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.

Finally, somebody with a better closet than R. Kelly

Eric Baus, Closet, Tiny Tour from Dorothea Lasky on Vimeo.

Peanut Butter and Chocolate. Dogs and sleep. Scooby-Doo and The Harlem Globetrotters. Eric Baus and the Tiny Tour. Sometimes favorites are just better together.

It's Coming...

Further Adventures: Book 1 is on its way. Be Warned. Be Wary. Be Friedrich. Be Aaron. B.J. Beautiful. This is what they will look like, only printed on a more colorful paper. Class the place up a bit. Add a sense of occasion as only colored paper can. The revolution will not be televised. It will Xeroxed. It will be mailed to you. It will cost very little.

I don't know about you, but I'm excited.

A Friday Night at Home in Pictures and Sounds

It's like The Beatles breaking up all over again

Zachary Schomburg and Mathias Svalina have basically built the contemporary poetry world from the ground up, or in the very least, refinished the hardwood floors and put in new windows. And though they're not actually breaking up, they are going bi-coastal and leaving those of us in the Midwest with one less thing.

Go see them read, it will be nothing short of awesome.

I haven't yet gotten around to filling out the questionnaire, but I have a good excuse: I'm getting ready to print the first Further Adventures chapbook. In the coming weeks, be on the lookout for Book 1, by Aaron James McNally and Friedrich Kerksieck.

Of course, when I say, "be on the lookout," I mean, be ready to be inundated with news and information. Basically, I'm going to bash you over the head with it... You heard it here first, bashed over the head.

Jack Spicer's "Poetry as Magic" Questionnaire

I. Politics

1. What is your favorite political song?

2. If you had a chance to eliminate three political figures in the world, which would you choose?

3. What political group, slogan, or idea in the world today has the most to do with Magic? With Poetry?

4. Who were the Lovestoneites?

II. Religion

1. Which one of these figures had or represented religious views nearest to your own religious views? Which furthest? Jesus, Emperor Julian, Diogenes, Budha, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tse, Socrates, Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes Trimegistus, Li Po, Heraclitus, Epicurus, Apollonius of Tyana, Simon Magus, Zoroaster, Mohammed, the White Goddess, Cicero.

2. Classify this set of figures in the same way. Calvin, Kierkegaard, Suzuki, Schweiter, Marx, Russell, St. Thomas Aquinas, Luther, St. Augustine, Santayana, the Mad Bomber, Marquis de Sade, Yeats, Gandhi, William James, Hitler, C.S. Lewis, Proust.

3. What is your favorite book of the Bible?

III. History

1. Give the approximate date of the following people of events:

Plato____Buddha____The Battle of Waterloo____Dante____The invention of printing____Nero____Chaucer____The unification of Italy____Joan of Arc____

2. Write a paragraph about how the fall of Rome affected modern poetry.

IV. Poetry

1. If you were editing a magazine and had an unlimited budget, which poets would you first ask for contributions?

V. Personal

1. Name: Address: Age: Sex: City: Phone: Height: Weight: Married or unmarried:

2. What animal do you most resemble?

3. What insect do you most resemble?

4. What star do you most resemble?

5. What card of the ordinary playing-card deck (or Tarot deck) represents the absolute of your desires? The absolute of your fears?

6. Write the funniest joke that you know.

VI. Practice

Answer either or both question 1 and 2

1. In any of the three following poems fill in each of the blanks with any number of words you wish (including none) attempting to make a complete and satisfactory poem. Do not alter any of the existing words or punctuation or increase the number of lines.

2. Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet.

I

With the gums gone ____
are ____. And though the nose is ____ nothing,
the eye ____.

And now the ____
Of the radiator ____ floor
is ____, the even row of it
fit to raise
____ children.

You will count ____
You will stay in the midst of them,
You will know ____, you will hear them
in the narrow ____.

II

In ____ endlessness
Snow, ____ salt
He lost his ____.

