Douglas Blazek and Joshua McKinney
Monday, Oct. 27 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Douglas Blazek is recognized as a primary instigator of the Mimeo Revolution – a course correction for the culture, dedicated to “making poetry dangerous”. In this endeavor he was instrumental in publishing formative work by Charles Bukowski, d.a.levy and Robert Crumb alongside other poets and artists central to the era. Despite such prominence, Blazek describes the obligation he felt to his poetic evolution as a “self-lit fuse detonating its own limits.
My poetry demanded to be fully realized, just as elements of nature cannot be less than their inherent design. Knowing the futility of achieving such perfection, if I were not to address what I had previously published, the kinetic imagination of my early writing would merely serve as an inferior prelude to a more successful later work that advanced by observing its participation in the mirror of its creation. In synthesizing those potentialties into their self-requested destiny, I catalyzed a process that allowed a timeless dimension of ripeness to exist in all my poetry.
Over the years, new poems were spliced into the manuscripts I was rewriting. My poetics accelerated to sketch its dialectics on the synaptic scrims of reality in a language of paradoxical correlation, suggestive, yet simultaneously skin specific-– unitary in consciousness. An inked cohesion of mysterious signatures informed by an all-encompassing vision. No old poem is old. Each is as fresh as if never breathed before, yet preserves the bones its body first owned in its natality.”
The Ventriloquy of Light, The Blindfold Alphabet, Gutting Cats in Search of Fiddles, and Aperture Mirror published by Edition Muta are neither representative nor atypical of his other efforts. Neither chronologically early nor late. Early and late are all in the same matrix, all a portal to Blazek’s life’s work.
Joshua McKinney is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Saunter, co-winner of the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series Open Competition in 2001, and The Novice Mourner, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize in 2005. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: Saunter (Primitive Publications, 1998) and Permutations of the Gallery (Pavement Saw Press, 1996), winner of the Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared widely in such journals as American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. Other awards include a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. He teaches poetry writing and literature at California State University, Sacramento. He is a member of Senkakukan of Sacramento where he studies Mugai Ryu, Toyama Ryu, and the curriculum of the Zen Nihon Battado Renmei.
