My new poetry book, MY ANGIE DICKINSON, is now available at Small Press Distribution:
HERE
Here’s David Trinidad’s back-cover blurb:
In Michael Magee’s cyber-quatrains, two Dickinsons – Police Woman and the Belle of Amherst – meet in the depths of the internet…and what a perfect pair they make! Employing an oulipo-esque Google procedure, Magee channels the poetic line through the window of a search engine. His contextual ruptures and pop snippets accumulate and resonate , continually surprise. My Angie Dickinson is an obsessive, innovative, and exciting work.
And here’s part of Ron Silliman’s review of the book:
Fifty years from now, when people are writing without irony of “the classics of flarf,” one of the works that will turn up on that relatively short list will be Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson …brilliant, hilarious, deeply conceived, completely serious, with more twists than a pretzel factory, well written, but still thoroughly flarf. Just for good measure, My Angie Dickinson is also the most ambitious production, design wise, Zasterle has yet attempted. This book is a joy.
And here’s my Forward to the book(and please register that the writing at http://myangiedickinson.blogspot.com is NOT mine):
The poems in this book were written during an intensive period of reading and writing in 2003 and 2004. I was curious as to whether I could, using some of Emily Dickinson’s forms, evoke in my own readership that combination of shock, bewilderment, excitement, pleasure (a process of dis-orientation and re-orientation) that I imagined Dickinson’s earliest readers must have felt when reading her work. I was cognizant of the fact that Dickinson’s poems, in both form and content, remain surprisingly volatile despite the various historical attempts to render them more placid. This is especially true of those invisible poems that continually escape anthologization and discussion, many of which stray far from English hymnology. So, I reread Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems and, as I did, performed Google searches using the phrase “Angie Dickinson” combined with bits of syntax from Emily Dickinson’s poems: “Angie Dickinson” + “Hope is”. Likewise I would sometimes integrate rhyming words into the search: “Angie Dickinson” + “with a” + “chimp” + “limp”. Each poem involved a series of such intuitive searches followed by a fine stitching together, the mouse replacing the needlepoint.
Why Angie Dickinson? Most obviously to disrupt some of the pieties around Emily Dickinson’s work that I don’t believe have served her poems very well. (As an example, I would note the rarely mentioned fact that Emily Dickinson is one of the funniest poets ever.) Then too, Angie Dickinson is a sort of Zelig figure in American popular culture (and in particular on the internet), performing for almost fifty years in great films, terrible films, mediocre ones and in those difficult to judge films known as cult classics. Her most enduring characterization though, one that immediately brings her image to mind, is the single word: Policewoman. I had a hunch that searching her name would throw up an unending stream of interesting Googled material. Whatever voices emerged from this procedure were, to my mind, pure “flarf” as I describe that word in the “Afterword” to my book Mainstream.
I sent the first several of these poems to the Flarf Collective listserv and then began posting them to the My Angie Dickinson blog as a “serial poem in progress”. Each time I produced ten new poems I announced it to various poetics discussion lists. When Manuel Brito asked me to do a Zasterle Press book I took the blog down. Having relinquished control of the blog URL, http://myangiedickinson.blogspot.com, someone else took up residence there, posting his diarist’s discontents until ceasing for some unknown reason on February 17, 2005. As of now, his entries remain available at that address.
Many thanks to the editors of Dusie, New American Writing, New Messes and Shiny where some of these poems first appeared in print; to the members of the Flarf Collective; to Susan Howe, David Trinidad and Ron Silliman; and especially to my family.
has had two superstar players die of cocaine-related heart attacks and have been cheated out of drafting Tim Duncan and Greg Oden because of the infernal “NBA Draft Lottery”. WTF?!?