The color white. He walks
Over a ____ carpet made
_____.

Without eyes or thumbs
He suffers _____
But the ____ quiver

In the ____ endlessness
How ____ a wound
His ____ left.

Snow, ____ salt ____
In the ____ endlessness.

III

Blue-rooted heron, ____ lake
____ song, like me no traveler
Taking ____ rest, loose-winged water-bird
And dumb with music ____.

I stand upon the waterfront, like him no traveller
____, dangling of ____ wings.
Aching for flight, for ____
I ____ and take my rest.

They will not hunt us ____
The flesh of the ____ is ____ and is dumb.
The sound of an arrow, the sight of a hunter
____ life without wings.

So let us die for death alone is motion
And death alone will make these herons fly.
____ wingless ____ ocean
____ die.


Now that I have done you the favor of typing this all out (full of original and new typos), do me the favor of filling it out and sending it back to me. I will post all completed questionnaires as I get them, and if I get enough, perhaps I can even put together a new site featuring nothing but.
My email is linked to this page, and it should be easy enough to copy and paste this into a message and shoot it off to me.

Heck, I'll even do one too...

How I Lost Ten Pounds in Only Two Years

Step one: Buy these books from Tarpaulin Sky, ONE WAY NO EXIT by G.C. Waldrep and THE EXOTIC MOODS OF LES BAXTER by Paul McCormick and read them feverishly. Also, you want to occasionally skip desert, but I promise these books will be sweet enough.

Step two: Drag your lazy bum down to Hyde Park tomorrow to see (and hear) Sarah Rosenthal and Kristy Bowen read a sampling from their books and maybe a new poem or two! This can be done by showing up at the HPAC at 7:00 and finding a seat. You will burn more calories if you applaud here and there.

Step three: Muster up you gumption and surf over to http://anti-poetry.com/anti/rooneyka. Anti- is a pretty good journal with new content up (almost) every week, and this week is, true to form, pretty good. And if you feel up to finishing strong, peruse the archive for some good poems by Nate Pritts.

After all this, don't be surprised if you are tired. That's okay, take a nap, or, if its late, go to bed. You will sleep well and your dreams will be filled with a skinnier, well-read version of yourself.

Fortune Telling Isn't Magic, 8 Ball!

How To Make A Cootie Catcher/fortune Teller - video powered by Metacafe

This may very well be the most important information I ever put here...

When you're finished I want to pick red, and then these numbers as they are available: 3, 1 and 4. Who am I going to marry?

I mentioned the other day that I wanted to know how to get a hold of Kristy Bowen, well serendipity caught up with me again and it turns out she is reading this Tuesday for the May Series A Reading at the Hyde Park Art Center. Hopefully she'll have my book... Or at least a little tenderness (Otis Redding) towards my situation.

I received a rejection from diode today, not surprising considering who they've published and who I am... I was pulling for that one though.

Still, I would highly recommend submitting to them, Patty (who responded to my submission) was very thoughtful in her comments and made the loss almost seem like a win.

DUNE!

For Realz...

I just bought mine, now go and buy yours. I've been hyping this up for months, and it's finally here, and only $10!

If $10 is seems a little steep for you (and it shouldn't, unless you're my mom) than another option is the new issue of DIODE. It's full of gread poetry and sprinkled with a few of the poets you get to hear me freak out over, time and time again. Namely, Zachary Schomburg, Noah Eli Gordon (who I love, but don't mention enough in these posts) and Julia Cohen, who completed my current Holy Trinity of female writers (the others being Sommer Browning, who's in the new TIGHT, and Jennifer L. Knox, who I hope is my long lost twin because I feel like we complete each other).

In other news, I don't want to leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth, but I still haven't received the book I ordered from Dancing Girl Press, the e-mail I sent to the one suggested in the Paypal message was returned, so if anyone knows how to contact Kristy Bowen let me know... it's not the money I'm worried about, I just really want that book...

