#10

Octopus #10 is up...it's so awesome it'll make you question how Metallica's "Black Album" could have ever been awesome. And Metallica's "Black Album" WAS awesome, but #10 will make you dribble a bit in your pants.

That's right, complete loss of urine control.

http://www.octopusmagazine.com/

"This Elizabeth" will kick your Elizabeth's ass

So I just finished Lesley Yalen's "This Elizabeth," and it, my friends, is good. I've had many an argument regarding the necessity for poetry to be narrative. My point? It doesn't need to tell a story to take you on a journey. But that is neither here nor there. What is here is #2 in an edition of 200 (I'm slightly proud of that, if you can't tell) of Ms. Yalen's book, and it is surprisingly narrative in that way a good stand-up comedian is. Comedians don't just tell jokes, they create a space in which repetition and your everyday catch you totally off guard, they guide you into funny, carry you across the threshold to a place where a single idea or phrase can become the most hilarious thing you have ever heard.

And so it is with this poem. People, places and all sorts of other nouns keep popping in and out. All at once these street people, kitchen people, specialists and matinées appear both inconsequential and the sole reason the world keeps going. Yalen begs you to notice the mundane, but in pointing it out, she makes you realize how much awesomeness we never take out of our bags, makes you long for that awesomeness. The experience of reading her book is just like having three tubes of chapstick sitting in your change tray at home but having really chapped lips driving in your car to Minneapolis (I've never wanted anything so bad as any of those chapsticks as I did right then).

It's easy to call an artwork subtle, especially when we don't quite get it, but I feel like I get this book; its' purpose, its' goals, its' reason for being, and I have to say that the most amazing thing about this book is its' gentle nature...its' subtlety. Example, "A loved one is like a sound/ compounded over time/ by another sound"

My favorite poetry is poetry that isn't satisfied with the words we have to explain, well, everything. Yeah, I can say I love you, but what does that mean? It's a gesture, and one that does nothing to explain how I fell about you. Yalen's poetry is after a better explanation, she is taking a walk and lucky for us someone asked her how it was. But where a lesser person would say, "Oh, I saw homeless people, people chatting in their kitchens, a few signs, and the sky was blue and big," she gives us, "This Elizabeth."

You can buy it here: minushouse.wordpress.com

Please go and do it...I beg you.

Good News!

The Tiny Tour is back with a few more videos...from the fire escape. Honestly, I look forward to this as much as I do just to see where the next reading will be. You can see these people read, if you like; Thomas Devaney, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Dorothea Lasky, Michael Carr and Aaron Tieger. You can see it here: http://www.birdinsnow.com/ I would just do it, you got no real good reason not to.

Here's a carrot to get you going:


Dorothea Lasky, Fire Escape, The Tiny Tour from Dorothea Lasky on Vimeo.

Also, you'll notice a new link over on the sidebar...it's for a new journal called linebreak that I just found about today, thanks to The Lovely Arc. It looks cool, unfortunately, they seem to frown on prose poems, which is about all I write these days, but I would encourage you to submit. The thing I find most intriguing about their features is that they post audio recordings of someone other than the poet reading the poem. This interests me for two reasons: one, I, like every poet before, during and after me, am just enough of an egomaniac to desire to hear our words coming from other's mouths. Two, I don't think that I am a very good reader of poems and would like to hear how someone good reads my poems so I can just imitate them there after. Lazy? Yes. But also interesting to consider.

Also (again), I got the new issue of jubilat the other day, it's full of great poems as well as an awesome interview with Peter Gizzi. You know what you should do? You should totally go buy it!

Poet of the week (A new feature)

I don't know if this will stick, but since my fascination with certain poets is revolving, I thought maybe it would be nice to throw a name out there from the time to time, and then tell you where you can buy books and read poems.

This week: Mathias Svalina...why? Because the guy rules, that's why. He's the physical incarnation of a snow day. He's your new favorite bar. He's finding Ramones and Costello L.P.'s at the same garage sale.

