Half-priced whole books

New Shoes

Old Tree

"Professional Bum"

Early Fall

Hello

Spider Songs

There is a spider living in my window. This doesn't bother me. What does bother me is how fat he's getting. My window is like a port city. Like New York City. Spiders, I've heard, grow to be very large in New York City. There was a time when a spider crawled up my arm and almost into my shirt sleeve. The park ranger picked him from me just prior. There was a snake too.

I'm reading Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" again. Not because I want to, but because I have to. This seems, to me, contrary to what "Leaves of Grass" is. Which also makes me wonder if literary studies, as a whole thing, is contrary to literature. But I'm mostly a big complainer.

I completed my "in-print" Frank Stanford book collection today having received my copy of his "Tales." I get this way occasionally. In 2007 I bought 11 Tom Waits albums to "complete" that collection. In 2004 is was Wes Anderson movies (Criterion only, mind you). I think it stems from baseball card collecting as a boy.

I have laundry in the wash that needs to be switched to the dryer. I have more Whitman to read. I have a dog that needs to poop.

If I only had the money...

For Immediate Release:
September 21, 2008
press contact: Katy Henriksen, kathenriksen AT gmail.com

Poets and Scholars Nationwide Travel to Fayetteville, Ark., to Celebrate the Life and Legacy of Frank Stanford with Three-Day Festival


Fayetteville, AR -- The Frank Stanford Literary Festival, Oct. 17 through 19, will honor Arkansas poet Frank Stanford's life and work through a small press reading, three panels, a screening of the rarely seen, award-winning experimental bio-pic It Wasn't a Dream, It Was a Flood, and a marathon reading of Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.

When Frank Stanford took his own life at age 29 in Fayetteville, he left behind a daunting collection of over 10,000 pages of published and unpublished papers. His poems appeared prolifically in publications including the highly visible magazines of the day such as The Nation and American Poetry Review, as well as smaller, ground-breaking literary journals such as Field, Ironwood, and kayak. In 1977, with C.D. Wright, he founded his own small press, Lost Roads, which aimed to "reclaim the landscape of American poetry." Lost Roads, in conjunction with Irving Broughton's Mill Mountain Press, released Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Many of Stanford's titles are long out-of-print and first editions now sell for several hundred dollars. Countless poems have been written for him and Lucinda Williams paid tribute to him on her album Sweet Old World. This year Lost Roads Pubishers reprinted The Singing Knives and You. Despite an intense and impassioned following, Stanford's work has largely remained untouched by academia. Today Stanford's legacy is seeing a resurgence driven by an emerging generation of lyrical poets who esteem Stanford among John Berryman, John Ashbery, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, and Alice Notley as the most gifted and daring poets of the second half of the 20th Century.

A limited edition letter pressed broadside of Stanford's poem "Search Party" will be released at the festival, the result of a collaborative project between Lost Roads Publishers, Cannibal Books (Fayetteville, AR) and Effing Press (Austin, TX).


Hosts of the festival are The Burning Chair Readings, Fascicle, The Fayetteville Public Library, Lost Roads Publishers, and Typo.

Event Details:
Friday 7 to 11pm
The Garden Room of The Ozark Smokehouse (215 W. Dickson St.)
$5 suggested donation

The festival kicks off with a small press reading by 18 readers who represent the small press tradition and Stanford's continuing influence. Poets include Stanford's friend and Lost Roads poet Ralph Adamo, Coffeehouse Books author Anne Boyer, Flood Editions authors Graham Foust and Philip Jenks, and Walt Whitman Award Winner/Kuhl House poet Tony Tost.

Saturday 11:30am to 5pm
The Fayetteville Public Library (401 W. Mountain St.)
Free and open to the public

Daytime festivities include three panels (two critical, and one consisting of friends of Stanford discussing his life), a screening of It Wasn't a Dream, It Was a Flood introduced by director and Mill Mountain Press publisher Irving Broughton, and a reading of selected poems from Stanford's eight full-length poetry collections.


Saturday 7pm* to ?am Sunday morning
Metro District Meeting Room (509 W. Spring St.)
$5-$10 suggested donation
*doors, reading begins promptly at 8pm

The festival closes with a marathon reading of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, a 380-page poem that Stanford began in his adolescence. The entirety of this seminal work will be read without interruption.

Resources:
official website – typomag.com/frankstanfordfestival
official blog – frankstanfordfest.blogspot.com
Lost Roads Publishers – www.webdelsol.com/Lost_Roads
Fascicle – fascicle.com
Fayetteville Public Library – www.faylib.org
Typo – typomag.com
Alsop Review – www.alsopreview.com/thecollections/stanford/stanford.html
Rain Taxi – www.raintaxi.com/online/1998fall/stanford.shtml

For more information contact Katy Henriksen, kathenriksen AT gmail.com.

