Dear Poetry Publishers

Laura Boss and I will be putting together a proposal this fall for a Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt and sending it to you.  It will include work from his five published books of poetry as well as from three decades of uncollected work.  Here's a bit of biographical info on Benedikt:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/89

Anyone have any suggestions of who I should be hitting up first?  Any publisher want to save me the trouble and jumping on this right away? 

Here are two short poems from Mole Notes, to give you a feel for the prose poems that make up about half of his collected work (most are a bit longer than these; I’m being a lazy typer this morning):

 

SOCIAL CONCERNS

 

Waking, Mole’s greatest social concern at present is this large rock.  The earth must have rolled around until the mouth of his burrow was directly under it; then it stopped. 

 

ESTHETIC NUPTIALS

 

I invited our favorite famous writer, who happens to be a distant friend, to our wedding.  To celebrate, he gets high and cuts up the manuscript of one of his most famous love poems, using a paper punch; then he throws it all over us in our hotel room, like confetti.  And everybody considers us just one more nice normal average couple when I tell them that we spent the first night of our love in a motel room crawling around on our hands and knees.