October 2025 - Big Bang Poetry

Been living here for 15 years now and I’ve finally managed to make it to the Albuquerque Zine Fest. Well, for the first few years I was in New Mexico, living in Santa Fe, I didn’t even know about it. It wasn’t until I had been living in ABQ a few years and started working at CNM that I met a comic book artist named Peter who was working in our marketing department. He is involved in some local comic events and knew about Zine Fest from the crossover.

But even still I was never able to make it there until this year. And it was fun!

I found it impossible to be choosy with my zine purchases (a few dollars here, a few dollars there), mostly because so many creative things were being done. In fact, I missed about three or four rooms of zines just by being overwhelmed with riches in the main room. I never did even open up the zine map provided by the organizers. But that was probably just as well considering I ran out of money before finishing my spin through the main hall.

Even though many zinesters took credit cards and Venmo, I wanted to stay in the analog world of cash…because that’s so zineish.

My zine haul

My History of Zines

I was first made aware of this thing called a “zine” when I started working on Ape Culture with Julie Wiskirchen. She wanted to create an online zine, not a magazine. So I purchased some zine anthologies (The Factsheet Five Zine Reader and The Zine Reader, Volume 5) to figure it all out. And then every time my friends and I visited Little India in the East Village of Manhattan we also visited a zine store that was in a basement a block down the street. There I found used copies of Bitch and Bust (both which turned into news-stand magazines at some point), 8-Track State of Mind and Beer Frame, some of my favorite zines at the time.

Then I created my own three Cher zines (which are huge, compared to a typical zine, 8x10s with 70-120 pages compared to most zines half to a quarter of that size with between 10-20 pages). My zines were hard to reproduce, especially as paper prices escalated over the years. I wanted to do 5 but only managed to finish 3. Now I’m facing technical challenges with Microsoft deciding to not support MS Publisher anymore, which was a high-tech way to create them compared to the cut-and-paste model of most zines. Now I’m trying to get my zines n PDF form to sell and distribute electronically instead. Very unziny of me.

Anyway, I love zines. As an opposing force to my interest in Digital Poetry is an interest in very crude, analog poetry and art (like cassette tape art, installation poems and DIY paper zines or any hand-made publications). I love to see what other people are doing with it, too.

ABQ Zine Fest XIV

Let’s start with the organizer’s table. First of all, I’m a sucker for buttons. The Zines No Maga buttons were free. This year’s fest button came in the screen printed pouch, a great DIY zine kit (oooh…an eraser in there too).

Another woman was selling DIY zine kits. I couldn’t resist that kind of generous offering from artist to artist. Below is a picture of the envelope and its contents. That vendor also had a box that you could interact with and contribute notes to. I added my own. Maybe this box of content will end up in a future zine.

Some adorable little guys…

There was also a table of Marxist zines, most of which were free. I took three of those freebies and then as a gesture of thanks, bought the Anti-capitalist affirmations (which were great).

My main goal of the day was to find poetry or pop-culture zines, similar to my own projects. I didn’t see any pop-culture zines but I did find a few poetry zines, including these three. The far-left one is from a group of artists who have monthly art meetings in their driveway. They then compile a yearly zine compilations of photos, art and writing that they’ve shared with each other. I told the zinster that felt like a very COVID-era project but they said it was started later. The middle zine has writing from the Santa Fe prison and the far right one is from a poet who creates their own zines.

Another table had compilations of poetry and other art from prison-projects, too. These were $10 a piece and I asked her what her favorite one was and she found it hard to choose but finally said this one. She saw me combing through my purse for cash and said she’d take $5 but I inissted on scrounging together the full price. Nobody’s gettin’ rich on these zines.

Another woman did zines based on research she had done around New Mexican food. (!!) What’s better than a zine? A local zine. I would have bought all the zines she had, but restrained myself to these three:

One table was managed by a professor at UNM showcasing works from student projects. She also showed me this book of hers exploring alternative designs of a book, a “french door” inspired piece called “The Split” which is two sides of an argument that “comes together at the end.” Awesome!

My favorite zines were the ones that had this kind of “thinking outside the box” creativity. Two people had folded zines into those fortune tellers we made as tween girls with numbers and boys names written inside. (Image one and two contain the same zine about extinct birds.) And another used a gumball machine to distribute very tiny zines. That was my favorite. So creative and fun!

I also loved zines that used cut outs. And these were the zines I paid the most for. The pages of this purple zine had hand-painted watercolors, cut-outs and that telephone pole page actually has string sewn in!

The New Mexico Birds was also a local topic, delicately made and hand drawn. And charmingly tiny!

