Michael H Kew

Purpledeneye Michael H Kew

(From the introduction) - Twenty-twenty was to be my fat fertile year pimping "Rainbownesia" and "Nectars of Sky". Myriad sales, signings, readings, slams, fests-months of general gaiety and hobnob abundance spanning the U. S. West Coast, British Columbia, Hawai'i, points Atlantic, aims of Europe and the Trans-Tasman. For me, an ambivert weaving a pseudomonastic life in the coastal mountains of southern Oregon, the books promised a depth of opportunity, a rejuvenating social manifest. Four author appearances occurred in late winter. Then the world shut down. By April I'd begun chronicling fragments of my increasingly vivid dream journeys, not deliberately to craft new works but to interpret per curiosity as most were quite lively and communal-a sharp contrast to the wacky anthroreality unfolding. Subconsciously I was living vigorously. There were no lockdowns, no hint of face masks nor hand sanitizing-six feeting-societal suffocating-quagmired quarantining. Rather: smiles, laughter, wild parties, music concerts, beach gatherings, pubbing, womening, world traveling, odd yet delightful scenarios-my nocturnality depicted merry normality while 2020 burst into a wide dinurnal stink of nightmare. One rainy May dusk with a glass of Humboldt petite sirah, I browsed my new copy of "The Penguin Book of Oulipo", a lush 400-page anthology of exotic poetic structures and techniques exemplifying the Oulipo, or Ouvroir de Littér hature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, two brilliant Frenchmen who elected unique individuals into what became a small eccentric core of giant minds. One, Jacques Roubaud, summarized Oulipo thus: "The aim is to invent (or reinvent) constraints of a formal nature and propose them to enthusiasts interested in composing literature." New York-based Academy of American Poets boiled Oulipo doctrine down to "the profound potential of a poem produced within a framework or formula and that, if done in a playful posture, the outcomes could be endless."To that end(less?), equipped also with cherished copies of Harry Mathews's "Oulipo Compendium" (an Oulipo dictionary), William Gillespie's weirdo Oulipoish "Table of Forms", and Edward Hirsch's iconic "A Poet's Glossary", spontaneously I resolved to distill my waxing collection of dream notes, eventually whittling 55 of them into 55 poems per 55 different structures, 55 a Fibonacci number. This is Purpl?deneye.