News...

A few exciting things I've come across, mostly by accident today.

1. The new print Rain Taxi (available for free at your local independent book seller) has a front cover and materials inside featuring Frank Stanford. Go pick one up, read about this guy and then go buy his books, oh, and then read them!

2. This Thursday, one of my favorite reading series in my old home town of Cedar Falls is featuring one of my favorite new writers. Their names? Final Thursday and Rauan Klassnik. I got a first taste of Klassnik at last years AWP. His book, "Holy Land" is on one of my favorite presses, Black Ocean. To those who live within driving distance, you should totally go. It's at 8. But that only matters if you're here, The Hearst Center for the Arts at 304 West Seerley Blvd, Cedar Falls, IA 50613.

"This month’s featured reader, Rauan Klassnik, was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, has lived in Dallas for most of his life, and now spends most of his time in Mexico. His work has appeared in many journals including The Mississippi Review, North American Review, Sleepingfish, No Tell Motel, MiPoesias, and Caesura. His first book, Holy Land, a collection of prose poems, was released this year by Black Ocean."

Typo

Typo has grown into one of my favorite magazines, or perhaps it's that I've grown into it. Either way, Issue 12 is up and awesome. Ryan Flaherty is a guy I met a few years ago, his poems are too good to not have a wider audience and thanks to small fires press, he's soon to have a collection to take home. He also makes chocolate. Good chocolate.

Check it out!

http://www.typomag.com/issue12/index.html

http://twopoettruffles.blogspot.com/

http://smallfirespress.com/news.html

busy. busy. busy.

work. work. work.

It's foggy in Chicago. My bit of it, at least.

Read this poem: The Unbelievable Nightgown

This is a "little" awesome

Microphone + Title by Noah Eli Gordon, read by the author, Eric Baus and Sara Veglahn

+ Octopus Books has Matthew Rohrer's, "They All Seemed Asleep," chap ready to go. Buy it here. Rohrer is one of my fence favorites. I was introduced to his work via the collaboration(s) with Joshua Beckman. I loved those poems, everyone in each of their forms (book, CD and live), but his "solo" work I go back and forth with. I really like "A Green Light" but thought "Rise Up" was a little...easy? What I mean, is that unlike his other books, "Rise Up" was much more narrative based, which is a style I'm currently waning on. That said, I will always be curious to see what he does next. He is a poet of talent and skill and his ability to master differing styles will keep me reading everything he allows me to.

+ Around the office I work in, I am always responsible for the ordering of food. Today I ordered way too much... I've been eating muffins, strudel and bagels, and drinking coffee all morning and now I feel like I have to poop which is bad because I work in a school and the bathrooms are full of kids all the time and whenever a kid realizes somebody's pooping in the bathroom that's all they can talk about and there is nothing more shameful than people talking about you pooping, while you are pooping.

Daniel Borzutzky will rule the world...

...or at least the area of it now known as Istanbul, which was once Constantinople.

I had mixed feelings at first. Wasn't really into the first 25% of the reading. Outside factors: big white gallery, video art full of street and fun park sounds, and the radio recording equipment that neither amplified the poet nor allowed him to speak loudly.

All this aside, it has been along time since I've heard work as good as his translations of Raul Zurita and the work he's done under the influence of that author. It's beautiful and violent and beautiful. I am almost desperate for these collections to come out. Borzutzky's will be called, "The Book of Books." I don't know what the Zurita collection will be called, but I would like to reccomend "The Book that Kicks Ass."

Ultimately, what is most appealing to me is the fact that I'm tired of pretty poetry talking about pretty things. It doesn't surprise you when it's pretty. But these poems did. Frank Stanford poems do. A good chunk of Zach Schomburg's poems do.

These moments exist in life, but aren't wholly represented in poetry: our facinations with explosions, car accidents and fighting. We understand what they take from us, but on the otherside we see what they leave us with. It is appreciation through disaster. Poetry without "prosody." Beauty being burned alive.

This is a poetry of the quick draw, it only means something after someone dies.

You can find this, and other interesting facts in Further Adventures Book 1, available now...

Here's a poem by Zurita not translated by DB:

The Desert (1) [Down below...]

Down below, the endless stones of the desert,
mountains of stones, long escarpments of
stones, infinite stones on the desert like a sea.
The sky above, the blue sky falling. The stones
cry out as they smash into the air, into the sky
that’s falling.

The desert cries out. There’s a limestone wall
with names. There’s a white wall and little
bottles with plastic flowers that cry out as they
bend in the wind.

