The anxious, clammy, and paranoid film choices of Paul Giamatti? (You have to skip the Sprint ad.)

Chicago's finest in riot gear is needed to disperse poets at a Printers' Ball? They could've just announced that the liquor had run out.

Ward Churchill can be fired after all.

DNA tests might have proven him innocent, but it's too late for poet Darrell Grayson.

Fully awake at Black Mountain College.

John Yau speaks with Rosalyn Drexler about art, capital "a."

It's time for another Best of the Net.

How to write the McPoem.

Here's an interesting interview with Kenneth Goldsmith re: Ubu Web.

A road is the end of the nomad.

Stratagem

We seek indigo theories
to explain our gravity.

As humans we pain.
Captives of perspective.

Mystique, in league with
altitude, resists.

The Piano's Assassination

To sing but never to hum again along the vine

lining consciousness with fangs each

several lifetimes long our fingers hanging

like dove grey icicles, shapely tentacles that
sigh in the jelly dark

eyes like two terriers she danced into
view and multiplied.

Before I
knew it she had one times ten made two

several pipelines along a shoreline like a finger

the czar of sleep lie freezing
and unannounced as a pink priest

blessed evening fell gently on the town
lobsters and invitations falling all around
but even if we star on separate shows

on separate channels


silently swimming, almost unaware
our photos are so far Mafioso

but all we know of the piano
we loved so well.

Flood Table

If I could rewind your anesthetic
tell the forest leaves to quit their labor
then among clocks I would quince
and there aren’t enough thieves
in the ocean to construct twelve years
but my unemployed fork
will never be the same without your amber.
Here in the studio of wings
umpires drip sequined rumors.

The Spirit of Reality

For Pierre Reverdy poems were self-sufficient objects, or “cristaux déposés après l’effervescent contact de l’esprit avéc la realite” (crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality). The Cubist Poets in Paris anthology (ed. L.C. Breunig) was a bargain because its inclusion of Raymond Radiguet makes me think it really is complete. So a Saturday morning reading Cocteau, Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Radiguet takes my mind off the Printers’ Ball last night. I was having a pretty good time until the Chicago police forced everyone to leave—apparently the building code at the Zhou B. Art Center doesn’t allow for hundreds of poets and publishers to stand around drinking and talking about one another. Oh well. The choir singing an a cappella version of Frank Black’s “Where Is My Mind” was a nice touch.

I’m looking forward to the new issue of Ocho. Amy King and Didi Menendez are amazing. Everything they touch is golden. The latest Ocho is edited by Adam Fieled though. Thanks, Adam. You do great work with P.F.S. Post and I’m sure the next Ocho will be major league.

Souvenir of the Mountains*

The year’s rotting twilight
reddish memory wanted to get rid of them

photographs are cozily at home
famous paragon’s amorous adventures

naughty girl in a filthy shed
the great lagoon lives in the tiger

there is a glory to nicely
his knocker was iron impeccable

people who keep their mouth shut
have been painted green

as soon as possible on her
her luxurious grave of generous conversation

and I murmured around in circles
the metallic landscape with incredible lucidity was wrong

with great haste less pleasure
I don’t remember the answer

the black automobile of days is waiting.


________

*appropriation of lines from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Selected Stories.

For Thinking What You Live

Truth came early in the throat
a blanched monkey, stout as birth
hellborn and helpless these months
ache like inconspicuous stems
holding grapes filled with echoes.
My pleated lives really feel
cycloptic beasts who, greenish, need
and we’re brained and dying among false
trembling whys. Could nature be our
how, or are we helpless as unbranched
maples lining a driveway we’ve never known
staring upward into now?

@ Myopic Books this Sunday

Myopic Books in Chicago -- Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue,
2nd Floor


Sunday July 22 – Gene Tanta & Evan Willner

(Note. Gene Tanta will present a roundtable discussion on contemporary poetry.)

