"Silence" and "Poem" on the 1967 Hermes 3000

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

My writing assistant wonders…. um, why?

Truly, I am not intending to collect typewriters. All shelf space is spoken for by books!! Last week I brought home a 1967 Hermes 3000 because (long story zipped) my 1961 Hermes 3000 is temporarily inaccessible, and it was bugging me that my 1963 Hermes Baby types unevenly and sometimes muddily (which could be a problem with the ribbon, but anyway), and I had a deadline to type my short story “What Happened to the Dog?” for the anthology COLD HARD TYPE (about which more anon).

Well, obviously I had to buy another typewriter!

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

I dare not buy anything but a Swiss Hermes. The one I could find in my local office supply shop was a refurbished 1967 Hermes 3000 with a Swiss-German QWERTZ keyboard. I’ve had to get used to the transposed Y and Z keys; otherwise, kein Problem, and es freut mich sehr to have the umlaut.

A QWERTZ Swiss German keyboard
(American keyboards are QWERTYs)

Of my three Hermes typewriters, this 1967 3000 is by far the smoothest, easiest to type on, and most consistent. I venture to use the word “buttery,” in fact. 

Herewith, typed on the 1967 Hermes 3000, “Silence” and “Poem,” from my forthcoming collection, Meteor:

Typed today but originally published in Muse Apprentice Guild in, ayy, 2002. I think it was.

www.givalpress.com

If you’re going to the Great American Writerly Hajj, I mean the Associated Writing Programs Conference, come on by my reading– it’s a free event– I’m on the lineup with Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Martinez-Gil, Tyler McMahon, Seth Brady Tucker, John Domini, Teri Cross Davis, Elaine Ray, William Orem, Jeff Walt, and Joan G. Gurfield for the Gival Press 20th Anniversary Celebration Reading on Friday March 29, 2019 @ 7 - 10 PM. Hotel Rose, 50 SW Morrison St, Portland OR. 

The following day, Saturday March 30, 2019 @ 10-11:30 AM, I’ll be signing copies of Meteor at the Gival Press table (Table #8063) in the AWP Conference book fair.

You can also find a copy of Meteor on amazon.com. And read more poems and whatnots apropos of Meteor on the book’s webpage here.

P.S. Tom Hanks on typing, in the NYT. And Richard Polt on typing in San Francisco. And David Rain on “Hermes of the Ways.”

# # # # # 

>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

“Round N Round” on the 1963 Hermes Baby

Marfa Mondays Podcast #19: Pitmaster Israel Campos in Pecos

"Round N Round" on the 1963 Hermes Baby

Uh oh (I can begin to see how this gets out of hand!) I just brought home a second vintage Swiss-made typewriter, a 1963 Hermes Baby, which is a sight lighter at 3.6 kilos (just under 8 pounds) and more compact than my 1961 Hermes 3000. It is in excellent working order, klak, klak!

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

He has not expressed himself verbally on the matter,
but it would seem that my writing assistant would prefer
that I use the MacBook Pro.
Also, geesh, it was ten minutes past suppertime.

From Meteor, my collection which will be out from Gival Press later this month:

>More about Meteor on my webpage.

>More about the Hermes Baby at the Australian blog ozTypewriter and at the Swiss Hermes Baby Page by Georg Sommeregger (in German, but Google translation available).

# 

On the Hermes Baby I am also typing up my story (originally written on the laptop), “What Happened to the Dog?” for COLD HARD TYPE: Typewriter Tales from Post-Digtal Worlds. More about that anon.

Meanwhile, whilst strolling about the Rio Grande outside of Albuquerque, my fellow COLD HARD TYPE contributor Joe Van Cleave ponders the Typosphere, its relation to digital media, and the ultimately analog origins of the digital:

# # # # # 

>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Top 10 + Books Read 2018

Top 13 Trailers with Extra-Astral Texiness

Consider the Typewriter

(Am I Kidding? No, I Am Not Kidding)

From the Typosphere: "Right & Wrong"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

Typed on the 1961 Hermes 3000, a pair of poems from Meteor:


>> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Meteor (Gival Press Poetry Award) to Launch at AWP

My book Meteor, which won the Gival Press Award for Poetry, and was orginally scheduled to be published in late 2018, has been delayed slightly; it will be out in early 2019. 

I’m thrilled to see the cover, designed by Kenn Schellenberg, and to announce that Meteor which will launch at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Portland, Oregon this March. If you’re going to conference, come on by my reading which will be part of Gival Press’ 20th Anniversary Celebration, and also to my booksigning the following day in the AWP Bookfair (details below).

