By: Brad Buchanan
this painful slouch
is also my crouch for working
each laborious hunch
into a molten line of type
a proper printer’s devil
in shape and ancestry
but a poet at heart
I reverse my “p”s and “q”s
cross my “i’s and dot my “t”s
spell out my problems under protest
I misquote the proof of my heart
introduce some addled signature
as evidence of a volitional error
hoping someone mistakes it for genius
when it is merely the flop-sweat
of failing inspiration
no great artist had such clammy hands
or inkstained teeth
think of Blake with only a gift
for ungainly names of the godly
a Nobodaddy of the worst quarto
you have ever imagined
and no original or reliable alternate folio
to consult or console you with
if you feel that it hurts you to read this
just try setting it down with a straight face
and a distended poisoned stomach
what a wretched life
writing for mass reproduction
a broken cog in the grammar machine
fighting for space to fit one stylish colophon
into this twisted and thunderous frame
Brad Buchanan's poetry, fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in nearly 200 journals, among them The Antigonish Review, California Quarterly, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Journal of Modern Literature, The Portland Review,The Seattle Review, The South Carolina Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and The Wisconsin Review. He has also published two book-length collections of poetry (The Miracle Shirker and Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter) and two academic books. His third book of poetry, The Scars, Aligned (A Cancer Narrative), is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (2019). He was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2015, underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016 (leaving him visually impaired), and is currently in remission.
"This poem has an autobiographical element (I have terrible posture made worse by my work habits, as well as stomach problems due to a chronic illness) but it is written in the voice of a specific persona. The Bibliographer is an alter ego I have created/evolved to explore and indulge some of my book-nerdy obsessions (in this case the process of composing and printing texts on an old-fashioned press). In writing this poem I was inspired by some of the controversies surrounding early Shakespearean quartos (i.e. the First “Bad” Quarto) as well as by William Blake’s visionary illustrated prints of his own poems, and by James Joyce’s remark (made through Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses) that a genius makes no mistakes, that any “errors” are “volitional” and thus become the “portals of discovery.” Basically, the conceit of the poem is that my physical body has taken on some of the characteristics of a malfunctioning and outdated printing press. I sometimes worry that poems like this one are private and inaccessible, so it is very gratifying to see it published (in print, so to speak)."
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