Ity Bity Pity Party for the Mini Pony

Happy 4th of July:


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We just made potato salad for a picnic. And by "we made" I really mean that I went and bought some ingredients and M made everything taste good. I helped cut the potatoes though!

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Brian Foley has poems up at Softblow. Check em' out. I particularly like the first one, "Somewhere A Ceiling Clouds."

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Avalanche RIP Press

This takes me back to my days in publishing: http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/.

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If you haven't ordered a copy of Saltgrass, our new 5th issue, please do. We're small and would love your support:

This issue features:
Lisa Jarnot, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Natalie Lyalin, Sandra Simonds, Laura Eve Engel, Tristan Tzara (translated by Heather Green), Gabe Durham, Maged Zaher, Jennifer Denrow, Catherine Meng, J. Boyer and Mark Yakich.

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We went to Leadville last weekend. I love Leadville:






















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In other news, my band updated our website with recent photos from our TBA tour: http://www.shittonofhitpoints.blogspot.com/

The Trees The Tress Make No Mistakes Press

Joseph Massey. Has a new chapbook, Exit North (Book Thug, 2010). You can read kind words about it here.

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The lovely Karla Kelsey reviews Mary Jo Bang's The Bride of E at The Constant Critic.

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I'm playing scrabble again on Lexulous. I dare you to challenge me.

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Did I mention earlier that there's a new issue of Sixth Finch up? Starring:
Anthony Alessandrini, Jackie Clark, Farrah Field, John Findura, Whit Griffin, Joseph Housley, Dan Hoy, Matthew Lippman, Daniella Pafunda, Catherine Pierce, Gregory Sherl, Kim Gek Lin Short, Andy Stallings, Leigh Stein.

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I think I just ate too much toast.

But it was delicious.

Tommy Toosoon Press

Jackie Clark has an awesome poem up at RealPoetik:

WE GATHER AT NIGHT


We have spent
the day collecting

like mercury.
Our shiny

beaded pool,
our independent

gauge. I am only
every adjective I can’t

think of and still
you are well-fitted

from bone to skin.
It is menacing

to acquire fences,
to drive down

from the mountain
day after day.



So you should go to the journal and check out her other work there. www.realpoetik.org

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Don't forget that Travis Nichols is reading in Denver tonight.

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I've been reading Rae Armantrout's Up To Speed (2004, Wesleyan University Press). If you haven't read it, I'd suggest you do:

Queen Squeeze Press

If you're in NY tonight, Friday:

James Belflower, Claire Hero, Shelly Taylor, Matthew Thorburn, Kim Gek Lin Short & Wendy Wisner ~
June 25, Friday @ Goodbye Blue Monday – Bushwick, Brooklyn

with

James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press) and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. Commuter was recently voted the 2009 “Best Book Length Long Poem/Sequence by ColdFront magazine. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting and exchange of poetry resources. He received a BA in music composition from Arizona State University before attending the University of Colorado, Boulder, for his M.A. in Creative Writing. Belflower currently resides in New York and is pursuing a PhD in poetics at SUNY Albany.

Claire Hero is the author of Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press 2009) and two chapbooks: afterpastures, winner of the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, and Cabinet (dancing girl press). She lives in upstate New York.

Shelly Taylor is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Black-Eyed Heifer(Tarpaulin Sky Press, May 2010) is her first full collection. Born in southern Georgia, she currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.

Matthew Thorburn is the author of a book of poems, Subject to Change, and a chapbook, the long poem Disappears in the Rain. He is the recipient of a 2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Currently, he’s working on two new book projects: Every Possible Blue, a collection of poems about artists and their work, and Snow in Early Spring, a series of poems set in China, Iceland and Japan. He lives in The Bronx and works as a marketing manager for an international law firm.

Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits and the forthcoming China Cowboy, both from Tarpaulin Sky Press. Her chapbooks include The Residents (dancing girl press) and Run (Rope-a-Dope). She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

Wendy Wisner‘s first book of poems, Epicenter, was published by CW Books in 2004. Her poems have appeared in The Spoon River Review, Rhino, Natural Bridge, The Bellevue Literary Review, online at Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Wendy previously taught writing and literature at Hunter College, and is now an at-home mom to her two-year-old son. Visit Wendy on the web at www.wendywisner.com.

at

Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway
(corner of Dodworth St)
Brooklyn, NY 11221-3013 (718) 453-6343
J M Z trains to Myrtle Ave
or J train to Kosciusko St


*****

If you're in Denver on MONDAY:

Fiction Reading: Travis Nichols & Aaron Morales

Tattered Cover: Colfax Location
2526 East Colfax Avenue at Elizabeth Street,
June 28, 2010 - 7:30pm
This Monday


Travis Nichols & Aaron Morales will read from and sign their debut novels.

Travis Nichols will present Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder ($14.95 Coffee House Press), an eloquent, original, and hypnotic story exploring generational divides and the enduring human desire for love, adventure, truth, and understanding. He is also the author of the collection of poems Iowa (Letter Machine Editions).

Aaron Morales will present Drowning Tucson ($15.95 Coffee House Press), a haunting and honest story, set in Tucson’s toughest neighborhoods during the late 1980s, that follows the disintegration of the Nuñez family, and the people whose paths they cross.

