How Can You Be In Hell When I Know You're In My Heart Press

This is a song I made up on the subway:

Water water water
I made it out of clay?
and when it's dry & ready
with dehydration I shall sway?



Ok, I'm going to be at this event, Sunday afternoon:

HOUSING WORKS BOOKSTORE CAFÉ
Lit Mag Fair
Located at 126 Crosby Street - just south of Houston Street (just East of Broadway)
Sunday, May 31, noon-5pm
The 10th Annual Literary Magazine Fair with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, when all lit mags are only $2

Please come! Check out the last three issues of Saltgrass. Along with many other amazing presses/journals:
6×6, AGNI, Alimentum, Aufgabe, Bellevue Literary Review, The Dirty Goat, Fence, The Idaho Review, jubilat, Lips, LIT, Literal Latté, The Literary Review, Lumina, Magick Mirror Communications, One Story, Open Face Sandwich, The Pinch, Raritan, St. Petersburg Review…etc

Complimentary Salad Shooter Press

I'm going to eat some pizza in a few moments. I'm waiting for the doorbell to be rung by the pizza man. In the meantime,

Karyna McGlynn has poems up at Anti-.

***

Some new chapbooks are alive at Scantily Clad Press:

At night: by Lisa Ciccarello

You Are So Pretty by Donald Dunbar

Theater by Drew Kalbach

Prairies by Natalie Knight

Mandolintries by Philip Nikolayev

Taco Truck to Awesometown by Cate Peebles

*****

If you live in or near or maybe are from the midwest, maybe John Gallaher tells me you should submit to this:

The Laurel Review Chapbook Contest


The chapbooks won't be organized until about the 10th or so, so if you send it in late, it'll still be fine.

GreenTower Press/The Laurel Review
The Midwest Chapbook Series

The contest is open to anyone who is living in, from, or closely associated with the Midwest, excluding close friends and former students of the editors or contest judge, as well as employees and students of Northwest Missouri State University.

Guidelines:

20-30 pages (typed, single-sided, one poem per page).

Individual poems may have been previously published. You may include an acknowledgements page if you wish, though one is not required.

Include two cover pages: one with title only, the other with name, address, email address, manuscript title, and a short note establishing your connection to the Midwest.

Your name should ONLY appear on the cover page, which the staff will keep on file. Manuscripts will be read blind.

Reading period opens February 1 and ends June 1, 2009. Late entries will be returned unread.

$10.00 reading fee. Please make checks payable to GreenTower Press. Reading fee gets you a one-year subscription to The Laurel Review, starting with the summer issue.

Final judge for 2009 will be Martha Collins.

The winning chapbook will be published in an edition of 300 copies. Winner will receive one hundred copies. Additional copies offered at 40% off the list price ($7.00) plus shipping and handling.

Winner also will be invited to give a reading at Northwest Missouri State University’s Visiting Writers series, which includes travel expenses paid and an honorarium of $250.00

All entries will be considered for publication in The Laurel Review.

Winner will be notified by email or telephone, and will be announced on our website (http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/tlr/) in August, 2009.

If you’d like an acknowledgement of receipt send a SASP; please do not send a SASE.

Send entries to:

GreenTower Press
Midwest Chapbook Series
Northwest Missouri State University
Maryville, MO 64468

Questions may be addressed to the editors of The Laurel Review at: TLR@nwmissouri.edu

Recent chapbooks available from GreenTower Press:


Off the Fire Road, Greg Wrenn
Anatomy of a Ghost, Rumit Pancholi
ITINERARY, Reginald Shepherd
Instructions for a Painting, Molly Brodak
WORM, Charles Harper Webb
The BirdGirl Handbook, Amy Newman
Grenade, Rebecca Hoogs
What Night Says to the Empty Boat, Wayne Miller

Sunken Jowls Press

Do you think that/know if there is a much larger number of male Marxists than female Marxists?
***

Send your chapbook here:

Dear Black Lawrence Press Friends,

This is a friendly reminder that the Spring, 2009 Black River Chapbook Competition deadline is May 31. (That's only ten days away!) Twice each year Black Lawrence Press runs the Black River Chapbook Competition for an unpublished chapbook of poems or short stories. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $500 cash award, and twenty-five copies of the book.

Black Lawrence Press recently named the winner of the Fall, 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition. Congratulations to Tina Egnoski, for winning the contest with her fiction chapbook Perishables. Congratulations also go to Katharine Rauk whose poetry chapbook Basil was named as a finalist for the competition and was also selected for publication.

For more information on the Black River Chapbook Competition, instructions on how to submit your work, information on purchasing chapbooks that have won the competition, and lists of previous winners and finalists, please visit blacklawrence.com/chapbook.html.

Happy Spring!

