Guerilla Poetics

The very cool and talented Justin C. has brought to my attention: Guerilla Poetics. Check it out. I love the premise of it.

A Poem I Had Forgotten I Loved So Much

Gary Short's Gathering

Parfait

To quote Maggie Anderson regarding the evening with Eleanor Wilner here at KSU, "it was incandescent." And it was.

Regarding the week, the people I've met and every minute I've been here, I could gush on and on, but I'll spare you. I will say that last night, the Venice Bar some Eliot Ness beer, and Eleanor--stunning in her black poncho and so funny and wise--made for one of the best nights of my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Wick family with the anything-but-ordinary Chris as representative, and David Hassler, the newly-awarded Ohio Poet of the Year, and Maggie Anderson: gracious,sharp with "quiet authority." Of course, you Eliot Wilson, generous, appreciated, knowing you only gets better. And to my students here--you were icing to the sweetest "birthday cake" of a week. Here are the links I promised you. (You are already missed--stay in touch.)
(Google searches should get you there until I have time to plug in links)
Born Magazine
The Diagram
Wave Books
Death Villanelle
New Pages Lit. Links
Poetry Machine
Also, for a great sample cover letter check out Pebble Lake Review's advice in the submissions section.

For a great sense of the terms and forms of poetry, check out John Drury's Poetry Dictionary.

A feather in the hand is better than a bird in the air.

I'd steal a fortune for you Bird.

I want candy

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A CANDYFREAK

"A lot of this is really about how frightened we are, as a culture, of pleasure. We always have to make it something dirty and hidden. So one agenda of the book, in that sense, is to allow other freaks out of the closet."

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Interview with Steve Almond by Amy Cox Williams

What did I know, what did I know?

Oh how I love Those Winter Sundays. Today is cold and colder still on account of Austin, Texas.

My dear Floridian friend sent me a delicious package of reading: Julianna Baggott & Steve Almond's collaborative novel Which Brings Me to You is pretty & steamy. And Kathrine Wright's winning story in Paper Journey's newest anthology: Blink is worth the whole price of admission. (Lots of other good stuff too including Words on Walls' own Abbe and Tiffany.) Read them.

While I'm at it, let me direct you to anything by Ander Monson. Ander Monson has a brain that's like a rollercoaster all threaded with dollheads and daisies plus some major electricities various. I mean, really, where else can you go for that? Expect some links soon.

Some Thunderless Thursday

Motion/Silence

What storm, a severed house
with its matched pleats, scattered

breaths of lightning, broken thirds?
What children, double-helix

of limbs, that precision of sleep?
For there is no love

but this: your face, our room
with its parted legs. A darkened city

with papery rain and drawn dusk.
What vagueness, all your force,

but what could we mend
with clarity? You know a body

will move against resistance.
And for this, I have made

our bed. The lamp
has burned intention to a slip.

Come to your place. What solace
is there to outlast this?

I have already left you
as much as I can.

Wendy Scofield
(but I wish it were mine.)

Expect Such Breathlessness

The Nearest Simile Is Respiration
To poetry

I was boozed I was doped I was maybe
a floozy before you knew me, loose
leafed like autumn and most of the books
of the Old Testament that fell out
of my father's Bible. I had a body.

I had a habit of hauling my telescope
into the outskirts, ransacking all
the toothsome blackness for what: a reason
not to do me in. Proof I was more
than the seasonal ragbag detritus
choking the rooftop gutters, more
than a piece of the cosmic dust
in some ruined philosophy.

I could not be consoled by the universal
Sisyphus in us all, the dung beetle
nuzzling its putrid globe.

I could not hitch my wagon. The stars
and stars abrade my notions of my Self;
tricuspid Eros chewed me raw; Jesus
Christ rubbed mud in my eyes, and I saw
not. I did not see.

But with you! my sweetheart hairshirt,
my syntactic gondolier, ruffian for hire, befoolable
irresolute Chanticleer: with you, I back-float
the massy and heretofore unnavigable childhood
algal blooms, where no fish swam. No fish
have swum that Mississippi.

With you, I forgive my father's notes
to NASA, the self-inflicted swastika tattoo,
my sister's coked-up juggernaut cannonball
into the afterlife.

I forgive the afterlife,
resurrect John Lennon and the jukebox
at the Quik 'N' Hot, infect myself
with a rare strain of tarantism. With you, I dance
the summum bonum. With you, I am greater
than or equal to the lack, and luck is weather
that permits my red begonias.

Ashley Capps
Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields
The University of Akron

(I just bought this book and it waits like a pastry for me to be allowed to read anything not on my exams list. You have no excuse not to indulge.)

Light Coming Through the Shape of a Moon

and the man etched upon it, with a book of poems beside
and not one dead letter among them, these are live-wires
and lit-bird these are Alan Mays and loaded weapons

Go here to buy some