I leave the dream, I come back
this is how
it’s done
there is
a record
on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost
and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.
atavism
(god is someone’s calendar
–
valley
(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose
–
pulpit
(rooster ghosted by elevator
–
subculture
(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down
–
alpenglow
(the scalp will baby its grief
25% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code of LULU25
*
(this was always the abridged version of how to believe in nothing when addicted to meaning)
*
*
youtube channel readings, bad lighting:
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. will send free PDFs per request. 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
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available work:
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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 and so the only place you can get his books is here. 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.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/poetry-foundation/reading-list-november-201_b_8538050.html
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earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015
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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
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infant*cinema, Dink Press, April 2016
6.00 (first non self-published work)
http://dinkpress.bigcartel.com/product/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock
of which, the some that said, say:
Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.
~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)
Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.
~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)
/
review for infant*cinema, by Forage Poetry editor Emma Hall:
https://foragepoetry.com/2016/12/02/review-of-infantcinema-by-barton-smock-emma-hall/
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shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (& other poems)
7.00
114 pages
published June 2016
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depictions of reentry
9.00
146 pages
published August 2016
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/depictions-of-reentry/paperback/product-22811652.html
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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
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surprise for me a crow
8.00
104 pages
published January 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/surprise-for-me-a-crow/paperback/product-23034353.html
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name calling
9.00
110 pages
published March 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/name-calling/paperback/product-23117082.html
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paw five
9.00
130 pages
published May 2017
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/paw-five/paperback/product-23198602.html
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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
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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
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other praise:
Barton D. Smock’s poetry speaks with a complex and implicated simplicity, it speaks a world somewhat surreal and intellectual, but nevertheless imbued with all the complexity of these strange rages of human emotionalism that strike us at inconvenient or strange times…
~ David McLean
The work of Barton Smock, a prolific mid-western poet, modifies the meaning of Christian Wiman’s idea in that it seeks unceasingly for the spaces between those ‘annihilative silence[s]’ that would pursue us, and for the watchful reader opens some door into human experience in a way that is at once intensely personal and detached. Through the manipulation of both common and cerebral language Smock’s poems maintain a dance between the familiar and the unspeakable. They act as a shout to the silences that curl up in experience- offering some view from the inside of that experience, but never in an expected way.
…The themes of family, abuse, poverty, and alienation figure heavily in the book, but to call this confessional poetry seems a bit out of keeping with what is traditionally considered confessional. He speaks of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers while also utilizing the first person, but the reader can never be exactly sure who these characters are. They are changeable, and often engaging in nearly surreal activity that might confuse more than enlighten. The key seems to be finding some language to quantify suffering, or some way of qualifying experience out of context – which at moments brings it ever more sharply into sight…
…Smock has found a way to speak for those who don’t perhaps know that they have something important to say; to share. The marginalized child, the grieving mother, the ailing child or sibling- they will all find a voice here, and though it might not be the way they would voice the affliction that rests within them, they are sure to recognize their faces. Whether this is a burden or a blessing remains a judgment to be formed by the individual reader, but I find the poetry…to be full of the intensity of experience in a way that I can’t help but identify and empathize. Something preserved so as not to be forgotten, and perhaps repeated.
~Emma Hall
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thing why and thing why:
http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/write-poetry-barton-smock
FREE mail shipping or 50% off ground shipping at Lulu today with coupon code of ONESHIP
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my newest {L A I T Y} is here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/l-a-i-t-y/paperback/product-23292660.html
~
from L A I T Y:
notes from life under bell
(i)
on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.
(ii)
there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.
(iii)
violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.
(iv)
the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.
(v)
it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.
(vi)
a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church. an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore. my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth. a bomb is dropped on a bomb.
(vii)
the man his shadow and the woman her dream.
their child
its track
of time
(viii)
onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller. the mosh pit is weak. last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole. onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch. dog’s been tased.
(ix)
we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.
(x)
outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form
a line
(xi)
tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming
shade: the folder of my clothes
(xii)
praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd
prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide
(xiii)
a body to dry my blood. some god
seeing me
as a person…
how quickly birth gets old.
(xiv)
lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma. genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea. this open umbrella. ghost at the keyboard.
(xv)
and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss
(xvi)
we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby. a door was a door. a ghost was a ghost and a door. the house was possible. its rooms were not. baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub. I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow. said the redheaded tooth fairy.
(xvii)
his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke
(xviii)
for a spine, doll prays to fork.
all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.
(xix)
one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is. day four: prayer is dismissive, but welcome. whose past is how we left it? body is delivered twice. beginning and end. nostalgia and wardrobe. middle eats everything. it snowed and I thought my blood was melting. could be the way you reason that happens for a reason. I was a kid when mouse was a kid. there’s no hope and I hope.
–
my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key. it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.
–
aside: we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep
–
aside:
I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise
–
it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb. his fist has been called: hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard. I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.
–
sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember
–
I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.
–
the disappearance surrounding said event. a horse belly-up in water’s blood. see telescope. also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.
oh silence afraid to start a sentence.
–
in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed
the unremembered
present.
–
traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-
today was mostly your hand.
for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son
in scenario’s territory.
the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.
seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.
I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.
god will die with his ear on my stomach.
mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.
15% off all print books at Lulu today with coupon code of LULU15
my newest thing, {L A I T Y}, is here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/l-a-i-t-y/paperback/product-23292660.html
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most of my work is self-published, and is here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
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will send a free hard copy of any work to any person interested in reviewing. such a request can be made to: bartonsmock@yahoo.com
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I write often at https://kingsoftrain.wordpress.com/
~
some poems:
[to angels on diving boards]
the chain-smoker’s
projected
backstroke
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[the quiet that comes after a two car accident on a country road]
could strangle
an owl
cast
perhaps
as a mole
listening
to the belly
of a stopped
deer
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[untitled]
I vandalize the outside of a church in a city designed by men with bad teeth and there I mistake a drop of blood for a penny and begin to last forever
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[atop]
I told everyone at school that my parents were together when they died and everyone at work that my children were not. I chewed my sister’s food because she feared the quiet. ate in two languages. I wanted my brother’s singing voice. his newborn to be shaped in the shadow of a pipe that went from cocoon to cornstalk. the sound of god hitting on a ghost.
~
[stars from a glass eye]
its gaze
a eulogy
for distance
the animal
is mostly
pity
~
[cocoon has its own name for suicide]
age I’m at
I go
from bath
to funeral
to bath-
puppet
that made
a fist
kingsoftrain 