The Holocaust - No Joke

The title of my 2nd book's going to be "The Holocaust."

When I told my friend Dean Gorman this he emailed me the following:

"i can't tell if you are joking or not. you know the holocaust is no joking matter, ron...unless you are a denier..."

Well, I am not joking. And I am not a denier. (those pricks really fucking piss me off.) And I'm not just going for shock or hype value. This book is going to live up to its title. Many of the poems are like dynamite in my blood.

"The Holocaust" is going to be made of "imperfect erasures" of Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) and Joyce (Finnegan's Wake).

Imperfect erasures in that I'm tweaking some words (for example "pass" can become "passed" or "passing" and "he" can become "she" or "me" etc.....)

and i'm also adding, as needed, small words like "and" or "but" or "through" or "in" etc etc

I've got nearly a 100 drafts of individual poems so far, and I have a rough and evolving sense of an overall shape and sequence. Lots of work ahead. Yeah. But I can feel the book. I can feel it. And it is fire in me.

Temptations----Move Past the Sex Stuff (?)

Everyone gets tempted. For me it's

a) to write sweeter. To be less violent, sexual. Monstrous. Shocking.
---fyi, I don't feel so monstrous. And I don't think I'm trying to shock. But people do keep accusing me of being a serial killer :) ---

b) to write the gore-and-sex crowd. easy to just shock. to be gratuitous.

Anyways, here's what my good friend Dean Gorman (poet, editor, songwriter, band frontman, etc) had to say to me (in emails) about violence and sex in my work

(speaking mainly of my e-chap Ringing)


"I think its an important part/component of your makeup, but i would just hate for it to be perceived as your "thing," as it were, by those not familiar with the entire breadth of your work. and, from reading through your new chapbook, you seem to be amping it up more than you did in Holy Land, which i think is a really good balance of beauty/insight/wonder and the darker side of humanity (sex, violence, humiliation, etc.).

that is my two cents. i would like to see you move past the sex stuff, or at least look at it from a different angle (which i think you have done at times). but maybe its just not for me, and that's fine. i'm sure there are many people who enjoy it (obviously there are). i guess it just can come off as pretty agressive at times. aggressive in the way it leaves you as a reader with your back to the wall, forced to listen, but not to engage or experience."

the above is Dean expanding on his original note to me that he had "less of a stomach for (the violent sex stuff) in (his) middle age."

My next chapbook is Dreaming and it comes out this summer from Scantily Clad Press.

Some of the poems in it are published at Coconut. If interested check them out here.