I've started reading a lot of Svalina in the days after AWP. A few of his "Creation Myths," were in Handsome, some more were in Tarpaulin Sky, and then I just went ahead and bought the book from New Michigan Press (you should too, just go to www.thediagram.com, click on the chapbooks link and do a wee bit of scrolling, no big whoop).

Here's what kills me about his poems...Svalina manages to share head space with an 8 year-old kid who is able to have complex thougts, but hasn't yet learned to express them out loud, and as such, is made to find slightly round-about ways of letting you on. In this way, his creation myths share the function of ALL creation myths...a simple explanation for the things we have no explanation for.

Here is a taste:

Creation Myth

There was a big puddle of honey & millions of ants surrounded
the puddle & after the ants came the mice whose faces grew
sticky with honey, honey dripping from their long whiskers
& after the mice came the dogs who lapped at the honey until
their fur was matted & coated with honey & after the dogs
came the bears who spooned up big handfuls of honey with
their stony paws & after the bears came the humans but by
then all the honey had been eaten.

The humans stood in the spot where the honey puddle had been
& looked at each other & cried. One of them invented speaking
& they all complained about how much they were looking
forward to the honey & one of them invented the plough &
they built a farm on the spot where the honey puddle had been
& one of them invented guns & they went out into the world
& shot all the mice, dogs & bears.

The ants watched all of this from their anthill. They patted
their swollen bellies. They laughed at the humans & their
complicated objects. They passed bowls of honey around the
crowd & drank deep of the honey & passed out from too much
honey. So they did not see the humans inventing a new kind of
ant that feeds on honey-eating ants.

Once the ant-eating ants ate all the ants they turned on the
humans & ate all the humans. Once the ant-eating ants ate
all the humans they turned on each other & ate each other.

Eventually there was only one ant-eating ant alive, the only
creature alive in the world. He returned to the spot where the
honey puddle had been, sat down & watched the sunset over
the foothills & then ate his own thorax.


Now that you've been properly convinced go and visit Mathias' blog where you can find all things related to Mathias. That's here: http://mathiassvalina.blogspot.com/

Thus ends our first weekly poet profile...I'll get better at this as I go, I hope.

Everyone Else is Doing It.

Okay, so I'm trying something new. You can check it out here:

http://furtheradventurespress.blogspot.com/

I'm going to leave it at that...here are some poems from someone(s) I like...alot:



I keep stealing videos from Rabbit Light Movies, maybe you should go there and see them all first hand.

On a side note, if you ever been in one of the Rabbit Light Movies I highly encourage you to submit to my new "thing."

I've mentioned this before, but, Sommer Browning is my new favorite poet

How totally awesome is she...I raved about a poem of hers not too long ago and yesterday I finally got her book from horseless in the mail...I read it immediately. It's prolly my awesomest book (to paraphrase a favorite t-shirt). The book is called Vale Tudo. It's about Ultimate Fighting, Walt Whitman and consumer culture...exactly. You can by it from Jen Tynes for only $6 and it comes with a collectible card.

This just reminds me of what a good job Jen does with all those books. The format she has chosen really plays with your expectations of what will be inside...shit, I'd recommend going to the website and buying everything you can.

On a side note, after three months of unemployment and then three months of working and working to get caught up, these are the first two records I buy: the Juno soundtrack (because I'm a 17 year-old girl, and Kate Nash's "Made of Bricks," mostly for the same reason, but also because I have a tendency to love anything with a British accent.

Greetings from Series A

Okay, so tonight I saw Betsy Wheeler and Joshua Marie Wilkinson read down at the Hyde Park Art Center and these are the results:

I LOVE Betsy's new book "Start Here." Imagine your best friend calling you at 3:00 in the morning to tell you how crazy he is about this new girl. That is what reading this book is like. The poem is at once beautiful, desperate, cute, innocent and yet from a voice that you know knows better. It simultaneously makes you long to love like that again and yet, be so glad you don't have to love like that again. The poem did great things for me and I want it to do great things for you as well.

