have any of you latecomers to the Project ever wished you had access to those first broadsides published back in August 2006 to complete your collection? have you ever wondered how you were going to display your Operative copies of GPP Broadsides? wouldn’t it be great to have all of em collected somehow, Year One and Year Two and so on, in some beautiful, artistic package?

well, our intrepid Printer General has come up with a truly amazing and fantastic package: a hardback book, handbound in black bookcloth on boards with red title stock set into the cover, 7″ x 7″ and about 3/4″ thick, with 3 ’signatures’ of 12 pages each sewn into the binding, bringing it to 36 pp with notes and colophon. the broadsides, starting with the justin.barrett poem that began the whole project, will be affixed to each individual page. the book will appear in a lettered edition of 26 for $50 each.

so far, we’ve already pre-sold roughly 18 of em and they’re not even finished yet. that leaves us with about seven or eight to make available to the GPP Operatives who are lucky enough to check the blog for news and updates. if you’d like to get in on this action, we are taking pre-orders, just send us an email to info[at]guerillapoetics[dot]org. they’re not yet in the store, and will probably sell out within hours of this posting, so act fast.

we are definitely going to make a Year Two hardback collection of broadsides (and hope to do so every year we manage to hang in), and there have already been a number of Year Two books reserved as well. we recommend reservations of both if you’d like to make sure you get em. Year Two will be out about six months after Year One, and again will be limited to a lettered edition of 26. we’ll be asking for rapid payment from all pre-orders, as these books will vanish quickly, so as soon as we hear from you, we’ll put you on the list and send you an email with confirmation and payment info. and as always, all proceeds go to furthering the cause of the Guerilla Poetics Project; we still don’t make a dime on any of this.

we’ll have some better photos of this bad boy very soon but here is a sample to whet your whistle:

you won’t see anything like it ANYWHERE in the small press, we guarantee.

Gerry Locklin.

thanks to the poets who submitted for the last broadside vote, and we’re already busy designing em.

there was some discussion that 140 poems was a lot to wade thru, so we’re gonna try lowering our submissions from three poems each to two poems each. what this means is everyone will really have to raise the level of their short poem game. we hope everyone submits, and if you don’t have your password, etc., please email us and we’ll get you taken care of.

head over here to login.

also, we’re working on uploading a page that will have all the authors who submitted poems listed alphabetically by author, with the poem titles listed/linked to the poem itself. hopefully this will make it possible for anyone who enjoyed a particular poem to locate it and find out more info about the author via their Operative profile, order books, read more poems, etc. our web boss has some exciting changes in store soon, and all will be made clear…

read the GPP Interview by Brian Morrisey at Poesy Magazine.

we hope everyone buys a print edition when it becomes available. support independent presses!

Did you know that one of the main ingredients in NyQuil, dextromethorphan, is a hallucinogenic if taken in about 8 times the recommended dosage? I don’t know if I had 8 times the recommended dosage in me this weekend, but I had a lot, and I blame all the mistakes on the drugs.

First of all, the actual list of winning submissions;

exposed - Amanda Oaks
Gender Characteristics - F.J. Bergmann
Midnight - Glenn W Cooper
poet talk - c o mccauley
At 5AM - Glenn W Cooper
Cicada - Hosho McCreesh
armageddon - justin barrett
five seconds well spent - Michael Phillips
Waffle House, 1 November 2007 - Hosho McCreesh
The path - Father Luke
for 7 months - justin barrett
Blue Heron - Sharon Kessler

UPDATE: two poems had to be disqualified because of a misunderstanding in the submission process. sorry about any inconvenience and enjoy the proper list of broadside winners above.

So, how did we fuck up the first announcement of who won by putting 5 of the wrong poems in there? Well, we use some strange and rickety tools behind the scenes to see the vote results. The whole foundation that the site is built on is changing over the next few months, so it’s extra rickety and taped together at the moment.

The database query that I was using to display the winners wasn’t including the operatives, just the poets (the site rebuild fixes that issue and puts us all in the same “members” database). Since we opened the submissions and votes to operatives, failing to include that operatives table in the query failed to show the operatives who broke through.

The votes are all stored in the database just the way you place them, so it’s relatively easy for us to recover from something like this technically. What’s less easy to recover from is the disappointment of thinking that your work was going to be on a broadside and now it isn’t, just because some ham-fisted site admin has a flu bug.

