T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

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so deep in my words & the world’s Art they embedded within, that perhaps there was no
room for anyone else that deep. Has anything changed, near a decade later?
I don’t know if people change so much as evolve, & some even cease doing this after
a time. What my years living alone, most of my free hours alone have brought to me now,
married, is a sense of the value & pain of solitude. How it teaches until it corrodes with
overdose. How the mind adjusts to its own company, & re-adjusts to intimates. How
humans, in short, are every one neither quite solitary nor gregarious. Choices involved, &
made, as countless other things.
Still, New Period sticks to me freshly at moments:
Begin, raw, incandescence. Raw, full moon, broad tree in sleepless field of dancers & doors.
Full moon, raw, strips of woe. Raw. Incandescence. Begin.
Continue, mature, dreams til daylight . . . then blankness . . . hookah explanations . . .
theories, purgations, crescendos. Blood & thunder. Continue, dreamless daylight. Beards & woolen
caps ‘gainst the frost of doubt. Cold. Colder. Burn. Burning.
Burn. Burning. Most hopeful that we all burn together. Most fearful that we are all
candles, flickering on, flicking off.
But burning. Burning, no matter the. Burning, beginning, still raw, words & skin, music
& colors, laughter & fire. Laughter.
C54’s back cover was by an online friend, Fuzz, of a favorite stretch of road in Denmark, &
captioned multiply: “wither next?” So I was asking every day & keep asking, & keep asking.
In June I worked at the ElectroLounge’s radio page, concerned with both adding to its
archives, & posting descriptions of new broadcasts. The summer proved an especially busy
one for publishing-related events. We attended an event called Stetset, a gathering of local
indie & zine publishers, at a downtown Seattle bar & Cafe. It was fun for Kassi & I to see
our local peers. We also attended the Portland Zine Symposium, a larger event in downtown
Portland. To the first event we stayed up all night readying copies of Cenacle 54 to bring. To
the latter we brought Cenacles, Scriptor Press Samplers, RaiBooks, & Burning Man Books, a
whole array of projects to gift away.
These events were new to us, a way to expand where our work touched & who we
met. Our trip in August to Burning Man 2005 was, of course, the summer’s highlight & what
our work finally pointed toward. We drove this year, our car Syd, our bikes hanging from her
trunk, our week’s worth of water, supplies, tents, packed with. No Borders Free Bookstore
open for business at Black Rock City for a seventh year.
What made the trip more poignant & precious was the money difficulties we faced
that August. My job at the online travel agency ended suddenly. Panic at the time; looking
back, good riddance. Scrambling for new work while readying hundreds of chapbooks made
tense days. It worked out, even to being able to have time off from a new job to travel to
Burning Man. I was happy it played out as it did. The new job was editorial work for a
phone company. What mattered, bluntly, was the paychecks clearing, & our freedom to leave
Seattle for a week for our other home.
The volumes in Burning Man Books 2005 are heavy on modern short fiction:
Herman Hesse’s lyrical “Strange News from Another Planet”: William Faulkner’s horrific
“Dry September”; Jorge Luis Borges’ cryptic “Circular Ruins”; & Philip K. Dick’s sweet
“The King of the Elves.” Also a seventh volume of writings on psychedelics titled All is
Dream. And, dear to me especially for the work Kassi & I did on it together, Many Blooms: An
Anthology of Modern Women Poets.
The selection process for Burning Man Books has become more complex as the
library of titles has grown. For the first several years, I simply selected my favorite writers;
The Cenacle | 60 | December 2006