A Book Proposal

A few weeks back, while reading Adam Smith, I wandered over to the Stimson Room in the Mount Holyoke library.  It’s a nice place to read in the summer—comfortable chairs and quiet.  It’s also the room where they house a large selection of books of poetry.  Looking up from Smith, I noticed on the shelf a small volume of poetry with the title coffee coffee.  Not surprisingly, I was deeply intrigued, and so I picked it up to look at it.  I then proceeded to read the whole volume.  It took less than 2 minutes.  Really.

The first poem:

though

That’s not the title of the poem, by the way.  That’s the whole poem.  Other poems:

acre

sleep

phone

That’s not one poem; that’s three different poems.  Not all the poems were one word long; there was, for example:

air

air

air

air

Each poem is printed roughly centered on the right hand page (what would be the odd page in a book with page numbers).  The font resembles that of an old manual typewriter. 

I cleverly realized that this volume of poetry was different from the sort of thing which Milton used to do.  I figured it was some new statement about something or other, then got to wondering why Mount Holyoke had bought the volume, so I looked it up.  Much to my surprise, the volume is a reprint of an old 1960s volume of poetry.  Curiouser and curiouser.  Then I found out that the author, Aram Saroyan, once received an NEA award for the masterpiece:

lighght

Your tax dollars at work.

Now many people might grouse about this sort of poetry, but it inspired me.  So, I herewith offer up the following manuscript of poetry for any publisher who would like to publish the Next Big Thing.

The volume is entitled

cancoffetos

It is a series of 100 poems, broken into three sections.  The first section has 34 poems, the following 2 have 33 poems each.  The poems are printed on the left hand page (what would be the even page, though this volume has no page numbers).  The first poem in each section is printed one-third of the way from the top of the page; the following poem is printed one third of the way from the bottom of the page, and the placement then goes back and forth for the remainder of the section.  The poems printed in the top third are in the font Cambria; the poems printed on the bottom third are in Perpetua.  The exceptions are the last poem in each section, which is printed in Old English Text MT and in all three sections is located one-sixth of the way from the bottom on the right hand page.  The poems in the first and third sections are in 18 point font; the poems in the second section are in 16 point font.  The first twelve poems in the volume are as follows (each line is the complete poem):

dawoodrk

mammattermoth

agearlyainst

flaquaticts

tilaplethorapia

orabluenge

deficlefning

googeigeinvaluele

bruqwertynch

esgablesence

iwhaled

flophalynxuride

The volume ends with the poem

comstarsedy

Also of interest to a prospective publisher is that the volume of poetry clearly will market itself.  Indeed, a large initial print run will be desirable due to the truly innovative and avant-garde nature of the work.  I am also happy to pass along one of the initial reviews of this volume:

A breathtaking new work of poetry, cancoffeetos, by James E. Hartley, has recently been published.  In what is clearly a bold update of the tired work of Aram Saroyan, Hartley has taken Saroyan’s idea and inverted it, showing us how the world around us envelops us even as we seek to master it.  The human effort in this technological age to make sense of our surroundings through the ever increasing drive into the microcosm, epitomized by the ubiquitous cell phone and Saroyan’s single word poems, is called into question on every page of this volume as simple concepts are wrapped up in often surprising ways, invariably smothering our original notions on how to make sense of the world, problematizing the very question of our existence.  The very location of the poems on the left hand side, alternating between top and bottom of the page, point out the conventional nature of Saroyan’s work, demonstrating that what we used to think of as bold innovation was really just sterile adaptation of the sterile modernist era.  The locations change and the fonts change, leaving us with the realization that here we have no firm ground on which to stand.

            The poems are puzzles in themselves, refusing to reveal their secrets until the reader has worked at it.  For example, the poem

                                    bupuntter

stares out from the page at the reader, asking for interpretation, but offering no immediate clue.  Gradually, the reader begins to notice that the poems all consist of one word thrust violently into the heart of another word.  The outer word encompasses the inner word, revealing a juxtaposition of the attempt to understand the irrefragable nature of the conventional definition with the hermeneutical epistemology of the broken outer word (or should that be broken outer world?).  In the poem reprinted above, for example, the realization that punt (which could be either a boat or a term from American football) loses its solidity of (dual?) meaning in the substance of butter, which has no solidity.  Why is the butter being divided by the punt (verb or noun?)?  Are our lives simply being transported (by boat or kick, notice) from a state of solidity (hardened butter in the cooler) into a state of dispersal (spread over bread).  The poem tantalizes with possibility, never quite revealing its full secret.

            The very title of the book offers up this exploration of the duality in which we live.  Coffee is clearly a reference to the work of the epigone Saroyan, and it is surrounded by cantos.  Thus, the title of coffee inside cantos conjures up the image of Bach Coffee Cantatas, a secular work by a religious composer.  The cantos (or songs) make up a Bachian (or should that be Bacchanalian) opera, while the coffee provides stimulus to the brain.

            In short, this work is a masterpiece, and its reception will undoubtedly rival that of The Rite of Spring or The Wasteland.

            I should also add that while that review does capture many intriguing things about this proposed volume, the reviewer did miss some things which should have been obvious.  Note that the structure of the volume, divided into 3 sections of 34/33/33, is the same as the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, each section of which is, of course, called a canto.  Furthermore, the embedded word at the end of all three sections is stars, again echoing Dante.  Moreover, the reviewer also completely missed the change in font size and its obvious significance to the work as a whole.  These and the other such hidden clues (e.g., the connection between the 14th poem and the 41st poem, the relationship between half of the prime numbered poems (and since there are 25 primes, it is uncertain if that is 11 or 13 poems which are related), the importance of the missing secondary color and the sole tertiary color in the series) scattered throughout the work, mean that literary scholars will inevitably favorably compare it to Finnegans Wake. 

            The author, who can be contacted via e-mail at jhartley@mtholyoke.edu, is happy to entertain proposals for publication.  Serious proposals from established publishers only, please, as a work of this magnitude will require an advanced distribution network.