August 8, 2018 / barton smock

/ this was always the abridged version of how to believe in nothing when addicted to meaning

bartonsmock, isacoustic, poem, poems, poetics, poetry, prose

check out the 4th Blue Hour Anthology (BlueHourPress), in which I have a poem, link below:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/632554547/the-blue-hour-anthology-4-a-collection?ref=shop_home_active_1

youtube channel readings:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WuSKK8yNnngtdNlb5NfwQ

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author spotlight on lulu:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

all book previews on site are the viewed book in its entirety. also, all titles will be sent free in hard copy to those interested in writing a review.

inquire, request, here: bartonsmock@yahoo.com or bartsmock@gmail.com

PATREON

friends, enemies, family:

in the doing of a thing there is often a lull and in that lull a curvature of worry that perhaps something has too quickly taken shape and so one might be led to explore creating, not to make, but to evoke and I will attempt, here, to do that and hope it is a space that takes up only its own.

https://www.patreon.com/bartonsmock

some recent work:

eating the animal back to life
10.00
315 pages
published July 2015
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html

of which Kazim Ali says:

Speaking of being captivated, when I was in Cleveland’s most exciting new independent bookstore, Guide to Kulchur, I picked up on a whim a few small volumes that appeared to have been published by the author using Lulu. I was so entranced by the seemingly simple but endlessly complex, prickly lyrics that I wrote to the author, Barton Smock, through his blog, kingsoftrain.wordpress.com. He’s been sending me books now and then and his latest, Eating the Animal Back to Life, is just knocking me out. These poems are desperate, tender, wry, alarmed, god-obsessed, and musically driven. Smock is not published by others, he does it all himself…
All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/reading-list-november-2015

earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/earth-is-part-earth-and-theres-a-hole-in-the-sound-i-made-you-from/paperback/product-22503167.html

MOON tattoo
9.00
114 pages
published March 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/moon-tattoo/paperback/product-22621263.html

…The result of this type of work is that a poem might seem fractured, when it is not. Smock works with both image and symbol in order to create poems that are iconoclastic, alpha and omega…

as reviewed by Krystal Sierra:

http://krystalsierra.blogspot.com/2016/05/between-language-and-narrative.html?m=1

infant*cinema, Dink Press, April 2016
7.00 (first non self-published work)
https://www.dinkpress.com/store/infant-cinema-barton-smock-dp2

of which was said:

With sparse language, Barton Smock creates semi-prose poems that contain concentrated riddles, such as in the line “follow the spider’s trail of abandoned birthmarks” or “one of us is dreaming I entered your body.” There are clues across poems, of a broken family, of disbelief in religion and reality, and of the pain stemming from all of that and more. The question of the nature of pain itself is put forth, and its origin: “before it began to go everywhere without him, was pain god?” An evocation of both the trinity (namely, god as his own son) and a child’s jarring transition into independence, which can be destructive to the self and others, for who is so easily prepared for the world? The poems are without titles, except for the title of the chapbook as a whole: infant*cinema. “inside my father I can’t hear one tv over another. […] the people watching the fight want to be seen looking at it.” As soon as we begin to concretely process our surroundings as infants, we must absorb or cancel out competing stimuli, but even so we need to learn what is what. By then, we may have seen too much, the violence of disappointment, loneliness, and, more often than one would like to admit, mental and physical abuse. But is this what makes humans human?

~George Salis

shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (& other poems)
7.00
114 pages
published June 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/shuteye-in-the-land-of-the-sacred-commoner/paperback/product-22744790.html

depictions of reentry
9.00
146 pages
published August 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/depictions-of-reentry/paperback/product-22811652.html

hick lore rabbit hole
9.00
124 pages
published October 2016

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/hick-lore-rabbit-hole/paperback/product-22914385.html

the boy who touched all the eggs
11.00
258 pages
published June 2017

-this is a combined publication of three previous works (surprise for me a crow / name calling / paw five) as well as some newer poems

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-boy-who-touched-all-the-eggs/paperback/product-23224033.html

L A I T Y
8.00
116 pages
published August 2017

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/l-a-i-t-y/paperback/product-23291654.html