What do I always say at this point? Why don't you go to: http://smallanchorpress.com/about.html and drop a few coins on this book. The poem is great and book itself is gorgeous; letter pressed AND silk screened.

I also realized something about reading, in general, while listening (and watching) JMW. That man loves his poems. You can see it in his eyes and his hands. You can hear it in his voice. Even after years, he still loves his poems! I should be so lucky...

I can't believe I'd never pieced this together before, but watching JMW read is like watching a musician when he realizes he is tearing shit up. Like watching Jordan. Like watching your feet be totally in sync with whatever is playing on your iPod. He finds that groove that goes hand in hand with doing something you feel lucky to be doing. His eyes shift and project mood. His hands twitch when something good is coming up. His voice sounds both tired and excited all at once.

What can I say...at least I figured out WHAT to work on. Now the question is how?

Merry President's Day...

I hope you enjoyed your day off, or if you were like me, your day at work minus the reward of mail when you got home. The fellow having a sit just North of here is one Millard Fillmore...he was a president and according to this picture quite unevenly skin-toned.

A few poetry related things: Tomorrow, come on down to good old Hyde Park and watch Betsy Wheeler and Joshua Marie Wilkinson hawk their wares at the Hyde Park Art Center. I'll be there, if you don't know me, ask around...I'll be happy to say hi. The reading starts at 7 and if you live anywhere else but Hyde Park...I'd leave early. I've been looking forward to this reading for quite awhile, and have no doubts that it will live up to my self-imposed hype.

Also, I found a 1st ed. copy of Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems" at the antiquarian book store last Saturday. I bought it for only $8 (what a deal!) and it used to belong to Ralph J. Miller Jr. I know this because his name is inside the front cover. I think I'll write my name just below his, that way neither of us will lose it.

Last Friday I spent the evening at the Checkerboard Lounge with a friend and her parents...inevitably the question regarding, "what kind" of poetry I write came up. I have to say, that is the hardest question in the history of questions to answer. It's a question only non-poets will ask, which, I guess, makes it not so difficult (figuring they don't really give a shit, they're just trying to be polite), but I always try, like an idiot, to answer them. And my answers fizzle down into a puddle of mumbo-jumbo that make me sound as though I'm making the whole, I'm a poet thing up.

Which I am...

Friday Night Walk Down

By following the images south you can virtually re-live my walk home last night. It was sunny and not too cold. I walked past Nichols Park and saw a mostly eaten pigeon (which makes me wonder WHAT is eating all these pigeons?), I deposited my paycheck at the bank, but got in trouble for taking pictures of that and was made to delete them. I walked down my street. I walked up to apartment building. I walked in to my apartment and found my dog sleeping in my dirty laundry (if you look close you will see that she had been INSIDE that shirt and crawling out through the neck hole). It was a weird day.

I think you should watch this...

Wasn't that awesome? Now, go and blow some coin on these fucking kick ass books! If you buy theirs, they'll buy yours, and if you don't have one yet, by the time you do, you'll have loads of people who owe you book buying favors!

Walking to Work...

This morning I walked to work. There was nothing extraordinary about this. It was cold. It was bright. There were snow angels in the park, which brought me relief...knowing they got away. I was walking to work this morning and listening to Jen Bervin read from, "A Non-Breaking Space." It made walking to work feel like being an angel stuck in snow, but then, finally getting away.

You can click on the title of this post to read it yourself, or if you want to be more like me you can download it, and others, here:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html

I know I've mentioned this before, but you really should spend some time in Pennsound's website, it's free, most links are downloadable, and it's chalk full of great poetry.

Go.

Listen.

Tell me what you liked best...we can start conversations, it'll be fun, I promise.

The Collabo, and how I've gone from "ehh" to "whoah"

Here's what I love about collaborative work: No other methodology has the ability to capture the way our mind's work, our minds working, our minds workings. Collaborative poems react. React to the writers, react to their poems, react to each word. Our brains, or at least their processes, are nothing more than reactions. And they are never, NEVER, singular reactions. Do we catch or do we duck? Do we cross, or do we wait? Do we cross and then catch?