Diane Goettel
Executive Editor, Black Lawrence Press

I Particularly Liked The Scene in Terminator 4 In Which The Silent Mute Child Held The Metal Hand of the Half Robot/Half Human To Symbolize...Press

I read an interesting interview with Brandon Downing at Bomb. You also get to watch one of his videos. So, go.

***

Christiana Baik has poems up at RealPoetik.

***

Do you like Pilot Books? Maybe you should send them your chapbook manuscript during their open reading period:


Pilot Books will hold our first open reading period in May of 2009 to select a manuscript to be published in our new Meddling Kids Series. Please submit 2 printed copies of your original poetry manuscript (10-25 pages of verse) postmarked between May 1st -May 31st , 2009. Include two cover pages--one with manuscript title, your name, address, email and phone; another with manuscript title only. Manuscripts will be logged in by an impartial third party, read anonymously by the editors and a panel of outside readers. A selection of finalists may be asked to submit their manuscript electronically. No SASE necessary, we will communicate via email. Post your entries, along with a $10 reading fee to the address below. (All entry $$ will fund the production of the selected manuscript.)

Pilot Books
39 Lilly Street
Florence, MA 01020

Thunder Like a Giant Rabbit Foot Press

I feel like I need a little good news.

I'm patiently waiting for someone to tell me good news.

Well, not so patiently, but waiting nonetheless.

Or you can tell me your own good news, and then I can be happy it too, while I wait. That's what comment boxes are for. Today.

**

While we wait, let's talk about The New Whole.

Let's talk about How Your Face Is A Waterlull.

Let's talk about how Out Of All Three of My Arms This Is The Only One I Visit.

Let's talk about Doing Everything At The Same Time.

Let's talk about Carving An American Hero Out of Stone.

**

Mathias has an excerpt from Play (The Cupboard Pamphlet) up at This Recording.

It would be sick not to check it out. This is one of my favorite lines, "Little children tend to disappear. Especially if there are large trees, tall grass or white canvases nearby. One child is born It."

I know we live in an age of poetry where we are no longer supposed to scan poems for truths. But I still think those lines are true.

You Said I Was Breathing But I Never Breathed Out Press

One year I lived on a street where the name of the street was spelled differently at the each end.

One year I didn't check my phone messages for 8 months.

One day I suddenly stopped biting my fingernails.

One day I will not mangle your name.

Jared White told me that on June 23rd Christie's is auctioning off a bad poem Dylan wrote when he was 16 years old about a dead dog. For $15,000. Is this the most a poem has sold for?

This made me laugh out loud at work:
"Written on both sides of a single page, the poem tells the poignant story of Little Buddy, who is killed at the hands of a drunkard, and the boy who mourns him." Christie's pop culture expert says, "It's a very early example of his brilliance. It comes from the mind of a teenager (with) some very interesting thoughts kind of percolating in his brain."

I think what the Christie's "pop culture expert" actually means is, "We can't wait to get a lot of money for this":

Besides the commission Christies will take, the money goes back to the camp Dylan wrote it at, so at least that's good.

Your Country Is Weird No Offense Press

And by "yours" I mean "ours."

I'd like someone to explain to me why so many Senators thought it was a good idea to pass legislation that ALLOWS people to carry concealed weapons in national parks and refuges. Am I being crazy in saying that the idea of bringing a GUN to a REFUGE sounds a bit oxymoronic?

Do you understand that this was added to a bill that has to do with credit card restrictions and nothing to do with gun policy?

It's like the Republicans said: "We need balance. Since we're making it harder for poor people to go into debt, let's at least make it easier for them to be shot or raped while picnicing in the wildlife refuge." And then all the Democrats said, "Sure, we're tired of battling your stupidity, we'll give you this freebee."

Uh, I think these two measures should be voted on separately, no? I think I have a profound 'distaste' for the NRA.

***

Unrelated, I'm going to the Younger Than Jesus show on Thursday at the New Museum:




***

And this show on Friday:

Johannes Goransson, Joyelle McSweeney, Cathy Park Hong, and Ken Chen
Stain Bar in Brooklyn
7-9 pm

If You Have A Very Generic View Of Nature It Will Ease The Pain Press

Hey bangers.

**
Justin Marks has some new poems up at The Raleigh Quarterly.
**
Justin Taylor talks about the last book he l.o.v.e.d over at The Rumpus.
**
What are other people not named Justin doing?

Oh, a great interview with Lara Glenum right here at Rauan Klassniks's blog.
**

I would like this to be the cover of my book Triggermoon Triggermoon. It's a piece titled "Departures" by Michael McConnell (San Fransisco based artist), but you should check out his website here:

The antlers, the flecks of color floating away, the alliance- I like the awe that's actually buoyed by loss, that what might look like innocence is actually a quiet understanding.
(Also, of all the artist statements in New American Paintings, he had the best.)

Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead Press

I watched samurai movies this weekend.

I listened to people honk at the ice-cream truck.

I ate broccoli raab sandwiches.

I cut little pieces of tarp & built tents all over your body.

I touched your cheek so the air caught on fire.

I put a toy truck where your hip used to sit.

I came back to work and realized that for the past year I had been sad that my office chair didn't go any lower when I could have simply put a thick book under my computer screen to raise it up, for the same effect.

Now there is a thick book under my computer screen and I'm no longer looking down.

***

New things to look at on Please Go Easy On Me.

***
New issue of The Home Video Review of Books is up featuring reviews of:

Notes on Conceptualisms, by Vanessa Place & Robert Fitterman
To Hell With Sleep by Anselm Berrigan
UNION!, by Ish Klein
Lullaby: Speculations on the first active sense, by Christine Hume & music by James Marks
Full Catastrophe Living, by Zach Savich
Survey Says!, by Nathan Austin
Bob, or Man on Boat, by Peter Markus
The Belladonna Elders Series #3, by Chris Kraus & Tisa Bryant
Night-Sea, by Rachel Moritz
from Disclosure, by Dana Teen Lomax
Quarry, by Carolyn Guinzio
Prairie Style, by C. S. Giscombe
Areas of Fog, by Joseph Massey
More Perfect Depictions of Noise, by Justin Taylor
12 X 12: Conversations in 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Christina Mengert & Joshua Marie Wilkinson
speaking off centre, by James Cummins
Tree of No, by Sandy Florian
The Tangled Line, by Tod Marshall

***

The Giant Squid Press

Remember that day I saw loads of jelly fish and flowers?

I do:









And then like 50 kinds of roses! It smelled so good to breath!:









Don't roses look like ruffly jelly fish?

Maybe?

Where is Summer? Where Is Summer? Press

I keep dressing like it's warm out.

It's not.

I want to tell you a little about where I work.

This is what it looked like in 1910

Every day, hundreds of tourists come either into the building to read the Flatiron trivia on the walls or they stand outside it, right in the middle of pedestrian traffic, to take a photo that a million other people have taken. I'm pretty sure they all look like this:

or this:

I like that hot dog man (in the background), he is always there.

The Flatiron is also located next to TWO clinics for the blind. Consequently, It is the only place I've ever been where I've witnessed two blind people coming from opposite sides of the street walk/smash into each other before anyone could warn them. I'm pretty sure they all look like this:

And one clinic for the mentally disabled. No photos included.

THEN, in addition to the two blind clinics, one clinic for the mentally disabled, and all the tourists specifically stopping in their tracks to take photos of the buildings, we are also near about THREE modeling agencies. Many times do I help the directionally challenged but confident, hot but anorexic model figure out where her modeling agency is, as she stands, just as still as the camera-clicking tourists, at the exit of the subway station. I'm pretty sure they all look like this:



What I'm saying is, anyone want to meet me for lunch?

Serotonin-Transmitor Gene Press

Hi.

I've been traveling & stuff.

Now I'm back, luckily just in time for this, on Saturday:

Second Annual Table Fights at Magnan Projects Gallery
Fully automated, remote-controlled tables will compete for ultimate supremacy in a splinter thirsty tournament of furniture mayhem. Two tables per match fight within a 12' diameter ring with the grandeur of a prize fight and chaos of a cock fight. The event is complete with witty announcers, ring girls and boys, judges, and a DJ. Don't miss the crowning of the 2009 Table Fights Champion! The event is free and open to the public. Check out www.tablefights.com for more info.




And now that I'm home I want these newly published books to arrive in my mailbox:

1) The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Click here: Tupelo Press 2009.

“Equal parts flashed-forward backstory and passing sad daydream, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth helps us and hips us to the circus of public secrets. I trust this book as far as it can throw me.” —Graham Foust

“Reading this collection is like trying on someone else’s dreams. Or getting secret, elliptical messages from the books that you read, and loved, in childhood. Strangely satisfying, and satisfyingly strange—I’m a fan.” —Kelly Link
***

2) I think I already mentioned it, but Justin Marks has a book you should definitely get, and you can read his new interview right now: Poetic Asides.

A Million in Prizes, by Justin Marks
But it here: New Issues 2009.

