Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 19

A Wedding, A War, A Necktie

I put on my three piece suit

and stand in front of my mirror

practiced shooting my

own reflection, a 2 finger gun

I dodge fake bullets

till late afternoon

till it comes easy

an hour before the wedding

I try to learn how to tie

the blood red tie

but I can’t get it

so I slipped my pre-laced

neon sneakers on

I don’t own dress shoes

and rode my bike to church

the sun was hot

and this is why no one

before me

had tried to ride a bike

in a three piece suit

as I ride

the red neck tie

is granny-knotted

to the handle bars

and streaming in the August air

no dogs have the guts to chase

and I still have my gun

anyway

the bridesmaid

in the peach dress

helped me

with my tie

ducking into

a quiet room

possibly not holy

later, I learned

she had a brother named jay

who drove a jeep

over an IED

in one of those deserts

she had a picture

of him alive beside the bed

saw it on August 19th

I remember it well

a Tuesday

in her bedroom mirror I stood

naked, tie around my neck

my dick hard

in the reflection

I shot her dead

laying on her bed

we laughed

I was late for school

bunch of days after that.

Everything Neon, reviewed

The site Up The Staircase was kind enough to give my poetry collection Everything Neon (a weird love letter to 173rd street/my wife, Spout) a review.

You can check it out here

Things are going pretty good over here. Just got over pneumonia. Just got my car fixed. The weather is warming up. Been doing a lot of writing: mostly poems and poetry.

Hope all is well for you, wherever you are.

Schedule of Upcoming Readings

these will mostly be poetry from Everything Neon.

May 29th: online reading for LitDemon, (click here to attend) it’s viewable live at 7pm or will become a YouTube video

June 11th: with Robert Vaughan and Amy King. 7pm

June 12th: An Beal Bocht in the Bronx, 8:30 Pm

July 7th: Saturn Series 15th street Revival Bar
 
September 13th: Mello Pages Library in Brooklyn with Sara Lippman and others

THINGS HAPPENED! Two new pieces published in/on/in the net

Things happened:

1. got in a severe car crash (but I’m okay)

2. have pnemonia (but I’m okay)

3. have two recent publications to share with you.

Here is a piece of strange flash fiction called “Leaving Las Vegas” running at the beautiful odd website TheNewerYork!

Here is a poem called “Today’s Going Fast” which is a stuttering bullet flying voyage through my Wednesday.

my street

a tire swing with rusted chain

that’ll snap soon

a pit bull happy in the yard, digging

bluejays return each year

to destroy rival eggs

the girl living in that window

shoots them with her BB gun

a nameless cat

collects their heads

namaste

oak tree growing in and through

the power lines

yesterday a crew painted it orange

a row of Xs

many cigarettes were smoked

staring up into those

electrified branches

now: lichen on old brick

asbestos singles

no one want to strip

kites wrapped around

the phone lines

the thud thud thud

of a basketball distant

there must be a lake here

somewhere stocked with fish

on warm mornings a man

in a maroon hat

walks down the street

with his fishing pole and bucket

“where do you go?”

“I can’t tell” he says

“come on”

“well, I could, I mean–

but I’d have to kill you”

sometimes his bucket

is still flopping around

and he’s whistling

the ice cream truck

has better plans

for better streets

I can smell a wood fire

it’s the first day of spring

the air tastes like smoke

somewhere bees are sleeping

a mailbox, the exact replica

of a certain house

overflows with paper

rumor is, they’re losing the house

but will they take the mailbox?

down the hill, six cars

rest under blue tarps

I wonder what cars they are

but I never lift the tarp

I don’t want to be disappointed

never meet your heroes

mine: the quiet kid who never misspeaks

Good Luck Poem

it just happened, a bird

shit on me—so begins

the good luck streak

off in the distance

the cowgirl sings her

saddest song

but I am payday invincible

nothing will be wrong

every beer bottle that falls

does a somersault

slaps on its bottom, flat

there are not even suds

just more championship seasons

more blossoms, more meaning

sleep walk to a charmed life

not off a single rock knife cliff

furthermore get no shiners

no busted lips, no lies

other houses burn down

in the spring death night

cars explode, the world shakes

my tongue-sweat dogs

sprint off, get doomsday lost

a whistle, all it takes is a whistle

and my dogs come trotting back

usually I’m busy

falling down the stairs

laying there till morning

tonight I’ll climb to the top

of the sea green water tower

this town’s highest point

to toss my pennies

onto the sparking power lines

to make myself happy.

“The Fun We’ve Had” reviewed by Gabriel Ricard for Drunk Monkeys

budsmith:

A review of Michael Seidlinger’s new novel.

Originally posted on THE FEATURE S P A C E _:

Among one of the first reviews of the book, Gabriel Ricard nailed it with his review of

“The Fun We’ve Had”

over at Drunk Monkeys. Here’s a glimpse:

Don’t take anything for granted, and don’t expect what you believe about death to fill in the blanks. The only thing you can be sure of is the proven range of Seidlinger’s imagination restating itself here, and of his ability to take something like slipping the murky depths of eternity (the book is appropriately broken down into the stages of grief), and turn it into an apocalyptic, poetic, and existential fairytale.

Click here for the full review.

View original

Poem Written While Searching

all this distance

the girls disappear

and out my window

fruit trees bloom

a TV through the wall

murmurs, 300 vanished

the first robin

has its nest broken

by a random wind

on buzzbox AM radio

a man mentions again

that misplaced airplane

through the fence

new green on things

thought gone

the leaning telephone pole

beside my sleeping car

has a xerox of Jane

missing since June

that night

finally it’s warm

the computer is off

I search the dryer

for my other sock.