Collaborative poems (done right) capture this, not indecision, but UNdecision. That moment just before our minds are made and we turn left; that moment when possibility and chance are the only thing is the only thing on our minds. That, ultimately, is why I love collaborative work...so much of it is out of your hands, and yet, just as much is in them.

Yes, decisions must finally be made, but the art of the collaborative poem is in how you manage to stretch it out without being indecisive, or without being invasive in that process. It's the artful mapping of the decision itself. That conversation we all have with ourselves every second of every day, but with just enough embellishment to make it interesting again.

An off-the-cuff list of my favorite collaborations:

*T.S. Eliot's, "The Wasteland" (never would have been what it was without Pound's extensive involvement)
*Friedrich Kerksieck and Aaron James McNally's "Postcard Poems"
*Jen Tynes and Erika Howsare's, "The Ohio System"
*NEG and JMW's "Figures for a Darkroom Voice"
*and this poem by Eric Baus, Noah Eli Gordon, Nick Moudry, and Sara Veglahn

�Charles Shively�

Come back from easy Chicago. Chicago is new. It is not old. I like your
pants. I like all pants. I also hate everything. Come back from easy Chicago
I mean. The road signs will always be just that, just nostalgic to hear a
song say that radios are everywhere in reticent Chicago, opening just
enough, just a few more notes: I like your paths. It�s funny, though,
because I also hate everything. I try not to effect my objects. The way to
describe it is �I am writing to grow old.� Just because what I�m writing has
a face, it�s not required to have expressions, and I don�t care how long of
a sentence I�m expected to fulfill. I�ve gone days without saying anything
and gotten all the way here only to start from the beginning. All these
eyes going after each other isn�t interesting. Nothing is interesting. I
hate it. Just face it, your tooth is coming out. Symbolic form. Whatever.
In the Chicago I left, pale light, the fountain in the courtyard running,
everything you put in the vault comes out covered in dust. I knew what you
meant, even if you were mocking me. My tooth, too, is falling out. Why did
your pants displace my beautiful beautiful braincase? My tooth, too, is
falling out (a different one). No one�s mocking anyone. I can�t help that.
Every song is about itself, gasping for air or waiting on a ferry. It�s been
snowing all day in Massachusetts & we don�t even talk about war here, too
busy listening to the radio I suppose. There�s nothing on the radio. I hate
mirrors. Hunting bees. These are hunting bees. Where will they go in the
snow? Where does anything go? There are road signs along the road, days
multiplying the boredom. Sometimes there are reasons to sleep. Where does
sleep go when there is no reason to sleep? I have found a reason to sleep,
writing in a way that tells me I just turned my am around, writing to �from
inside what time it is.� I hate snow but it�s addictive. I love adding to
everything, going bad or around or inside or mirroring some kind of honesty,
if that�s the right word. Thinking in absolutes or left underneath a
ladder, I�d wonder which was a way to say it without any background noise.
Nothing in the city changes but the street signs. I am eating snow. You
are eating snow. I took a bus around the river. I couldn�t even see it, the
windows were too dirty. While you went there, I went away too. Smoke means
something is burning, you said to the only lie inside the poem. The poem is
about love during wartime, about tackling itself. I caught a fish once in
the Chicago River. You told me not to eat it, so I ate snow; you told me not
to eat that too. I couldn�t tell where the voice was leaking into the
cistern. I never hear anything right. See? I�ve gone all wrong again.
There are bits of paper sticking out of my pocket, but I�m ambivalent about
it. Building mountains from yarn or trying to see how long it takes to dry the
clay into another worn down penny left on the tracks where the train hasn�t
run in years. I�m ambivalent about the way I look. And sound. What welds
each note to the air. What cleanly embraces a long sliding gaze. In your
mouth, Charles Shively, I see there is a corncob pipe! I sweat a lot and
have never liked fishing. I quote myself, removing the quotation marks. Or
so they say. Stamped in.

