New Beginnings

By midnight tonight, this blog will have a new name and with it, a new address. I'm also unveiling a new website.

I'll always have a place in my heart for the name Freak Machine Press (I'll still use freakmachinepress@yahoo.com for the time being, since it didn't feel right to retire it for one of my available alternative email addresses). It's a name that took a while to come to me after reading a quote from Andy Warhol saying, "I want to be a machine." There's more to that quote, but that's all the art book in my undergraduate college's library printed. Those words spoke to me and my feelings on my lack of productivity, which were at their peak two years after graduating with my MFA but always present throughout my higher education years. The freak part came from my own feelings of alienation. Typical adolescent thoughts, but thankfully when added to the machine part, you don't detect that.

When my fellow grad student and roommate Phil Choi finished his MFA earlier than me, he offered me the opportunity to take over the humor magazine he started up at Emerson. I toyed with renaming it Freak Machine Magazine. School time and my erratic schedule as a waiter tanked that idea. Years later, "Freak Machine" eventually became a very bad performance-type poem dealing with my life as a waiter. The poem was scrapped (don't expect to ever see it), but the name still intrigued me.

I kept toying with the idea of publishing my own work. I might have continued to daydream about it if I hadn't made a move to Rhode Island that was foreseen as permanent but only lasted about three months. By 2002, I had been spending most of my time there anyway with my girlfriend and her two daughters. When I had moved in, it was with the intention of becoming engaged and married within two years or earlier. We even had our flower child pre-picked. My lady was on a schedule, and I was tying myself to the outside of a car speeding down the highway in an effort to catch up. The relationship was doomed to fail, though neither of us saw it at the time. By the end of our first month together, that statement would only be half true, and I was asked to leave.

But while I was in denial on one aspect of my life, I was trying to accept that I would not be a poet anymore, not with me planning to work triple time to support a new family. To deal with the personal stresses in my new life involving the girlfriend and my family's reaction to my move (which I've mentioned once or twice here), I began steps to publish what I foresaw to be my first and last chapbook under my self-publishing imprint Freak Machine Press. The last night before her eviction notice, I was working on my girlfriend's Microsoft Publish program, preparing the layout for my book while she and her daughters watched the Britney Spears movie Crossroads.

Yeah, she was a fan of Creed too, which I am not. Like I said, there were signs of our differences, I just either didn't see them or did my best to ignore them (and in doing so learned more about modern pop than I ever would have learned even if forced to watch MTV Clockwork Orange style. I could DJ her oldest daughter's high school reunion five years from now).

I didn't have the relationship anymore. I didn't have much money. I didn't have a home aside from my best friend's spare room as I commuted back and forth to work from Rhode Island to Boston and searched for a place to stay in Cambridge (ended up in Southie). All the while, I was working with one of my small press editors, Robert Young, who ignored the fact that I wasn't smart enough to use Quark, took my initial design for the book and made it something that could be printed as long as I found a saint willing to do the work and make my Microsoft Publish file work.

The saint turned out to be someone I met through my job at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He did the printing for everything that required a Harvard logo for my department, and through his friendship with my boss (who was friends with my ex and so helped me get the job--the relationship was far from all bad), the book was published just in time for the last Beantown Zinetown ever held and two months before my 30th birthday.

With the book still pretty new, it made sense to make Freak Machine Press the title of this blog. However, with only one other self-published chapbook after five years, it's pretty clear that aside from my web efforts, I am not a typical poetry publisher (and not one at all in the eyes of some, I'm sure). Spoonful aside, it's been pretty clear that I've been doing everything possible to have other people publish my work for me. Getting in print through Cervena Barva and Louisiana Literature Press were two of my biggest highlights as a poet, and I'd like to repeat that kind of thrill someday.

In these insane economic times, I am much more concerned with getting my work out there than I am in having my own banner over it. I'm also concerned with how I appear to those who approach me about my work (it has happened). I'm also concerned how I've always gotten too many hits from people looking for a press machine. Moreover, I'm thinking it's time to move on and change at least a little.

The new name? Well, you can visit my new website and find out.

Click here to visit the website of Chad Parenteau, Poet for Hire.