M Sarki

Any of my friends here on goodreads who wish to have a copy of this book to read in pdf form please message me with your email address and I will be happy to send you a pdf file. The book is also available in both softcover and hardcover additions now at the url address in the listing. And sometimes the book is available on amazon.com

Stamped Against the Night was first conceived in northern Michigan one early morning in June of 2013. My wife and I have a cabin in which we spend the entire summer communing with nature and recharging our cells. Our cabin is what I call "glorified camping" as it is only six hundred square feet and has a toilet most women would certainly abhor. There is nothing fancy or convenient about our summer digs. We have no television and the internet is suspect at best in that part of the country. Wireless phone service is purported to be updated to the highest quality but I have yet to have enjoyed or made solid proof of that same experience. Each of our days are reserved for morning walks in the Huron National Forest, and on the very warmest afternoons we drive into the beaches of Lake Huron where my wife can swim in friendly fresh water that resembles an ocean to anyone who has ever visited this Great Lakes region. But every morning before taking off on one of our daily outdoor activities I sit in a chair I have had for the last eight years and read to my heart's content. I have to myself at least two hours each morning, quite early, and before anyone but the dog might bother me. It is after this morning's reading is complete that I prepare to compose whatever it is that I am inspired as a writer to produce that day on the page. I decided on this particular morning in June to attempt consecutively everyday to write one legal page of whatever impelled me to put my pen to paper. The text would be poetry, but narrative in scope if I could actually accomplish composing an entire page lyrically. I had no plan for subject, but would let whatever should come to me freely as something I felt no part in only as conduit. This method reminded me of the recently resurrected poet Jack Spicer who claimed the gods instructed him what to write. He even confessed he let the words on the page be exactly as they were received, and he never revised. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Jack Spicer was delusional as well as a mediocre poet.

In the process I was previously describing there were times I rejected a word or two that entered my consciousness as I felt I was projecting a bit of myself and getting in my own way. It was rather amazing how well the words came to me when I removed myself from the creative activity and just became its secretary. I operated like this for as many days as we were at the cabin which amounted to sixty-eight total due to two trips away involving about a week of not writing anything at all. But I never really knew what I was doing, only that it was a daily routine I trusted and never wavered from. The only changes in my day were in the books I was reading, completing, and newly beginning throughout the entire process. I am sure what I did read influenced what I wrote, but I was nonetheless open to whatever might come of it.

Upon my return to our home base in Louisville in September of 2013 I began the long and somewhat arduous task of transcribing the legal pages onto my computer while revising each poem in the process of my entering them. The most I could ever hope to file in a day would be three or four pieces, and most times I only got one or two poems entered into my machine. It was painfully boring work and something I did not want to do. I still had no idea what the body meant or what I was accomplishing except for the vow I had made to myself that I would complete the burdensome affair only when it became clear to me just what it was. I trusted in my process. I had complete faith and remained, in fact, this totally ignorant for months. On three consecutive occasions during the fall of 2013 as I was editing and revising I would report to my wife that I had made another complete pass through the entire work and surprisingly still had no idea what it was. I felt it might be a novel more than a book of poems, but I remained disconnected to anything that could clarify my uncanny position of willful servant to the work.

In the process of my first beginning the book and on to the present point, I now found myself having read already twice the brilliant new novel [b:John the Posthumous|18002361|John the Posthumous|Jason Schwartz|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1378832049s/18002361.jpg|25264166] by Jason Schwartz as well as another disturbing affair by Josef Winkler titled [b:When the Time Comes|18502643|When the Time Comes|Josef Winkler|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1381546803s/18502643.jpg|26195500]. Among all the books I had recently been reading these two made the greatest impact on me. Subsequently it was again Josef Winkler in his [b:Flowers for Jean Genet|779067|Flowers for Jean Genet (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture & Thought)|Josef Winkler|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266642030s/779067.jpg|2662022] in which I finally had my breakthrough regarding my own laborious activity. Josef Winkler seems to always incorporate outsider's quotes he deems necessary to his text, and I found these quotes added much to my understanding of his work. These quotes also got me interested in more writers I had previously been unaware of and compelled me to purchase additional books by these unfamiliar authors. I decided then to go back through all of my own notes I had made since 1995 when I first began studying under [a:Gordon Lish|232097|Gordon Lish|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1267719924p2/232097.jpg]. Because of Lish I learned of specific philosophers and their work and was feverishly devouring everything I could of these great thinkers and taking notes throughout my fevered reading. My now independent study naturally progressed to countless others in the arts and I began to grow both as a reader and a writer. Throughout these many years I filled four spiral notebooks with heart-felt mind-exploding quotes I had lifted from their work.

But it had always troubled me over what I was to eventually do with all these notebooks and the knowledge and secrets they held. I thus began going through them all and painstakingly transcribing certain quotes applicable to the feeling involved within the body of narrative poems I had composed throughout the entire summer in Michigan. After compiling a good number of them I decided to begin choosing which quotes might go with which poems, and then realized early in the process that this was where these quotes truly belonged. It was at this point in the composition of Stamped Against the Night that I learned I had amassed a total of sixty-eight chapters that summer and needed that same number of quotes to complete my new-found mission. They were not at all hard to find as each quote chosen by feel fit in exactly as if I had planned the entire exhibition. It is my hope that you enjoy the book as much as I did in writing it.

Thank you for reading me.