Close Calls With Nonsense

And here is the sort of multimedia, couldn’t-be-anything-else very short film of a microfiction that makes me wonder why I don’t write about video art all the time. It’s a wonder, and it’s apparently also a book trailer for an upcoming book of flash fiction, or microfiction, or prose poems, or whatever the kids are calling such things these days, by Joseph Young. The same webmag, HTMLGiant, said something about me a while back, and now says something haunting about Lydia Davis.

Speaking of which, or of whom, is there any difference between microfiction and prose poetry any more, other than what it says on the spine and whether the publishers send it to “poetry people” or to fiction reviewers? Because as I start to think seriously about whatever prose poems now do and mean (Waldrep, Benis White, Guess, Johnson, Clary, Lerner, &c &c) I’m thinking that Lydia Davis does most of those things too. (No wonder poets tend to admire her.) I realize that it’s hardly a new question: I’m just wondering whether I’ve missed some cool answers.

Did you know that you can reach a human being at almost any megacorporation that deals with consumers, even the ones that try very hard to connect you only to automated computers when you dial their 800 number, and even the ones that try hard to get you not to call? There’s something like a figure for 21st century lyric poetry right there. Stay tuned.

Up late doing laundry for our upcoming trip to MN and the Twin Cities Book Festival. Maybe we’ll see you there.