Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Humming This Song Trying to Remember the Way Another One Goes


This here is the poster for the Frank Stanford Literary Festival (it's very Henriksensian, if you've seen the Cannibal cover art lately). Frank Stanford is the poet version Daniel Johnston. In other words, he's influenced practically everybody writing today and yet, he's no household name. In fact, he's not really even much of a classroom name, but thanks to a dedicated few (like when Kurt Cobain started wearing the Daniel Johnston t-shirt) his name and, more importantly, his work is finally being seeing by a lot of eyes.
For those of you reading this who have never read Stanford, you must and thanks to the updated Alsop Review Collections page, you can have most of his out of print work broadcast directly into your retinas. Stanford's work is hopeless, in the Romantic sense, lunar, drastic, devastating, nightmarish, beautiful, but above all else, completely relateable, even when you wish it wasn't.

Please go read these poems, we are lucky that they exist, even luckier that we have such easy access to them.

Tarpaulin Sky's Summer issue is up...check it out.

Story time: When I was 23 I was really into the Dave Matthews Band. When I was 23 I was also really into tattoos. Unfortunately these two things crosses paths. When I was 23 I got a Dave Matthews Band tattoo. The only positive result of this? Now that I am almost 30, I'm really into wearing reef rash shirts to the pool, which saves me both from embarrassment and skin cancer.

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