So I apologize for that again, the work was all very strong and we have already printed four of the five who we had to remove. To Doug Draime who we haven’t (yet) published, my special apologies, I owe you one, and I feel really terrible about the incorrect results being posted.

where did the votes go? well, houston, we have a problem.

seems like some nyquil was spilled in our computer’s brain, causing mad hanging chads and half-perforations and someone voted for a Pat Buchannan poem somehow. so: we have a different set of results to display soon with regards to the broadside vote.

we apologize for any freakouts this may cause…;)

more soon…

and we’ll be announcing them very shortly.  thanks to the voters and everyone who submitted.  140 poems was a lot to go thru, and there were many many good poems in the batch.   check back here or the forum tomorrow…

thanks again for your patience. the new broadsides are amazing, and they include two design/print jobs by our Lt. Printer General (the Cooper and the Cunningham) as well as a linocut/multi color wonder from The Printer General Himself. here is what he wrote about it: “…The justin.barrett is in three colors on the front and was done with linocuts that I made here. I printed the cammie on a full sheet, so that once it was cut into fourths, we’d get different patterns. Also, it is the only way to do this in colors without having to hand feed an extra 2600 impressions to get it done (which would be a new broadside, front and back to give you an idea.) As you can see, the nature of linocuts and custom mixed ink is that the impression and length that I run the press before I pull the throw off lever (other letterpressers will understand) changed the color. Also, I was mixing the ink as I went, so the color changed from impression 1 to 1300…”

that’s 1300 of each broadside hand printed, front and back, folks. no small task, but well worth the effort

take a look at the DEC/JAN mailing:

thanks to everyone who participated in the submissions and voting; this has been pretty damn successful considering it’s our first attempt. we’re gonna close the voting on Friday in order to get started on broadside design, and this means hurry and vote, and if you’ve voted, make sure to finish up and lock your votes. thanks again, and we’ll be posting the results very soon.

In case the giant banners everywhere escaped your attention, voting for the next set of broadsides is underway.

Remember, every operative/poet can vote on the poems that were submitted for broadsides. Every operative/poet can also submit poems for consideration (as soon as one vote is over we open up the submissions).

If you aren’t an Operative, why not? It’s cheaper than a tank of gas and you get to spread the word, literally, for a whole year. Sign up now and get into the ring.

We vote for 12 broadsides during each round, and it’s a lot of poems to go through (140 or so in this round, depending on whether you submitted poems of your own - you can’t vote for yourself, this ain’t the Chicago mayoral race), but they’re all short and you love poetry anyway, right?

You can also vote on a dozen or two at a time, go away and do something else, then come back later and do more. Our trusty database will remember your selections.

So get with it!

okay, the Core Vote is underway, and we’ll be opening up voting to the entire GPP in a couple of days. we had 57 poets submit work from the GPP’s ranks. very exciting indeed. we’ll post here and the forum when the Open Vote is ready to roll. thanks to everyone for participating.

okay, we’re almost there. the number of submissions has been fantastic, and are still coming in. our web boss is working on an unforseen glitch and is smacking around the hamsters responsible for it. all will be made right quickly, and the Core Vote will happen like clockwork and the Open Vote is still slated for the next week or so. we’ll post the date when we’re all set, but check back here for the info soon.

we are finishing the last details on the DEC/JAN broadside mailing and it will go out in a very short while. we apologize to everyone for this little period of delay; we hit a growth spurt and have been working hard to find our legs. we’re almost there. the OCT/NOV broads were mailed in mid January, and if any of our Operatives haven’t yet received theirs, please send us an email to guerillapoetics[at]hotmail[dot]com and we’ll get you squared away. our Printer General has tried growing a second set of arms but so far has been unsuccessful, and is thus forced to use the two he’s got. we applaud his efforts.

thanks everyone and more later…

On January 31, 2008, in Shoreline, WA
in Portrait of an artist as an old man by Joseph Heller at Shoreline Library

is now sold out.  thanks to everyone who bought copies and helped support the mission of the GPP.

we hope you enjoy the read.

the next round of voting is rapidly approaching and we’re excited to try out the new system. we wanted to take this opportunity to remind all our Operatives and Poets that now’s the time to submit your three poems for broadside consideration. we hope to begin the initial Core round of voting around Feb. 11 and then open up the final voting to the entire GPP Membership around the 16th. we’ll post more as we get a bit closer.

of course, if you’ve forgotten how we got to this point you can read this blog post.

if you’re listed as an Operative to the left of the screen, head over HERE and enter your user/pass to submit, and if you’re listed as a Poet, go HERE and do the same.

if you lost your user/pass, and can’t get it via the email reminder at the site, email us and we’ll get you sorted out. the submissions will close right before the voting, so get those short powerful poems in soon.

more later…