we say places are being re-envisioned (i.e., gentrified). It looks at the current state of San Pablo, focusing on its walkability, along the lines of a Letter from Pedestrianica. Read the essay's here!

Kelsey Street Broadside!

The Contemporary Writers Series at Mills College hosts poets Renee Gladman and Rena Rosenwasser tonight in celebration of Kelsey Street Press. Emji Spero and I, with assistance from Lara Durback, designed a broadside featuring both Gladman's and Rosenwasser's work. The letterpress broadside is structured as a diptych that displays excerpts from each writer and incorporates chance elements: on Gladman's side, a gouache wash (shown at left) and on Rosenwasser's, a splash of India ink. The broadside is part of a series the Mills College Book Art department produces in conjunction with CWS. It will be for sale tonight at the reading, which starts at 5:30 pm and takes place in the Mills Hall Living Room. 

Interview with Katarzyna Bazarnik & Zenon Fajfer

Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer are a Krakow-based duo that coined the term liberature, a literary genre that focuses on the physical form of a text. “The term we coined for this kind of writing,” the couple says, “points out that it is nothing else but literature in the form of the book (one meaning of Latin liber), liberated from any literary and editorial conventions (another meaning of Latin liber)—it is a kind of ‘book in freedom’.” Baxarnik and Fajfer have released a series of liberatic titles under the Liberatura imprint for Korporacja Ha!art publishing house. They recently toured the US, where they participated in a “Liberty Poem” at an Occupy Wall Street action and visited Mills College here in Oakland as artists in residence. They graciously answered some questions for me this month, which are posted at San Francisco Center for the Book’s blog:

The Liberating Bond: An Interview with Katarzyna Bazarnik & Zenon Fajfer