http://theblogpoetic.wordpress.com/
Alexis Orgera lives in Florida. She is the author of How Like Foreign Objects, available from H_ngm_n BKS, and two chapbooks: Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink) and Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). She also writes at The Blog Poetic.
Has anyone seen Disgrace? I remember being pretty affected by the book.
1. Now you can screw around with magnetic poetry wherever you are.
2. Matt Hart’s new chapbook, The Hours, from Cinematheque Press is sure to be fucking fantastic. No, I haven’t read it yet, but if his other books are any indication…. And look at all their other good stuff.
3. I know Justin posted about Sommer Browning recently. But I want to reiterate: her tweets have been making me laugh for months. Her comic has been killing me since AWP.
It’s Saturday, and it’s beautiful here in Florida. By beautiful I mean fucking hot. The point being, I want to go outside and ride my bike. The other point being, I think we should all ponder this poem by Emily Dickinson because it’s HOT too:
249
Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
in Thee!
A new book. Is it comforting to know that other people are rejects too? There’s that great Merwin poem, “Berryman,” that describes Berryman’s writing advice to the poet. Lines on rejection:
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetryhe said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I was at my favorite bar the other night watching some NBA playoffs when the bathroom called to me. I found this:
I think it takes some real balls to 1. claim to be God and 2. claim a space in the Smokin’ Joe’s unisex bathroom to stake your Godness claim. Or maybe some drunkard had a supernatural experience in which God visited said bathroom and said drunkard simply wanted to share it with the world. Whatever. Bathroom poetics.
“The hallucinatory twilights, the nightmarish birds, the exquisite putrefactions of the mangrove swamps seemed the cherished memories of a past he had not lived.” –Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons.
Write the cherished memories of a past you have not lived in 13 words or less.
Archibald's Bar-B-Q
1. And so we mark the success of Slash Pine Poetry Festival No. 2: The Year of the Laundromats. Lots of poems about laundry and laundromats.
I don’t really know how many hours it was. 40 readers at 10 minutes per over the course of the weekend. Then there were the overages (you can’t keep all 40 poets in line, can you?), the undergrad reading, the dinners and bars and making new friends, etc. etc.
Joseph P. Wood puts together a real shindig. There were art galleries, blues singers, bars, bands, poets of all shapes and sizes—and even some fictioners and essayists, though I think they crashed the party. Seats were packed for every venue despite the tornado warnings and thunder so loud I thought I could hear it inside my head.
On a maybe more important note, Joseph took Myron Michael and I to Archibald’s Bar-B-Q (see above) in Tuscaloosa, and I ate a plate of the tastiest ribs I have ever had. The sauce on these things was magical.
2. New issue of Sixth Finch:
The Slash Pine Poetry Festival is this weekend. If you’re in or around Tuscaloosa, maybe stop by.
The tree
The native range of the slash pine
