I’m going to be Broadsided (and I love it)

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Got the wonderful news the other day that I’m to be Broadsided. If you’ve never heard of this press, they pair up writers with visual artists to create broadsides which are published online, one a month, as pdfs and which people all across the country (and beyond) download, print, and post in the streets or anywhere. Next August my poem “Stop Doing That,” first published in Poet Lore, will be Broadsided. I’m excited to see what an artist does with the poem. Meanwhile, check out the broadsides already made (they’ve been going since 2005) and perhaps print out a few and stick them up in your neighborhood? Anyone can become a Vector (their name for people who post their broadsides.) Cool, eh?

Some of my favorite broadsides include:
* “Aphasia” by Dorianne Laux
* “Epithalamion” by G.C. Waldrep
* “In Our Time” by Ilya Kaminsky
* “Mooring Stones” by Paula Carter

My final Poets Weave

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The last show from my time as host of The Poets Weave is now available as a podcast/stream. It’s the third and final section from Curtis Bauer’s reading this last spring as part of the Indiana Review’s Blue Light Reading Series. I’ve posted it on my Poets Weave page, or you can just visit directly here. It’s five powerful minutes of poetry and a lovely end to my three years as host. I’ll miss it. A lot. Thank you to Curtis and all my generous guests, the publishers and poets who allowed me to read their work, and most of all to my wonderful producer LuAnn Johnson. I know Romayne Rubinas Dorsey will be a great host. Visit often to see what she gets up to!

They don’t want to kill anyone

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Received the happy news that three of my poems will be published in upcoming Issue Sixteen of the elegantly designed online literary journal > kill author. “Every issue of > kill author is  subtitled with the surname of a deceased writer” and the writer for Issue  Sixteen will be Kōbō Abe. You can read a 2009 interview with the anonymous editors over at PANK.

P.S. Do yourself a favor, sit down with a mug of mulled cider and give a listen to the twelve minute audio of Jon Steinhagen reading his short short story “Washington Crosses the Delaware, Eventually” from the current Issue Fifteen. It’s hilarious and he reads it marvelously. There’s something (a lot) to be said for actual acting ability when it comes to reading your work aloud.

A Poem by Jim Harrison from Letters to Yesenin (1973)

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Number 19

 

 

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth
not so apparently devoid of angels. We become very tired with
pretending that we like to earn a living, with the ordinary objects and
events of our lives. What a beautiful toothbrush. How wonderful
to work overtime. What a nice cold we have to go with the cold
crabbed spring. How fun to have no money at all. This thin soup
tastes great. I’m learning something every morning from cheap wine
hangovers. These rejection slips are making me a bigger person.
The mailbox is always so empty let’s paint it pink. It’s good for
my soul that she prefers to screw another. Our cat’s right eyeball
became ulcerated and had to be pulled but she’s the same old cat.
I can’t pay my taxes and will be sent to prison but it will probably
be a good experience. That rattlesnake striking at dog and daughter
was interesting. How it writhed beautifully with its head cut
off and dog and daughter were tugging at it. How purging to lose
our last twenty dollars in a crap game. Seven come eleven indeed.
But what grand songs you made out of an awful life though you had
no faith that less was more, that there was some golden splendor
in humiliation. After all those poems you were declared a coward
and a parasite. Mayakovsky hissed in public over your corpse and
work only to take his own life a little while later. Meanwhile
back in America Crane had his Guggenheim year and technically jumped
ship. Had he been seven hundred feet tall he would have been OK.
I suspect you would have been the kind of friends you both needed
so badly. So many husbands have little time for their homosexual
friends. But we should never imagine we love this daily pile of shit.
The horses in the yard bite and chase each other. I’ll make a carol
of my dream: carried in a litter by lovely women, a 20 lb. bag of cocaine,
angels shedding tunics in my path, all dead friends come to life again.

Here I shall make occasional blog posts…

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…Concerning my poetry and poetry in general. I don’t know how involved I’ll get with this. Perhaps often, perhaps very infrequently (there are so many wonderful poetry blogs out there already). We’ll see how things shape up. Meantime, here’s a photo I took of some reeds.