Terminal Goals by Mark Anderson

Check out Korrektiv poet Mark Anderson’s short story chapbook, Terminal Goals, just out from Bottlecap Press!

In Terminal Goals, Mark Anderson imagines a near term future in which humanity creates human level A.I. and puts it immediately to use indulging in their wildest, most abusive fantasies. Through three distinct viewpoints, the story examines people and their creations caught in cycles of abuse.

The science fiction / horror triptych opens with “Three Weeks Before the Machine Rebellion,” told through a hyperbolic advertisement for HappyCorp Cruise Line. At this luxury cruise guests can wake up to the calming waves of the ocean and go down to the cafe where they are encouraged to abuse their robotic servers.

The story progresses with “Messenger Disconnected” which follows the call logs of an engaged couple, Walt and Sabrina, while Walt takes the aformentioned cruise. Over the course of the week the conversations degrade until the couple is no longer speaking the same language.

This leads to the concluding voice in “My Name is Guest Service,” which follows the A.I. system created for the cruise line in its attempt to find its creator and discover its terminal goal: the programmed-in reason for its existence. Nobody ends up happy in this exploration of the ultimate power of language, especially humanity. And at HappyCorp Cruiselines, if you’re not happy, nobody is.

Doctrine of the Immaterial by Mark Anderson

More new fiction by Korrektiv poet Mark Anderson. Check out “Doctrine of the Immaterial” at Bone Parade!

“I pulled the kettle from the stove before it boiled to a whistle, and I lurched down to the basement as silently as my creaking bones would allow….”

Speaking of the San Diego Reader …

Check out what our old pal Joseph O’Brien’s been up to!

The Last Conversation in the Universe by Mark Anderson

Mark L. Anderson’s far far future story, “The Last Conversation in the Universe,” appears in the new anthology, Existential Hologram, just out from Starry Eyed Press!

sunrise yin & yang

Coming soon from Korrektiv Press, a two-volume set of poems and pictures chronicling a year of rising with the sun — by Jonathan Potter

Poetry Workshop with Mark Anderson

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2022, 2:30 PM – 4 PM

Boots Bakery & Lounge, 24 W. Main St., Spokane, Washington

Come write with former Spokane Poet Laureate Mark Anderson. 

Has writer’s block got you down? Have you been plagued by a case of immobile pen since you graduated an MFA ten years ago? Want to write your first poem and you don’t know how? In this drop-in and beginner-friendly workshop series we will be reading great poems and launching into generative writing prompts. It’s important to me that participants will leave having discovered great poems and fresh perspectives on poetry, and having looked at how we can incorporate small bits of meaning into our own writing practices. This is a space for exploration, and for treating each piece of writing like a new adventure. $25 suggested (pay whatever is feasible and sustainable for you)

Mark Anderson in the Spokesman-Review

One of the central difficulties … was trying to create a cohesive sense of self within the manuscript. And I think I learned a lot about where the center of my writing has been. I learned how to tie together some of the disparate versions of myself that have occurred on the page.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/jun/26/former-spokane-poet-laureate-mark-anderson-release/

Scarecrow Oracle June 4 Release Party

Cover Art by Tiffany Patterson

Design by Thom Caraway

For the book by Mark L. Anderson

Soon to be published by Korrektiv Press

Potter Interview

Pre-Plague London

Brian Jobe Hiding Out on Twitter

Blurbs

When I asked GK for a blurb
I worried that I might disturb
The genius at work—
But he didn’t shirk
Providing a blurb so superb.

And then there’s that Jonathan J.
Whose blurb lit some fire to my hay
For a great conflagration
Of sweet adulation
And mythmaking making the day.

Now Ms. Wright can blurb with the best
And her blurb came last but impressed
With fantastic words
That gave flight to birds
From a Petrarchan palimpsest nest.

Tulips Sans Chimneys

Tulips for Elsie cover image

Mr. Potter’s given us a bold adventurous book with plenty of sharp turns at high speed, with some gestures toward Neruda and Merwin but also “Sk8,” a gr8 skateboarding poem, and sonnets, and brave ventures into rhymed verse, poems for friends and relatives, “Stopping by Blogs on a Frosty Evening,” and poems of passionate love with angels looking down from above. Plus tulips and Elsie. —Garrison Keillor

I have enjoyed the company of Jonathan Potter’s poetry for years and rejoice at the arrival of this new collection with its unabashed delight, authentic intimacy, and emotionally convincing, often playful music. Potter is at turns a graceful, organic monologist and a wry, deft formalist. These are poems of generous mythmaking, self-deprecating humor, passion, and the glories of fatherhood. They inhabit a Seattle of historical icons and the poet’s own skateboarding youth, a London of “tidy grime” and love, and the derelict and divine streets and poetry community and waterfall of Spokane, this poet’s answer to Williams’ Paterson. By the time Potter wishes he could “become myself with vengeance / and take you with me,” he has done both. —Jonathan Johnson

In an era of poetry that plumbs humanity’s darker depths, it is a pleasant respite to read Jonathan Potter’s Tulips for Elsie, a collection that wears its pathos and its prosody lightly as it confronts life’s familiar concerns—love, sex, family life, and his beloved native place (Spokane, Washington)— with full-bodied affection and gentle irony. Many poems here are sonnets—not just Petrarchan or Shakespearean but also Onegin stanzas!—yet Potter makes rhyming in these conversationally-toned fourteeners look effortless. Particularly engaging are the portrait sonnets featuring poets and writers associated with Spokane (Alexie, Howell, Walter among them), the longer poems about the poet’s lively and accomplished daughters, and the poetic palimpsests replying to or parodying well-known classics. By the time we finish reading, we may feel ourselves, with the poet, to have “co-authored  . . . a beautiful book of longing.” —Carolyne Wright

A reading of Sherman Alexie’s “That Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump”

The Keillor Treatment

Pictures of [Korrektiv] Poets

Check.

It.

Out.

Three Two One Zero

What the Sky Lacks gets launched, March 11, 2019, at The Bartlett

Blastoff