So we (A and I) got a new camera (a Nikon) for Christmas from both our parents. I have sworn it off until the actual holiday is here...with limited success. Mostly, I've taken pictures of my dog. Which is ridiculous, I know, but she's just so f-ing cute (she also threw up on my bed as I was typing that).

I recently submitted a few chapbooks to Greying Ghost. It's one of those eggs in one basket deals. I really don't know who else would be willing to publish this stuff, so it's most likely this, or nothing. So far, they have been the only press willing to bring my work into the physical world in their Corduroy Mtn. journal. So, let's hope I get lucky.

I'm 1/4 of the way through my MFA.

I'm currently reading Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito. Johannes gave me a copy at his reading a few weeks ago, which was super nice of him. I also loved his reading. Watching Johannes read is like watching someone push words through a working mouth. The product and the process of it being made are hard to distinguish.

My hands used to smell like onion, now they smell like dog puke.

I'm going home for Christmas today. I will be getting a camera box. How about you?

Great Moments in Literary History

Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun

Have you heard of this movie? It sounds totally rad, especially in a culture where a good chunk of our entertainment is based on previous entertainment. When you constantly feel the need to properly cite everything? When you're demanded to cite everything? When even our president is basing his presidency on previous presidencies? Why not stop referring and just use the original? If you haven't heard of this movie, it's narrative is entirely based on found footage and it, odd as it sounds, might be the most original movie I've read about in a long time (I don't actually go to a lot of movies, but I read about them maniacally). And at a time when I have a hard time sitting through most movies (graduate school has only multiplied my ADD), this sounds so cool...you should probably look it up yourself.

These are books I've read, and at time loved, over the last few weeks:

An Earth of Time, Jean Grosjean
The Difficult Farm, Heather Christle
40 Watts, CD Wright
The Sonnets, Ted Berrigan
The Last 4 Things, Kate Greenstreet
Pilot, Johannes Goransson
History or Messages from History, Gertrude Stein

These are books I want for Christmas:

A mouth in California, Graham Foust
Destruction Myth, Mathias Svalina
Lots of Gertrude Stein
Archicembalo, GC Waldrep
Anteparadise and Inri, Raul Zurita
Dream Songs, John Berryman

Also, I want a new camera. A and I have one picked out, now we're just hoping that our parents will be willing to work together...

Speaking of Johannes, he is reading here in IC this Thursday. You should probably go. The reading is celebrating a new journal of translation. It could be pretty sweet. Maybe even this sweet:

These diagrams were on the board when I walked into my classroom the other day. The only thing I added (besides captions) was the ball. Did you ever play tetherball? I did. Like everyday.

I kind of want to play tetherball right now. Though, I may just go watch Superman on TV.

After class the other day I was walking through buildings and I came across a hallway that has been a part of every nightmare I can remember having...turns out my mom took me here once. It's like walking down the Terminator-animal hall of fame. Oh, and then there were some skulls and then a table of elements.

Ununhexium is elemental mystery.

Mr. Dan Perry dropped off the covers for Further Adventures next book. With this, we are officially entering the world of single author chapbooks. This will make a great gift to give your loved one(s) during the holidays. That's a promise. What do you think? Are you excited? Excited as I am?

When they are done, I will let out a mighty roar. Wait for it.

I ordered some 1/2-priced-post-Halloween animal masks early last week, and got them in the mail yesterday. These are pictures of me trying them out. I can say with some certainty that when they make these masks, they don't take into account the human face underneath. The sheep mask touches my eyeballs. The bear's eyes are so far apart you have to walk sideways...bears don't walk sideways and thus the disguise is completely blown. Oddly enough, the wolf fits me perfectly.

So, if anyone is interested in playing out a lover's triangle starring these three, let me know.

There was a time when I believed my life was YouTube free. That time has passed:



I fell on the bus today. My abilities to walk on or above moving things never matured...

A GREAT interview, oddly relevant to the previous post, in which I mention CA Conrad's role as parent.

This has been happening a lot lately. Don't know if it's because I'm reading so much right now, and that all things poetic happily dance with each other, or if it's some mystic bullshit, but it seems every thing I read has a direct and noted connection to something else: I read Simone Weil. Then I read T.S. Eliot and he mentions Simone Weil. I read Jabes' "Questions" translated Rosmarie Waldrop. Then I read, "Boris" and it has a blurb by Waldrop.

There are more, but I'm out of time. Ask me about it...I'll be happy to tell you about them.

Yesterday, instead of reading my students' fiction work, I drew this. It's jowly. I don't think I have that much face above my nose. Though, maybe I've just never paid that much attention.