One final interesting thing was how many of the zines in my haul (some of which I’ll be giving away) had music playlists included in the back of them. Two examples:

Frijoles and Folklore zine also had a whole tamale-making playlist with a great introduction. If you’ve ever made tamales from scratch, you know what an all-day, labor-intensive family event it is. One would need a substantially long playlist for it. Well, Aunt Toodles had one! This shows just how much music and cooking, (I myself love to listen to music when I cook), and music and zine-making go hand in hand. The author had two QR codes at the end leading to Spotify mixes but they are private and unsearchable from Spotify. You have to have the zine to access them. So perfect.

But there’s also something zinely analog about just having the paper list and searching for the songs one-by-one yourself.

I can’t wait until next year.

Many writers engage in revenge works, usually tell-alls about enemies, colleagues or lovers. the most famous example probably being Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist after his wife, actress Claire Bloom’s own revenge memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House. Poet Robert Lowell was also not above using dirty laundry for selfish reasons. And pop culture is overloaded with “he said/she said” books. (I’m reading two now.)

Short of physical violence, revenge art could be the worst format for revenge (or the best, depending upon your point of view) in that it has some staying power. It doesn’t dissipate as easily as other more transient kinds of retribution that you might prefer soon evaporate after your regrets start to kick in.

I’ve actually been waiting a long time to write about revenge, having had it perpetrated upon me once or twice over the years (and probably far back into my past lives). I’ve been waiting for the Into to Anthro podcast to get to their Revenge episode because it’s a very interesting one, delving into the psychology of wanting and enacting revenge on someone you feel has hurt you. Turns out just thinking about revenge activates the same parts of our brain as gambling does, and like gambling the anticipation is thrilling, but the execution or “winnings’ are inevitably an emotional let down.

I’ve thought about revenge a bit over the last few years and the idea that it’s best served cold. Ever since my mother sent me a box of childhood things. In fact, that very box illuminated the best revenge ever enacted upon me, one served so freezer-burned it felt more funny than upsetting. But I’ll get to that story in a minute.

I want to first continue by saying I’m not talking about the idea of justice, the nice word society gives to its revenge, the social deterrent we use to keep criminal behavior at bay. I’m talking about interpersonal revenge. Anything from the neighborly feuds of the Hatfields & the McCoys to revenge in-coming from a once-intimate partner or friend. The tragedy about this kind of revenge, unlike society’s revenge which at least does lip-service to forensics, is that it is often, more than not, founded on mistakes and misunderstandings.

This is why, (if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times), we are our own worst enemy. Because we have serious blind spots and we strike out too often and too soon. Usually this is because when we’re in pain our brains shut down. Anne Power describes this very well in her Ted Talk, how we snap into flight or fight during times of suffering. All behavior makes sense in context, she says, but we’re never in any position to investigate the context when we feel we’re under attack.

Probably hundreds of tales have been told about the many misunderstandings that stimulate acts of revenge. My first exposure to this kind of tragic revenge was when my friend LeAnne, who sat next to me in French class, invited me to start seeing foreign films with her at the Tivoli Theater, an art house in St. Louis. We were probably still in high school or just out of high school when we went to my first foreign film, the French movie Jean de Florette (1986) and its sequel, Manon of the Spring (also 1986). It was a beautiful (and painful) illustration of tragic revenge that I never forgot.

Because the effects of tragic revenge can be devastating in their mistakenness, the risks of being wrong are pretty high. And again, few of us have access to the context Anne Powers describes. If someone attacks you who doesn’t even know you, how can you uncover that context?

So revenge is very human, mostly only human actually. But that doesn’t make it any less dreadful that we are so quickly willing to weld the sword into our own blind spots.

So back to my example of brilliant revenge. When I was a child, I was a bit of a lamenter. I once literally started a picket line in the living room of my grandparents house in Oregon over having to eat fish every night for dinner.

Well, one day when I was seven, my parents told me we would be moving from “Albaqeqe” to a place called Creve Coeur, which sounded very French and exotic to me when I was seven. My parents said it would be a very green place and, enticed by this, I was an early enthusiast of the project. Soon, however, I realized what leaving “Albaqeqe,” (like Pontrhydyfen, it’s an impossible city to spell), would mean for me socially.

Here is an early expression of that emotional trajectory.
Click to enlarge.

(I had such big ambitions for my literary output. But I was misspelling my own name so…I hope I wasn’t too optimistic about winning a Pulitzer Prize. By the way, Candy died under my parent’s bed in Albuquerque a year or so before we moved and my parents couldn’t bring themselves to tell me or my two older brothers for three weeks during which time my parents stalled us by saying Candy was at the vet. She was actually immediately and quietly buried by my parents in our backyard on Claudine Street without any ceremony. But she lives in immortality as my very amazing porn name ((first dog, first street)) of Candy Claudine. So there’s that.)