[>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

Leslie Pietrzyk interviews me about Meteor on her excellent blog, Work-in-Progress. 

Visit Meteor’s webpage here. All of the poems in Meteor have been published, but only a few are online, among them: “In the Garden of Lope de Vega,” “Stay West” and “Bank.”

I’d be the first to say many of these poems could be considered flash fictions, and in fact, a number of them were originally published in literary magazines (e.g., Exquisite Corpse, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review), as fiction. But as I like to say, it’s all poetry– or at least, it should aspire to be.

March 29, 2019 Portland, Oregon
Associated Writing Programs Conference
Oregon Convention Center
7 – 10 PM
C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor, to participate in Gival Press 20th Anniversray Celebration Reading. More details to be announced.

March 30, 2019 Portland, Oregon
Associated Writing Programs Conference
Oregon Convention Center
Book Fair, Gival Press, Table # 8063
10-11:30 AM
C.M. Mayo will be signing Meteor.

Yep, I am still at work on the book about Far West Texas. I aim to post a podcast apropos of that shortly, however next Monday’s post– the month’s fourth– is dedicated, as ever, to a Q & A with another writer: David A. Taylor, who will be talking about his intriguing Cork Wars.

# # # # #

>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Meteor, Ambiance, Influences

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Literary Travel Writing: Synge, Kapuscinski / Wordpress in 2019

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

Warmest wishes to you, dear writerly readers, for a fabulously felicitous and swirlingly creative 2019.

With the new year two brilliant titles have just been added to my list of recommended literary travel memoirs: J.M. Synge's The Aran Islands and Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus. The former is a classic of the Irish Renaissance published in 1907; the latter, the memoir / meditation of an extraordinary Polish international journalist of covering India, China, Africa, and more in the 1950s and '60s. Both these memoirs were written well before the advent of smartphones and social media and in many ways reading them--and on paper-- felt like... profound relief. I'll have more to say about smartphones, social media, and literary travel writing in next Monday's post.

Speaking of writing, I can scarcely believe it but in 2019 "Madam Mayo," this veritable Methusela of blogdom, will celebrate its 13th year. And it has been blinking & beeping on my "to do" list for nearly all of these many years to take my own advice and get off of this Google platform onto self-hosted Wordpress. [>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW SELF-HOSTED WORDPRESS BLOG, MADAM-MAYO.COM]

Top Posts of 2018

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

Throughout 2018, except on rare occasion when not, I posted to this blog on Mondays, offering a post for the writing workshop on the second Monday and a Q & A with another writer on the fourth.  As ever my posts tend to focus on my works, works-in-progress, and related reading. If you're new to this blog, dear writerly reader, subjects include literary essay, fiction, and poetry; Mexican history and literature; Texas, and in particular Far West Texas; and heavy doses of the history of the book and of technology in general. 

Herewith, the top posts of the year:

December 24, 2018
José N. Iturriaga's "Mexico in US Eyes" (México en las miradas de Estados Unidos)

December 17, 2018
Top 10 + Books Read 2018
#1 was a tie between Peter Brannen's The Ends of the World and Jeremy Naydler's In the Shadow of the Machine. An especially crunchy list.

December 10, 2018
Luis Felipe Lomeli Interviews Yours Truly about Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion & etc.

December 3, 2018
Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

July 1, 2018
Marshall McLuhan: Some Notes by Way of a List of Books, Videos, and More

June 25, 2018
Notes on Tom Lea and His Epic Masterpiece of a Western, The Wonderful Country

June 18, 2018
A Review of Claudio Saunt's West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

April 30, 2018
Notes on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

March 5, 2018

Notes on Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute

February 4, 2018

On Organizing (and Twice Moving) a Working Library: Ten Lessons Learned of Late with the Texas Bibliothek

FOR THE WRITING WORKSHOP

November 12, 2018
Poetic Alliteration

October 8, 2018
Poetic Listing

September 24, 2018
Working with a Working Library: Kuddelmuddel

September 10, 2018
Poetic Repetition

August 13, 2018
Diction Drops and Spikes

June 11, 2018
Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

May 14, 2018
Blast Past Easy: A Permutation Exercise with Clichés

April 9, 2018
Grokking Plot: The Elegant Example of Bread and Jam for Frances


Q & A WITH OTHER WRITERS
(with a special focus on grappling with digital distractions)

November 26, 2018
Amy Hale Auker, Author of Ordinary Skin: Essays From Willow Springs

November 18, 2018
Mary Mackey on The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, Bearing Witness, and Women Writers' Archives

