Yes, that is my kick ass Prince tatoo...
Ladies and gentlemen, Jurassic Park...or, my current back yard.
There's hair, there's face, there's red...you decide.
Did you know that T-Rex's won't see you if you don't move? Did you know that I do a really good T-Rex impression?
I climb Hawaiian trees...look at those calves!

HI. Moon Decor. Heart, Turtle

HI. It's Me Again.

HI. How Are You?

The Coolest Thing I'll See All Week, and I'm Going to Hawaii

This was just posted on JMW's blog, but in case you don't read his, you must see this. I've been tearing through it like a coyote tears through a chicken coop. Hungrily. Voraciously. Gorily.

Click on the title to this post (I really need to learn to embed links into text) and be made wicked. Uncontrollable. Inconsolable. I long for the day when people begin to ask me to take part in things like this. I'm hella jealous, but that doesn't mean I can't still be awed.

And yes, tomorrow I leave for Hawaii. My sister-in-law is marrying a nice Hawaiirish boy who loves him some islands and also some isles. Hopefully, I'll be able to send along pictures.

I hope you've all bought "Battlefield." In the very least, if you're worried about the credibility of your book collection, owning that book is the easiest way gain wow-points.

I love you...

Jimmy and Elvis Presley walked in a little drunk

Weird. Imagine listening to Joshua Marie Wilkinson reading Frank Stanford. Only, not imagining, but actually listening. Weird. Awesome. Weird.

I've been reading Stanford's poem, "The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You," for about three weeks now. But tonight was the first time I got to hear it read, as well as be heard reading it, aloud. It's a really interesting thing reading this poem in a public place. I kept thinking that the casual passers-by must have thought we were as crazy as Sylvester thinks Francis is. Also, the poem is frequently dusted with the n-word, which made you hate that word even more, as the fear of saying it in such an open forum removed you from the reading and made you nothing more than a crazy white man stumbling over naughty words and naughtier ideas.

A few ideas/words that were dropped: Evil Dead (not Evil Dead 2), Really long Tom Waits song from "Rain Dogs," reverie, terrified, terrifying, we're a 150 pages in and the kids still 12!, and finally, I was hoping to skip over the baby killing.

Here's my "big" thought on "Battlefield" tonight: In a time and place when so much was not possible, it makes sense that everything was probable.

These Were Supposed to Pictures of the Beach

Rain + Power Outage + Lazy Dog = a beach free weekend.

The Moon Where the Love is a Battlefield, says I

There is no slick and easy way to talk about how awesome this book is. There is zero chance of not mentioning the word, "awesome." So, I'll just go for it. This book is fucking awesome. Epic in length, scope and purpose, this book falls somewhere between "Huck Finn," and Bob Dylan's, "Blonde on Blonde." To help you visualize, imagine Huck in all his Southern glory, singing, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

It's shocking to me (now) that Stanford has yet to be cannonized, especially since poetry in the 70's was still reeling from beatnik and hippie culture. Let's be honest, poetry was a mess in the 70's and to this day I am hard pressed to think of any major voice to come out of that decade like they had in the decades prior (seriously, start listing the major poets of the 20th century and I bet you run out before the 70's). Anyway, Stanford was a voice of his generation and this book proves it.

As a text this book's focus is based on dreams, but where the real fun begins is when the dreams and the reality begin to intertwine. The South, both old and contemporary) is oft thought to be a magical place. It's where the devil walked freely. It's where the devil kept his souls. It's where religion and hoodoo were, for all practical purposes, the same thing. It's basically the birthplace of superstition and as such it is the perfect setting for this poem. 

Ultimately, it is my belief that Stanford's goal was to prove that the world was the same whether we were asleep or awake and that both dreams deserved to be taken seriously.

**************************************

I'll talk more about this over the coming weeks (like I said, it's a big fucking book) so I'd suggest you go out, buy a copy (actually, stay in and buy if from SPD), and read it with me.

Ryo Yamaguchi

Learn that name, my friends, as it is beginning to pop up everywhere. He's got poems in Tin House, Diagram, Blackbird, and 42opus.

Here's what I love about his poetry: He tends to write in a colloquial, conversational style that is unassuming and not at all confrontational. Yet, the images the words build have a tendency to be both startling and a little perverse. In fact, only in the realm of poetry does a dialogue like this not seem absolutely bananas.

It works like this, you see a screaming nut in the park yelling about how bear-like he is, you aren't shocked into considering what he is saying. You just think, crazy. But with Ryo's approach, you made to take a more intimate role in the situation. The bear-man isn't an other, he's you.

Here's what I'm trying to say: Ryo's poems are scary, explicit, epic and ridiculously romantic, but anywhere else, he's just plain crazy.

Thank God for poems...and nuts.

May's read list vs. June's to read list

What I read in the month of May:

The journals TIGHT and redivider.

Both these journals rocked it pretty hard. redivider has a great poem series by Tao Lin that all but forced me to change my name to Tao Lin and walk around with the poems safety pinned to my t-shirt proclaiming to friends and strangers alike that I wrote them... Billy Collins I could do without, but then, so could the world. You heard me Billy Collins, nobody cares anymore. You're a jerk and it's about time somebody told you so.

TIGHT was a great read. Sommer Browning's "house" poems are beyond. I also really dug Katy Henricksen's song poems, they made me get out my Tom Waits and Silver Jews records. The piece de resistance of the issue though is Daniel Nester's "question" poems.

The books "Why I am White," by Mathias Svalina, "Spell," by Dan Beachy-Quick, "The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story," by Rusty Morrison, and once again, "The Collected Books of Jack Spicer," by Jack Spicer.

Here's what I can tell you: If you really like Svalina, buy "White." If you don't know him so much, buy "Creation Myths." "Why I am White," is kind of like Svalina's "Rubber Soul." All the Beatles fans out there know what I mean... I really liked "Spell," but occasionally found it to be a tad stand-off-y, though through no fault of its own. It's been close to 10 years since I've read "Moby Dick," and that wasn't helpful. HOWEVER, I'm not saying that "Spell" leans to heavily on Melville that it doesn't stand alone, but "Dick" is "Spell's" pimp cane, not a necessity, but handy in a bind... Rusty Morrison's book was really beautiful and tremendously scary all at once... Jack Spicer was 10 times the poet Allen Ginsburg ever was and hopefully, someday, will be remembered as such.

What I will read in the month of June: "The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You," by Frank Stanford, and just today I finally received my copy of Daniela Olszewska's "The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe."

A few months ago I read an interview with Zach Schomburg where he mentioned that he's always a little tentative when people buy his book...

"I almost always want to ask the buyer are you sure? I hope it doesn't disappoint you. Wouldn't you rather buy Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You? We [Mathias Svalina and Joshua Marie Wilkinson] read almost half of Stanford's Battlefield out loud in the car on that trip. We tried to read it all, but kept repeating parts that killed us."

That was enough to convince me, so I ordered a copy not realizing that it is epic...literally. Unfortunately, it sat while I read other things, but then JMW mentioned that he is leading a reading group for the book and with that, the stars aligned. I'm about 100 pages in which is remarkable considering I have to read every page twice before I make myself go on. This book is no secret, but if you by chance haven't read it yet...whoa.