Ebooks
Argotist Ebooks is the publishing wing of The Argotist Online. Due to the large number of submissions only those manuscripts that are accepted will get a reply. If you get no reply within two weeks of your submission then assume that it has not been accepted. For all enquiries contact: argotist@fsmail.net
The catalogue in order of publication:
by Jake Berry
Poems by Jake Berry that originally appeared as status updates at Facebook between May and September 2009.
by Rich Curtis
A series of thirty-five poems composed by Rich Curtis from found text. The found source material was a copy of the book Ironweed, by William Kennedy, that has been ripped in half, with the half that was attached to the spine of the book being used here.
by Martin Stannard
As may be inferred from the title, this poem by Martin Stannard is published in the hope that it will assist the complete idiot to understand the basic problems of living a life, and also help him or her to overcome them.
by Francis Raven
Moisture Surges by Francis Raven is a book of poems about water. There are three main sections divided by two conversations/plays and book-ended by a prologue and an appendix. The three main sections are: (1) a section on the metaphysics of water (2) a section on the biology and life of water and (3) a section on humanity's interaction with water. The prologue is a sonnet and the appendix includes resources about water. The two conversations/plays that break up the main sections are: (1) a play about the water shortage in the west that alludes to Plato's Apology and (2) a roundtable conversation with real philosophers on a possible philosophy of water.
by Chris Mansel
Chris Mansel writes like a man without a country. Each poem of The Ashes of Thoreau is a labyrinth of fragmentation and resolve. The projection is dense but difficult to abandon. Like cinema, it will leave you entertained by the time you step back into the light.
by John M. Bennett
158 poems (or barely constrained outbursts) written in the Spring of 2009 in which John M. Bennett tries to reformat the world with a swarm of linguistic distortions and formal jiggling, bursting out of the thin shirt of consciousness to reveal what's out there and also what's in there. The poems are textual, visual, aural, multi-lingual (English, Spanish - or their simulacra - and bits of French and Globbolalia). Unlike anything else written.
by Peter Ganick
What is a text? After John Coltrane's wall of sound, we have here a wall of text. What does making sense entail? Is it in the words themselves and/or the sequence of words? In An Archeology of Theory, Peter Ganick suggests both and neither in true spatial reference. Energy is space is a version here-to-be-read.
by Todd Swift
Todd Swift’s Experimental Sex Hospital is the ebook sequel to his critically acclaimed, Mainstream Love Hotel. Shadowing that previous work, the poems here deepen and lengthen the poet's exploration of desire and devotion, and, aesthetically, the tension between innovation and tradition in contemporary poetic styles. As in all Swift's work, musicality, sense of form, and wordplay fuse with elevated and street-level tones that create a zany, risk-taking book-text that interrogates ideas of self-identity and poetics, with an earnest eroticism. Barely literature, or literally bare, these are poems that enjoy walking naked with a flamboyant display.
Sparagmos Never Mind the Via Negativa
by Jim Leftwich
The word is flesh. Tear it apart, syllable by syllable. Tear the syllables apart, letter by letter. There is no longer any need to begin with the word. We have already torn the letters apart. The word made flesh, the letters made noise... Eat it - raw. Jim Leftwich's Sparagmos Never Mind the Via Negativa was written in May 2010 using a Logitech EX 100 keyboard. It is a text, but it is not a text about reading.
by Sarah Ahmad
Sarah Ahmad's Closing Eyes Blazing Life consists of neo-vignettes fabricated from the chaos of absurdity that is the background noise to the human experience, and which encircles us like a demented throng.
by Alan Sondheim
In Playz by Alan Sondheim, extreme base desires take over base desires, control becomes politics becomes control, and zaniness is exposed as violence, sex, arousal and betrayal.
by Jeff Harrison
Jeff Harrison's Sharks of Mary Shelley explores the subterfuges and circumscriptions of the authorial persona before a backdrop of cannibalised historical identities filtered through the ventriloquism of poetic utterances.
by Bill Drennan
Stories Short and Strange is the first volume of a unique collection by Bill Drennan. These tales are typically laced with blends of absurdist science fiction, satire, childish cartoonism and black space humour.
by Jack Foley
Jack Foley's King Amour is a series of amour-plated adventures that take the rider on a fifty-year journey in a soi-disant con-sciousness that takes itself serially and postulates both pos and impostures in a grand, grad granulation of mic and picturation. The Kong is dead, but the Konig kicks. Who but Amour would dorothy these ravings? As the great, inspiring, and possibly loony Samuel Greenberg wrote, 'The blue, faded purple, horizon mount / Seemed to bellow the valleys in mists / Of enriching, ensuing, divine shadowings... / Where may this be?'
by Evelyn Posamentier
In
Brainiography Evelyn Posamentier creates a dreamscape in which objects
become animate and humans objectified, both inhabiting a marginal realm between
physical and virtual dimensions. In language that is neither pre-modern nor
postmodern, a compelling narrative brings language to a turning point. Here is
poetry responsive to encounters with world and technology—brutal and
immediate. A new form of witness.
by Chris Stroffolino
Chris Stroffolino’s Light as a Fetter is a collection of poems inspired by Cliffs Notes. A collection that John Ashbery has described as 'carelessly brilliant'.
by Rich Curtis
As
a performance art piece, Rich Curtis became a licensed notary public in 2009.
