I'm Not There

Now they're saying Shelley's politics "verged on the totalitarian." You can't fit a genius into the cookie cutter, but they'll keep trying, I guess. Mozart was a sillypants, but he wrote some mediocre tunes that people still waste their time on and Shakespeare was a sophomoric dreamer. Thus spake the New Yorker: A Magazine for All and None.

Burning man was burned too early by this weisenheimer.

Another stray City Visible review by Rob McClennan, interesting Canadian poet and publisher extraordinaire.

When I finally retire, I'm going to kick it in Yambol, Bulgaria. Don't ask why.

Daniel Borzutzky and Lina ramona Vitkauskas are my favorite poets in Chicago. Notice I didn't say "Chicago poets."

What would Dylan do? I know what he won't do. He probably won't go see that movie, although you know how I feel about Cate.

Readings @ Myopic Books

Chicago is known for Sox and Cubs, gridlock, Vienna Beef, furniture dealer Al Capone, Old Style, and guess what? ...poetry. Check the Myopic Book's blog for the latest news on what's happening next in the Myopic Books Reading Series.

Poems-for-All

It's good to see that Poems-for-All got a little mention from Ron Silliman. The catalog is pretty impressive. These matchbox-sized books are really remarkable. I was glad Richard Hansen published my poem Crossing the Meridian. I got a big manila envelope filled with many little booklets. I first heard of his press because of Hansen's Poets & Writers interview. Despite the size, the production value of each is better than some full-sized books of poetry I've seen lately. Is bookmaking the lost art? In the past few years, Richard Hansen has published these folks. Whoa.

d.a. levy
Ted Joans
Robert Creeley
Roque Dalton
Peter Kropotkin
Charles Bukowski
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Jack Spicer
Bertolt Brecht
Anne Waldman
Arthur Winfield Knight
Kit Knight
Douglas Blazek
William Blake
Jack Hirschman
Delmira Agustini
Peter Orlovsky
Patti Smith
Allen Ginsberg
Dr. Seuss
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Burns
Tom Waits
Ruben Dario
Pete Seeger
Tuli Kupferberg
Jack Micheline
Ko Un
W. H. Auden
Larry Sawyer
Harold Norse
George Harrison
Steve Dalachinsky
Michael Basinski
William Wantling
Jean Arp
A.D. Winans
Lyn Lifshin
Richard Brautigan
Diane di Prima
Gerald Nicosia
Kenneth Patchen

People are scooping up old LPs at record rates these days. There's no need to fear the latest phase of the retro craze. Sometimes new technology isn't necessarily bettter, it's just more convenient. iPods seem like old news now, but throwing an original pressing of Led Zeppelin IV or any James Brown
on the turntable causes some real excitement because vinyl's fuller sound really does make for better listening. Physical Graffitti is still my favorite Zep. But nothing compares to Quadrophenia for thrills, spills, and chills. The first Bob Marley and Miles Davis I ever heard was on vinyl and I think that added to the experience because I would sit listening to it and just stare at the album cover after reading the liner notes. Who does that with a CD? Anyway, from Chicago to Tennessee, vinyl is selling again. I'm glad I listen to jazz, because hardly anyone buys it and there's more left over for me.

Decembering



(This just in)
From the dark side
of an illustrated moon

a volcano destroys
all sentences
without religion.




*


Another Love Poem



We wear nothing but the air between us.






*



Late Night Movies



A train emerges from your
Mouth. Across the platform of our lives
Your lips are melting igloos. Could our
Conversation be any colder? Spring sparrows
Noticed it, your skirt of complications.
Your stilettos stab the pavement like my heart.
I crossed great waves to find you and dove
Into an ocean of metaphysics to discover
Your home there at the bottom. You lounge inside an
Echo. Your fragrance is eternal: I can’t escape it.
Did I try to escape? That’s exactly what I can’t
Remember. I’m shackled by the freezing
Rain on my window, deliriously silent.
Who am I, who are you? These are questions
We ask the hours. Each of them.




*



Dear Lorca



I love to Friday

through the thunder in the wall.

Ghosts spill

out across the carpet.

In the rain God nails

secret meetings.

Foreign Junes

skin lush jungles.

Humility is a vole.

Notice the chocolate horizon.






*



Poets


Wear the blue sweater of memory.
The days ahead won’t be easy.

Make a world noise:
the future is already here.

Advertising turned us into mosquitoes.

Galaxies in the distance still sculpt
the gism of the void.

It's good to see a review of The City Visible (which includes yours truly) up at Book Slut.

Hallelujah Fruit Bowl

Thank you for your reliability.
I could always count on you to
maintain your even temper, as you
held the few remaining oranges
and a banana or two. You no
doubt heard my random muttering
in the kitchen on bad days, perhaps
a “goddammit” slipped out
once or twice, as I nearly cut my finger
or a pot boiled over. But you sat
there steadfast, performing your
duty so calmly. I salute your
temerity in that somewhat
frenzied nook, neighbor to
the toaster, but ultimately
without peer.

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