MarioKart Wii has taken over my life, the only thing saving me from it, is that Lego Star Wars is my wife's new me. She love's it, professes her love for it while she plays it, and spends every waking moment with it. I'm beginning to miss my wife.

What I'm currently listening to:

This American Life
the continuous sound of opening beers
three people telling me to get off the computer

Straight from The Horses' Mouths

A few things I've found out over the course of the last few days...

One, Michael Schiavo tells me that David Berman's work in his journal, Tight, is a "sort of" poem, and that the Jews has kept him a little too busy over the last few years to do much non Silver Jews work... But that is supposedly changing next year. Whoopee!

(update: Check out TIGHT's webspace here: http://tightjournal.blogspot.com/
I've also been told that the issue will soon, really soon, be ready to purchase from Northshire Bookstore, perhaps even as soon as tomorrow... check that out here: http://www.northshire.com)

Two: If you're like me, and if your reading this blog you most likely are, you have been waiting patiently for a new Eric Baus collection. Well, I heard from Eric this morning that Octopus Books should have his next book, "Tuned Droves," slapping our senses across the face in early July... AND soon to follow will be another chapbook, "Bee Stung Aviary," which will be fully exposed by none other than me and my press FURTHER ADVENTURES CHAPBOOKS & PAMPHLETS. It's criminal, it's good, it's windproof too...

What else...

There's a good poem over at linebreak this week.

Schomburg is sneak peeking Ben Estes drawings from "Scary/No Scary," very cool.

Reading Mathias Svalina's "Why I am White." He's doing some very rad things. It's a book that appears to be noting our fascination with single sentence descriptors of self, and the broad, umbrella language we use to express them. I like how it's just as much complex social behavior study as it is poetry. The book lays out hundreds of these definitions and ultimately, I think, we are to find each one grossly oversimplified, so much so, in fact that when we look back at ourselves we will begin to demand more.

Finding Typos Usually Sucks, but Occasionally I'm Wrong About That

Adam and Matt have pieced together a new issue of TYPO, the 11th new issue to be exact. It's chalk full of poems that ooze awesomeness all up your arms. Like that scene in the Matrix. Though you might not wake up in an alternate reality, you also might. What is for certain, you will utter, "whoa's" all over the place. Here is your whoa suppliers:

Paige Ackerson-Kiely
Lucy Biederman
Christopher Deweese
Farrah Field
Andrew Grace
Jane Gregory
Kirsten Kashock
Karla Kelsey
Dorothea Lasky
Kristi Maxwell
Karyna McGlynn
Patrick Morrissey
Michael Robins
Eleni Sikelianos
Matvei Yankelevich

Here is where they are supplying it: www.typomag.com

There's a Solid Chance That This is the Coolest Thing I've Ever Seen

Creation Myth from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

Mathias Svalina's "Creation Myth," is one of the best books I've read in a long time. So much so, that so far this year, I've read it 3 times. The poems inside it make me jealous. Make me think I will never be that good. Make me wonder how its possible that Svalina hasn't had a full length out yet. I love that book... Here's an idea! You should go buy it! It's over at NMP.

The Future

I had dinner tonight with a world renowned psychic. It was awesome. We at a little French place, he paid, he ordered our food, and he told me that I am like a vacuum. Apparently I'm soon to be massively successful, and it's just going to come to me. Here's the kicker though, it won't be because of my writing... Which I guess should be assumed since, as Zachary Schomburg said in an interview I read today, "If [you're] famous, [you're] famous to a sliver of a sliver of the population." And a sliver of a sliver ain't going to pay the bills...which is all the success I can imagine anymore.

What he said surprised me, partly because of what it was, but mostly because I believed it all. He was a weird, cool, interesting, frightening cat and I can honestly say that I love him. He also told
Anne and I that we were like two trees whose branches touch here and there, and that we will never grow into or on top of each other. Ultimately, he felt he couldn't give me the details of my life, because it was necessary for me to allow things to come to me, rather than go and pursue them, which at first I was certain was bullshit, but then he launched into Anne and was acutely detailed. Crazy.

