How to Continue: the opposite of AI

new chapbook from Economy Press and more soon

Hi Friends, hope you are all hanging in there as safely and well as you can.

A very kind poet from Chicago, Anthony Opal, who runs Economy Press, is next month publishing a chapbook of some poems I’ve written since I Love Hearing Your Dreams. He makes such beautiful books and this is no exception.

It’s a limited edition, and the first 50 preorders will be hand numbered and signed. You can pre-order here - theeconomypress.com/HOW-TO-CONTINUE — preorders are discounted, and help him make the books.

If you are a paid subscriber to this substack, please send me your mailing address and I will send a complimentary copy in appreciation for your support. If you sign up to be a paid subscriber, I’ll send you one as well, for as long as they last.

I sent Anthony a bunch of poems and some prose from the past few years, and he put this book together. It was great to see someone else identify a commonality and unity in the poems that is retrospectively apparent, but which I could not see until he did. The title is a question I am asking myself all the time. What is the best, most meaningful, most helpful, kindest, most creative way to continue to write and create and live? I certainly don’t know, but I think it’s the right question to ask. The book ends with the title poem, a longer one that feels exciting to me, and points me in some new and familiar directions.

How to Continue comes out on August 19th. Thank you for supporting me, and this amazing labor Anthony does of creating hand made books. It’s the opposite of AI basically: to make a handmade chapbook of poetry. True poetry is in fact the opposite of AI, something I will just say and not explain for now. Surely in a post to come. I am so moved that Anthony does this work, and that he would put the time into this with my poems. Anthony is also a terrific poet and you can see his work and the work of others on the site, and buy other chapbooks as well and support him.

Substack has blown up for writers it seems over the past few months. We’ll see where that goes. For now at least it makes sense: it feels good to write into a group of people who are at least somewhat interested, as opposed to writing something and then consigning it to the variegations of the void. So I plan to write more and share more here, and in addition to share some special work in progress (poems, songs, and essays) with paid subscribers who I know would really be interested in it. More on that in the weeks to come, and if you have thoughts about what you’d like to see more of, please share them with me!

Here is one poem from How to Continue, dedicated to the late great Dean Young. I had more or less forgotten about this poem, and then found it again when I was gathering material for Anthony. One more thing to be grateful for. More soon,

xo m