Galvanized Iron on the Citizens' Band

Joseph Mosconi has a book out!

Despite being a leading figure in LA's group of Conceptual Writers, Mosconi has never released a collection before. This one is a big green hardback with a few huge words on each page--minimalist poetry in an expansive format. It is a conceptual work--apparently each short poem consists of one term from trucker slang fused with one term from military slang--the resulting concoctions are highly suggestive, presenting hyperbolic masculine talk in an atmosphere of restrained elegance.

Consider a few of the poems:

Zipper-
Suited
Sun God
How Tall
Are You?

or

Fuzzy
Wuzzy
Church-
On-
Wheels

or

Smell
Your
Own
Musk
Money
Bus

or

Throttle
Jockey
Watch
Your
Donkey

You have to imagine each of these printed big enough to fill the page.

These pieces are strongly reminiscent of the work of LA's Aram Saroyan. At stake is the necessary confidence that small samples of language can stand by themselves in an interesting way. In this case, it is a confidence in the suggestive power and beauty of a single combinatory act, that two slang terms can be put together to make a significant poem.

Here are a few more examples, chosen for their elegantly tweaked machismo:

Shooting
Pool
With
The Captain
Blinkin'
& A-winkin'

-

Sea
Daddy
Trading
Stamps

-

Since
Jesus
Was A
Corporal
Negative
Contact

-

Bend Over,
Here It
Comes
Again
Checking
My Eyelids
For Pinholes

-

Admiral
Of The
Narrow
Seas
BUSTED!

-

Obviously, Joseph has had quite a bit of fun with the homosocial implications of some of these phrases.

LA has quite a few Conceptual Writers (Ara Shirinyan, Joseph Thomas, Vanessa Place, Harold Abramowitz, Mathew Timmons, and Christine Wertheim, among others), but Mosconi stands out among them for the way his work presents ideas at unanticipated, oblique angles, for his multidisciplinary engagement with visual arts and film, and for his editorial rigorousness (which is responsible for his reluctance to publish).

Galvanized Iron on the Citizen's Band is published by the Poetic Research Bureau in an edition of 100 copies and as far as I'm aware is only being circulated to friends of the poet (though perhaps I can convince him to make it more widely available).