25 Points: Factory Hollow Press/Northampton, MA
1. Factory Hollow is the publishing division of Flying Object, which is located in Hadley, which is an over-the-bridge walk from Northampton, which is probably my favorite place in the world.
2. I love Northampton so much that I once kidnapped Mike Young and held him up in Baltimore for ten months. Every day, he had to interact with a dog. The two of them got along just fine.
3. Dick move alert—I waited until the last day of AWP before picking up Mark Leidner’s and Seth Landman’s books. They’re $15 a piece, but I think I got them for $20 total. Take that, capitalism.
4. Before AWP, I had pre-ordered Rachel Glaser’s new book and Heather Christle’s new chapbook. I paid full price for these. Take that, Mark’s Paypal balance.
5. I’m about to review all four of those books in one LeBlog James.
7 Comments
June 5th, 2013 / 10:37 pm
June 5th, 2013 / 10:37 pm
Mike Young—
“The bad word and the bad word and
The word which glamours me with some
Quick face it pulls to make me let
It leave me to go across
In roughly your direction, hates
To go out maybe so completely
On another silence not its own.”
from “Approaches to How They Behave” — W.S. Graham (thanks to Heather Christle for the spot)
0
Mike Young—
Okay, so Derrick Rose will maybe never again play basketball like such a firefly, but that doesn’t mean you should stop believing in the triumph of the canny and soulful: for example, friend of the GIANT Heather Christle has won The Believer‘s 2011 Poetry Award for her book The Trees The Trees. Congratulations, Heather!
WHOASHIPPING
is the code you can use until midnight today to get free shipping on Tyoyeu. What is Tyoyeu? “Tyoyeu by Seths in Poetry.” is the Book of 2007-2011. You can get it today, truly at cost, because shipping its 466 pages will cost you nothing. Keep in mind: ”Our manufacturing process precedes shipping.” (Know too: 2012 not included.) Two copies of Tyoyeu came in the mail today having been shipped expediently, with extra not free shipping. When you have Tyoyeu you will see who needs WHOASHIPPING. Also today: two copies of What Is Amazing arrived, delivered on foot by the author. The author is a fan of Tyoyeu. Fans of the author are fans of what is amazing. Now I’m going to play basketball with Rachel B. Glaser and John Maradik and then I’m going to eat the rest of this pizza
and watch basketball with Emily Pettit while typing words from the six books pictured (Berlin Stories by Robert Walser translated by Susan Bernofsky, TYOYEU by Seths, What Is Amazing by Heather Christle, TYOYEU by Seths, What Is Amazing by Heather Christle, and Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch with a cover by Maira Kalman) in the comments. Whoever is the first to BOTH take a picture of themselves reading both Tyoyeu and What Is Amazing AND correctly match all the words with the correct book (in the comments), that person will receive (either via expedited shipping or delivered on foot by the author of this post) six machines:
- the only copy of a book written just for that person (either OUR THE ROBERT WALSER or NANCY KÖF’S BÖK MADE OUT OF WORDS™ or RODNEY GRAHAM’S MACHINE FOR READING LENZ)
- Matvei Yankelevich’s Bending at the Elbow (trade edition, pictured below)
- Taryn Andrews’ Clouds Can Trees
- Lesley Yalen‘s The Beginning In (watch Lesley read on a Seth’s Divine Magnet)
- Just Kids by Lawrence Giffin and Lauren Spohrer
- This Is What We Are Up Against by Ben Hersey, who is what what is and will be touring with Heather Christle in March and April.
The Continental Review
For years now Jordan Stempleman’s The Continental Review has been quietly turning out the farthest seeing television on the prophetube (witness past videos by Ryan MacDonald, Michelle Taransky, Dana Ward, Cara Benson, K. Silem Mohammad, Linh Dinh, Tom Beckett, Susana Gardner, Chris Tysh, Nico Vasilakis, Kiki Petrosino, Eileen Tabios, Alyssa Wolf, Joshua Clover, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Ben Mirov, Daniel Borzutsky…) In the past few weeks, Stempleman’s turned it up to 11. First Amanda Nadelberg’s “Alternatives Considered” and then Paul Legault’s English to English translation of Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Today new videos by Peter Davis and Dara Wier (above) dropped. The latter, a stop motion setting of Wier’s cant miss “Not That Lake,” is a collaboration between Heather Christle, Ben Pease, Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit, and Bianca Stone. They made it in more or less one day, planning a birthday party the whole way. You can watch it in 3 minutes. Or twice in 6 or 3x in 9 or eleven times in 33. You will see.
Call Heather Christle at (413) 570-3077
On the occasion of the release of her second book of poems, The Trees The Trees, which just came out from Octopus, and is indeed mazelike, Heather Christle has secured a phone number that you can call her at, through which she will read to you a poem. This begins today and will continue through July 14th.
The number is (413) 570-3077
Calls answered during Eastern Standard Times:
M: 10am-6pm
T: 10am-1pm
W: 10am-6pm
Th: 10am-1pm
F: 10am-6pm
S: 12pm-6pm
Su: 12pm-6pm
Get the book while you’re at it; it’s unprecedented, and gorgeous.
Take two for wanting
1. Beecher’s Magazine is now available. Look at the list of contributors. I like how they show what’s poetry and what’s fiction.
