(listed below)
Let's Keep it Simple
Rather than downloading the 43 books listed below the fold, I have created three mini-collections (in PDF format) that contain poems I still like.
 |
Mike's
Early Poems 1971-1977 "Like
driving by a flaming wreck ..." |
 |
Mike's
Middle Stuff 1987-1995 "Getting
there, |
 |
Recent
Poems 1996-2006 "Stop! Go
back!" |
NEW!
Statement
Poetry used to be more important to me. For more than a decade I wrote every day, often for six hours or more. These were the "lost years" ... so brace yourself for a certain fumey aroma.
Now, poetry doesn't mean as much. I mean, I still love it ... but it's so freaken conscious, it is hard to get around its own awareness of itself. Too bad.
An editor once wrote a wonderful blurb about my work:
"In no one else's poem's except Vallejo's do I feel such desire," wrote Michael Cuddihy of Ironwood, a magazine of the mid-1970s.
I loved this when I first heard it. Only recently have I tasted the sting in amongst the honey: that desire, while thrilling, is basically just neediness ... practically addiction.
Didn't I say something about writing six hours a day?
Writing poems constituted a kind of self-absorbed pleasure. A place I could go to where I was in charge, not The Man. Not other folks. Not life beyond the page.
Michael Cuddihy, from the grave you still stab out at me ..
I still write poems, but not so much, and (I pray) not so grandiosely.
Nebvertheless. Here are a score or more of free chapbooks. Over the past ten years some 95,000 copies of these booklets have been downloaded. Which is amazing to me, even though they may have been downloaded by spdiers and robots.
I never set out to be the quantity guy. I was actually thinking quality in the early going. But fate is fate and here it is.
Download all you like. They're free, it gives me a thrill.
And it makes her old man look good to the baby girl in the picture. (Off the lap now but just as loved.)
SMALL PRESS TITLES
The
Movie under the Blindfold (Vanilla Press, 1978)
I tried to stretch with poems like "Triangles Prisms Cones" -- surrealism with a broken heart. I submitted it to VP at a time when they were a conventional press. It was accepted by its panel of editors, but its publisher was going through the first big blaze of feminist reorientation, and she bridled at the idea of publishing yet another chapbook of patriarchal verse. Aw come on, I said, just one more? It was never quite distributed. She was so chagrined by me that she had the books boxed up in her garage. It rained, the books were ruined, and that was the end of that.
Home
Trees (Minnesota Writers Publishing House, 1978)
A breakthrough in terms of discipline and focus. I was starting to mean something. Check out "This Gun Shoots Black Holes." Of all black hole poems, I am told, this is the one most uninformed about astrophysics.
Lucky
You (Litmus, Inc., 1976)
Look at me hugging myself on the hell-red back cover -- and dig the hair. My friend Charles Potts published this first book and it remains, astonishingly, in print to this day. "Letter from Como" is especially wack.
Water Hills (Salthouse Press, 1985)
My buddy D. Clinton published this as a favor to me when I lived in Milwaukee. It was my last book published by someone besides me.* Includes the Pushcart Prize-winning "Gise Pedersen Sets Me Straight on a Matter of Natural History," and "A Drive in the Country," which appeared in Paris Review.* Until a short but gorgeous artbook, The Orchard, to be published when Richard Stephens of Richard Stephens Press gets around to it.
The
Beagles of Arkansas (Mudborn Press, 1976)
Everything there wants to leave. A little booklet from a car trip Red and I made through Missouri and Arkansas. I always have had a warm spot in my heart for "At the Ball Park," mentioning Rod Carew and Lyman Bostock.
LANGUISHING & UNPUBLISHED ETEXTS
I had the strangest feeling when I first visited the Curtis Hotel, on Halloween, 1969. It turns out I was conceived there, and against heavy odds.
Selected Poems. This book contains my two "greatest hits," The Clarinet Is a Difficult Instrument and Browsers.
Less a poem than a wacky essay. I wrote this for my daughter, who was afraid of dentists. It is very popular -- over 100,000 people have downloaded it.
The Good King (Six Children's Tales)
Six stories, including the much-loved "A Frankenstein Christmas."
Contains the harrowing tale of how I was hit in the head -- right where my brain tumor was diagnosed 25 years later -- by a falling 12-ft tailpipe combo.
I went through a very hazy phase around 1977.
KRAKEN PRESS
ORIGINALS
The following chaplets I published myself, on my
Kraken Press imprint, mostly since 1985.
Midnight at the Mounds
(Kraken Press, 2004)...
A very short selection of things I wrote mostly while hiking in British Columbia with Rachel.
Moab
(Kraken Press, 2004) ...
Poems I wrote on the road this past summer, with Rachel lying flat on her back in the back seat, still healing up from her onstage hanging in The Handmaiden's Tale.
Bing Cherries
(Kraken Press, 2004) ...
A collection of essays.
Holiday poems from a Minnesotan in Manhattan. Written in a hotel room overlooking Lincoln Center, one grand wintry evening. There's a good one about a woman in a brown coat begging on the Avenue of the Americas.
Borrowing from Minneapolis (To Pay St. Paul)
This was my Smile, the great never-published opus. It's a dialogue about city/country living, written when I worked as news editor of the Worthington Daily Globe, 1978-80. It takes the "reportorial" poetic style of Home Trees and pushes it farther. Dig The Iliad." It applies the classic style of Homer to a four-hour cornfield fight between a raccoon and a German shepherd.
Sometimes, when we say no, we mean yes. A tribute to the woman I love.
The story of a man and the dog who feared him. Oral history first told me by Joe Paddock, which I ran with. .
I wrote this as a Xmas present to my family members. Something special for each of them. Includes the title poem, which sets a new benchmark for paternal self-pity.
Poems from around 1991. My stepdad Dick died from a brain tumor -- foreshadowings of my own problems. Suggestion: "Sleeping on My Hands."
It ain't all it's cracked up to be at Castelgandolfo ...
The Lord God Has Words with the Choir
Death to poets! A poem for those who love poetry, and also hate it. Charlie Potts included this in his great anthology SPIRITUAL POETRY OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST anthology.
University Avenue and Other Poems
A love poem to my self. Takes on a certain resonance since my brain tumor diagnosis.
A tree collapses in its best friend's arms.
A long poem about finding my second book remaindered. In the end I melt into Homer.
A poem for my boyhood friend, El Rayo X.
Two summer weeks, sitting with my laptop in the sand.
Weird stuff from a period of languor and depression. But do check out "What We Want" -- a more ambitious poem was never wrote.
A trip to the Juan de Fuca Straits.
Short items from a long time ago.
It struck me that there aren't enough poems that are about what we do most of the time -- work.
These two collections were published the same day, for a reading at the Black Dog Cafe in Saint Paul. The first book is a brief compendium of my flaming young period; the second are the high points of my inevitable decline.
Two compilations assembled for readings in Duluth.
Poems for my old school friend Peter Meister, to let him know how I'd spent my life.
And for the truly adventurous ... my unpublished memoir Fixing the Christians
The
tribute that keeps on hurting.
I got this in the mail October 2, 2003
(and responded here)
KRAKEN PRESS
1841 Dayton Avenue
Saint Paul MN 55104