The Sweet Bitter
Notes Toward Andrew Weatherhead's "Fudge"
Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead, Publishing Genius Press, 2023
Typefaced in a sans serif font, a rejection of excess
My now favorite poem about the National Basketball Association, which isn’t about the National Basketball Association but something like to what ends we are willing to endure tedium, or what tedium allows us to excuse ourselves from, again a rejection of excess, a subtraction turned multiplication, a filling up with the wondrous pointlessness of the wait (wait for it), is in a book called Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
“I love poetry / And poems / People are different / They’re fine” runs the entirety of one of Weatherhead’s poems, I tend to agree
The serious among us might decry Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead as slight, or unserious, or exactly what it is, or minor, or self-defeating, or unreadably readable, errata and etc., all adequate descriptors and exactly what allow this collection to be a poetry of the present, a poetry of presence, a subsuming of legacy in favor of our moment to moment interfacing with death
Who are the serious among us
A poem is a portal into YouTube
“Let the products sell themselves, they said” is a line in Andrew Weatherhead’s book Fudge, a book that is a product produced by Publishing Genius Press, a product I am or am not attempting to sell you (link below), though, given the challenges small presses endure in selling product due to capitalism’s fuckery with distribution chains and marketing and decaying cheerleaders, things I’ve learned more about than I care to know via the Cleveland State Poetry Center’s interesting if poorly edited podcast Index for Continuance, it is a product you should probably purchase, if only to celebrate the fragmented glowing portal of the terrible now, a fitful instability that demands nothing of you apart from likeness
I have no idea why this book’s title is Fudge, thank you Andrew Weatherhead