I've got a secret that I've been dying to share, and there's no better place than on a blog that very few people read, for who wants to actually read about pop art? People want an exhibit, they want a big Marilyn in their face, they want a bold statement like those that Warhol was good at making. All on the surface. All in a single picture. All with the boldest colors one can imagine.

Here's my secret: I make book covers; that's my medium, and though I'm not great at it, I've found it to be a fascinating way to crank out pop art. First I have the book, of course. The book doesn't need to have all its copies have the same cover; a cover can last a few years, and then I can change it to another cover. In fact I can change that cover after I've sold only a single book. It doesn't seem to be against Amazon's policy and it doesn't even necessarily upset them all that much. If they feel inclined to make a few test copies or have a few sitting around to prepare them for orders, then of course they risk wasting those few as I move on to a different or better cover and they're stuck with the old ones. But I never hear about that. What their machinery tells me is that if I make a new one, they'll put it on there. That can be tomorrow or any day.

What that means is that theoretically, I can print as much pop art as I want. I can get all my pop art out there in the world, one book at a time, and with every bizarre bold pop-art creation someone will look at it and say, wow, that's a wild picture. That's a piece of work. That's like Andy Warhol.

What I'm working toward is to have every book, every cover, every iteration, be as special as an Andy Warhol work. I have twenty-seven books out now and many of them if not all of them have some kind of pop art on the cover. Sometimes the titles and author's name ruin it a little - if it looks too much like a standard book cover, I'm a little disappointed. I want it to be bold, striking, intense. I want them all to be like that. If one of them is not, I want to change it until it is.

The world of pop art requires someone to be the kind of hustler Andy Warhol was. I don't know if I have the kind of genius it took to take a Campbell's soup can and make millions off its image, which actually has some problems with copyright probably, but I do know that Warhol did not let copyright keep him from splashing images all around the world and becoming one of the most easily recognized artists of the modern era. He had a kind of genius that I admire and am following up on. My books will for the most part be full of haiku, but that's ok, you have to have something in a book, otherwise it's just blank pages with pop art on the cover. The haiku is part of the bargain. And you know the kind of thing that goes along with haiku: flowers, roads, monarch butterflies. Vistas of incredible beauty. Impressionism through computer-aided cartoonization.

In this pop art site, I keep my best secrets. In plain sight.

covers to die for

Nobody buys haiku; the market for any poetry whatsoever appears to be pretty small. When I buy one of my own, I shoot straight up in the ratings and become one of the best sellers ever. With a single book buy I can own the haiku ratings.

Of course I could get the "author's copy" where it only costs a couple bucks but they charge a couple more for shipping - they have to make back on the shipping what they don't make simply printing the book - but I'm too cheap to pay any shipping whatsoever. And besides, it comes out to about the same. You pay over the top, you get about a buck royalty and your ratings skyrocket. So when my ratings swoon I've taken to just buying my own.

And if I'm going to do that, then I'm going to have my own pop exhibit, by having pop covers that are essentially the best I can make them. I'm only at the beginning stages. I'm not sure I've mastered this art of covers. These books that have professionally made covers seem to have gold and silver embossed lettering on them or something like that, and mine are not quite like that yet. Also they tend to make the author's name really big like it's more of a draw than the book itself - I'm not sure if I'm ready for that either.

But the covers themselves are the new pop exhibit. It appears to be a book. But actually it's pop art, in your face.

update

I'm in the doldrums with my pop art. I've been Kandinskying things - almost all my pop art over the last couple years has been Kandinskyed (sp?) photos - and it hasn't really run its course. I produce one for the Quakers every week. I produce book covers. That's about the run of my pop art these days.

On the topic of book covers, I've had trouble, actually, getting the inspiration to remake all the ones that need to be remade. I've remade a few - Kandinskyed, in most cases - but have a dozen to redo. I've had a few ideas but I'm having fewer hours to click together to pull them together.

Furthermore, I'm not happy about my pop gallerie, which doesn't really display the pop art the way I want it displayed. And, I don't have much time to redo it although I've had plenty of chances.

Life is just so bizarre. I'm going to take my phone out, and try to record more of it.