INTRODUCTION to THE POET

 

INTRODUCTION to THE POET

 

Back in 2015, I didn’t intend to write a third Rand novel. Okay, I DID intend to write a third Rand novel…but I didn’t intend for it to be the one that you’re going to be reading. Originally, I had good ol’ Rand back in Pittsburgh contending with his past, and getting involved with the Pittsburgh poetry scene. But then in the summer of 2015, that Trump decided to slither down the escalator at his Midtown Manhattan Sith Palace, and declare his candidacy for president of the United States.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, I don’t think I need to go into what the last nine years of Trump being on the political scene has done to this country. Getting back to Rand and writing in general, I couldn’t focus on much other than what I was witnessing around me. And I didn’t like what I saw. I didn’t like that people around me weren’t taking this, once existential, now ever-present, threat of American-style fascism seriously. I felt like Chicken Little running around telling everyone that the sky was falling.

I needed a way to cope.

My way of coping was going back to the Rand manuscript that I was writing, and give it an overhaul. I moved the story from Pittsburgh back to New York City, so that the characters in the book could be closer to the political maelstrom around them. Many of the characters in the original manuscript are in this version of The Poet. A familiar character is brought back to add some tension, and the Orange-hued billionaire hovers over everything like some ominous beast waiting to strike.

I wrote the book quickly. An easy thing to do when you already had about 200 manuscript pages. The story in The Poet takes place from Fall 2015 to Spring 2016, and I’m leaving whatever language I would’ve used back then. The idea was for the book to be released before the election in 2016. That didn’t happen. I don’t know why that didn’t happen. That’s not for me to answer. And I’d like to say that The Poet is a book we could read and look back on and say, Jesus Christ, look how close we came to the precipice of evil.

I wish I could say that.

This 2024 election season seems more ominous than 2016. Trump is still around, still blathering, still encompassing the worst of this nation in every movement he makes, in every cheeseburger utterance out of his fat, uneducated mouth. But the stakes seem higher now. Roe v Wade is gone. The Supreme Court is stacked with far-right ideologues and the Constitution means nothing to them now. Trump has found functionally literate people to help him usher in American Style Authoritarianism.

Read about Project2025 if you don’t believe me.

I decided to put The Poet on my WineDrunk Boulevard blog for those of us who maybe need a little bit of comic relief during these times. To start, I’m posting the first two chapters of the novel, and then every Monday and Wednesday at 12pm EST, I plan on posting a chapter until the book is finished. This is a new concept for me as I devote more time to fiction than I do poetry, and simply do not have the patience to sit around waiting on agents or small presses to deem my stuff worthy to published.

The idea is to bring this to you directly.

Hope you enjoy.

If you do, I plan on doing this with some other stuff.