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.

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.