***

3) It's so good, you don't even have to buy this: The new issue of GlitterPony featuring:
Nicole Burgund, Sean Casey, Christopher Cheney & Francesca Chabrier, CAConrad, Lisa Suzanne Donovan, Jessica Fjeld, Charles Freeland, Gary Sloboda, Bob Hicok, Zachary Schomburg, and Eleni Sikelianos.
***

4) This one costs money, but I am really happy to be in this issue with such awesome poets, such as Timothy Liu, Brandon Downing, Sandra Simonds, Christian Hawkey, Noah Eli Gordon, Rosmarie Waldrop, Ben Doller, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Bin Ramke, Joshua Beckman, Evie Shockley etc etc etc:


Buy it here: Columbia Poetry Review.
***
Recently things have been happening in pairs. For instance, two random people who do not know each other will mention to me the name of an obscure historical figure twice in one day, or an unusual name will come up twice that I'd previously never heard of before, or two people will bring up a random movie from 1979. For example, Lucien Rosengart, Jan Sverak, the word "pneumatic," the Maldives Islands (and how the president want's to relocate the entire population), the word "wheedle."

25 Cents Per Moth Press

On Thursday I'm going to Atlanta to visit my brother, meet his ladyfriend, and hang out with my parents. Pretty sure I'm going to act like a 5 year old and have my parents take me to the aquarium. Then later I will act like a 16 year old and have my brother take me to an 80s hair metal band. Thus, suggestions are welcome.

***

I suggest you ask your library to purchase this book for you:

Buy it here.

“Facing the ‘dark mouth’ of poetic inspiration, Hugo’s prophetic bouche d’ombre, Rasula does not stand in awe; instead, he decides to organize tours of the cave. Acting as a spirited and indefatigable guide, armed with an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, great quotes and illuminating readings, he invites us to overhear an ‘infinite conversation’ linking poets, poems and poetics of an ageless modernity. Hence the mouth will not only speak to you but sing and murmur, echoing with the rich polyphony of thought.”--Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania

“From Orpheus to Echo, sphinxes to medusae, Rasula unveils the varied guises of the Muse, and in the process - precise and anarchic - he finally accounts for how the avant-garde leapt so nimbly from the mythopoetic to the postmodern. With his signature stylistic flair and incendiary flares, poetry's fiercest champion of intelligence has produced another work of - dare one say it? - inspiration.”--Craig Dworkin, University of Utah

“In this intense and wide-ranging set of ruminations about the sources and resources of poetic inspiration, Rasula takes into account such mechanisms of the muse as the murmur, the voice-over, the lucky break, and the erasure. His compelling subject is the protocols, echoes, and legacies of mythopoesis from Hesiod to modern mass media, from Orpheus to the Internet.”--Adalaide Morris, John C. Gerber Professor of English, University of Iowa

“Everything Rasula writes is endlessly fascinating and marvelously illuminating. The proof of his work is in its extraordinary details, but the significance is in the stunning constellation he creates with these details. Modernism & Poetic Inspiration is an immensely original, playfully digressive, and sumptuously engaging work.”--Charles Bernstein, Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania



***
If you're in town, I recommend this:

Annual Books Party
Thursday, May 7, 2009
6-8pm
Jack Shaiman Gallery
513 W. 20th, NYC
For further information contact: seguefoundation@verizon.net


Featuring
Belladonna • BootStrap • The Figures • Granary • Roof
Talisman • Ugly Duckling • United Artists • Portable Press at Yo-yo Labs

Belladonna
Area by Marcella Durand
mauve sea-orchids by Lila Zemborain
Open Box by Carla Harryman
The Elders Series

The Figures
Space by Clark Coolidge
No. 111 by Kenneth Goldsmith
Ted by Ron Padgett
Mon Canard by Stephen Rodefer

BootStrap
Rancho Weirdo by Laura Chester
I No Longer Believe in the Sun:
Love Letters to Katie Couric by Derek Fenner
Parish Krewes by Micah Ballard
Riot Act by Geoffrey Young

Granary
Faster Than Birds Can Fly by John Ashbery & Trevor Winkfield.
Nine Nights Meditation by Anne Waldman & Donna Dennis
Oaths? Questions? by Marjorie Welish & James Siena
The Square by Emily McVarish

Roof
Styrofoam by Evelyn Reilly
Rob the Plagiarist by Rob Fitterman
Public Domain by Monica de la Torre
Quadragene by Larry Price

Talisman
Eschaton by Michael Heller
Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse by Timothy Liu,
Hearth by Simon Pettet
Petals of Zero Petals of One by Andrew Zawacki

Ugly Duckling
Classification of a Spit Stain by Ellie Ga
Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman
The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova
(translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler)
A Plate of Chicken by Matthew Rohrer

Portable Press at Yo-yo Labs
Shaved Code by Frances Richard
Materialisms by Miranda Mellis
Generic Whistle-Stop by Thomas Fink
The Book Called Spring by David Brazil

United Artists
Absolutely Eden by Bobbie Louise Hawkins
My Autobiography by Barbara Henning
The Influence of Paintings Hung in Bedrooms by Phyllis Wat
Join the Planets by Reed Bye