A thousand years ago, saying the name “Andy Fogle” around these parts often earned you a chuckle; he was a smiling, wacky undergraduate who was serious about poetry and not much else. He worked as my assistant for a short time, and he took poetry writing classes from my husband, Dean Taciuch. We all became good friends. Dean turned Andy on to a an artist-poet we were close to at Kent State University a million years ago: David Thornberry. Dave produced a number of cool poetry chapbooks,and Dean loaned? gave? his copy of Couplets to Andy. A thousand years ago.
Some seeds just take a while, but here it is: Andy Fogle’s The Last Apprenticeship, an amazing chapbook published online by the amazing White Knuckle Press. To borrow a chunk from the intro:
“. . . the whole piece owes something of its juxtapositional technique to Dave Thornberry’s Couplets, which has made me habitually play with odd pieces within uniform sets. Plenty of us do that, but Thornberry was the one that got me really interested in regimented fragments—in this case prose pieces of three sentences each.
This is dedicated to Dean Taciuch, who first encouraged me with this and many other oddities long ago, and also turned me on to Thornberry. “
Go Enjoy.
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