A little further off there’s a ship. No-one would
say there can be a ship in the middle of the
desert. It’s a big, rusty ship, lying on the stones.
No-one would say it could be, but it’s there.
The same sky that falls on the stones falls on the
ship. All the stones cry out.

They cry out, the Chilean desert cries out.
No-one would say this could be, but they cry out.

I'm bad at following direction(s). Relatively major personal flaw. As such, I am currently reading for my third Comprehensive Exam. First attempt: didn't use the proper mix of John Donne poems. Second attempt: didn't use quotations. At all. Thought it would be fun to try. It wasn't. Now, third try, which is also the last attempt I get and two more than I want.

Texts: Mrs. Dalloway, The Tempest, Leaves of Grass (selections from).

I've read them all before, so it's more of a re-reading.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to watch Daniel Borzutsky read tomorrow night down at the Hyde Park Art Center, say, around 7:00 pm. You should come too. Borzutsky is pretty good. Melissa Severin from Switchback Books will be there as well. I definitely think you should come.

Also, you should buy the book I've published. Info here: www.furtheradventurespress.blogspot.com

New Boots and Panties!!

My blog was boring me. It looked cluttered. I need to straighten it out. Streamline it. I need to sell merchandise. Amongst other things. I got a new costume for the blog.

I'm going to see Peter Gizzi this week. I've never seen him before. Looking forward to it.

Joshua Wilkinson is doing this:

"Poetry & Chicago" Convocation
featuring brief talks, lunch, and readings by

Lisa Fishman
John Keene
Robyn Schiff
Jennifer Karmin
Quraysh Ali Lansana

with special guest Abraham Smith

When: Friday afternoon November 7th, 2008
Where: Loyola University Chicago, Lake Shore Campus (Rogers Park)
What: Talks, Readings, & Lunch
How much: Free
Open to: General Public, Students, All

The premise of the convocation was to invite five poets to Loyola to talk about Poetry AND what their other work is in/on: whether fiction, activism, publishing, collaboration, environmental work, community outreach, farming, archival work, &etc.

Each of the five "Chicago Poets" will give brief talks about how their work influences their poetics, their projects. We'll break for a catered lunch, and each of the five poets will read from their work--and our special guest Abraham Smith, visiting from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, will also give a brief reading.

It should be fun. I really want to see Abraham Smith, but mostly because I'm reading his book right now. But mostly because he's awesome and one of the big reasons I'm considering Alabama.

Here's a list of schools I will be applying to this fall.

Amherst, Iowa, Illinois, Alabama, Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin and then Indiana and Michigan if I have enough money. I'm hoping one of them wants me. I hope you want that for me too.

Did I mention that you need to send me five dollars? Well, you do. And if you do, I will send you your very own copy of Further Adventures Book 1, featuring the work of Aaron McNally and Friedrich Kerksieck. I've had them both over to my house at one time or another. I've been to both their houses too. We've drank together, though it's been far too long since we did it ALL together. If you buy this book, it will just like having them over to your house for drinks. That would be fun.

Send your payment and address to:

B.J. Love
5110 S. Kenwood Ave. #209
Chicago, IL 60615

Love you...

I know you've been waiting...

& your wait is finally over. Further Adventures Book 1 is ready to love you as only a Further Adventures book can.

Friedrick Kerksieck. Aaron McNally.

poems, poems, poems...

layout, editing (some unintentional, but hey, this is why I chose to do two of my best friends first), cover art and design by yours truly.

Edition of 100, buy now before its too late! Send your payment of $5 to me, B.J. Love at:

5110 South Kenwood Avenue, Apartment 209
Chicago, IL 60615

Book 2 is in the works and will feature Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Luke Pingel... Tell your moms!

8.4

New DIAGRAM. Check it.

Laboriously

My mother-in-law was in town this weekend. We saw lots of things. Lots of touristy things. Which was fun, because I don't usually get to see the city that way. We went on an architectural cruise. On top of the boat we saw things like this:





On the bottom I saw a bar that made strong drinks. I also saw Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Lily Brown. They were there with Josh's brother and sister-in-law. Josh is going to be in FURTHER ADVENTURES book 2. He was happy to hear that I was putting together book 1 this week. He asked me for a copy. I'm considering it...

Assembly begins tomorrow...if the pages and cover are done at the printer. I like how we still call it a printer even though it's just a couple of guys and really expensive xerox machines. Oh, well.

Is it wrong that I'm excited about seeing Peter Gizzi read next week in hopes that he has some copies of the new Spicer with him? I mean, I'm looking forward to hearing him read, but man, I want that book. I also want into Amherst, but that will be a conversation for a later date.