I finished up with, "Boris by the Sea." I have to admit, it did lag in a few spots. I wasn't as much a fan of the "plays" as I was the prose blocks. That shit got real! Here's a line: "And then he thought and understood that to think and to create something resembles defecating and peeing." Before this book I never would have thought of CA Conrad's "Book of Frank," and Edmond Jabes' "Book of Questions," as long-lost lovers, but when you see their kid standing there, holding each of their hands in his and his logic is a little cyclical and his hair is actually some kind of fire that is more frightening than any fire you've seen before, well...

Hey, did you know that both a new issue of diagram (9.5) and h_ngm_n (9) came this week? They did! Wow!

The other day I saw my first beaver roadkill. It was everywhere. I kept telling myself, "but his tail was already flat." When they came to scoop him up, they realized that he was the perfect beaver-pile. Everyone had a good story to tell their wives. But that was last Friday and ever since we've been chasing beavers across 1st Avenue. Wives will only listen to the same story so many times.

Iowa, by Travis Nichols, is coming out soon from lettermachine. I was lucky enough to read this book a few years ago when it was put out by braincase. I borrowed it then, but I'll buy it now. This book will change your life...seriously.

Last Saturday I received a shit-ton of Octopus Books books in the mail. Matvei Yankelevich's "Boris by the Sea," will be the book that makes you fall in love with poetry just like you did the first time. You're confused, it hurts a little, you know you probably won't cry, but think you should and yet, you're never anything but elated (which is making it really hard to not cry).

This weekend Jon B. is coming. We're going to the Iowa game. It will be epic.

All this actually happened

I did this, you should do it too.

This blog is the grossest and coolest blog I've ever seen regarding pigs and bugs. The exactness of data collecting language is practically poetic. From Day 11: 27 June 2009:

The carcasses are in the post
decay stage of decomposition,
but are becoming more
leathery on the surface.

Maggot activity
is still present
underneath
the pigs
in the soft
tissues that remain.

Beetles have been collected
from the carcasses as well
as the pitfall traps.

My line breaks, but still, pretty cool, right?

The Strandman Cometh

I want this to be the cover of my first book when and if that ever happens. Maybe I'll call it, "Poems about bears and sex...and mittens."
Books I've read over the last few weeks:

1. Kate Greenstreet's "The Last 4 Things." It is the best book I've ever read that came with a dvd. Greenstreet writes poems for the multitasker at the end of long day.
2. Raul Zurita's "Purgatory." It's a new translation recently out from the U of C press. I've had a tumultuous long-distance relationship with Zurita for about a year now. He writes poems for the revolutionary at the end of a long day.
3. Edmond Jabes' "The Book of Questions." I'm reading this one for school. Jabes writes poems for the post-Holocaust Jew at the end of long day.
4. A shit-ton of essays on poetics, namely, "The House that Jack Built," which collects Jack Spicer's Vancouver lectures, but also pieces by Robin Blaser, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound and the rest of that lot. I like to read these essays, but they usually lead to me having a long day.

Mark Strand is coming to read on Thursday. We're going to try to convince the Strandman to grab a beer afterwards...we'll see how that goes. The deets are here.

Do you feel your books are full of nothing but words? Does your book collection fill you dispair? Are your shelves haunted by bad fonts, ugly design and laser prints? Friedrich Kerksieck is ready to believe you!
__________________________

Dear Friends,

Hello, my name is Friedrich Kerksieck & I operate Small Fires Press. So far the venture of running the press has been wonderful – I’ve put out two issues of Matchbook Magazine & many books, including authors Scott Pierce, Mathias Svalina, Julia Cohen, John Chavez, Megan Gannon, Rachel May, Joshua Ware, MC Hyland & numerous others.

After leaving Tuscaloosa’s MFA program & beautiful studio, I’m asking for your help to set up my own studio so that I can continue my work. I’ve accumulated 8,000 dollars for a Vandercook Press & Photopolymer Plate Maker, but I still need about 3,000 dollars more for all of the various items needed to finish setting up a workspace to print upcoming book projects. Items needed include: a paper cutter, metal type, type-high gauges, inks, tympan paper, challenge key & quoins, press furniture, a boxcar base, etc. etc. etc.

What can you do? Well, there are lots of things – the simplest way to help me out is to donate money or equipment. If you’ve got a print shop with a lot of duplicate equipment you can send it to me with the promise that it will be well-used and cared for. You can purchase a book from the press that you’ve had your eye on. You can pass this note along to friends that might want to help a little press survive. You can show my books to your local special collections library and convince them to purchase my catalog.

In turn I promise to keep working to produce new texts in innovative packages, and to do my own part in supporting our community of artists, printers, readers, and writers.

