FREE BOOKS
by Mike Finley
America's Most Widely-Published Unread Poet
...
(Hardly anyone in the established world of
poets
is aware of my work.)
... yet one of the the Internet's most
widely-read poets ...
(This site gets 3000 hits a day, a lifetime of
readers for most lit magazines.)
FREE
DOWNLOADABLE
BOOKS
NONFICTION
THE DOMINANT DOG
POODLEVANIA
GOOD SOAP
TAKE ME OUT OF THE BALL GAME
FATHER DAYS
THE OFFSET REVOLUTION
essays
FICTION
THE MEGAPODE
POETRY
LOOKING FOR CHINA
THALIDOMIDE DREAMS
WATER HILLS
THE MOVIE UNDER THE BLINDFOLD
HOME TREES
WORK SONGS
UNIVERSITY AVENUE
FAREWELL TO THE CURTIS HOTEL
other poems & essays
CHILDRENS
A FRANKENSTEIN CHRISTMASTHE GOOD KING
The Offset Revolution A work in progress about the early days (60s, 70s) of the offset literary scene.other childrens titles
"In no one else's work, except Vallejo's, do I sense such desire straining at the limits of words." - Michael Cuddihy, Ironwood
We are out of the professional part of the website now. (For info on professional books, go to the business bookstore.) What follows is news from my hobby press, named for the kraken, a mythological creature no two accounts decribe the same, or even similar. Was it half alligator and half lion, or half serpent and half codfish? Your guess is as good as anyone's.
The Rector's Tale
This is my favorite written piece. It is a comic novel that takes place at the time of the Second Vatical Council in 1963, at a Catholic prep seminary in Bucks County, Penn.Click to download:
Part 2 .... the Novel within the Novel
Essays & Stories
The Things I Meant to Say
... Before the children got away ...
Kraken Press' latest title
AMONG
DREAMS
DREAMS
Stories by Barry Casselman
"Haunting stories ..."
"Great power and vividness... "
"The stories unfold in unexpected ways."
$5.95 paper
ISBN 0-936623-00-4
Call 651-644-4540 to order
A Message to Poets
Before you do something crazy and submit to Kraken Press, read this
message:
Dear poet, Thanks for writing. I'm sorry I don't have time to critique your work. But I'm grateful to you for looking at my site, and if it got you thinking about writing yourself, that's great. Writing poems is a wonderful way to learn to think and feel on paper. Not a day goes by that I don't get a submission or a query by email. It is an easy thing to send a letter to 50 'zines and hope some publisher out there is experiencing a verse shortage. But there is never a verse shortage. The problem with poetry is that there are 20 writers of it for every reader of it. The reason is that there are quality standards for readers, and none for writers. May this not mean you. Many poets ask me, "How can I get published?" Well, if I knew that, I wouldn't be self-publishing on my website. But here are some ideas. Swap poems with other poets. Show them to thoughtful friends. Make your own e-mail 'zine and send new work to people who'll put up with you. Put up a web site and stop passing traffic. Or send poems to Usenet and WWW sites, like rec.arts.poetry and
Do these things and you'll enjoy 49% of the joy poetry can provide. (The other 49% of fun is in the writing.)
A poetry press can give you nothing you can't give yourself. During a different, more economical era, I published in hundreds of places, and let me tell you, it's like throwing the family dog down a well. A yowl and a splash and it's over. The thing you loved is gone and you really never hear about it again.
I don't want to tell you what to do. The way I went, self-publishing, isn't perfect. But it bought me time. I made myself write. And along the way I met and made a few friends, some of whom stayed with me for the duration. And doggone it, I believe writing poetry gives my other writing a particular flavor.
My best advice, my friend, is to attend to the inner voice, and treat people willing to listen to you well. The rest, I'm sorry to say, is mostly crap.
Very best wishes, Mike Finley
A New Philosophy
As of February 1996, I'm going to present material here in a different way. Readers who want to read a book of poems or essays can simply click on the textfile. Books are published by my own Kraken Press unless otherwise indicated.
People ask me why I spent a lifetime writing this stuff. It hasn't made me famous, and it hasn't brought me much revenue. And I suspect it confuses some of my regular clients, who must wonder which I prefer, their assignments or the work I assign myself.
I used to have a lot of high faluting answers for that, about the Imagination and Semiotics and Stuff. Nowadays I see it as a hobby, like fishing. It helps me pass the time in a soothing and sometimes exciting way. I try to have fun and have an audience "in mind" even if I don't have one in reality. If you are out there and enjoy something, please drop me a line. It is a nice feeling to hear you have "gotten through."
"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune
|
Visit Amazon.com
New Free Titles ...
YOUNG, GIFTED & OBNOXIOUS, Poems 1965-1978
LONG IN THE TOOTH AND STARTING TO TRAIL OFF A LOT, Poems 1980-2000
CURTIS HOTEL FAREWELL
The Tooth Fairy Naked at Last
The GOOD KING (Five Children's Tales)
Punch the blue button, or click the link to download a Microsoft Reader-version of each book. It's free! And the books are much more attractive than ordinary HTML.
Download free Microsoft® Reader software here:
Download Microsoft Reader
Old (free) standbys ...
- Looking for China
Selected Poems.
Contains my two "greatest hits," The Clarinet Is a Difficult Instrument" and "Browsers." Those two elliptical bits of whimsy have each been published over ten times -- while making no discernible impression on the reading public.
- The Movie under the Blindfold (Vanilla Press, 1978).