I also want to say I am not living in “Albaqeqe” again due to some lifelong effort to get back here. Girl Scouts honor. By the time I got to Junior High I forgot all about ever returning and it was Monsieur Bang Bang who wanted to move here to study archaeology back in 2010 and who then become ensnared in “The Land of Entrapment” (as we say).

Anyway…on to St. Louis where I was placed in remedial classes immediately because I was behind in reading and math was a foreign language. I was allowed to leave science class twice a week to visit the Fern Ridge reading specialist who implored my father to stop reading to me (I was eight years old by this time) so that I would start reading on my own, after which, very similarly to Candy-gate, my parents couldn’t come right out and tell me this but instead told me they would rather watch PBS’ miniseries I Claudius instead of finishing the book Heidi with me, thereby generating in my tender heart a lifelong hatred of I Claudius.

But rather than enact revenge on my parents for all those things, I started reading instead. Like pretty voraciously. In grade school we received a catalog called the Scholastic Book Club. That reading specialist advised my parents to let me read as much as I wanted and so I started collecting books about dogs, haunted houses and a magazine called Dynamite. There was also a magazine called Bananas but that was for older kids. I purchased so many books from that catalog, I always received the free poster and so my bedroom walls in St. Louis were at first covered by posters of puppies and kittens (until those were replaced by Cher albums and posters of shirtless boys). One season I bought so many books I struggled to get the stack home on the school bus.

And I was happy in reading but still pretty upset about being in St. Louis and so I decided to write a letter to the advice column “Good Vibrations” in Dynamite magazine, a column run by Ms. Kernberg. (In my memory, she was a man; but her real name is Pamela Kernberg.) I wrote out my complaints against my parents in that letter, folded it up, added a 15-cent stamp and then gave it to my mother to post.

In hindsight, maybe this is where my own revenge plot went awry.

I awaited Kernbergs response for a year and it never showed up in Dynamite Magazine. I was very depressed about this. It triggered my feelings of invisibility. You could say I never got over having that letter passed-over, literally being rejected by Ms. Kernberg.

Fast forward 40 years and my mother is downsizing in Brunswick, Ohio. She has sent me and my brothers a box of our childhood papers, things she had been saving all these years like badly-formed clay pots, report cards, crayon drawings, all the things. The box took me six months to go through due to being so uncomfortable acknowledging my little wiseacre self. (Worse than invisible, I was annoying.)

But the box was also a gift because inside it, (and through a struggle over my very idea of myself), I found comedy gold, an ability to see that little shit as an idiot, but also very, very funny. Which was gone a long way toward healing from all those childhood slights, from both others and also from myself. (I find if you can’t practice forgiving yourself, you are probably not very good at forgiving anybody else.)

But here’s the thing. Tucked inside all that childhood paraphernalia was that damn letter to Ms. Kernberg! Unsent and opened!! Not only had my mother not sent the letter, she ripped it open, read it and kept it for me to find 40 years later. Okay, probably unintentionally. Maybe she kept it because she thought it was ridiculous. This was maybe unintentional revenge. But knowing my mother…it was perfectly cold revenge.

Soon after finding it, I called her to congratulate her and we laughed about it. She had no memory at all of the letter. Maybe this is because there’s been so much other drama ever since.

I was not upset by my mother’s revenge. Only impressed at the time span of its execution. And my great hubris in thinking my mother would be a secretary to my anti-parent missives to strangers. Besides, I’ve had other revenge that has hurt me far worse. Was it just? I never thought so, but I just can’t seem to drum up the energy or enthusiasm to retaliate.

But beyond my energy deficits, since young adulthood (maybe even since childhood) I have been practicing compartmentalizing my feelings, separating them from my perceived antagonists so as to, yes, protect myself with boundaries but also to keep my feelings honored and valued, separated from the drama of the other person, all in order to allow my feelings to keep-on-keepin’-on…because they are a gift. Your feelings are a gift. Some people never get them. In their whole lives. And they’re desperate for them. So if you can separate your feelings for someone apart from what you think they may have done to hurt you, then you won’t lose everything.

I don’t do it perfectly, of course, which is why it takes practice. Like everyone else, first I have to calm down.

Which brings us back to art and writing, which is a great space to practice this compartmentalizing. Practicing art, I would argue, is better than revenge, better for your own soul. And probably more fruitful and healing besides, that which gives and receives, instead of more and more and more suffering, the mastery of grace.

Going through the covers of Dynamite Magazine this week, I discovered some interesting things: