"I write every day, on a good day, for more than ten hours. I have always had low-impact, get-by jobs and relish unemployment and am comfortable in poverty. I remember near the end of the sky position I had crazy twitches and cramps in my hand, and then I knew I was finally getting somewhere as a writer." —Tom Blood
Pre-trimmed cover of The Raccoon, which functions as both a table of contents and as a poem
Tom Blood reading last week in Portland, backed by heckling and haunting strings
Tom Blood is an eccentric poet who lives in Portland and writes powerful verse. His new book, The Raccoon, comes out in May. He has been working on the fringes, and no one who hears his story can doubt his dedication. He also has a songlike and captivating manner of reading that can be heard above. The following stanza is from the first poem he reads, "taking dew deep within."
it began as a beetle crawling my arm I thought a raindrop
sun bang out in a thong ax of sea wings
a bear moves within us like King Lear
wildly, under a full coffin moon we admit totality
and a beast forest affirms we are the beauty
The Raccoon is being published by Marriage Publishing House (MPH), a literary offshoot of the music label Marriage Records (co-founded by Curtis Knapp and Adrian Orange). Knapp and Blood have been close friends since meeting at an open mike fifteen years ago. "Poetry was our first and only love at the time," Knapp writes. "From the outset of the record label I'd had it in mind that I would eventually be able to afford publishing books as well." For their first book, MPH released Blood's sky position in 2007. (A friend tells me that his previous collection, Dot, was comprised of quartered 8.5”x11” paper with a card stock cover, held together by a binder clip.) The sky position won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, awarded by the poet Donald Revell.
Flint Jamison is co-president of MPH and the editor of Veneer magazine, as well as being the designer of The Raccoon. Only 350 copies are being printed, and the book will be published in May. In an interesting blend of technology, ordering includes a code for audio of the author reading the book. Jamison described the unique design of The Raccoon and the thinking behind it:
“The materials selected are specifically chosen to make the thing easy to hold and subsequently read. The fonts are large and the paper is not overly fetishy or eggshell or textured. There is nothing much to distract, no page numbers, no table of contents, barely a colophon, even. The poem that wraps around the cover is the sequence of titles of the poems. Flipped through, it opens easily because the binding is stitched and we used lightweight papers. Myself and Emily Johnson of Emprint Press letterpressed the covers together. We are using a bible bindery to smyth sew them together in Salem, OR.”
In addition to Veneer, MPH has published works including Radical Computer Music, a transcript of a lecture by the Danish artist Goodiepal, and The Moon for Its Citizens by Wallace Cochran. This is an idiosyncratic and creative press that is also visionary in its unconventional way of thinking.
The Raccoon is the work of an unusually gifted poet, a true eccentric and original worthy of serious attention. Below is a long quote that conveys more about Tom's views on poetry, as well as a long poem from the collection.
"I thought about how poetry movements correspond to painting movements and that I had not seen a poetry that reflected the changes in art made by the abstract expressionist painters. Without sound collage, there is no way to not refer to things in writing but I try to leave a lot of ambiguity so the reader can work with the connotations to arrive at their own interpretations. I never went to college and most of my friends are from jobs in restaurants or painters and musicians. I wanted to make poetry for people who don’t like poetry, people who tuned out in 11th grade after being told ‘the charge of the light brigade’ is important and deep. My favorite compliment for my work is 'I hate poetry, but I like your shit man.' I have performed with bands much more often than with other poets. At the editing desk, I ask if a line will come across to the people on the sidewalk outside my window, if I could say something like that in conversation."
"as without" from The Raccoon
as without, so within
marks on doors to rooms where there is no exhibit
I dodged wheels of doing along my drift, free of homes
it got old, ways to take the world from myself
variations in coffins are an anthropological study
now my heart crosses the wild like a river again
and while the gnome day long star holds, I sing trees
I come from the lake, I come from my memory
to where the wind walks stalks of seed on the sheets of leaves
wasps resolve hollow sheathes from the void
as we see to the measure of deed by coming from within
fulfillments make a force on the wild, as a whale ballet
outside, an owl mind perceiving a color of mint
secretly to others, I disappear as a triangle of water planes
over an idea so speechless it is nothing, I cry in silence
meandering both actual and ghost escape
I made a tree in the math of sky and accept it as granted
hockey arena parking lot moon plethora of peaceful reasons
willow pods thrum, red veil of secrecies circle
in the place mating squirrels hold in the sky
we could marry in the rapids of our cedar raft heart
my focus is staying after dark in the woods for soliloquies of silence
breaking through the trees to the stream along the lights of farms
wings in the veins and dire of night, sleep outdoors heart of perspective
the reunion has taken us away and made swans there
I sleep throughout the city and wake in a pool of water
I will be done wandering when the will ends
till then I will be in the mind's oak
so I sit in the tree and make another go of the math of the sky
on exactly where airplanes go when we die
I tried getting up north, crumpling the earth into my satchel
searching the shanty's reasons unraveling as streams
treaty signings in ziggurats of uncommonly known empires
no prayers come from unnoticing orange brooms in trees
God works through us by us and within our means
lamentably our misunderstandings combine
but if the for us light removes
I wish to be smothered in sheathes of heather
wrestling the one thing that was nothing
we could plan for memories to go like old people prepare for another time
when the former form of you would hold me like sails hold winds
as airplanes disappear in air, we become essential by becoming essences
the idea of form is from the stun of seeing.
—
Rob Crawford is the author of Brilliant Families, forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. An editor at Overlook Press, he attended Phillips Academy Andover and Yale University. His writing has appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review and Publishers Weekly, and he lives in Brooklyn. @rcrawford7