boston’s best dad
As many writers alter ego as editors, all too often their own work is overshadowed by their press efforts. I know the feeling and its a little bittersweet. But today is a different day because Janaka Stucky has been voted Best Poet by the city of Boston.
Styles
Do you fear style in poetry?
Do you skeptic it?
Once the style is figured out, does it become less impactful?
My favorite writers are styled.
Their words have good hair.
Lack of style seems to be what keeps good words from becoming distinguished words.
I still look for things that I think are “cool”
“Cool” I think appeals to the mind more than the heart.
It doesn’t need to be overt.
“Cool” is the neon sign that comes to mind when reading Cows by Frederic Boyer just published in the new Puerto Del Sol
V.
The cows are useful and sure. Their existence is an infinite number of successive
presents.
It is thus understandable with what pleasure we exterminated them.
The cows are only themselves when gathering into their own finitude the infinite
totality in which they found themselves. Beneath a tree. In a meadow. On the earth
lost in the universe.
The human being is quickly jealous of the cows. Oh, if only the gods would arm
me with such power—comes the muffled voice of tiny Telemachus that is held in The
Odyssey.
The cows don’t read what’s in our hearts. They don’t understand us any better
than we understand ourselves. They ask neither for our recognition nor our gratitude
nor our hate as we ask it of ourselves. And never have we contemplated them in their
truth.
Thought, the cows immediately knew in our presence, betrays general indifference.
It’s only when dangers become evident that indifference ends. In our presence
the cows learned this at their own expense.
Over 1,000 pages of Georg Trakl coming. In 3 years, but coming…
Forthcoming in 2013 is The Collected Works of Georg Trakl, translated by Daniele Pantano and published by Black Lawrence Press. The book will include all of his poems, plays, fragments, drafts and letters and will be well over 1,000 pages. The timing of publication will dovetail with the centenary of Trak’s death (November 3, 1914).
Trash
What makes a work unpublishable? Ubu Web invites 50 authors to answer this question.
Read a conversation over stolen food by John Cotner and Andy Fitch, a handwritten letter to her father by a young Mary Jo Bang, Christian Bok’s proposal for nanoscopic poems,some language dissolutons that end in a review of Lou Reed by Alan Licht, and lots lots more.
The web is a perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure.
Flesh Eating Poems
Cannibal books is offering a chance to subscribe for 2010. If you were a subscriber this past year, you would’ve received chapbooks by Claire Donato, Shane Jones, Keith Newton, Carolyn Guinzio, Amish Trivedi, Patrick Morissey, Thomas Hummel, as well as the the mighty NARWAL ( A collection of 7 chapbooks by Kazim Ali, Maureen Alsop, Sommer Browning, Karla Kelsey, Laura Goode, Kate Schapira, and Jared White).
This year, for the low blow of $75, you will get
- Allyssa Wolf’s second full-length collection, Sister.
- Chapbooks by Kevin Holden, Ben Mazer, Tim Van Dyke, Dot Devota, Adam Roberts, and Tom Andes.
- Mini-chapbooks from our Boundless Books Series.
- Cannibal: Issue Five, featuring poems by Carrie Olivia Adams, Samuel Amadon, Susan Briante, Lily Brown, Adam Clay, CAConrad, Kate Dougherty, Farrah Field, Laura Goode, Kate Greenstreet, Jane Gregory, Whit Griffin, Melanie Hubbard, Andrew Hughes, M.C. Hyland, Grant Jenkins, Jeff T. Johnson, Jon Leon, Sam Lohmann, Sara Mumulo, Hoa Nguyen, Danielle Pafunda, Alison Palmer, Kyle Schlesinger, Cedar Sigo, Sandra Simonds, Nate Slawson, Tony Tost, Steven Toussaint, Amish Trivedi, G.C. Waldrep, & Joseph Wood.
- Anything other books and broadsides we make before the New Year.
- The unparalleled sense of supporting one of the most aggressively productive and self-sufficient book arts poetry presses around.
We can handle only a limited number of subscribers and will take this post down once we have enough money to help finance our busiest time of year (the next two months). Immense thanks to everyone who subscribed last year and in advance to our subscribers this year. We could not keep the press running without you.
Birds LLC
Check out Birds LLC, a new publishing collective run by poets Dan Boehl, Justin Marks, Matt Rasmussen, Sampson Starkweather, & Chris Tonelli.
