A Very Walt B-Day

Nice find, Caolan!

---

More treats for me: The New Pornographers perform "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk" on Letterman tomorrow night, 6/30, though technically 7/1 in the East!

I think Dave genuinely likes them:

Six Months Since / Till Crimbo

I uploaded the wintry images off my old camera, which I cruelly abandoned for its replacement at Xmastime, and made this video:

Poem For Tonight's Full Moon & Partial Eclipse

I’m Over the Moon

BY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.
But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries
and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

What do you have? You’re a tool, moon.
Now, noon. There’s a hero.

The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy
of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read
my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

It’s hard to learn that, hard to do.
The sun is worth ten of you.

You don’t hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,

taunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,
quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,
letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

This eclipse will be felt most powerfully by anyone whose natal planets are in the early degrees of the cardinal signs (Aries, Libra, Capricorn, Cancer). But there is enough planetary energy locked into this eclipse chart that others may also benefit from its power. This eclipse is probably the peak of the Cardinal Drama that we've been watching unfold over the past year because so many planets are so tightly aligned now.

This is not a time to be afraid - doors are opening now and it's time to walk through them. Our world is in a state of terrible dysfunction and a rebalancing is necessary. Any fears and areas of discomfort that arise now are emerging so that they can be seen for the shadows that they are rather than the experiences of reality that we believe them to be.

Hellloooooo Chicagooooo!

Please go to Irish Eyes tonight, and tip your editrixie barkeeps!

Mairead Case & I making irish eyes in 2008.

SWITCHBACK BOOKS FUNDRAISER

The Women of Switchback Sling Drinks for Poetry

Thursday, June 24, 2010
7:30-11:30 p.m.

Irish Eyes Pub
2519 N Lincoln Ave

Chicago, IL 60614

No cover, $2.50 domestic bottles, & more!

DRINK CHEAP TIP BIG FOR POETRY!

All tips benefit Switchback Books -- which is now, we are happy to announce, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit press!

Switchback staffers will be tending bar and offering:

*custom erasure poems on demand!

*a coin-operated poetry machine!

*completely unprofessional tarot readings!

I Forgot To Tell You About Neko's Shoes

I told A. I thought "Iron Maiden" was sort of like "Lady Pilot." It could also be like "a heavy metal band" or "a torture device," though, I spose!

Photo via Brooklyn Vegan.

UPDATE: You can hear their 6/23 show at the 9:30 Club in DC here. Highlight: "To Wild Homes" around minute 41:00. Okay, officially done obsessing. It's like, you think your love for a band is fading until you see three of your favorite songwriters on stage all at the same moment, because oh yeah, they're in the same band, and then you're still like, SUPERGROUP!!!!! and Beatlemania, Elvis-fainting, Conrad-Birdie teenagerisms ensue.

Welcome To Boog City Heads-Up

5 DAYS OF POETRY AND MUSIC

FRI. SEPT. 24- TUES. SEPT. 28 2010

Over 50 poets • 11 musical acts • Poets’ theater plays

Our two-daylong, seventh annual small, small press fair

Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited performed by the supersized I feel tractor

A night devoted to Satellite Telephone magazine of Buffalo

Sidewalk Café • Zinc Bar • ACA Galleries Unnameable Books

While I Bask in Phony Beatlemania

You might want to check out:

1. This review of Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country by somebody who gets it right!

2. This Beard of Bees e-chap of Michael Leong "cover poems"! (PDF alert!!)

3. This Culliton / Dougherty / Wilson reading if you live in Chicago!

New Pornographers @ The Bell House, Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY

I haven't been to a New Pornographers show since 2005 (Twin Cinema tour), and in the meantime, everybody seems to have come around to the idea that Dan Bejar is the wildest genius among geniuses. The crowd of devotees at the intimate, awesome Bell House definitely sang along to his songs the loudest -- which makes sense, because he enunciates like a madman and it's FUN to sing along, but it also surprised me.

He also managed to tie with Neko for best hair, no small feat. I think it was actually growing forward?! (At one point during the get-Dan-to-come-up-and-play shtick, she teased him (not a direct quote), "C'mon Dan, your hair looks great, you're wearing white slacks....")

I bring you the DB deep cuts via PopArtist!





