MICHAEL CZARNECKI ON THE POETIC ROAD TO CLOUDBURST

Michael Czarnecki is a poet, small press publisher, oral memoirist and encourager. He founded FootHills Publishing in 1986 and since then FootHills has published over 400 chapbooks and books of poetry. When FootHills was formed Michael committed to never using grant money to publish books. 26 plus years later he still holds onto that commitment. Nearly 18 years ago he gave up working a regular job and has since made his and his family's living entirely though creative work. Though poor in dollars, he is rich in life's experiences.

Michael lives on his 50 acre homestead, Wheeler Hill, in the northwest corner of the Susquehanna watershed, with his wife, Carolyn, and sons, Grayson, 21 and Chapin, 17  ( turning that on May 11, the start of Cloudburst.) They all are involved with the business of FootHills and the publishing would not be what it is without their contributions.

When not on Wheeler Hill, Michael is often out on the poetic road. Over the years he's traveled tens of thousands of miles across America on poetic tours. Twenty Days on Route 20 is a haibun account of a journey from Boston to Newport, OR on America's longest US Route. His recent books include Wheeler Hill (Benevolent Bird Press), Never Stop Asking for Poems and just released, In the Spirit of T'ao Ch'ien, American recluse poetry, also featuring Sam Hamill, David Budbill, Antler and Charlie Rossiter.

From Wheeler Hill

Observing Monarch                        

Monarch
wings by
lands on
goldenrod blossom
flutters off
a little farther south
while another
takes its place
lands on same stalk
a few seconds of rest
then it too flies off
while I stand
marveling at frail creatures
this last generation
born here, now turning
south, heading far, far
away to southern grounds
to continue this life journey
while I stand, contemplating
my life’s path for these
remaining years ahead
wondering how I’ll pass on
my life’s experience
to some watching bystander

From In the Spirit of T'ao Ch'ien

2

Hilltop covered in thick fog
nearby trees barely in view.

No sunrise over eastern ridge
only slow lightening of sky.

Cat meows, wanting food in his dish
homemade bread toasting on wood stove.

Would you understand if I said
right here, the center of the world

ALBERT GLOVER: CLOUDBURST BUNDLE ITEM: THREE

Cloudburst Bundle:  Item 3

…for most of its several centuries’ run, modernism’s taproot in romantic ideology drew heavily on the notion of opposition and critique.  Whether flaunting disregard for bourgeois conventions, or upending the tables of polite discourse, or slapping the face of public taste, the artistic attachment to posing a critique has been one of the hallmarks of the long legacy of romanticism up through the avant-garde and beyond. Attachment to some notion of politics as a task for poetics, rooted in the notion of critique, is premised on the idea that artistic identity had a privileged role in the culture. Artists were other, somehow apart, the watchdogs, the agents provocateurs, the self-styled shamans, outsiders, whistleblowers, or keepers of the flame of moral conscience in a fallen world. Metaphors of salvation and redemption aside (and with them, all whiff of theology), the sense that the artist’s role was linked to critique has come to be a feature of the contemporary scene. We can read the writings of the modern philosophers, aestheticians, the passionate advocates of social change, radical epistemological defamiliarizers and imaginative visionaries. All are premised on the same principle of utopian reform.

But as the theoretical precepts of complex systems begin to come online (in literal as well as metaphoric senses), the status of critique changes. If authorship and its myths of agency dissolve in a situation where writing is aggregated, made, constructed, processed so that poetics emerge out of the mass of discourse rather than being other from it, then the grounds of distinction on which the figure of the author gained purchase fall away as well.  We become authorettes, components of an authorial stream, bits of the larger code tide. Critique was dependent on apart-ness and distinction, relied on the configured condition of identity to sustain its premises—the outside otherness, a contrived stance at best, but a much-cherished one, was the requirement for such a practice, rooted in what look now like very mechanical distinctions of self and other, subject and object, self and world, perceiving consciousness and a priori phenomena.

From “Beyond Conceptualisms: Poetics after Critique and the End of the Individual Voice” by Johanna Drucker published in The Poetry Project Newsletter, April/May 2012.