Pain Fantasy by Jason Bredle is one of the most enjoyable books of poetry I’ve read this year.  Strange, funny, dark, heartbreaking, mixing in sports and wordplay (yes, sports), there was a lot to like about this collection.  Bredle has also been hitting the online journals – most recently three solid pieces in the latest issue of No Posit.

Some writers you just want to know what they are working on.  At least I have a list in my head like this.  I emailed Jason Bredle and asked him to talk a little about what he’s working on.  What follows is the response I got:

Basically I decided to divide up all my poems from the past two years and make two chapbooks out of them, but I haven’t even made the chapbooks, and I don’t know how to get them published even if I do make them. I’m thinking maybe instead I’ll let them fall in love with each other and make a baby. I don’t think this is really newsworthy, though. I thought I was going to finish a manuscript in June and I put all this time into revising and reordering poems and then I went to LA and decided while I was there that I was going to scrap the whole thing, so I came home and rewrote a lot of things all over again. Did you ever see Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? It’s very much like the part where John C. Reilly is doing all this acid and working on the same song for six months. I didn’t love that movie as much as I’d hoped I would, but it was worth seeing just for that scene. I’ve only written two poems in the past three months. One I wrote a week before I was hospitalized, and then I was sick for a little while, and then I wrote another, and then I started working a lot of extra hours and haven’t had time to sit down and write, or when I do I go back to this poem called Caspian Sea, which is essentially a blank page I spend hours looking at with Caspian Sea written at the top.

I also asked who he was reading, what writers he likes:

Mark Halliday has a new book out, which I’m reading. He’s my favorite poet. I was going to try to find this one particular poem of his on the internet and send it to a friend of mine so if I can find it I’ll also send it to you. Okay, I just looked around and I couldn’t find it, but it doesn’t help that I don’t really remember the title.

For those who haven’t read Jason Bredle, I suggest doing a google search and picking up his books.