Besides not being a writer he told me that Kansas City and Salt Lake City were going to be important to my life.

Otherwise, I still haven't received my orders from Kitchen Press, or Dancing Girl Press and it's been over two weeks...c'mon!

You can read that Schomburg interview and many others at Kate Greenstreet's blog: http://www.kickingwind.com/052907.html

I'm still wading through Beachy-Quick's "Spell," and I'm still wading somewhere between loving it, and kind of liking it...though I've yet to take that bath with it, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Today I got "A little touch of SCHMILSSON in the night" from my psychic friend. It's pretty much the best thing I've ever heard. Harry Nilsson at the top of his game performing over a massive orchestra arranged and conducted by Gordon Jenkins, who did some of Sinatra's best albums.

Oh, one more thing...Dorothea Lasky has a new chapbook out on transmission press. It's called, "Tourmaline." Here is a poem from it:

FIRESHOWER

In the middle of the night, Olympia took a gun and blew me up
Blew up the whole house in sparks of blue and orange
All I could do is wait
For her to get over the whole thing
As the bits of me flew up into the nightsky
I looked so pretty as I floated away
Kind of like that one time the man I wanted liked me back
Or at least tolerated me
For one night at least
What you all don’t know is that I am quite accomplished at hiding
At masquerading
Alongside the highway, you will think you see a sick clown
Really it is me inside that thing, scowling at you
Also, I didn’t know that you liked the real me
I thought you only knew of the scientist in me
Who dissects and displays the whole season long
Still, sparks rang out of me
On every occasion
It was your birthday, a holiday even
I thought it was my day that you all had come here for
I thought I was the thing you were celebrating

Buy it here: http://transmissionpress.blogspot.com/

Me Too Lucas, Me Too

So I found a working copy of "The Wizard" at a Unique Thrift Store yesterday. It's a bad movie that for some reason has managed to have lasting effects on me personally. At 11 years old I fell in love with Jenny Lewis. At 29 years old I still love Jenny Lewis (who has a new solo album coming out this year). Also, this movie is the genesis of my love for the greatest video game ever, Super Mario Bros. 3.

I'm going grocery shopping today, but if I wasn't...

I'd sit at home, or somewhere with a wi-fi connection and read Coconut 12. I've not read much, but I did read Matthew Zapruder's poems. This small sampling, along with the poems he has in Fou, is a bit of a different voice for him. What's most exciting to me is how his poems, over the course of his first two books, and this new set, have gradually expanded. In "American Linden," the poems are very cerebral, often in the vein of language poetry, and quite dense. In fact, I've read that book three times, about once every other year since it came out, and only recently have I been able to enjoy it for its beauty as opposed to the workout it put my mind through. In Zapruder's second collection, "The Pajamist," the poems do venture outside his head, but only so far as the immediate world around him. The settings of the poems in this book are very urban, very constricting. I credit this to his living in New York, though I could be wrong, but either way, of all the imagery one can gather of NYC, Zapruder's are the scenes that I hope New York to be. Where so many other poets talk of the dirtiness of the city, Zapruder speaks only of the parts that feed into his romanticism. He goes one step further in this new set, however, using lots and lots of natural imagery that to me reads like an old Biology book I saw once that depicted every "known" creature on the planet. There were sea serpents and dragons, merpeople and griffins, side by side with drawings of bears, birds and elephants. This is the kind of nature that Zapruder uses in his new poems: one that is quite real, but not established. There is a dreaminess to these poems that appeal to my senses like none of his work ever has before.

Another thing I'd do if I wasn't going grocery shopping? I'd drive down to St. Louis to watch the first place Cardinals take on the second place Chicago Cubs. The baseball season is still living in the same place as Zapruder's poems, very real, but still full of mystery and wonder.