[full set list]

[Spinner concert review]

[pics]

Have Ya Heard

Robby Hecht wins! The Telluride Troubadour contest, that is.

I think this means he is officially too big-time to have to play Joni Mitchell songs at my mom's behest when Annie brings him home for the holidays.

Also check out his alter ego, the mysterious Bobe Hectik!

Dorothy

Just learned about Danielle Dutton's new press, Dorothy, which already has an exciting slate of books coming up: two by Renee Gladman, and what looks to be a reprint of a 1955 Barbara Comyns book.

Dorothy "is dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women."

I Said I'd Be in Bed By Now

Oprah says

if I can

suspend my judgement

and my repulsion

for an hour

I can learn

what's in the minds

of sex offenders

by watching her &

a pretty psycho-

therapist

talk to four

but,

I cannot

keepin'

my skin

thin

Bill Berkson, "One April"

This poem from the latest Brooklyn Rail reminds me that I need to put Milwaukee in more poems, not only because I love it, but also because it has a nice sound. Even if you pronounce it like Alice Cooper in Wayne's World, "Mil-ee-wauk-ay," and even if you pronounce it like a local: "Muhwaukee."

Also, I love "literal" signs.

Lyn Hejinian on Leslie Scalapino

If you stay in one place too long you'll be taken over—either by your own fixating ideas or by those of others. To survive one must always be outrunning what she called "the destruction of the world."

Laurie Anderson's HOMELAND streaming at NPR

through application of an effect she calls "audio drag," Anderson even turns to her male alter ego, Fenway Bergamot.

2 in Super Arrow 2

Super Arrow no. 2: Fiction by Colin Bassett, Barron Byrnes, Chris Dennis, and Scott Ogilvie. Poetry by Micah Bateman, Amy David, Phil Estes, Eileen G’Sell, MC Hyland, Becca Klaver, and Colby Somerville. Art by Angela Zammarelli and Francis Raven. Conversation with Issue One contributors Jaffa Aharonov, Joe Collins, Roxane Gay, Maggie Ginestra, Ben Spivey and Kyle Winkler about creative community in the internet age.

Ana Božičević on the spider & the circle

that’s what I dream poetry will do: save my life. Teach me how to be less of a servant. I kind of hate the word “avant,” because it’s based on linearity, the drug the empire survives on. Lines. You’re a spider inside the circle, but who drew the circle? Why can’t you cross the line? Because all my friends are here. Even if your friends drew the damn thing, don’t stick around just cause you’re nice.

Poets for Living Waters

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

If you would like to submit work for consideration, please send 1-3 poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published submissions to -- poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com

Editors: Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples

http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/

To date --

FRANK SHERLOCK ** BROOKS HAXTON ** ANGELA SORBY ** T. CLAYTON WOOD ** RON SILLIMAN ** TAMIKO BEYER ** JUDITH BARRINGTON ** JAMES WAGNER ** JULIAN T. BROLASKI ** LISANNE THOMPSON ** JAN HELLER LEVI ** SAM SCHILD ** ALISON PELEGRIN ** STEPHANIE STRICKLAND ** CYNTHIA LAWSON JARAMILLO ** PAUL RYAN ** NICOLE COOLEY ** RODRIGO TOSCANO ** JOSEPH P. WOOD ** GORDON MASSMAN ** TARA BETTS ** FADY JOUDAH ** PHILIP METRES ** JEFF NEWBERRY ** KIRSTEN KASCHOCK ** PATRICK DURGIN ** ALICIA OSTRIKER ** CARLY SACHS ** KATE SCHAPIRA ** BILL MARSH ** EVIE SHOCKLEY and FRANZ WRIGHT

Submission Call: Leslie Scalapino Tribute

Leslie Scalapino's writing placed inside/outside events together with/in spacetime. Reading Leslie Scalapino is/as an altering act/event. We honor her passing and celebrate her not ever passing. We invite you to write alongside/simultaneously to/of/on her work for a special issue of Delirious Hem.

