I had the pleasure and honor to join a bunch of fantastic poets at The Linda in Albany, NY last December to celebrate the end of another year of local poetry, and the recorded the session for WAMC, the area’s NPR affiliate, which you can listen to here. Albany Poets and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild have a great relationship with The Linda and they’re slowly releasing each poet’s performance as we near the end of 2022. Mine was posted in September. I haven’t listened yet (like most folks, the sound of my own voice makes me cringe a bit) but it was a fantastic night and I’m really proud of the poems I read, including a few that will appear in an upcoming book of mine (called Both Ways Home) that should drop before the holidays. Enjoy!
Five Spooky Podcasts for the Halloween Season
When you really love Halloween and eerier aspects of autumn, it always feels like Spooky Season is right around the corner, no matter if it’s high summer or the depths of winter. And when it gets to be late August and early September, I start to listen to some of my favorite spooky old radio shows I’ve downloaded over the years, or audiobook short stories that give me the chills. And of course the creepier podcasts that help me get me through the day. We all have some go-to favorites, but if you’re looking for recommendations for something scary to listen to as we enter the best time of the year, these are the five I’d recommend (in no particular order).
Read moreHeel Spurs: Top 10 San Antonio Players Who Make Great Heels and Villains
The San Antonio Spurs have had a reputations of being a straight-laced, team-first squad for decades, to the point where many fans think they’re boring. This is thanks to the humble, nice-guy leadership of legends like David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Avery Johnson, and so on. The “buy into the system” expectations for this team are as clear as the black and white on their jerseys. But there’s silver in those jerseys too, a gray area for players who are harder to tame and buck at the heavy-hand placed on them by Pop and the front office (affectionally know by Spurs fans as PATFO). Now this list is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and like great heels in wrestling, these are the Spurs players who took a turn toward villainy, providing some drama (be it entertaining or franchise threatening) for a team that is unfairly treated as vanilla, as plain paper, as drama free. They’ve been anything but over the years, thanks to these thorny Spurs in our heels.
Read moreA Quick Look At My Unpublished Novels
I just finished a major revision of one of my novels and restarted my literary agent search, so I thought I’d take a moment to list and encapsulate the five “completed” novels I’ve finished over the years, never mind the first novel I wrote in college that shall never see the light of day, or the three half novels I started but have yet to finish. Hopefully one or all of these will find themselves on a bookshelf near you someday!
Read moreAbout My Instagram Account...
My Instagram account was hacked by some crypto loser on May 19. If we are friends on there, please report @jameshduncan, but don’t block it or you won’t get to see my new account. The hacker is STILL using my old account and Instagram has done NOTHING to help me despite dozens and dozens of reports by myself and others. My new account is @that_poet_james_duncan. Please only use this one to contact me. Thanks!
One Perfect Episode in Drunk Monkeys
The new Pop Culture Spectacular! issue of Drunk Monkeys is now live! Inside you’ll find my One Perfect Episode essay about the fantastic UK sitcom Peep Show, specifically about their “Nether Zone” episode, which I think is one of the best of all time. By condensing the show down to what works best, trapping the two “odd couple” main characters with each other and letting them riff. It’s staggeringly hilarious and I can’t encourage you enough to go find it and watch it.
The rest of the Drunk Monkeys issue is packed with poetry, fiction, essays, movie reviews, and more, all drenched with pop culture references from a huge variety of writers and voices. My thanks to the editors for taking another piece of mine, and for putting together a truly epic issue.
Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line
Now available from Gutter Snob Books! Order from the publisher or order from my Big Cartel shop!
“The work we do, all of us, this whole universe of spreadsheets and emails and wrenches and lesson plans and bus routes, this work we do is just to keep us from thinking of Love.”
When our value is judged by our productivity, when we’re seen more as cogs in a machine than human beings, when the warnings of a world on fire are ignored by CEOs and politicians cashing in at every turn—doom is inevitable. These poems explore the grinding, churning world of the working class waiting in line for their turn in the slaughterhouse, and when the world begins to fall apart after years of dour warnings, we’re still expected to come in and punch the time-clock as the bombs fall, the water dries up, the toxins spread, and the end comes for each of us. But the boss is throwing a pizza party at 4 p.m., so don’t punch out too soon!
