Six months ago I found myself emotionally incubating in the wordsmith womb of this really cool artistic Los Angeles recording studio reciting a silly poem (that I fucking had to sign away the commercial rights to) I initially scribed for a reading at one of your poetry readings’ at Champs West two years prior. The recording session was a disaster. I had been up for like six days straight printing out homemade chapbooks (which I also had to sell to the bookstore first so they could grant me a menial slab of the profits) for the literary gala later on that night. I hadn’t consecutively crashed for more than three hours in a 24 hour period in over a week. One of my co-workers was in the hospital so on what might have been the most significant seven days of my seventeen year odyssey to become a full-time successful writer I was working at a job I loathe 16 hours a day while eking out every sacred second chiseling out the annotations and illustrations for my burgeoning chapbook. I was enervated beyond all fathoms of fuck. The recording session was conducted by this cool voice-over artist who is well known in Hollywood and in television commercials. Outside the booth were writers from across the country. There were O. Henry Award winners and Bread loaf scholars and pushcart prize recipients in the room. The sound booth operator wanted me to sound more nasal. More NPR fresh-airish. He gave me a severed wine cork and mandated that I place it between my lips like a half gnawed on communion wafer to enunciate my vowels. I got pissed and almost spat the cork into his forehead. I tell him that I monopolized maybe thirty hours writing that poem two years ago and that the poem no longer belongs to me. I tell him that if he wants to read it the way he wants to hear it he is free to record it himself. I make an asinine aside about him being the choir teacher who cut Bob Dylan because he didn’t sound like everyone else. After about five takes I get a solid recording. When I exit the sound booth most of the writers’ were outside smoking but there was one poet who teaches creative writing at the university of Pittsburgh and who just won this poetry award no one outside the industry has scarcely heard of where the judge was Mark Doty who kept on chanting: “That’s it. That’s it. That’s just fucking it. Yes.”
**
Thanx for the last couple o’ years. We’ve had some fun. All best in yer own creative endeavors and let the beauty you love be what you do…
Here’s Bloom bartering back yer potato.
DVB.
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