If you wish to send something, please do so to:

Friedrich Kerksieck

1447 Poplar Ave. Apt. 1

Memphis, TN 38104

Donate through paypal.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=8709059

Or visit the website and make a purchase:

http://www.smallfirespress.com/order.html

Thanks,

Friedrich Kerksieck, Small Fires Press

Poems started this week but as yet unfinished: An Index of first lines

1. My bones are not bones but bee swarm...
2. Since last we spoke I killed two more crickets and a fistful of birds...
3. When I discover my dinosaur I will name it after you...
4. I’m still trying to figure out your occasional beard...
5. It’s Armenian in the most actual way...
6. I was born a deciduous boy...
7. Before there was fear, there was the scarecrow...
8. First and foremost, you will have a heart and it will beat, though, slightly irregularly, you see, your heart will be pumping spiders...
9. Adventures are non-native speakers of English...
10. I trained 1000 spiders to kiss you...
11. He squeezes his his fingers through bird throats, wearing them like rings...
12. Last Friday, I pulled out all my insides...
13. In the notes section of my hospital body you wrote, “this boy is not a scarecrow...”
14. I killed the mouse with my tongue...
15. And look! where your heart once was...
    

Here are a few things I've been doing and/or want to do instead of reading more French poetics:

• Nate Slawson has a chapbook and it is the most fun thing I've done today.
• Issue #3 of FOU is up, though a little hard to navigate through...there are no names on the lilly pads and you have no idea whose poetry you've just clicked on, which I'll admit is, in turns, both exciting and time consuming (if you'd much rather be reading someone else).
• Next Wednesday Kate Greenstreet and Elizabeth Robinson are reading at Prairie Lights, I'm seriously considering canceling class for this one...worth it, totally. What if I gave the students a chance to make-up an absence by going to it? Yea/neigh?
• The very next night I'm going to see Wilco, which, currently, is a band I've only heard (they were playing at the Pritzker in Chicago and I sat nearby and listened.

My spider bites have turned scabby and occasionally bloody, but then they usually just go scabby again.

My blog is old and dusty. I think it may even have swallows living in its rafters. If blog's were children, this blog would probably be in foster-care right now.

These are things that have happened since my last post:

1. I purchased two copies of "Scary, No Scary." One is a collector's edition. The other, I've read 3 times in the last week. On my uncle's farm there is a pond completely surrounded by corn fields. By this pond there is a small shack with broken windows and a rotting porch. Inside the shack there is the skeleton of a baby crib that my cousin and I were frequently placed in when my family would visit theirs. This book is just like every dream I've had of that place.
   
2. The class I'm teaching has turned into a totally awesome example of what I want every class I teach to be like. Seriously, these kids are rad...one of them even hops trains in the summer.
3. I've seen a black squirrel, but as of yet, have not been able to capture it.
4. I watched John Koethe read at Prairie Lights and I'm glad I didn't make a special trip to do so. He only read like 5 poems and they were all about famous people/poets he once knew, and were too prosey for my tastes. I was happy to have to catch the bus back home.
5. I've been readying the new Further Adventures chapbook. Not only is the content totally sweet, but the package will be a major step forward for the press. Pretty psyched.
6. I've been reading and writing a ton and want to write a long-ish poem titled, "Your New Anatomy," but so far, just have the title typed onto a blank document.
7. I'm being slowly eaten alive by spiders...it's an itchy process and I look forward to its conclusion.
8. A and I decided to stop loading up our Netflix queue with every new movie that comes out and just watch what we have on there already...this has led to the viewing of some real shitty movies and may be a factor in why I'm not all that concerned with spiders eating me.
   

Tonight, I am made to unforget the awesomeness of Squirt.

So I bought a new computer the other day. It wasn't exactly a necessity, but I think good times to buy computers are when that happens to be the case. Anyway, it's a Mac Book and I haven't yet grown comfortable enough looking into it to believe that poetry will eventually be staring back at me. In the meantime, I've found, or re-found, I guess, writing with pen and paper to be a good time. Like taking your dog to the dog park good time; you just feel better afterwards knowing you made someone really happy by both letting them play and by taking them with you when you went home. I've talked with people extensively about this, me being, primarily, an on-screen composer and a good chunk of folks I know using the pad. Previous computers I've owned had essentially become poetry machines capable of untold evils, meaning, writing on them had become a fluid process in itself...I could type, look up words, research anatomy and reformat virtually all at once. Seriously. Anyway, I'm finding a real genuine pleasure in writing in notebooks or paper scraps again, and though I can't speak to one method being better than the other, the physicality of dragging that pen across the paper has, in turn, added a deeper sense of the physical in my poems.

I am 31 years old and by the time I turn 35 I want to have my first full-length book published. When I'm 32 I want a chapbook.

I realized today that I'm the kid who never wants to be a club that's willing to have him. I lusted after Iowa for years. Now that I'm here, I'm like, "meh." I feel like an asshole. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be doing this than working, but the reality is that, after 6 months of anticipation, nothing was going to be as awesome as the Iowa I had pieced together in my head. I think feeling a little let-down is natural, I just hope I can control it so that it doesn't deteriorate into distaste or, even worse, angst. I'm far too old to be angst-ridden. It would probably give me shingles or something...