I'd also watch "Eagle vs. Shark" again. That movie was awesome even though Jermaine Clement, of Flight of the Conchords fame, played his character like an aged Napoleon Dynamite. It was funny, very sweet and endearing, and featured two apples on a quest back to each other.

Joshua + Diagram = A Pretty Good Wednesday

Tomorrow is Wednesday. Tomorrow you can be showered with poetry. Here's how: A new DIAGRAM will be available for you to web surf. I have no idea who will be in it, but Ander does an awesome with that journal and don't see why he would change now.
Perhaps momentarily better in the short term is a reading taking place tomorrow night, 7pm, at The Book Cellar. Richard Fox, Richard Meier and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, amongst others.
Details:

The Book Cellar

4736-8 N. Lincoln

Chicago, IL 60625

I hope you enjoy your Wednesday, I know I will...

Donald Hall, "White Apples & the Taste of Stone"

Postcard Review #1

My favorite thing about this card, besides it being the first one, besides the awesome thumb drawings, is that it merges the works of Donald Hall and the Harlequin series (look for the copyright).

I started Dan Beachy-Quick's, "Spell" today. I think I will read it more, but while in the tub. It's a very wet book. Wet and whaley. 10 pages in, and I like how he's working with syntax and linebreaks.

Speaking of linebreaks, linebreak has a pretty good Bob Hicok poem up, at least for today. Read it at linebreak.org

I will write more on "Spell" later, but for now, send me a postcard and make me happy...

Chicken Parts (2)

I'm really into chickens right now. I want to buy one, feed it pizza rolls and small pebbles. I want to convince him/her that he/she is a super hero and even harder, I want to convince him/her that he/she's secret identity is a research scientist specializing in genetics. Chicken, I'd say, you have a PhD in Gene Mapping. You enjoy the connect-the-dot quality of the process. Ironically, you hate wearing jeans, even when they are your favorite color, which is salmon. When trouble arises you take to the skies in a flurry of feathers and zoom to your destiny.

For every gene he cracks I will feed him one pizza roll. For every inch he gets off the ground I will feed him one pizza roll. When he gets tired of pizza rolls I will feed him pebbles like aspirin, perhaps say something ridiculous like, take two of these and call in the morning.

It might take years, but eventually my chicken will call himself Adam. Every morning he will put on a lab jacket and stand over the sink scratching his chin. Occasionally, he will thrust a wing into the air and bock, A-Ha! Then, when I scream for help he will leap into action and change himself into the superhero known to you and I as, Genetic Chicken.

I imagine him looking like this:

What a Crazy Day!

On my walk home from work today I saw the coolest thing in the park. No, it wasn't another homeless man pooping in the bushes, it was a bumblebee/ rocket fish fight! I knew you'd never believe me so I took this picture...

From the looks of things it was a pretty even fight, though the rocket fist did have a little thing called, "strategy," on their side. They set up distracting refrigerators and ice cube trays while one rocket fist sneaked around the back way. The bees did bust out their secret weapon, the dreaded fish hook, but they couldn't catch a thing. I think all the fist were scared, that, and I don't know if rocket fist eat worms. My guess is that they eat rocket fuel, but I'm no scientist.

What surprised me most about this whole thing was that, though the fish were rocket powered, they didn't have laser canons...how's that for intelligent design?

Between all the buzzing and blasting things got pretty loud, but I had my iPod on and was listening to The Cave Singers, so it wasn't all that bad.

Anyway, I made it home safe and ordered some books, one from dancing girl press and the other from Kitchen. I've mentioned them both here before, so I'll leave you the pleasure of researching the archives, or if you can wait, I'll tell you about them when I read them.

Something real that happened: I finally found my copy of Kristy Odelius', "Bee Spit," (which is probably what got me thinking about bees in the first place) and it was alright. I wasn't engaged with it the whole time and found myself rushing through a few poems that didn't grab me right away. I know that William Allegrezza considers her to be one of Chicago's "experimental" poets, which I feel is a load of shit, with all the poetry being written right now, what IS experimental? It's a loose, umbrella term that needs to be carved out of our lexicon. Anyway, her poems are more like meditations on things (images, feelings, situations, etc.) we can only explain as they are, which isn't experimental at all, but in fact, what poetry has been striving towards for centuries.