October 29, 2018
Roger Greenwald on Translating Tarjei Vesaas's Through Naked Branches-- and On Writing and Publishing in the Digital Age

July 23, 2018
Lynn Downey: Research Must Serve the Writer, Not the Other Way Around

May 28, 2018
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub on Prodigal Children in the House of G-d: Stories

April 23, 2018
Sara Mansfield Taber on Chance Particulars: A Writer's Field Notebook

March 26, 2018

Nancy Peacock, Author of The Life and Times of Persimmon Williams, and 

On Writing in the Whirl of the Digital Revolution

February 25, 2018

Leslie Pietrzyk on the Siren Song of the Internet and on Writing Silver Girl


Warmest wishes to you for a happy, healthy, prosperous, and swirlingly wondrous 2019! 

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Top Posts 2017

Top Posts 2016

Top Posts 2015

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

My book Meteor, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award for publication in 2018, should be out any day now. I'm working on a brief Q & A about it, and this got me to noodling. One of the standard questions for any poet, any writer, is about their influences. I wrote many of these poems an eon ago; indeed, some are more than 20 years old. The most recent poem in the collection is from 2010. (Why did it take so long to publish? That would be another blog post. Suffice to say, I didn't make much effort; I was more focused on writing an epic novel and a book about a book and the Mexican Revolution.)

Back when, I would have said that my main influences as a poet were, in alphabetical order, Raymond Carver, Harry Smith, Stevie Smith, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats. But I think that now, from this distant perspective of 2018, that in writing these poems I was perhaps equally influenced by James Howard Kunstler's razor-sharp nonfiction, in particular, his The Geography of Nowhere, and by certain musicians prominent in the '70 and '80s-- not only by their lyrics, but the physical ambiance they create, the trickster, shapeshifting way they pull down the astral by sound, rhythm, the masks of archetypes. In English, we lack vocabulary for this.

Two examples:

Laurie Anderson, "O Superman"



The Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"




> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here. 

P.S. If you'd like to sign up for my once-in-a-ridiculously-long-while newsletter, you'll get the news when Meteor is available.

Poetic Alliteration

Poetic Listing

Poetic Repetition

From the Typosphere: "Bank"

[>>READ THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM]

Isn't just too too too tooooo much a-gurgling and churgling and over-arcing and under-the-rugging in this techno-kray-zee world? In the spirit of calming things down, this Monday I offer a wee but wicked poem, typed on ye olde 1961 Hermes 3000:

"Bank" is in my forthcoming collection, Meteor. 

P.S. New on the blogroll:

The Long Slow {typecast} Blog

The Typewriter Revolution

Welcome to the Typosphere

Consider the Typewriter (Am I Kidding? No, I Am Not Kidding)

Typosphere, Ho! "Stay West" on My 1961 Hermes 3000

Email Ninjerie in the Theater of Space-Time

METEOR Wins the Gival Press Poetry Award

Delighted and honored to announce that my poetry collection, Meteor, has won the Gival Press Poetry Award and will be published in 2018.

Founding editor of Gival Press, Robert L. Giron, is an amigo from my days in Washington DC, and a fellow El Pasoan, so I am especially delighted that he will be my publisher. I am even more honored, however, to know that Robert did not select Meteor for the prize; for Gival Press he runs a blindly judged contest (no names on the manuscripts), the winner chosen from a pool of finalists by the winner of the previous year's Gival Press Poetry Award. So Meteor was chosen by someone I have not yet had the privilege of meeting: Linwood D. Rumney. His book is the haunting Abandoned Earth.

Rains of karmic lotus petals upon you, dear Linwood D. Rumney!

> Visit my poetry page.

> Poems in Meteor now online include

Man High (originally published in BorderSenses)

UFO, 1990 (originally published in Gargoyle)

In the Garden of Lope de Vega (originally published in the anthology edited by Robert L. Giron, Poetic Voices without Borders)

Stay West (as messily typed on my 1961 Hermes 3000)

Meteor takes its title from the poem that was originally published waaaaaaa-hey-hey-yyyy back in 1996 in the anthology American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, and again in Ryan Van Cleave and Virgil Suarez's anthology Red, White and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America, 2004.

P.S. Hell yeah, I am still at work on the Far West Texas book. Stay tuned for the upcoming Marfa Mondays Podcasts. I invite you to listen in anytime to the 20 podcasts that have been posted to date.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Q & A with Karen Benke, Poet, Creativity and Fun Maven, 

Letter Writing Aficionada, and Author of Write Back Soon!

Francisco Aragón on 5 Books of Latino Poetry

Sarah Cortez, editor, Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance