Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
Two cool readings coming up in NYC:
1) Tonight April 9th @ 7PM @ Unnameable Books: Big Other Presents John Haskell, Jamie Iredell, and John Madera
2) Monday April 11th @ 8PM @ The Poetry Project: Rachel B Glaser & Amy Lawless
Feel free to give a shout out for elsewhere readings in the comments.
Yet even the most explicitly political acts of data gathering and collecting, like WikiLeaks, can succumb to a contemporary ideology of the self-sufficiency of information.
If you’re over eight years old, you don’t want anybody calling your art clever. Right? Clever is bad. Smart is good, maybe the best kind of smart is so smart it’s stupid. Dumbstruck. Two fish / this is water. Bill, a guy my father hated, out on the roof fixing our swamp cooler in the kind of beautiful July afternoon that gives California the best avocados. And Bill calls out: “Ain’t there just some days you’re glad to wake up?” And my father, talking to Bill through the slats of the swamp cooler, agrees. This is so stupid it’s smart. But it would’ve been clever if my father had said “Yeah, and there’s other days I’m just glad to fall asleep.” Too clever by half. Clever as measurement. Clever as cleaver. Perhaps from E.Anglian dialectal cliver, “expert at seizing,” Influenced, perhaps, by O.E. clifer “claw, hand.” Sammy Johnson said: “This is a low word, scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation; and applied to any thing a man likes, without a settled meaning.” Clever of me to say Sammy instead of Samuel, to make you think an extra nano-second who I mean, clever doesn’t want to give the other person credit (of course I knew you meant Samuel, asshole), clever means I’m hungry to catch the bus before you. Clever basically as cowardice and fear of intimacy. Right? READ MORE >
“The heart that thinks, the blood around the heart called thought. How does the mind think? It heaves.” Dan Beachy-Quick is a beautiful thought skater at Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s new poetics journal Evening Will Come. April isn’t just gags and snow; it’s also Quick and Cedar Sigo and Julie Carr. Do it the reading time, sexy loners, do it and hear your tick.
Pumpkins have long since rotted, and Massachusetts is trying to convince us that thirty-degree sunlight passes for bloomage. Which must mean the winners of the unstoppable smiles pumpkin caption contest are: Jeremy Bauer, Ted Powers, and Noah Falck. I know I said I’d only pick two, but I liked all three of their captions. Thanks to Ken Baumann for sponsoring the contest by accidentally buying two copies of Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable. Winners, email me at mikeayoung AT gmail DOT com with your mailing addresses to get your free books. Everybody else: the kid is bobbing for apples, not puking, but you shouldn’t let that stop you.
So Ken Baumann (author of the forthcoming Solip from Tyrant Books in 2012; congrats Ken!) accidentally bought two copies of Jason Bredle’s heart-sifting and twisting Smiles of the Unstoppable. When I offered to refund the extra money, he generously suggested I give the extra copy away on HTMLGIANT, which brings us to the pumpkin below this paragraph. See, I wanted to do a caption contest where I posted a picture of Ken smiling, but for some reason I found this picture of a pumpkin, which was actually even better than a picture of Ken getting Lasik surgery.
Here’s the contest: Post a caption to this pumpkin smile picture in the comments. Best 2 captions win copies of Smiles of the Unstoppable. Deadline: next Friday, March 25th. Very easy. Bonus points if Ken/Jason are somehow involved in an adventure with the pumpkin. See the picture, amplify your best/Jimmy Cheniest wit, and win some terrific poetry. Also you can go see Jason Bredle read at the Tucson Lit Press Fest on the 26th of March. So my best suggestion is to win this book, read some poems from it to your rich lover, and have your rich lover swoon so hard they buy you a ticket to Tucson. Duh. Very easy. Ready set go. If you need further convincing, read Jason’s poem “Moby Dick” below the jump, originally published at Ken’s No Posit. READ MORE >
Why there aren’t Jordan Stempleman fan clubs in every open field—fan clubs that would consist of an abandoned Astro Van, painted with blue and yellow racing stripes, almost hidden among the tall stalks under a sunset somehow permanent, while inside the Astro Van is a photograph of the same field and Astro Van under an even more beautiful sunset, a photograph the fans inside the Astro Van try to avoid looking at (but when we do we can’t help but shake our heads) while meanwhile they are either trying to scratch out every reflective surface until it’s not reflective or polish every unreflective surface until it is reflective (we can’t decide), and even meanwhiler crows live their whole productive lives on top of the Astro Van because above all it makes for a meek scarecrow, why there aren’t Jordan Stempleman fan clubs like this—well, it’s beyond me. Here are four sets of decontextualized lines from Jordan’s new chapbook Wallop (from Grey Book Press) :
1
One out of five people applying for citizenship
today secretly wish they were applying
to live in a forest just outside the country
to which they’ve applied,
where they could still see the lights
from the largest cities at night
2
Was that the tenderness people always talk about
or just a bad cold?
3
Health happens like this:
there are stupid things
we put in us.
Some of these things go from stupid to nothing.
A few never leave.
4
… It’s like a road of pine trees
that first say no to the car, no to the bike, no holding hands
to make your way through this rowdy, timeless path.