Their first two titles are now available for pre-order,The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert & The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli which you can now get both or a steal at $20.
Birds looks to be a strong new press, and with the arrival of Tonelli’s collection, without fear of the stigma that comes with self publishing.
Which makes me ask – how do you feel about self publishing? As a reader does it change your perception at all?
For Winners
Here is a writing contest worth considering. I imagine the shapeless bodies of poets in a montage of activities training for this mighty event, a triumph soundtrack playing over their sweat faces, kind of like this
The Bathroom and Boo: A Journal of Terrific things present …
The First Annual Racquetball Chapbook TournamentTired of myriad chapbook contests whose winners are determined by their works’ literary merit? Are your poems being rejected for publication because editors deem them unfit to print?
Would you prefer your chapbook published because you displayed a level of athletic prowess and competitive determination that in no way signifies your achievements as a writer?
Are you a writer who wants an excuse to learn to play racquetball? Or a racquetball player seeking incentive for sitting down to write your first short collection of poems?
Then consider entering the Racquetball Chapbook Tournament.
In order to get your chapbook published, you just have to be the champion of our racquetball tournament.
For more info and tournament details, follow the link
A new issue of Now Culture is loose, with a big emphasis on the short poem. Anyone who knows the recent me, knows I’m in a filthy love with the short poem. And so is Dara Wier. Here, she considers Keats’ ‘This Living Hand” and the inimitable powers of the short lyric. (click on the text of the poem to access the essay).
Short poems lend a seconds’ acknowledgment of our predicaments. They can be sniper-like in their direct action. I like that they aren’t working up to anything. I like that they employ no regimens of preparing the ground, or building up of logic or anecdote or image or sonic effects, they pretty much forego consolation and fearlessly approach archly flung truth. They lean hard on the notion of condensed (intensely so) remark.
Uncategorized / No Comments
February 15th, 2010 / 6:58 pm
February 15th, 2010 / 6:58 pm
Uncategorized / 12 Comments
February 8th, 2010 / 10:56 am
February 8th, 2010 / 10:56 am
Long Song Cave
The Song Cave is a chapbook press run by poets Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Each chapbook comes in editions of 100, is signed, and contains a “single poem in a single volume.” Their latest release comes from Ben Lerner.
Make sure to check out available past editions from Cyrus Console and Amanda Nadelberg and keep an eye on this press in the future. What they have coming is new light.
When you wake up this morning, before you start in on eating your greasy sausage, start your day by eating a poem at No Tell Motel. They feature one poet each week, one poem posted each work day.
Check out the future contributors below, plan a year of healthy mornings.
Uncategorized / 4 Comments
January 12th, 2010 / 2:46 am
January 12th, 2010 / 2:46 am
Last Rally
The last issue (?) of The Raleigh Quarterly curated by Chris Tonelli and Chris Salerno has been updated today. RQ has has featured some great poets in their short tenure like Mark Yakich, Matt Henriksen, Emily Kendal Frey, Mathias Svalina, Sarah Bartlett, Joe Massey, Tony Tost, Kate Greenstreet, & Laura Sims, who authored the poem below.
Uncategorized / 7 Comments
January 11th, 2010 / 4:03 pm
January 11th, 2010 / 4:03 pm
Reopen
Open Letters Monthly has put chapstick on the sow with a newly remade version of themselves. On their front page right now is a new translation of a Transtromer poem and a revisit with W.S. Merwin’s nastiest, blackened book The Lice.
.
And once more I remember that the beginning
Is broken
No wonder the addresses are torn
To which I make my way eating the silence of animals
Offering snow to the darkness
Uncategorized / 6 Comments
January 5th, 2010 / 12:22 am
January 5th, 2010 / 12:22 am
Brian Foley—
A new issue of Glitterpony is live with hot poems by Rachel Glaser, Hoa Nguyen, Michelle Taransky and others.
Chapel Haunt
Brandon Stosuy – writer, compiler of the unflinching UP IS UP, BUT SO IS DOWN, and pious metalhead, has moved his SHOW NO MERCY column, which was the last morsel of interest in the bowl of corporate shit that is Pitchfork, over to Stereogum. The column is now called HAUNTING THE CHAPEL. READ MORE >
