Pesbo - May 1st, 2008

64 free ebooks of poetry for download today only (until May 2, midnight) at Rick Lupert's Poetry Super Highway. Click on "The Great E-book Free-For-All" from the main menu.

Notice the wide assortment.

What caught my eye? Terry McCarty's The Use Your Delusion Sampler where a caped crusader, poet in black stands and denounces the wrong-headedness of slam and proclaims the only true faith as triolet and is escourted back to his high horse, it given a slap on the rump as he rides back out of town.

I paraphrase but a poem with healthy sense of lampoonery is lovely. An excerpt from his Poet Inc.

Poetry Inc.
Each day, I consult the corporate handbook
and churn out intricate, metaphor-laden and
purposely inaccessible poems loved by an Important few.

Lunches are spent with colleagues
denouncing “journal entry” poetry
and hailing rhyme-and-meter “new traditionalism”.

In the break room, we are treated to tape loops
of Robert Frost intoning “free verse is like playing
tennis without a net” hundreds of times.

Easy to read these. Paul Koenig has a completely other feel and pleasure in Poems for Pixels. It is hard to excerpt but a different kind of play, dipping into surreal of "Today is unavoidably Tuesday. / all robots are secret Monkeys / Flecks of gold say her eyes." It feels like screen shots of a flash animation poem, additions accumulating.

Jonathan Shaw's sheets are densely laid out and compressed packets of real life, for example, a woman pressing a man's hand at 3 stages of life to different results and effects.

Charles P Ries' in I'd rather be Mexican is more of a travelogue of prose poems.