This month I brushed up on my letterpress skills and took a beginners’ class at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The result is this edition of 40 broadsides. One can be yours for $20.

The poem, from my new book, Pitch, is called “Joke,” and it’s a spicy little zinger that runs like this:

JOKE

My mother used to say:

  Nobody was here today

  and she made dinner.

The joke was weird,

  for where was Nobody

  now, and where

the feast prepared?

Each broadside is signed and numbered on laid paper, and each is slightly unique. They’d look great professionally matted and framed. I’ll ship it to you rolled, in a mailing tube.

Want one?

Mail check to: MN Center for Book Arts, 1011 Washington Avenue S # 100  Minneapolis, MN 55415. Make check payable to Todd Boss.

I’m in love with a theater company that presents great theater to non-traditional audiences (in shelters, prisons, and the like). Now, I know what you’re thinking: They’re probably no good. Why else would they troop to prisons? Why else would they have no flashy permanent home to perform in?

Actually, Ten Thousand Things Theater Company (named for the Zen idea that the universe is made up of ten thousand things) is consistently ranked “best” of the Twin Cities by the major critics. The work is heart-stoppingly good. The actors are the best in town. The director, Michelle Hensley, is hands-down one of the city’s most talented. If you have a chance to be in one of their public audiences, I can’t encourage it enough. 

Several years ago I arranged to sit in on a prison performance. The audience was mesmerized, moved to tears, inspired to chime in with advice to the actors as the drama unfolded. The play was the broadway musical “Ragtime,” performed by a single pianist and a cast of about six. It’s amazing how little you need!

And that’s the point. Ten Thousand Things was founded more than 15 years ago with the idea that theater is better when everyone is in the audience. Shakespeare knew this, and so does Hensley. A unique electricity happens when audiences don’t know they can’t participate in the play by shouting warnings and instructions to the actors. When great plays are performed in the round, with minimal sets and no lighting effects to distract the audience, a raw theatricality is the result. The contract between viewer and actor is heightened, and that tension is a good actor’s greatest resource.

Ten Thousand Things makes theater on its most fundamental level, where it’s most powerful. I joined their board of directors years ago, and I’m proud to recommend them. Check out their season. See their story. See you there!

Last night I drove three hours north from the Twin Cities to the tiny log cabin library in Cable, Wisconsin, where 15 people had come out of the woods on a Thursday night to hear me read my poetry and show a few motionpoems. I’ve read my poetry and screened Motionpoems’ films for groups of hundreds, but I love doing events like these where I can get to know individual audience members and get their feedback on the work.

This one proved to be a tremendous audience with intelligent questions and a strong thirst for more. I like a plain-spoken audience that isn’t trying to outsmart fellow academics, and I love unbridled enthusiasm; I find it in abundance at community events like these.

Thanks to librarian Kristine Lendved for arranging this event.

If your library, community center, bookstore, or school would like to order a Motionpoems screening kit or arrange an event, let me know, or inquire at motionpoems.com.

This will be a rare chance to see the whole forthcoming season of Motionpoems on one big screen, meet the artists involved, and join in the discussion about Motionpoems’ unique hybrid form. Free and open to the public. Popcorn and beer provided! Details on our Facebook event page.

Each piece is hand-lettered and hand-colored on 13×20 archival paper and sprayed with fixative to keep it from smearing. Yours will arrive in a mailing tube, and will be suitable for framing.

I wrote this poem after buying a fresh sketchbook. I started drawing, but soon (alas!) I was writing, and savoring the forgotten childhood joys of writing with graphite pencil. It occurred to me what an illusion of permanence ink presents the artist, and that stirred me to a fresh appreciation of the fact that everything in the world is a draft, the Creator perhaps less creator than experimenter.

So it’s neat to see this poem in pencil, rendered with a nod to the same impermanence that inspired it.

E-mail me if you’d like to have a copy for yourself. They run $125 plus shipping.

Animated poetry in a hand-held device!

Designer / animator Angella Kassube has turned my short poem “God Flips” into a bound paper flip book! How flipping cool is that? Angella’s my co-directing partner at Motionpoems, she’s a typeface junkie like me, and she loves making things move. 

It’s old-school animation… in a mobile device!

The poem reads:

GOD FLIPS

the ages’

pages

like a book’s

twixt thumb

and hooks.

It was a shock to see it, at first. PITCH is a collection of poems that spiral from a specific event: the time that my father lost the family piano off the back of his pickup truck when I was 12. The accident took place at the very rural, heavily forested corner of County Highway NL and State Highway 27, just east of Fall Creek, Wisconsin.

But this piano, in this picture? This here’s a city piano. I doubt it’s ever seen a field or woods.

This piano didn’t fall from anywhere. It was placed on this sidewalk, carefully, by piano movers. A moving van is idling just beyond the frame.

This piano is not an upright, like the one that landed in snowbank and brambles that night. It’s a grand.

Don’t get me wrong: I love this cover for lots of reasons… I love its sinuous shapes and colors. I love how exposed the piano’s strings are. I love how the building behind seems to curve away in a haze.

It’s really hard to have someone affix a cover to your work.

Let me know what you think.

I like to work with people to discover the hidden meanings in their lives, and to use poetry to pinpoint and articulate those hidden meanings.

I can be hired to write a poem for you. It can work in various ways. I can work with you by phone or in person. You tell me your story, and, over time, I present you with a poem. It can be for you personally, a gift for a loved one, or a public gesture, whatever you like.

In 2008, a poem I wrote on commission, “A Deer,” even landed in my first poetry collection, Yellowrocket.

I have written for numerous “clients” on commission, and the process is always lively, stimulating, and richly rewarding. Let me know if you’d like references.

Commissions start at $250.