Hello. I am selling my chapbook for 4 dollars. This is primarily to cover the cost of shipping. All of the poems in this chapbook were posted to the PostFlarf list in late 2009 and throughout 2010. I wrote these poems for fun and to free myself from the burden of writing real poetry. Also, I was so busy with work and raising a toddler that I only had time to write fun poems at the end of the day–poems that didn’t require too much thought. I had no intention of collecting or publishing these poems but then I realized that these poems are real even though they are, what I call fake poems. I think of them as really fake poems. I am not too interested anymore in having other people publish my chapbooks because I am a control freak and like to make ART OBJECTS. I do not feel humiliated by self-publishing but I think this is because my real poems have been published by real publishers. I think it is fun to publish your own fake poems with your own self–a fake publisher–because it makes things feel more free and I like that because I like things that are unreal. Everyone thinks that they write really real poems but I wanted to go against this trend and therefore I have approached my ART with an extreme skepticism. It is clear that we only see our moral and ethical shortcomings after the fact and this is why I love surrealism–because it allows the unreal world a sort of beauty-enriched unburdening.
Thank you to all the amazing poets on the PostFlarf list especially Ben, Angela, Nada and Jurgen and Ben and Kasey and Sharon and Maurice B and everyone else. xoxo.
All right Sandra Simonds, yes to fun poems at the end of the day (which I guess maybe would mean deep in the night?)! Yes as well to the idea and practice of doing it yourself, controlling how your words look, and chapbook as art-object. I’ve sent money for one copy of the chap via PayPal.
The idea of a spectrum of poems, with real, fake, and really fake being among the points on the continuum, is an interesting idea. I actually think that working with words, the way (for example) an artist who draws works with paper and ink (or graphite), can be done in all kinds of ways, and that it’s all equally creative.
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