“James Duncan shows his work. He is thorough and true. There is a cadence to these poems that goes beyond the poems themselves. The entire book moves like a train. Duncan uses language as a vehicle in which the reader truly travels. There are depots and little worlds along the journey. There are tiny poems inside each poem itself. His poems are crafted like stories told between friends, stories too painful to tell, stories written in real time and reflection, stories that are windows and stories that are lessons learned through the grinding grief and unpredictable joy that define nearly every life ever lived. Duncan reminds us that our lives are large, real and precious, but so much is lost in the paperwork and the phone call and the everyday business of our lives. This book is a catalog of the glory and the desperation of being alive in a world that challenges decency. These poems fight to deny that challenge, to disregard it even as we live it and see it out the windows of our brains, our bargains with ourselves and as we bump along the tracks of our lives. Duncan reminds us that "if you’re going to die, die with decency.” — Dena Rash Guzman, author of Joseph and Life Cycle
“James Duncan's new collection of poems punch me square in the teeth. Most of us work a job we hate just so we can survive in a world that would rather see us exhausted than in love, that would rather see us depressed than creative, that would have us put our heads down and live among the meaningless than to look up and discover awful truths. These are poems in the vein of Carver, Bukowski, and James Wright. Workers, fighters, and people with little hope, trapped in a system they cannot beat, but sometimes can beat late at night during the exhausted hours. These poems take the everyday mundane existence we are force fed eight hours a day and show us there is hope, but only if we are willing to open the doors of the slaughterhouse.” — Frank Reardon, author of Loud Love on the Sevens and Elevens, Blood Music and others
“With Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line, James H. Duncan does a superb job of showing us our humanity exactly as we are living it, the pain, the struggle, the sickness and all the manifestations of any joys we can find to keep ourselves grounded. Duncan’s poems are both heartbreaking and equal parts exuberant within the expression of the simplest speck of human minutiae. This book of poetry exposes our very soul.” — John Grochalski, author of Eating a Cheeseburger During the End Times and P-Town Forever
So I've Had a Little Luck With Some Poems...
Over the last few months I’ve had more than a little good luck when it came to placing new poems into some great journals, some of which are old favorites and others are brand spankin’ new, literally the first issue ever in one case. There are a bunch more poetry publications coming soon, but I’ve added the more recent releases below and included links when applicable. The editors of these journals have my deepest thanks. It’s always an honor when someone else grabs your work out of a bustling inbox and says, “This is the one!” Or two, for that matter! And of course, my thanks to you for reading!
“A Splinter” now appears in Trampoline
“Picturesque” now appears in Viva Brevis
“Saint Michael” now appears in Book of Matches
“Both Ways Home” now appears in San Pedro River Review
“Ode to Madison Avenue at 6:15 PM" and "Topo-Chico” now appear in Day Job Journal
“And the party never ends” and “Riverwalk” now appear in The Rye Whiskey Review
“Wednesday Night South Main Avenue” and “May the Moon Shine On” now appear in Roadside Raven Review
New Poetry Collection Coming Soon from Gutter Snob Books
Later this year, probably late summer or early autumn, Gutter Snob Books is planning to release my next poetry collection, Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line. It’s a chapbook focusing on work life and the office “grind” culture in modern America and how destructive it is, and as the poems go on the story evolves into a tale of our impending apocalyptic end as a human society and how even down to the very last minutes on the punch clock, the corporate machine churns on and spits us out like used cogs, replaced by bones and nuclear winter. So yeah, cheery uplifting stuff! But I’m thrilled editor Michele McDannold selected the collection for the Gutter Snob Books 2022 lineup, and I’ll post more details and the cover when it all comes together. Thanks very much, and stay tuned for even more publication news soon!
My Top 10 Books of 2021
As with all my annual lists, the books themselves could have been published in any year, but they must be new to me. I didn’t read as many as I had hoped this year, but I am happy I was able to broaden my reading world with a lot of new authors I hadn’t explored before. If you hadn’t read any of these yet, I highly recommend them!
Read morePoets on Craft: James H Duncan and Rebecca Schumejda
Poets on Craft is an educational series of essays by poets about how they each approach their artistic craft and writing process from a practical standpoint, and I’m very happy to have my own essay appear alongside one by the incredible Rebecca Schumejda. My essay focuses on how narrative can play a role in poetry, even if it’s hidden behind layered metaphors and alternating styles/POVs. Having started out as a fiction writer, the ability to tell a story has remained vital even as I have shifted into poetry. Our essays are posted over at Cultural Daily, and they were compiled by another great poet and educator, Bunkong Tuon. There’s a lot there for young poets to explore, so I encourage you to take a look and explore the site! Thanks for all the support!
New Poem in Black Poppy Review
My poem “Creatures Who Survived” now appears at the delightfully grim Black Poppy Review, which describes itself as a journal focusing on “dilapidated, mossy grounds…hidden paths and nooks which lead to words that linger and haunt--poems of abandonment, flora & fauna, folklore, ghosts, memories, nature, night, solitude, weathering, wonder, and the otherwise forgotten.” My piece certainly fits into that mold. It’s one of the post-apocalyptic poems I wrote pre-pandemic that I’m working into a future chapbook of similar pieces, so stay tuned for that. Thanks to Sandy Benitez for accepting this piece and for publishing such a cool review!
