Awake Dream and Amazon Kindle Killing Comic Books

Awake Dream

I am tired.
Eyelids fall off;
now I'm awake,
lucid in the midst
of dream.
You are there,
but not yourself.
I am there,
but I have no eyelids.
Strange.
We are in love
with words,
and earthworms.
Shooting targets, large
Russian novels,
and icy lemonade.
We can't wake up.
Because you are yourself
and I am not.
I have no eyelids.

I'm not thrilled with the title - comments are always welcome

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On Newsarama.com they had an interesting article about the new Amazon Kindle 2 and its effect on the comic book market. Check out the article here.

As an avid comic book reading, anything regarding the comic book market is of interest to me. Vaneta Rogers provides some interesting facts towards the effect that comic books, very soon, will mostly be digital and readers will access them on some sort of device, like the Kindle. Here are my thoughts -

1. Has anyone actually seen someone with a Kindle? I have seen people - famous people, like Neil Gaiman, with them in online videos. But I have never seen someone with a kindle in real life. I do agree that comic book readers on an I-Phone or an I-Pod Touch is not that far off, but on a kindle?

2. Comic books have become a small niche market and most fans I know collect comic books because they like the stories. But those same fans also state the fact that they like having a physical copy of the book - something tangible that they can hold in their hands while they are reading. For many the collecting aspect of the hobby is even more important than the reading/good stories aspect of the hobby. This comes up in floppies (monthlies) versus trade paper back (collected editions) debates all the time. Many comic book fans like buying/collecting the floppies.

3. The kindle is in black and white. While some comic books are in black and white, and some black and white comics are very good (Echo by Terry Moore; Bone and RASL by Jeff Smith); most comics are in color.

I wouldn't worry too much about the kindle and its ruining the comic book market

Womb and a couple other things

I do have a poem today - the wife and kid went out so I have the house to myself and am able to post earlier than ten o'clock at night. But I also wanted to link some stuff and talk about some other stuff.

First - I am a huge comic book fan and my homepage is a site called Newsarama, which is essentially comic book news throughout the day. One of my favorite artists Ethan VanSciver has a weekly column entitled "Your time is now mine" and usually they are just strange musings and only mildly entertaining. Today's column was downright hilarious. Several times I found myself laughing out loud. It is on the subject of drawing and how we all begin drawing when we are young and some of us grow out of it and others do not. Anyway here is a link to it HERE

Second - I have been following Mary Biddinger's blog the word cage for a couple weeks. Earlier in December she posted an entry about taking our poetry inventory, or poetic accounting as I have been calling it - with myself. It's an interesting post check it out HERE. Anyway, last night I finally got around to taking my own poetry inventory. I divided my poems into three lists FINISHED POEMS, UNFINISHED POEMS, and SUBMITTED POEMS. I found that I have far more poems that are what I consider unfinished or still working on than I previously thought. With only 9 poems in my finished list and about 25 in my unfinished list. I guess some revision and work shopping of these poems is in order. It was good to take a minute to do some organization though. I now know where my poems stand and know where they are on my computer.

Third - the poem. And yes I have had several pregnant students. This has been a subject that has interested me time and again. I have three poems which are similar. This one I crafted most recently.

Womb

She barely squeezes
into her desk –
three rows in and four
back.
Her ripe belly
ready to burst
pomegranate red.
Soon a cry,
tears of joy.

I lecture –
ancient texts – classics:
Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Beowulf.
Expanded Canon:
Steinbeck, Salinger.
She doesn’t care.
Purple I-Pod to
her escape.
Eyes full of hate,
pain, sorrow.

But what of her child?
That swollen seed she bears.
Does this germ
of a student
now appreciate literature?
A grand violinist before
a London audience?
Brilliant scientists gazing
into a microscope?
Or the star quarterback
Throwing a game winning
Pass?
Like your bum of a father –
unwilling to acknowledge
your presence.

As with most of my poems - I am still drafting this one so comments are welcome.