Romatka made a meager and undependable living as a teacher and editor of poetry. He published this curious broadside about his unpleasant interactions with his clients, written as usual in his tiny meticulous calligraphy. The two columns are one sheet (letter size); I scanned them separately to make them easier to read. (Posted by Doug […]

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Anton Romatka was a poet, editor, publisher, calligrapher, and teacher, who held forth in Greenwich Village in the 1930s and ’40s. He died in 1948; his body was discovered by the writer John Keel, then a young Village poet himself, working on a magazine with Romatka. You can read the story here. I found very […]

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Charles Cros: Collected Monologues is now available from Black Scat Books! Charles Cros (1842-1888) was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, equally adept at poetry, fiction, and scientific inquiry. He wrote smutty verses with Verlaine, synthesized gems with Alphonse Allais, contributed wild prose fantasies to Le Chat Noir, and experimented with color […]

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Gelett Burgess’s story “The Man Who Lived Backward” (Blue Book Magazine, January 1946) uses anagrams in a way I haven’t seen before. The story is, as the title warns us, about a man who lived backward, aging into an infant. The man is named Levi Wicet, and we are informed that the men in the […]

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I’m now translating the comic monologues of Charles Cros (1842-1888), and am consequently unraveling the various versions of his first one, Le hareng saur. It’s not only one of Cros’s most popular poems, still dutifully recited by French schoolchildren, but one of the few translated into English. Most English readers, if they know Cros at […]

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No Bile! is now available from Black Scat Books! This is my 8th translation of the peerless French proto-dadaist Alphonse Allais (1854-1905). This collection of what he called his “anthumous works” includes love stories, revenge stories, short-shorts, and unclassifiable prose, all affronting the reader with startlingly modern black humor, imagination, and wordplay. Among the highlights […]

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Another new verse form: the equiliteral tercet. Like its geometrical model, the equilateral triangle, it’s composed of three equal parts: three lines of three words, each with three letters. It need not rhyme, but these three examples do: Old men say Now it’s day Cut the hay Sty for pig Fly for fig Tie for […]

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The Snowman Three Doors Down is now available from Black Scat Books! It has 24 stories! It’s 246 pages! Hapless characters slog through tangled plots and formal constraints in this bracing collection. Will the Chromatologist find the shade of green that identifies the adulterous cosplayer? Will a group of tipsy scholars discover the secret to […]

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Black Scat Books has released a free Peek-A-Book of “An Interview with Horace Ballantine,” from my upcoming collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. The veteran cartoonist has to contend with an interviewer who never heard of comic strips, and it’s not easy for either of them. You can download a PDF here. (Posted by Doug […]

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For anyone looking for new poetic forms, I offer the anagram rhyme. Instead of rhyming lines with words ending with the same phonemes, it uses anagrams. Here are four quadriliteral quatrains: When Peter heard the church bell peal, He shut his eyes, prepared to leap. Priscilla, features drawn and pale, Called out a final anguished […]

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