The only video I've found from Steal This Reading (so far)

Okay, so having this as the only moving picture document isn't exactly a travesty as Julie Doxsee's poetry is pretty amazing, that and she crushes tin cans just by entering the room (as witnessed by me and my tin can friends). I just wish there were more...if anyone has clips of Graham Foust's or Zach Schomburg's reading, please send them my way. Regardless, there is this...


Julie Doxsee at Steal This Reading from Octopus Books on Vimeo.

And I also wanted to share with you a poem by Sommer Browning I read in Black Ocean's "Handsome" mag. This poem is awesome for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its stance on the disappearance of art from our everyday. Not because someone is taking it from us, but because we are so willing to let it go, so willing to celebrate kiosk banking. I bank from kiosks. Kiosks built into beautiful old brick buildings that will be lucky to ever recover.

I don't know the rules on putting this here, but what the hell...

PAY-PER-VIEW DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY.

Some of you will never go to Long Island. Some of you will but will never go to Walt Whitman Mall. Some of you will enter Walt Whitman Mall and head straight for Foot Locker. So let me tell you about the facade of Walt Whitman Mall, how it's carved with passages from Leaves of Grass, how the blocky Emigrant Savings Bank sign is bolted to the poem. A child said what is the grass? Fetching it Emigrant Savings Bank to me with full hands. How could I answer Get more money for your money the child? ...I do not know what it is any more than he.

Tell me that doesn't kick ass!

Experimental Shmexperimental

Poetry has long been littered with unfair assessments and ridiculous labels. "Experimental," I think, is one of those. I don't believe in experimental things in general (it's the assumption that the creator of the "experiment" has not idea what she is doing...hence the need for experiments, i.e., lets see if this works), but in terms of art it just seems stupid. The labeling of poetry as anything but plain ol' poetry, is just a way to pronounce it as an other, an other apart from what we are comfortable with.

I've spent the last three years, or so, working to develop a voice and style that I felt captured the sentiment of what I was needing to say. I would have no problems calling the poems I wrote during those years experimental, because in fact, they were. I was experimenting with the absurd. I was experimenting with form, function. I was experimenting with my own ideas of what a poem needed to be...those were experiments, but now that I have found a poetry that works for me, these particular results are not really experimental because I know what they are doing and why they are doing it. Yes, I still do experiment, but those poems rarely ever see the light of day.

Mostly, though, it's the othering effect of the label that perturbs me most. We have our mainstream journals and we have our "experimental" journals. We have reading series and we have "experimental" reading series. We have poems that expect to understand, and we have "experimental" poems that we deem okay to not understand. And why? Because they're experimental, we obviously weren't meant to "get them."

Ultimately, the goals of both factions are the same...to inhabit space in a readers conscience. To become part of their mental vernacular. To affect their thought process if only temporarily. This is what we ALL do, we just have different ways of doing it. The best analogy I can think of is this; There are millions of English speakers in the world and each of them can tell you how the sun sets, but which one of them are you more likely to listen to?

As a brief side note, I think I'm really going to like to the new Nada Surf record.

Also, go to www.pilotpoetry.com and buy everything you can, and since they are out of McNally and Kerksiecks's postcards, if you really want to see one, e-mail me and I will be more than happy to send one along...they are awesome.

It's a blog that gives worms to ex-girlfriends. You guys just don't get it, do you?

Okay, so really this is a blog about poets and poet culture, which is just as ridiculous as giving worms to your ex-girlfriend, but as I love to say..."it is what it is."



As it is, I wanted to pass along something that I've enjoyed quite a bit lately...beer. This particular beer is called, "The Poet Oatmeal Stout." Every writer needs a drink to call their own, and until you find what that is, this beer will get it done. It's just trendy enough to impress your hipster friends, just expensive enough to impress your beer snob friends, and just pretentious enough that everyone will believe you when you mention that you've gotta get home and write, when really, you've come to the conclusion that this whole scene is dead and you'd be better off in bed.

