the rix mix

Bob Rixon's poems have appeared in many publications including New York Quarterly and The Village Voice. For 20 years he produced and hosted a weekly program over radio station WFMU. He  has been a featured poet at Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival & Visiting Poet at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is also the author of a long-running  blog, The Rix Mix.

Short bio to accompany one poem in a classy literary journal. Needed to think of two publications, still in business, with names not like punk 'zines. I'm proud of my association with WFMU & my blog. Every poet in Jersey does a Dodge Festival sooner-or-later; short reading usually for small audience, but a sought after gig because you receive a three-day pass.

Nobody cares that I wrote really good columns for a chain of weekly newspapers. My prose is well-suited to small, local newspapers (& their web counterparts)  provided editors don't mind  the touch of eccentricity  the young editors at Worrall Community Newspapers enjoyed. Newspaper writing also forced me to self-edit & tighten up my grammar & punctuation. Worrall Community Newspapers lost me when the supervising editor-of-editors  treated me as an amateur. I've received nibbles from other editors, which I decline because they are:   A: Not prepared to pay, or B. Won't suggest a topic on which I can knock off 400 words on one draft & little research.  Nothing goes over-the-transom, e.g. uninvited (except poems). You only do that when there's something you really want on the other side of the door, like an agent  who might read your novel sample pages & synopsis when nobody else will.

As a kid, I always wanted a print shop toy. They came with tiny rubber letters you set into a sheet metal tray, attached to a hand press, & coated with ink. Definitely made in Japan.  Instead, Santa brought me  a .22 rifle, a telescope, all kinds of interests  & hobbies my dad projected on me. Not even a cheap portable typewriter when I entered high school.   I briefly ran an A.B. Dick office offset, sheet fed duplication using paper masters.  All lists of independent petroleum quality tests from area refineries & tankers, I loved that machine, didn't mind coming in every other Saturday morning to clean it. Later, I was trained in running advanced  (for the late Seventies) Xerox machines  including their first commercially successful color machine, which I managed to set on fire one slow evening experimenting to see how many passes I could make through the machine of a color print, building up layers of ink.  On the third pass the paper got stuck & ignited & I fortunately fished it out of the  machine (leased but worth about $20,000)  before the ink had melted all over the works.

I've been told by professional printers that I'm too sloppy, not fastidious,  I don't go nuts over  the tiny ink spot in the corner of the page.  They're right. But I point out that copy editors ain't what they used to be, either, judging from the print errors I find in hard cover best-sellers.

Labels: about writing