Since that time he has notarized many things, none of which have been legal
documents. Curtis is fascinated by the idea of being legally bound to TRUTH. His
personal view that truth is inherently subjective runs counter to the notion of
a legal and absolute truth. As part of this project he devised an exercise of
witnessing one true thing each day. For the most part Curtis tried to pick the
most obscure, least significant event of a given day. He distilled each of these
moments into one sentence. The result of this is A Year of Ordinary Moments,
where the body of the text is the result of his daily observations.
by F. A. Nettelbeck
A
thirty-six-page sequence from F. A. Nettelbeck's blog, Sewing Memory,
written between 2007 and 2010, Pesticide Drift presents Nettelbeck as
both perpetrator and victim in the death of poetry and scandalizing myth.
by J. D. Nelson
Scratch-n-sniff the strange fragrance of J. D. Nelson's Noise Difficulty Flower. These 25 science fiction-scented surrealities were written between 2007 and 2010.
by
Ann Bogle
Ann
Bogle's Solzhenitsyn Jukebox is a collection of stories where texts
create themselves out of shreds of recollections, leaps of logic, and the
constant self-adjustment of narrative imperatives; spinning themselves out in
the process of going along under their own momentum. This is akin to what the
critic and culturologist Mikhail Iampolsky referred to as the poetry of "caresse".
by John Tranter
John Tranter's The Blast Area (originally published as a pamphlet in 1974, and no longer in print) consists of poems that are varied and strange, often veering away from common sense into a quirky surrealism. The final third of the book consists of 'The Poem in Love', a sequence of fifteen pseudo-sonnets (set up by an epigraph from the possibly fictitious Paul Ducasse) which critic Andrew Johnson noted, 'might stand for the variety of strategies we employ to make sense of the world, and for the fleeting, unstable patterns we think we perceive in our experience. It's as if having reached an extreme of cynicism about "meaning", Tranter lets it in through the back door, and a new-found humour with it'.
Portions of Conversational Assemblies
by Felino A. Soriano
Portions of Conversational Assemblies by Felino A. Soriano are ekphrastic interpretations of various jazz recordings, and part of the larger, dedicated series of poems Soriano has dedicated 2010 to composing.
by David Meltzer
Doom Cusp by David Meltzer is dedicated to the California artist Wallace Berman who was one of Meltzer's mentors when he became exiled there from Brooklyn. Berman's use of the Hebrew alphabet and especially the Aleph in his collages, reminded Meltzer of the presences of the Holocaust and seemed relevant today in the midst of another series of Holy Wars and their ultimate futility.
by Susan M. Schultz
Inspired
by a series of paintings by Elizabeth Berdann, Old Women Look Like This
by Susan M. Schultz is about very old age. Schultz tests the comparison of old
age to childhood by placing old people into unexpected narratives, including
children's stories, among them Pippi Longstocking and Diary of a Wimpy
Kid. An imaginative off-shoot of her Dementia Blog (Singing Horse,
2008).
by
Ric
Carfagna
Symphony
No. 2
by Ric Carfagna (and a follow-up to his Symphony No. 1) is a work not to
be construed as a symphony in a strictly classical sense, as is the case with
the symphonic forms of works by Mozart or Haydn, but more along the lines of
works by obtuse unwieldy 20th century composers such as Norgard, Nystroem,
Segerstam and Pettersson. It comprises not so much of thematic elements as it
does the repetition of images in differing contexts. It starts off with a burst
of dissonance then settles down into a placid, surreal, disjunctive utterance.
It also attempts to conjure up the ghosts of cubist poetry (a short lived and
little known poetic phenomena) with Carfagna’s own idiosyncratic spin on it.
by
Steve
McCaffery and Alan Halsey
This
revised and expanded edition of Paradigm of the Tinctures by Steve
McCaffery and Alan Halsey revisits the classic humanist idea of the Sister Arts
where poetry is understood to be a speaking picture and a picture a silent poem.
The revisitation, however, is bluntly revisionary and the result is a fresh
text-graphic dialogue.