Odelius has a way of capturing moments and making them as real as possible. Even when her images grasp at things absurd, she's calm and collected about it that you stay right with her. Example:

The Four Horsemen Cave to the Mayor's Demands

Would you rather be beautiful
or cool? it asked, and opened
like a Big Mac waiting for teeth.

The day, the day.

Roof-walking in the late winter,
red sweater against the grey bricks.

The little girl next door
plays in the yard. She's
coughing and trying
to cry, like us.

Tugging our micro-minis, vacuuming
in the glorious room. We know
what we knew. Not what
we used to, what we used.

Our electronic devices assure us
we got the skillz to pay the bills.
We're content to be sad, perched
like a glass bee on the tip
of a federal holiday.

Some days, the stone natatorium
down the street seems to hold all
dreams under slowly draining water.

This was my favorite poem out of the whole collection (hence, I typed it all out for you). The line breaks are genius. Each line can be a whole idea and are often cool individual snapshots. The scene comes across as very Chicago to me, but that's probably because it is, and I love that the Chicago she paints here isn't the standard metropolitan one, but one that chooses to focus on the stacked nature of humans in the city (some are up high, some are down below, but still they are sharing space). What Odelius tickles out here is a universal theme as seen through only her eyes. She doesn't try to alter her perception in order to make it easy on the reader, rather, she states it as if it's something we would have no idea about...and how do explain things to people when you don't think they will understand you? Just like this.

Adam's Clay

I got an e-mail from Adam Clay this weekend and he, "had to cancel [the reading in Chicago}, though I hope to make it there sometime soon-ish."

So do we Adam, so do we...

In other news there is still a reading down here in Hyde Park tomorrow featuring, Charles Blackstone and Cheryl Pallant. Also, Danny's is back this week on Wednesday with a bunch more of the Chicago crowd, Gabriel Gudding, Simone Muench, and Ray Bianchi.

Anyway, back to Adam Clay. I love this guy. His poems remind me of sunrise: always beautiful, best when they're quiet, and surprisingly surprising.

In the poetry spectrum Clay lies somewhere between Wordsworth (imagery, language, purpose?) and some of your more current situational/art poets. I made up the situational/art thing, so don't looking up exactly what that means, rather, just think about it a tad and you'll get what I mean.

The guys got poetry everywhere and a quick search of his name will bring up most of it. In print form he's got a full-length (from Parlor Press) and a chap (from horseless press). With Matt Henriksen he edits the great TYPO online journal, which very kindly rejected me.

I first came across him a few years ago over at the Wave Books site which was (for two issues) publishing an online journal called "The Bedazzler" and my favorite poem of his is still there, that is until right now...when it's also here:

A refusal of night refuses everything once thought

to be revolutionary. True, I can say

the first night of love was all blankets and revolution,

but it had little

to do with the sun

and more to do with coincidental destruction.

I am Rip Van Winkle

without the beard. I am reaching

at airplanes

in the sky

in my sleep every night.

This is the saddest thing I have ever told anyone,

but there is no one here.

Noon

skylines across my vision and the alphabet

is infinite.

The more words I read, the closer each

Atlantic wave comes to take my sickness away.

Record Store Day!

Please, please, please go to your local mom&pop record store and buy something. It could be the She & Him record. It could be a used Tom Waits record. It could be the Cave Singers, Elvis Costello, anything!

Without your help these record stores will go out of business. I've seen it happen to two, yes, two of my favorite record stores (Streetside Records in Webster Groves and Co-op Records in Cedar Falls). There is honestly nothing more sad than a once bustling records store going out of business. The haggard owner selling things off for whatever you'll give him, record geeks wandering out on the streets, lost and zombie-like, and absolutely no place to find the first Umbrellas record...yikes!