Save NYC Libraries: June 12-13 at Grand Army Plaza

We Will Not Be Shushed
June 12th – 13th
5pm – 5pm
Front Steps of Brooklyn Public Library @ Grand Army Plaza
Facebook Event Page

InDigest Mini-Talk

Dustin Luke Nelson, who runs the InDigest 1207 Reading Series, and who also hails from Wisconsin, asks participants to talk for a bit about a piece of writing--poetry, fiction, email, song lyrics, whatever--that has influenced them positively or negatively. Here's the teeny talk I gave on Tuesday.

*

Do you have a favorite song? I have a favorite song. It has been my favorite song for at least half my life. I am 28. I have listened to this song in a high school bathroom stall off a cassette tape in a Walkman, and I have listened to this song at bars where I am presumptuous enough to hold up my hand in a “pause the conversation” kind of way to announce that THIS! is my favorite song.

It is a popular song by a popular artist. Rolling Stone magazine, which shares a name with this song, dubbed it the #1 song of all time in a 500-song list. Someone on Wikipedia wrote, “the song has been widely credited with altering attitudes about what a pop single could convey,” and no one flagged that, so I think I may have reason to say a high-flying thing or two about it, like Bruce Springsteen did when he declared, “that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.”

“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan is my favorite song. But my favorite song is also a poem, and I’m pretty sure that this is no coincidence. I don’t mean that it is “really” a poem, as if its poem status could cancel out its song status—I mean it is a poem TOO. You might know that this song—the number one song of all time according to Rolling Stone, and according to me—started out as a sprawling poem.

Dylan has called the original text of “Like a Rolling Stone” a “long piece of vomit.” In 1966, he told a journalist: “It was ten pages long. It wasn't called anything, just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. […] I had never thought of it as a song, until one day I was at the piano, and on the paper it was singing, 'How does it feel?' in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion.”

When I am feeling most grandiose about “Like a Rolling Stone,” I think of it as no less than a cultural hinge of the 20th century. Folk to rock, acoustic to electric, sure—but also the moment when poetry was subsumed into music in a way that amplified both. So, another grandiose gut-feeling I have is that we need to consider post-1965 songwriters our poets, too. Some of them just plain are: David Berman of the late Silver Jews and John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, for example. I would also add Jolie Holland, Bill Callahan, Neko Case, and Edith Frost to the list. I could talk for a long time about how Dan Bejar of Destroyer is not only Dylan’s best, brightest heir, but a poet, too. Again, I’m not trying to say that their songs are “really” poems, but that these songwriters are ALSO poets.

Sometimes I hear the chorus of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a challenge to the artist, or to any searching person, to continually return to a place where you don’t know anything anymore, where you’re naïve, starting from scratch:

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

It reminds me of Keats’ negative capability, that “being in uncertainties.” The will to go to a place of vulnerability and anonymity, to not find in any style or subject a poetic “home” for too long, to come off the chrome horse, the steeple, whatever it may be—that is one of my few creeds as a poet. That is how I plug my lyre into an amp.

*

Okay but really, do you have a favorite song?

Notes for Marina Abramović

we all stare at countless bitches every day bro
--Tao Lin

Something about "the female gaze"
Something about "it making you cry"
Something about "celebrities in the public eye seeking new eyes"
Something about "the gaze of fashion bookending an interview," about "reinscribing a dominant gaze immediately," about "that impulse feeling crass and cowardly"
Something about "body and mind, feeling something in the gut across town or around the world"
Something about "the compulsion to fill in a silence"
Something about "taking liquids every 45 minutes at night" being harder than "sitting in a chair all day"
Something about "an open invitation for months and months"
Something about "am I the kind of person who wants to sit with her and if so what does that say about me and if not what kind of person am I"
Something about "I was not the kind of person who wanted to sit with her"
Something about "I went there just to watch and the text on the wall said something about generosity and then I got it"

Something about "it's not about me"

Something about "it's not about you unless you sit in the chair"

Something about "or maybe it is"
Something about "is she the diva or the mirror"

LA Liminal at Sharkforum!

Three poems from the book -- "Stare Too Hard & the Bad Feelings Creep Back," "On the Balcony," and "Back in America" -- are featured on Sharkforum.

Thank you, Simone!

Two For Today

Switchback's 1st or 2nd book contest for a woman-identified poet ends at 11:59 p.m. tonight! Full guidelines.

I'm reading at KGB Bar at 7:00 p.m.! Hope to see you there.