I think I like the idea of "poet culture." Don't be fooled, it does exist, but mostly outside any actual group of writers. Its that imagined life you dream of when you first entertain the idea of writing, its that Beat/S.F. Renaissance vibe...its mostly lame, but it is what gets us into writing in the first place, so perhaps not all that bad. There were a lot of young writers at AWP that fell, or were falling into this pretty hard. Mostly they were cute and harmless and buying a shit ton of not so great books.

God bless'em.

Salons that actually make you beautiful

I had a life once, really, and in that life I used to host readings in my apartment. People would come. It was BYOB (which my dad used to tell me meant; this isn't a party for kids). People would drink their beer. People except my lovely friend in this picture, who was pregnant and wrote only poems about pregnancy when she was pregnant. She said it was a craving.

Anyway, people would read poems...it was nice.


The rest of us would listen and politely applaud, but only when appropriate. One night only one person showed up. We got drunk (nobody to share our beer with, you see). We stayed until quite late reading William Carlos Williams' "Paterson" to each other. We had modernist fantasies. Which reminds me...I saw a poster the other day that said, "Mo' Dernity, Mo' Problems." I laughed at it. But not in a mean way. I think the poster still felt pretty good about itself.

Anyway, the point of all this is to illustrate the importance of not always GOING to poetry readings. Sometimes the most excellent thing you can do is BRING a poetry reading home. This is why I like Dottie Lasky's "Tiny Tour" so much...home is a good place for poetry. It makes sense at home, at least more sense than it does at a contemporary coffee shop. Yes, I get the historical thread tying poetry to them, but its a dead scene, man. And now that poetry isn't welcome in most other performing areas, home allows you to make a place for it, fill that place with good people, and to get it out there. Plus, you only need two things; a stool, and a music stand, and almost everybody has those things lying around...right?

Five Things

1. Eric Baus being surprised that someone (me) recognized him. Our conversation could have been tracked by that White Stripes song...you know the one. He gave me his e-mail address, but the question remains; what does one say to an author they love so dearly.

2. is for $2 subscriptions to jubilat, they even let me renew for that - and I was able to buy jubilat #5 again (my 3rd one), the Jack Spicer letters in that issue will literally change your life, yes, exactly like the Shins song in Garden State. It is that reason that I've had to buy it twice after receiving it once as a gift from my friend A.McN.

3. Zachary Schomburg running off with L.P.'s copy of "The Mansuit," and him replying, "Huh...really didn't see that coming," immediately prior to our cab showing up, and me trying to explain to a non-native speaking driver precisely what was taking place. Do not fret, all was returned and the inscription finally placed inside will forever lead to a great story.

4. Me reading Jonah Winter's "Book Reports" out loud to my unwilling suitemates. Sure, they might not have cared, but did Jesus stop when nobody cared? I believe my point is made. As a side note...please go buy that book, if you do and are disappointed I will personally buy it from you for exactly what you paid. That's called a guarantee, and I'm not even selling medicinal tonic.

5. Steal This Reading. It was like Woodstock, but for poets. The fire department even tried to shut it down! So many awesome readings, so many awesome people, and I even got the chance to make an asshole of myself by sitting right in front of the projection screen the only reading it was used in...no way to salvage that one, but it's better to be "that guy" than no one at all.

New York City and How it Rocks...

AWP is over and I'm back home trying to get used to not being drunk and sitting up 'til 4 in the morning geeking out over poetry and its writers. I got to see about 25 to 30 readings spread out over 13-14 hours. Steal This Reading was probably the greatest poetry related thing ever (5 of my favorite readers and $3 beer + lots of other good poetry too). I bought WAY too many books, but don't regret a single one. Jonah Winter's "Book Reports" is about the most genius writing I've ever seen...as is everything released by Black Ocean books. Oh, and what Betsy Wheeler did with Joshua Marie Wilkinson's "Book of Clover, Flashlights and Milk," is awesome...I highly recommend picking it up before you can't any more. The experience of reading that text is too cool for words, and once I figure out what exactly its doing to me, I'll let you know.