New Short Story “The Cloud” published at Metazen

Today up at Metazen my short story “The Cloud” about a man who works at a harpoon gun/jet pack factory and had a destructive rebound relationship with a cloud.

http://www.metazen.ca/?p=15622

http://www.metazen.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/The-Cloud-by-Bud-Smith.pdf

How The Manuscript Began, Middled and Ended.

Last month, Marginalia released my first full length collection of poetry Everything Neon, which I describe as, “some poems written either at my desk on 173rd street in NYC, or with the street, my neighbors and my wife in mind.”

Some other people said things too, the first of two reviews are floating around now, Olantangy Review said this, summed up, “Bud Smith is a real person. That may sound simple enough to say or to read, but it’s not, not by a long shot, not when you are talking about an authentic writer. It means everything to someone like me who loves to read modern poetry by people who are still living and breathing. Specifically it means that Bud Smith is an original. He doesn’t sound like someone else or someone imitating someone else. He has a voice and that voice is his alone. That should be enough for you to want to pick up his new book of poems, Everything Neon,but there’s lots more going on than that.”

and Len Kuntz, the author of The Dark Sunshine said this, “Finding poetry this honest and vulnerable, while also being entirely accessible, is a rare thing these days where most poets rely on gimmicks or word play strung together without any sense of cohesion, let alone any kind of narrative arc.   Smith’s poetry is like an urban take on what Raymond Carver might have written, spare yet lush, brimming with answers about what it means to be clear-eyed and alert while everything around us spins, entangled.”

I’m humbled to read these reviews. When you put together a manuscript, it’s hard to imagine how it will be received when it plops on the desk of a reviewer. I was thinking about that, the end result, the moment when the book is out, and what happens after that. But to a lot of writers I talk to, thinking about “how the hell do I put together a collection of poems/short stories/flash?”

I thought I’d write a summary of how the project, Everything Neon came together. Because maybe it’ll be a help to someone who is trying to do their own project.

1. Conception

The idea of putting together a collection of my poetry wasn’t my own. In all fairness, it was suggested by the publisher of the book, Matt Guerruckey, the publisher of the website Drunk Monkeys and the press Marginalia Publishing. “You ever think about putting together a book of your poems?”

I split my writing time three ways: novel, short story, poetry. When one thing isn’t working, I turn to one of the others. It’s a good way for me to keep myself busy and erring in the direction of staying creative.

In the past, such as with my collection of short stories, Or Something Like That, I knew what I wanted to do, at that time it was “gather some stories together that reads like Seinfeld on acid.”

I had a clear goal, a style I was aiming for, an idea. The same happened with my novel Tollbooth, I knew I wanted to expand on what I thought was ‘the mundane life of a tollbooth operator, being pulled apart by wild cosmic horses.”

Sometimes conception of a project doesn’t need to be clear at all. I recommend everybody to throw far less caution into the wind, and go fucking nuts instead.

2. Content

For Everything Neon, I had been already writing a lot of poetry about NYC. After the seed to collect the poems into a narrative arc, with characters and setting, was planted, I decided to collect the poems together as organically as I could.

The lynch pins for the collection, if you ask me, are the poem “In My Building” and “You Can Remain Anonymous”

In My Building is a look at the place where I live, a pre-war walk up on 173rd street and the people that share it with me. You Can Remain Anonymous is a look at the street/neighborhood beyond the building.

As I looked at the initial drafts of the poems, put together in a Word file, I tried to pick out the poems that did not completely fit the themes, which were: city living, me and my wife being love birds, domestication, apartment dwelling, finding a way to get away from the steal and glass and into the ocean, etc.

As I cut poems from the draft, it gave me a glimpse of what I wanted to flesh out in further poems. Both creating and cutting, simultaneous.

3. Workshopping

Before I started working with the publisher of the collection on edits/rewrites, I made a ‘dummy copy’ of the book, and mailed out five paperback copies to writers who I respect that had agreed to give the manuscript an initial read and give me two things.

A: the five poems (out of about 70) that the reader liked least and would potentially cut.

B: the five poems (out of about 70) that the reader thought stood out strongest in the collection.

From their notes, I cut additional poems accordingly. From their notes, I saw a clearer thread of where the poems could go to make a stronger book.

I like to think of this phase as “connecting the dots”

It’s usually my favorite part of a project. Whether I can actively get advice from beta reader peeps, or if I’m going it alone, and acting on my own intuition. I love connecting reoccurring themes, characters, places, events, outcomes.

4. Edits with the Publisher

I took the final draft of this new manuscript “dots connected” in two separate directions. I did some readings to see how audiences reacted to the poems, and I sent the word file to Marginalia. At this point, Robert Vaughan and Heather Dorn both got involved as content and copy editors. They cut apart the poems, offered guidance on syntax, punctuation and general composition. It was like a master course on ‘writing poetry’

I learned a vast amount by working closely with editors to put my collection together. These new discoveries, glimpses into my own work and what it is, will only help in the beginning stages of future work.

I am thankful for good editors. They are invaluable.

5. Layout and Design

The copy edited manuscript now went over to the book designer. Countless emails bounced back and forth between myself and Marginalia’s designer. With each pass through the layout of the interior of the book, the poems tightened up. The writing improved. We took our time. I was able to take the time I needed to add the detail I wanted.

Again, here was an opportunity to learn about book design, layout, presentation, the ins and outs of fine tuning. Wow.

6. ARCs

Okay! The book is finalized. The release date is off in the distance. Now it’s time for Advanced Review Copies. Whether or not you are going to seek actual reviews from websites, newspapers, etc. You should definitely send out some advanced review copies in order to get blurbs for the back of the book.

7. Release

I’m always looking for places to review my work and I always make sure I have books on hand. Do the same. Most importantly, enjoy all of this, the putting a book out stuff, don’t let it make you crazy.