I'm walking down to Hyde Park Records, what are you going to do?

Self-Mandated Week Off From Writing = Fun With Markers

Vacation PicturesI went to a planet that was like Earth, but strangely, was not Earth. I didn't recognize a single continent! That's me in the space ship...
When I got to the surface I camped out with a giant duck and a four-eyed alien. We sat by the campfire and watched rocket ships take off. Also, the moon looked just like that guy from "Le Voyage dans la lune." That first night was pretty sweet...
The next day I went to the mountains to see the lawn mower. Also, there was a lady swinging from a crescent moon just like in that movie, "Le Voyage dans la lune." I love that movie and was glad to see so much of it on this Earth that wasn't Earth.
I wrapped up my trip by touring the glowing gargoyle garden. There were jumping fish, big waves, fire-powered boxing gloves, Uranus and a weird sun that kept on asking about his scoops. "I don't know nothing about no scoops," I kept yelling. I didn't like that day so much.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my trip as much as I did, and as much fun as I had, it's back to grindstone for now...

Adam Clay is reading in Illinois this weekend and into next week, go check him where ever he is, even if that means seeing him a few times. You can check out details here: www.adamclay.org

Still waiting on postcard reviews...any day now would be fine...if you have questions just read the post below this one, or click on the link to the right.

Let's do something together...

I want to ask you a favor...but I'm nervous. Here's the deal: I want to share this space with you, I mean, more than we do now. Now, I write and you read, which are actually two entirely separate events and though you could argue that one does not exist without the other, I'm going to tell you that that is bullshit. What I want is for you to send me book reviews (poetry related, of course) that I can post here. But like any good show, here's the twist...I want you to mail them to me on a postcard. Tell US about books that rocked your world or perhaps books whose tour ends here. Tell us why, tell us how, but most importantly tell us on the half of a postcard that is allotted for writing on. What I will then do is scan it in (front & back) and post it up here for the world to see.

You know what I'm reading, now I want to know what you're reading. The purpose of this blog can't ramble on based on my tastes alone. I like swiss cheese. I like KFC biscuits. I like Zach Schomburg. What do you like?

Send your postcards to me, B.J. Love at 5110 South Kenwood Avenue #209, Chicago, IL 60615.

DO IT!

The only question is, could I leave HERE and get THERE by 8?

Zach Schomburg is reading his poem, The Pond, this Friday in Iowa City at the Burford Gallery. I've actually been in conversation with a sculptor friend about doing something like this...once again, Schomburg takes a good idea of mine and gives it the glossy brown appearance of been there, done that.

However, this is something I would definitely go to if I wasn't 5 hours away from it. For those who happen to be within 3 the details are thus: Show opens at 7:30, reading follows closely at 8, and you can find all this at 141 North Riverside Drive, 150 Art Building West, Iowa City, IA, or just Google "God's country," and I'm sure it will point you in the right direction...

While you're there, be sure to swing by Prairie Lights Books, THE best bookstore I've ever been to, and I've been to a lot of fucking bookstores. They have a shit-ton of journals upstairs and in the downstairs back right-hand corner is a poetry section without rival...I kid not. Go check it out and you will see why I'm wholly unsatisfied with every other poetry section in every bookstore I've so far been to.

What I've just laid out would be my ideal night...there was a good 5 minute space between this paragraph and the last that I spent dreaming about how awesome it would be...if this doesn't interest you in the least, you should still go for my sake.

Brownies...

Anne made brownies tonight, and I fell asleep on the couch...after I woke up we stood in our too small kitchen, ate them out of the pan and passed a jug of milk back and forth...it was the most romantic date we've had in months.

Saw Joyelle McSweeney & Johannes Göransson read up at Loyola last Thursday. In all honesty, I'm not so into Joyelle. My proof of that is this: I don't remember the poems or stories as much as I remember the voices she used...though I love well-performed readings, occasionally the performance can take over, the reading becomes bigger than the poems.