My Pixels Deflect Arrows Press

What have you been reading this summer? I just read:

Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms
ed & tr Matvei Yaklevich
Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press
Fall 2007

Many stories end in a single incident of senseless violence (beaten to death with a stick or a cucumber or folded in half and thrown out with the trash). Or they're composed of repetitive violence by "good people fighting each other." The lack of a conveyed premeditation or afterthought is coupled with a mundanity that is simultaneously terrifying and inuring.

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I've also been reading The Cubist Poets in Paris.

This collection has an incredibly weak introduction as well as descriptions of the poets included in the collection, but it's still good to read the work of Pierre Albert-Birot, Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Cocteau, Sonia Delauney, etc.
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My friend Michael Leviton has a new music video for his song, "I'm Shaking":


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Bob Vila' Wiki page tells me that it needs more info, so we've added a few details. Feel free to contribute/expand:
Bob Vila spent a year in rehab for his addiction to Merriam Webster dictionary entries. He has, to this day, stayed sober with the help of his sponsor, Webster. He is planning a cooperative crossover with Kingston Charcoal to introduce a self-lighting charcoal. He will be sending an email blast your way soon.

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Happy Birthday, Mathias!

I Can See The Sunlight from the Dungeon Press

This was the first thing I watched this morning:

Here's A Thing To Breathe Press

5 Things happening at this exact moment in my apartment:

1. We have 6 pizzas in our refrigerator.

2. We're about to watch an episode of Party Down and eat tofu scramble.

3. The pup is resting his chin on my leg.

4. We're listing to Bright Eyes' Every Day & Every Night.


5.I'm about to order Emily Kendal Frey's The New Planet:
"This collection of “epigrammatic blunt dream ends,” as the author describes them, is built on a poetics of the non-sequitur reminiscent of Max Jacob’s Dice Cup and Inagaki Taruho’s One Thousand and One-Second Stories. In Frey’s minimal poems flashes of the unexpected belie the seeming banality of everyday events and observations."
The New Planet is available as part of Mindmade Books’ 2010 series, which also includes work by Ernst Jandl, Deborah Meadows, and Philippe Soupault.

I Took The Whir & The Bramble Press

My left eye hurts. I think a bug flew into it yesterday when I was biking. Ah. It was so windy at one point that I was pedaling as hard as I could DOWN hill because the wind was pushing me back. But M and I biked to Golden CO and it was a lovely ride. I think need recommendations for what to actually do in Golden when we get there since we might bike back next week.

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My old high school friend has a conceptual book out, DEATH DEATH DEATH. Here is a description:

Death Death Death lists the relationships between over 10,000 words and death. The relationships are defined by associations. These associative chains are derived from a word association study that spanned twenty-five years. Using this data, I developed an algorithm to determine the most direct route between any word and death. The result is this book. The beginning reads like this:

Life - Death
Funeral - Death
Coffin - Death

Later, it takes several associations to get to death. The entry for Jiggle, for example, reads:

Jiggle - Jello - Red - Blood - Death

Death Death Death is 405 pages, and contains an index so you can find any word.
Order it here.

Leaf Mouth Press

Hi.

I'm pleased to let you know that Mathias and I have a new chapbook out called Sugar Means Yes. It's from the ever-lovely Greying Ghost Press. Please consider purchasing a copy, it's only 6.5 bucks, and looks like one of these:

Order it here: http://www.airforcejoyride.com/gg29.html

This book is about mine shafts, sugar, a dying brother, ominous doctors, how many ways a sister's imagination can resurrect a sibling, and things that start with M (like mercy, masks, mittens). Here is a sample poem:

I Miss Your Basic Face

It’s a matter of counting to 9, then holding the mirror up for steam.
Is the fact of a brother a familiar fact? Do you fumble for the keys
along the green cypress roots?

Cousins gather together on the branch, bowing to the water.
Counting breaks the skin & means more than the night before.

Call the middle of the mittens the soaked lungs of night.
Call the doctor & tell him that the bars have closed. His children hide
at the bottom of the pond, play jacks with eels that knot your hair.

I’ve spun a small dress to fit your sister.
I’ve cut leaves into the shape of a boy with no eyes, no ears.

When the envelopes open you find three pieces of red ribbons
& the yellow body of a dried scorpion.

This is what I mean by the color: a saddened lung, the side of your house
that faces the cypress. If they drain the pond can I say, Come here?

Step down from the bank
into a gold puddle until you turn gold.

Come here. Your sister, too. Steam blinds the grass
but hides our road. A pint of molasses, a sticky knee
pushing off the ground. Your luminous face,

they want to stand in the middle of it. I don’t want
to be left behind, either. A purse filled with berries, & yours & yours is yours.

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Photos without people from the last week:













If you're free this Saturday in NY, I strongly suggest you partake in the Harp & Altar journal launch:


Come join us this Saturday night in Brooklyn for a Harp & Altar extravaganza!

Writing will be read, music will be played, art will be shown, drinks
will be drunk, life will be lived . . .

Hosted by the Yardmeter Editions reading series, the evening will
celebrate the release of The Harp & Altar Anthology, recently
published by Ellipsis Press

With readings by Ana Božičević, Dan Hoy, Eileen Myles, and Azareen Van
der Vliet Oloomi, artwork by Lorene Taurerewa, and a musical
performance by Miracles

All of this happens in Shelton Walsmith's studio, 267 Douglass St.
(betw. Nevins St. and Third Ave.)

6:30 PM, Saturday, June 19th

http://yardmeter.blogspot.com/

Hope to see you there