Evan WILLNER is the author of "homemade traps for new world Brians" (BlazeVOX [books]), a 7450-syllable worksome of whose poems have been published recently in 6x6 and Jubilat. Having recently completed/survived a Ph.D. in English at Boston University, he now teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gene TANTA was born in Timisoara, Romania in 1974, and immigrated to Chicago in 1984 with family. He earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa 's Writers' Workshop in 2000. He also translates contemporary Romanian poetry and makes visual art with found materials. Mr. Tanta's Publications include: Epoch, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, and Columbia Poetry Review. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where he is also the Art Editor for Cream City Review.


UPCOMING


Sunday August 12 - Jason Bredle & Matthew Guenette

Sunday October 14 - Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Noah Eli Gordon



http://www.myopicbookstore.com/poetry.html


Myopic Books - 15 years of innovative poetry in Chicago

Arrivederci, Modernismo

I'm just digging in to "Arrivederci, Modernismo" by Carter Ratcliff (Libellum, 2007). I'm glad Vincent Katz sends me the latest. His press Libellum and his journal Vanitas are both prime examples of why small press publishing is flourishing in the U.S.

Write to Vincent at 211 West 19th St., NYC, 10011 if you'd like to submit. Vanitas is a gorgeous magazine and Libellum is kewl.

Untranslatable Glyph with Clouds

-for Edwin Denby

When my eyes look for an end to form
we may find orange morning in the darling blood
when the sheets are wishes and the fan comes swarming
plunge your hands into sleep's enormous diagnosis.
I am your patient on that unspeakable floor
when the clock squirrels sanity I posture my ice
as we wish these things time is our breeze.
we leave our pillows upon the sea.

Basquiat book by Phoebe Hoban is not recommended.

This Sunday at Myopic Books

MYOPIC POETRY SERIES -- a weekly series of readings and occasional
poets' talks

Myopic Books in Chicago -- Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue,
2nd Floor


As part of the Printers' Ball Reading Series . . .

Sunday July 15 – Daniel Borzutzky, Becca Klaver, Brandi Homan, & Mark Tardi

Join us for this unique event at Myopic sponsored by POETRY. Poets will read groundbreaking selected work from the Poetry archive including Zukofsky, Ashbery, Eigner, Creeley, Stein, Sexton, Wakoski, & Berrigan . . . at random. Beverages will be served (and served again).



UPCOMING

Sunday July 22 - Evan Willner

Sunday August 12 - Jason Bredle

Sunday October 14 - Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Noah Eli Gordon

Myopic Books - 15 years of innovative poetry in Chicago

A few important days in the life of Holden Morrissey Caulfield, a tall, skinny, highly critical and depressed sixteen-year-old who academically flunked out of Pencey Prep boarding school. . . I was thinking recently about the most famous, least famous (yet brilliant) poets and writers, not necessarily neglecterinos. I was also thinking about what poets and writers are the most well-known in the eyes of the public at large. If someone on the streets of Manhattan were asked about The Great Gatsby or Shelley or Ron Silliman or Edgar Allen Poe or Bob Dylan or Frank O'Hara where is the line of demarcation? Odds are that the average Joe on the street could not name the author of The Catcher in the Rye, or the author of Howl, or the author of Harmonium. Does everyone need some knowledge of the main works of literature to have an informed opinion and who's to say? Certainly Salinger's mystique was cultivated by his genius as a writer but also because of his elusive qualities. [Garbolike, he just vants to be left alone.] Some great books have worked their magic on our social subconscious in very subtle ways. Some works really only register with other artists. In byegone days, Rod McKuen sold many books. My copy of Listen to the Warm was bought nearly as a gag gift yet didn't go unread. Some of my favorite "sleeper" artists include Ray Johnson.

Realpolitik

Maim scar decimate confuse obliterate
lie prevaricate confabulate tear shoot hang
bomb incinerate beat stab torture
blast burn muzzle cripple wound punish
vivisect torment crucify bully misinform
perplex obscure confound shame disgrace
fluster moider embroil disturb jumble
disturb discriminate antagonize bludgeon
scapegrace dictate domineer tyrannize
inflict terrorize disturb rape pillage
plunder ravage overrun sack spoil
maraud vandalize loot pervert humiliate
mortify supress evade mystify cover-up
deceive falsify devastate wash rinse repeat.