Five Poems for Halloween
The trees are blooming orange and yellow and the wind rattles the leaves down the street, so that means Halloween is almost here again! To celebrate, I dug into my archives to pull up five of my more Halloween-centric pieces for you. The first two appeared in the wonderful but now deceased Lonesome October Lit, an online journal that focused on eerie and spooky poems and stories. (All pieces are archived online!) The last three pieces are from my book We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, which is available online or through me (if you want a signed copy). The book contains many more poems and pieces like those below. I hope you enjoy these pieces and that they get you into the Halloween spirit!
Read moreStrange Gods of the Prairie Anthology
The Gasconade Review puts out an annual poetry anthology (among many other individual collections) and this year they titled their anthology after one of the three poems of mine they selected for inclusion, “Strange Gods of the Prairie.” The other two poems they accepted are “A Dying Orchid on Fire” and “Two Chairs on the Front Patio,” and I’m thrilled to be included alongside the likes of John Dorsey, Linnet Phoenix, William Taylor Jr, Shawn Pavey, Zara Lisbon, Tim Heerdink, Holly Day, Ace Bogges, and many others. The cover art is pretty cool and you can find copies online for $15. It’s a big one so it’s worth your money. My thanks to the editors and congrats to all who made it into the anthology!
"Umbra" Now Appears in Pine Hills Review
My poem “Umbra” now appears in the always fantastic Pine Hills Review, the literary magazine of The College of Saint Rose, a small liberal arts college in my hometown of Albany, NY, and located just a few blocks away from where I’m typing this now. They’ve published a poem of mine before (“How to Watch John Ashbury Read Poetry”) and it’s always an honor. This new poem is from a series I wrote based on some of my favorite words and the connotations that come to mind with each, and they also have an audio version of the poem that I recorded for their site. I hope you enjoy!
A Look Back at Our Challenge to Find the Greatest Soda for Ice Cream Floats
Two years ago this summer, two ambitious scientists commenced the long, laborious, diabetic adventure to discover the best soda to use for an ice cream float. Using Stewart’s Vanilla as the constant throughout, and breaking the dozens of soda options down into six specific categories, these two meticulous analysts…no, dare I say HEROES…taste tested each soda and vanilla ice cream combo using a rigorous system of metrics and scoring to determine just what soda is the best for floats. Th results were not what either expected, and you can read about each part of the investigation within.
Read more10 Blogging Tips for Beginners
People have been blogging since the mid-90s, so it’s not exactly a cutting-edge medium for creating and monetizing content, especially when you compare it to things like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms. But if you’re a wordsmith at heart and want to give blogging a try, I’ve selected ten tips to help you get your passion project off the ground. Now, if you’re looking to monetize your blog, that’s a whole other game, so for now I’m just going to focus on getting your blog up and running in order to attract enough readers to (hopefully) justify any ads you might want to allow on your site. This is advice for someone who wants to share their work, their passion, and their ideas first and foremost, and blogging remains a great way to do that and reach potentially interested readers.
Read morePoetry Audiobooks Now Available at Bandcamp
Three of my poetry collections are now available in audiobook form at Bandcamp, including We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, Feral Kingdom, and my half of the split-collection Vacancy (the great Kevin Ridgeway wrote the other half). The files are available to stream for free at the site or on the Bandcamp app, and they’re only a few dollars each if you wish to download them. In the coming months I’ll be working to create and post more poetry audiobooks, then turn to my short story collections, and eventually longer fiction if people are interested in that too. Thanks for all of your support, and as always, signed copies of the books are always available. Just drop me a line!
A Review of Curtiz at Drunk Monkeys
Like many people, Casablanca is my favorite movie, but the story behind the film has just as much intrigue and suspense as the movie itself. The Hungarian film Curtiz (in English and available on Netflix) highlights the director Michael Curtiz and his struggle to get the movie made, and made correctly, while wresting his career and family from the grips of hyper-Americanism at home and fascism overseas. My 100 word review is now over at the fantastic film and literary website Drunk Monkeys, and you’ll find a few more of my reviews there too, mostly focusing on film noir. I hope you enjoy the review, and the film as well. Thanks!
New Poem in The Mantle, Issue 14
My poem “Fugue” now appears in The Mantle, Issue 14, alongside the works of Emily Scudder, Elise Houcek, Blue Nguyen, and other writers who are definitely worth checking out. It’s a small lineup but editor James Croal Jackson picked a great slate of folks, and I feel very fortune to appear alongside them. The poem itself is about the cyclical nature of life and fate, and what is lost will be found again, only to fade back into the night. I hope you enjoy!