#mike anton

[trackeaters-blog]

[trackeaters-blog]

this that #JerseyMusic!

[rachelmennies]

No Silence @ The Inclusive

IN: By nature, does the chapbook itself make it more of a smaller, more self-contained story than [other works you've written]?

RM: Yeah, yeah. The chapbook by definition... Well it's kind of tricky, because I've seen some that are one long poem and I've seen some that are as short as ten pages and as long as forty. Forty pages is almost a poetry manuscript but technically I think it has to be that focused. For me, I'm not really a narrative writer so writing a [longer] narrative would have been impossible for me...it's easier for me to tell a story in a chapbook because that's all the patience I have to tell a story in that very focused way.

IN: That's funny, because as I read [your full-length MS] I feel that one of your strengths is as a narrative writer. Even in the first manuscript, it was variations on the same themes, using the same kind of threads just more spread out. But each poem had a piece of the larger overall arc that you could track all the way through. Did you find that to be a better situation, in that it was so self contained?

RM: It's funny because when I started writing this I was not writing a chapbook. I wasn't writing anything. We have a chapbook class [in my MFA program] at Penn State and what I ended up starting in that class was my full-length manuscript. Ten poems from the first quarter of the manuscript was what I thought was a chapbook, but I thought, "no, no, no, I can run with this." When I started working on this later, I wrote about these two people in this barn and I realized as I wrote that I needed to figure out what they were saying to each other because I hadn't nailed it down yet. So it grew from this nexus of the poem about the marriage being like a gull, that was an early poem. The first couple poems were about them unpacking, him coming home from work, and I thought "well, something has to happen here, there's something [that must] happen." That's when I started to chase those characters down the street. I started to think, "what is it that I have to say?" And there wasn't that much more. This isn't a long story, it's a short story.

[algaetapes]

Mike Anton, friend of Algae, got shot in the fucking face.  Couldn't have happened to a sweeter guy, as they say.  But amazingly he's okay!  Read about it here.

[jasalc]

Soon the snow sparkles as if strewn with diamonds, and the soft gurgling of percolating water begins.

Crews blast winter away on Yosemite National Park’s Tioga Road by Mike Anton on latimes.com

[rachelmennies]

RM, the TumblrBot

I spent a few moments on the phone last night with a fellow blogger-friend, and--if you know me, you're about to either nod your head or roll your eyes--the conversation inevitably slid into the guilt that comes with doing anything other than writing thesis work. I don't consider myself a Real Blogger, perhaps instead a creature living somewhere between small-time media aggregator and literary publishing observer, but I mentioned to dear Mike that my website had transitioned almost primarily into a microblog, right around the time that thesis work really started taking off in the fall. 

I thought about this for a while--you know, about a half hour or so--and at first I wondered if this behavior weren't somehow encouraged by Tumblr, the format I'd chosen from Dreamweaver back in early October. The ease of reblogging and following, of posting multimedia content without accompanying reflection, certainly seems like something I've been taking wholesale advantage of. Might be lazy; might be non-contributory. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing for me, at least not at the present moment; I certainly don't see myself maintaining the sort of writing-content-and-research-heavy blog that some of my other friends write with splendor. 

So: I'm thinking that I need to make some sort of public declaration. Or maybe it's enough just to notice my own online behavior without an overt pledge of change. I'd like to stay in this format at least until the pangs of guilt subside. When the snow's melted, when I'm standing at Kinko's clutching a bound copy of The Thesis, when I've conceived of some other online writing identity for myself other than active observer.  

Enough already. I have words to scribble on.