Blake Butler
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.

If you haven’t caught Tao Lin on twitter since his declaration of “no longer trying” during the last ~48 hours, it’s been pretty fun/funny/interesting. Besides watching his unflagging dedication to the whim during the migration of hundreds of followers following the often several times a minute posts re: boredom, racism, music, being unfollowed, retweets forming a “Best American Tweets” anthology (during which I received ~45 notification emails), I think my favorite part so far was when he had “cybersex” with some dude from some band. It’s all getting deleted June 1st. Have you been watching?

The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it.
Each element can move, shift or sway back & forth in a changing relation to each of the other elements in the universe. Thus, they reveal not only isolated moments, but a physical law or variation among the elements of life. Not extractions, but abstractions. Abstractions which resemble no living things except by their manner of reacting.
I paint with shapes.
The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. Even my triangles are spheres, but they are spheres of a different shape.
That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.
With a mechanical drive you can control the thing like the choreography in a ballet and superimpose various movements.. a great number, even, by means of cams and other mechanical devices.
My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.
I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty but I understand it’s quite wonderful to go into it, to walk through.
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
It whirls, it whirls.

Recently released from Octopus Books, Christopher DeWeese’s The Black Forest is a slim, refreshing volume, intent on bending time and expectation in language carefully measured, calm and clear. It was described by James Tate as such: “These poems sock home truth and enact poetic somersaults that leave me out of breath. It’s a pleasure to recommend them to anyone brave enough. Chris DeWeese is the real thing, a poet true to his calling.”
BB: The Black Forest is your first book, while also one of many you have written over the years in coming up to it. Did you know this book was a specific project when you began the poems in it, or how did it come together as what it is?
CD: For three years while I was getting my MFA I only worked on this one thing, a sequence of poems called The Confessions. When I started that project, I had just been blown absolutely away by Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Berrigan’s The Sonnets, and I had this feeling that maybe writing a book-length poem was the solution to all of my problems. I remember at the time being very confused about how to write poems: before grad school, I had been writing pretty much on my own for a few years, and the poems I wrote were not very good, and all of a sudden I was around all of these people who seemed to already have really confident, singular styles, and I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing or (more importantly) even what I wanted to do in writing poetry.
The most helpful thing about just writing this one project for so long was that it gave me a stable architecture of form to write into. And that was huge for me, because I felt like just starting to write an individual poem was a process weighted down with huge decisions, decisions about form and content that needed to have complicated rationales lurking behind them. So for three years, I didn’t have to worry about that, because I was totally committed to just working on this one thing. And by the time I finished working on it, I was ready to realize that the way I had thought about the process of making poems before was actually totally wrong (for me at least) and that one good and valid way of composing poetry is to just start writing and to see what happens. So when I started writing the poems that would eventually compose The Black Forest, there were no ideas about the poems going together or belonging together as a certain project: there was just this feeling of freedom, and a desire to be loose and wild with my imagination. I had just started running when I began to write these poems, and a lot of the first lines would occur to me while running, and then I would spend the rest of the run saying the line over and over to myself to try and remember it, and by the time I got home the line would have achieved this power, this importance borne of repetition, so I’d write it down and often the rest of the poem would come out very quickly. And over time, I did realize that a lot of the poems I was writing belonged together, that they shared a lot of language and concerns, and it felt good to realize that the consistency of the book had come together in a fairly organic way. READ MORE >
For their 6th issue, the always excellent Birkensnake is looking for strangers to cull the content for versions of an entire issue, as an experiment in curation: “We hope that many prospective editors will become involved in this project, and that there will be a large number of different Birkensnake 6s.”
I have an extra copy or two of Daniel Bailey’s brand new and very excellent Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf, now out from Mammoth Editions. Leave a comment and I’ll randomly select a winner to receive.

“I don’t know how many poets could write a book bringing together meth, Barney, racecars, black metal, God, and the Lakers in one massive feral hymn, but Daniel Bailey is the only one I’d trust. Water into wine is fine but this man can do it to dogshit. Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf is hilarious and true and beautiful. Hail holy spazzlord Bailey.” —Blake Butler
“If Daniel Bailey’s poems were people, they would be the kind of people that you love to get drunk with but you’re always a little afraid that they might try to slit your throat. When you tell them about Emily Dickinson feeling the top of her head come off, they reach for a saw. Still, you can’t help but love them. They’re a blast! They’re always a step away from going to jail or running into your parents or causing you to rearrange the furniture in your loneliest apartment. Daniel Bailey’s poem-people are in a gang called The Space Wolves and they are really, really excited about learning something from this terrible, amazing, gigantic world, even if that means that we’ll need a mop for all of the blood.” —Peter Davis, author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!
If there’s any one good way to make writing even more irrelevant in the world it’s by doting over ceremonial bullshit that never meant anything in the first place.
ORIGINS ARE THE FUTURE
Dan Hoy’s Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Featuring Def Leppard, Bad English, Bonnie Tyler, Orbital, Bon Jovi, Belinda Carlisle, The Sugarcubes, Shakespeare’s Sister, Journey, Roxette, The Bangles, Heart, Alphaville, The Knife, Air Supply, Duran Duran
10 minute documentary by Errol Morris on champion chicken wing eater, El Wingador, at the Times.
What is the most you’ve ever eaten in one sitting?
-Performed by La Shea Delaney (@lashea_delaney) & Annabelle Quezada (@annabelleqv)
-Director/Producer/Songwriter – Annabelle Quezada
You missed the live reading. Excerpts were spoken from:
Partyknife by Dan Magers
The No Hellos Diet by Sam Pink
Meat Heart by Melissa Broder
Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by CAConrad
Crunk Juice by Steve Roggenbuck
Autoportrait by Edouard Leve
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney
The Black Forest by Christopher DeWeese
Sister Stop Breathing by Chiara Barzini
Transfer Fat by Aase Berg
A new volume of David Foster Wallace’s uncollected essays, Both Flesh and Not, has been announced for release on 11/27/12 from Little, Brown.
A preview from Tom Bissell’s forthcoming essay collection, Magic Hours, is up today at McSweeney’s.
At the Poetry Foundation, an excellent article about the intersection of writing and poker, concerning the life of Joel Dias-Porter, who lives and writes in casinos.