Johannes was really good. I love listening to non-native speakers use the English language. He made sure to wrap both his teeth and his lips around every word, so much so, that even without much of an accent, his exactness of pronouncement often left me feeling like I had never heard these words before. I am going to buy his books next paycheck (this Friday...don't rob me), they are: Pilot: Johann the Carousel Horse (Fairy Tale Review), A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books), and Dear Ra (Starcherone).

I also went back to Cedar Falls and caught Aaron McNally read. He also loves to perform his poetry and though he occasionally startled me, his performance of the poems is much more in line with the singer/songwriter. I really feel for McNally and his having/getting to read these poems. Though his book is really good, the poems in it are all 4-5 years old to McNally, which would personally drive me nuts, so I get his desire to "perform" the poems rather than just give a reading.

I will admit to the unfairness in my critique of McNally/McSweeney. It could be that one is a great friend and the other is someone I'm not all that familiar with. Or it could be that knowing one's poems so well allowed me to enjoy an "interpretation" of them, where the other, whose poems/fiction I was not so familiar with, left me wishing I could just hear the poems for myself.

Anyway, brownies kick ass. Eating brownies with milk also kicks ass. Eating warm brownies with Anne straight from the pan whilst chugging milk from the jug kicks the most ass of all.

You know what else kicks ass? Click on the title of this post and be amazed. Oh, and click here to be equally amazed: http://www.leftfacingbird.com/

Mathias Svalina's Fantastic Time Wasting Machine

Please go to this blog and look at it all...I promise you won't be doing this.

So I Hear You Haven't Been Listening...

Awhile ago I begged you to go to Small Fires Press and buy Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina's "When We Broke the Microscope." Well? Did you do it? Did you go?

Really...

Why not? The poems are awesome. In fact, you really couldn't ask for a better collection of poems...what's that? Oh, it costs 50 bones, eh?

Well, perhaps it would be best for me to take a different angle. Which is why I'm not going to talk about these poems at all, but instead tell you about the greater experience of reading this book.

Books serve functions. They are objects used by us to meet an end. Ultimately, what we hope for when we pick up a book is to entertained. To entertain. To be more entertaining ourselves. It is my belief that Friedrich Kerksieck had all this in mind as he pieced together this fantastic work of art.

To say that this book is a reinvention would demand too much of the thing itself, its creator, and the poems it holds. But what this book does do is twist your expectations....

We're all familiar with picture books. We've had them read to us. We've read them ourselves. We've read them to others. When you imagine a picture book most likely you imagine pictures that physically represent the words on that same page, pictures that work like road signs: though your imagination does do some work, the pictures point you to a specific place. For example, when we see a picture of Scooby-Doo in Shaggy's arms, we might imagine the act leading up to what we see, but rarely do we extend much beyond that.

In this book there are pictures, but they are pictures that do not represent the text, rather they are pictures that move within the text, are influenced by the text. It's easy to imagine each of the images swirling around inside a glass slide, bottom-lit, constantly reminding you of the microscope long after the title has slipped away from you.

What's easy to forget when reading this book is the profound influence that both illustrator Cherie Weaver and editor/publisher/printer Friedrich Kerksieck hold over the whole experience. Yes, the poems are beautiful. Mathias and Julia are two of favorite poets and I have a hard time not finding face-crushing beauty in their singular and collaborative poems. And these poems could have easily carried a lesser made book. But what these pictures do to the poems is add another level of conflict. Where the poems seem to ask the reader to rearrange and re-see the big picture, the illustrations beg us to go back to the poems and take a good look at their atoms, their electrons.

In short, yes, $50 is a lot of money, but you'd spend $50 on great meal without hesitation and you could never go back to that meal and hold it in your hands, appreciate the work that went in to it, glory in its construction and marvel at the genius of total package. There are many easy ways to spend 50 extra dollars, but not too many of those will give you as much joy as this book.