"In no one else's poem's except Vallejo's do I feel such desire," wrote one critic. I really tried to stretch with these poems, and write beyond a "Minnesota state of mind." Check out "Triangles Prisms Cones" -- surrealism with a heart. I submitted it to VP at a time when they were a conventional press. It was accepted by its panel of editors, but its publisher was going through the first big blaze of feminist reorientation, and she bridled at the idea of publishing yet another chapbook of patriarchal verse. Aw come on, I said, just one more? It was never distributed. She was so embarrassed by me that she had the books boxed up in her garage. It rained, the books were ruined, and that was the end of that.
-
Home Trees
(Minnesota Writers Publishing House, 1978)
A breakthrough book in terms of discipline and focus. I was starting to mean something. Check out "This Gun Shoots Black Holes." Of all black hole poems, I am told, this is the one least informed about astrophysics. I had a minor falling out with my good editor Charlie Waterman: I thought the book was hopeful, he found it dire.
-
Water Hills
(Salthouse Press, 1985)
|My friend De Clinton published this as a favor to me when I lived in Milwaukee. It was my last book published by someone besides me. I don't know why I lost faith with other presses, exactly. I think I came to see art as more private, more of a hobby -- and how bitter it can be to agitate for external approval, and not get it. But this collection is a honey -- my most "spiritual" book, I think. The title poem is terrific. Includes the Pushcart Prize-winning "Gise Pedersen Sets Me Straight on a Matter of Natural History," and "A Drive in the Country," which appeared in the Paris Review.
-
The Beagles of Arkansas
Everything there wants to leave. A little booklet from a car trip Red and I made through Missouri and Arkansas. Published by Mudborn Press as a "throw-in" -- subscribe to the magazine, get the booklet free. I always had a warm spot in my heart for "At the Ball Park," mentioning Rod Carew and Lyman Bostock.
The following titles are books I published myself, on my Kraken Press imprint ... mostly since 1985 ...
- Borrowing from Minneapolis
(To Pay St. Paul)
This was my "Smile," the great never-published opus. It's a dialogue about city/country living, written when I worked as news editor of the Worthington Daily Globe, 1978-80. It takes the "reportorial" poetic style of HOME TREES and pushes it farther. I don't even appear as a walk-on in most of these poems. Not that I didn't still have some fun -- dig The Iliad."
- The New Yorker
Holiday poems -- a Minnesotan in Manhattan. Written in a hotel room overlooking Lincoln Center, one grand wintry evening. More reportage poems. I love 'em.
- Lucky You (Litmus, Inc., 1976).
My dear friend Charles Potts published this first book and it remains, astonishingly, in print to this day. I used to find it embarrassing, because it is very hot and very young. I am totally showing off in every sense -- attitudes, styles, language, craziness -- and I love it now. "Letter from Como" is inspired looniness, with a real emotional wallop. Every young writer should let it really fly one time, and this was my wild whoop.
- The Old Saw
Everyone loves that Old Saw ...
- Thalidomide Dreams
Poems for my old school friend Peter Meister, to let him know how I'd spent my life.
-
Virtual Marble
Collection of poems for a sculptor I met in Redstone, Colorado.
-
Old Stone
That son of a gun is taken to his place of eternal reward. This is oral history, first told me by Joe Paddock, which I then ran with.
- When You Are Pope
It ain't all it's cracked up to be at Castelgandolfo ...
- The Lord God Has Words with the Choir
Kill the poets! This long poem has been compared to Ginsberg's "Howl!" Charlie Potts included it in his SPIRITUAL POETRY OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST anthology. If you love poetry, or hate it, you will still like this one.
- University Avenue and Other Poems
...
A love poem to my self. Takes on special resonance since my brain tumor diagnosis.
- Inexpensive Coffee Table Book ...
For my brother Patrick ... nothing special here but a nice assortment.
- The Thing that Had Its Way with Duluth ...
From a reading I did for Poetry Harbor.
- Return of the Thing that Had Its Way with Duluth ...
Followup to #1
- Four Jewels (Kraken,
1989)
A Christmas book for my family.
- The Whole While
My last psychedelic work ... from 1977 ... I was smokin' a lot of doobies about this time.
- The Brood
I wrote this as a Xmas present to my family members. Something special for each of them. Includes the title poem, which I am told sets a new benchmark for paternal self-pity.
- Great Blue
Poems from around 1991. My stepdad Dick died from a brain tumor -- foreshadowings of my own health problems. Suggestion: "Sleeping on My Hands."
- Remainders
A long poem about finding my second book remaindered. It is a hoot. In the end I am transmogrified into Homer.
- Dead Cat
a poem for Wm. Ray Langenbach -- El Rayo X!
- Sunset Lake Poems
Two lovely summer weeks, sitting by the sand and typing on my laptop.
- The House of Murk
Really weird stuff from a period of languor and depression. But do, do, do, check out "What We Want" -- a more ambitious poem was never wrote. Also, the naked lotioned behinds in "Girls of the Intercoastal Highway" hot, sss!
- Roads
A trip to the Juan de Fuca Straits. Sweet.
- Something about the Buddha
Real short items from a long time ago.
About Kraken Press
I started Kraken Press in 1979 to be a "publisher of last resort" -- a place artists could turn to if all else failed. I helped a lot of troubled projects by other writers find the light of day. Years later I am resurrecting the imprint as a way to keep my own work in print. Sad, innit? My goal is just to keep these items alive in a few reader's heads.
Kraken Press
1841 Dayton Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55104651-644-5226 fax