2. Feast your eyes on the cover of Heather Christle’s new book, which will be available July 1:
I’m on spring break right now
–>VIDEO: Adam Robinson and Stephanie Barber @ The Poetry Project
–>WWAATD: Everyone’s favorite poet Heather Christle writes about the poetry of foreign language textbooks. Here is an excerpt:
1 The patio looks very neat.
2 The apartment is unoccupied.
3 The desk is unoccupied.
4 The kitchen looks very neat.
5 The house looks very neat.
6 The rooms are unoccupied.
7 The houses are unoccupied.
–>NEW YORK: Monkey Bicycle 8 release reading this Wednesday, 7 PM, The Cakeshop, INFO
–>SUBMIT/READ: Patasola Press is Patasola Press (print) and Caper Literary Journal (online) and they will publish you if they like your work.
–>THING: Everyone’s favorite poet Matthew Rohrer writes here about how his work changed from 1995 to 2007. If you click around you can find out that this is part of a series in which poets talk about how their work has changed over time, which is cool.
–>PODCAST: No Slander Podcast, featuring Michael Earl Craig in episode two. Recordings of Michael Earl Craig are hard to find.
Andrew James Weatherhead—
Matthew Rohrer reads two poems on a Poetry Foundation podcast and they get talked about and talked about. Heather Christle‘s insight is provided. Curtis Fox writes with a pencil.
Blake Butler—
1. 1st issue of adjnoun comes in a ltd ed of 200, letterpressed and wild with Ohle, Markus, Lopez, myself, some other freaks.
2. Pitchfork runs an article I actually liked reading, on “drag”.
3. Heather Christle be tweeting for the month of June for @harriet_poetry.
Blake Butler—
1. @ Autotypist, Jeremy James Thompson presents 103 Image Search Results for Poetry Characterized Differently by an Assortment of Commonly Associated Adjectives
2. @ Almost Dorothy, an interview with Heather Christle
3. New issue 10.2 of Diagram
The Whole Thing About Poetry
At the Juniper Festival a few weeks ago there was a panel about The Future of Poetry. The panelists were Evie Shockley, Cathy Park Hong, Heather Christle and Rebecca Wolfe. It was good, cutting edge, perhaps too polite but definitely the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at panels.
Rebecca Wolff said poetry doesn’t matter and it sucks that poets, who are smart and engaged people, are wasting their lives on something cloistered and anonymous (my words) when they should become civil servants, business people, people who can make a difference. Essentially, the world is missing the poet’s perspective in areas where they are needed.
I could be paraphrasing this in an unacceptable way, just so you know. But that was the gist. READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
1. Heather Christle is doing a video challenge contest to win a copy of the new blue edition of her The Difficult Farm.
2. Keyhole just announced and is preselling a new minibook by William Walsh, Pathologies.
3. Tom Bissell writes for the Guardian about his addiction to Grand Theft Auto, a preview of his new book on video games, Extra Lives.
The Next Step and The Whole Point
When reading the work of prodigiously–okay wildly–talented contemporaries–people like Natalie Lyalin, Heather Christle, Sabrina Orah Mark, Chelsey Minnis, Claire Becker–I tend to think first:
I love this. This is essential and beautiful.
And then at some point, my thoughts turn to my own work, and a voice says,
I can’t do anything like this.
It is all too easy to stop at that point, and stew, and–to drown out the voice–spend the next part of the day doing something that isn’t writing.
But the voice isn’t done talking.
That is going to have to be okay. There are other things I can do.
Listen to that, and return to your writing. This is the next step.
It’s not as if Chelsey Minnis can do what Sabrina Orah Mark does. It’s not as if Sabrina Orah Mark can do what Chelsey Minnis does. This is the whole point.
Live Giant! Heather Christle Reads from Atlanta
The live reading is over, but we may post archival footage later.. thanks to all who tuned in.
You can get Heather’s first book of poems, The Difficult Farm, from Octopus Books and all orders from now to midnight tonight will also receive a copy of Tuned Droves by Eric Baus and Undersleep by Julie Doxsee for free!.
Thanks to everybody who tuned in. Next month we’ll have Dorothea Lasky, author of AWE and the forthcoming Black Life, both from Wave Books, February 24th at 9 PM. Mark it!
REMINDER: 9 PM Tonight! (Eastern) Live Giant #1 Heather Christle
Don’t forget to come back right here tonight for the first monthly Live Giants reading with the radical Heather Christle, who will grace us with something else. To watch the reading, tonight you’ll find a post at the top of the site around five minutes till 9:00 PM (Eastern, so 6:00 PM on the west coast and you can do the other math). You’ll be able to watch it on the site, or follow a link so you can chat and ask questions or otherwise type at Heather in chatforum style. We’ll kick off at 9 Eastern sharp! Her cat Hastings will be there. Hope you will too.
Blake Butler—
Don’t forget this Thursday at 9 PM Eastern time marks the kickoff of our monthly online live reading series, Live Giants!, featuring Heather Christle, author of The Difficult Farm, live from her home in Atlanta. More info at RSVP at Facebook.
Live Giants, a live online monthly reading series
Excited to announce today a new monthly feature we’ve been drumming around for a while now, and finally ready to kick it off for 2010, HTML Giant Live Giants, a monthly reading series hosted right here on the site.
On the last non-Friday weekday of each month we’ll have a writer we love reading from their home, or perhaps surprise locations, via live streaming, 20 minutes or so followed by a chatbox-prompted q/a. With so many excellent people all over the place, and all the invites we get to readings that we wish we had a time/space portal for, we hope this will help fill some of that gap, and without necessarily putting on any pants.
The inaugural reading will be that fabulous Heather Christle. Mark your calendar to show up around here on Thursday January 28 at 9 PM Eastern and witness her incantations and brainspeaks. BYOB. No RSVP.
Best Comment Exchange Ever?
Maybe the sommelier will pick this up later but: This just in: READ MORE >
