"While We Were Dreaming" by Pink Mountaintops

Vampire (Let the Right One In) by Pink Mountaintops

Straight Cold Sober

3:30 am and completely finished with one syllabus and mostly finished with the other two, minus the proofing and the long-overdue proofing for the Fulcrum feature and a review for Douglas Rothchild's Theogony I was supposed to have done by July 15. But I roofed a house and painted a house and a baby room and have shit to show for it. And I'll have shit to show for anything until I show up and teach, and I won't get paid hardly anything but I like teaching. People leave me to my own devices when I'm a teacher. Everyone has advice for an assistant carpenter. My advice is the world is shit so don't eat it.

And listen to Billy Joe Shaver, Charley Patton, Son House and Daniel Johnston all light long.

An Afternoon of Poetry (Pie) 8.15.09

Sameul Amadon, Stephanie Anderson, Tom Andes, Robert J. Baumann, Tim Earley, Jennifer Jabaily, Friedrich Kerksieck, Don Lee, Karl Saffran, & music by Sam King

New Harp & Altar

6.

Our Little Press, Our Little Family, Our No Money & Our House of Joy

Tomorrow I get to rip shingles off a roof in 90 degrees for eight bucks an hour, much better than cobbling books together and watching the nation collapose on the internet. Eastern Washington University Press is going away. Everyone is losing their jobs. But more and more Katy and I have pulled into ourselves, our little house on a shallow hill, with out cats and our tree stumps (now some of them have grown branches and look like small bushes). We read books (Katy finishes 2666 in a couple weeks, while I stop halfway through the second section and read Rachel Loden and Douglas Rothchild). We write our little pieces (Katy's far fewer music essays, my increasingly self-referential poems). And we blip ("It's not a bad way to make a living/And I ain't complaining" --"Going to Acapulco"). I guess we miss Brooklyn, but we're here with the baby coming. We keep the roof from falling in and the lights and AC on. And the press, despite three computer crashes and a perpetual absence on funds, thrives because people keep buying our books. People keep sending us amazing poems. We have the smaller room on one side of a bedroom ready for the baby, and on the other side the larger room houses all of our book-making apparatus and inventory. While Narwhal is still in bad shape, far from ready for those last few orders, our other titles are piling up. Maybe things will work so in the future. Political upheaval will entrench itself on Twitter and the arts will move into the side offices and livingrooms of the dedicated rather than the established. Our resource is us.

Incredibly happy from the bottom of the world.

Post-Reactionary

Our first reading at The Burning Chair's new digs featured Farrah Field & Jared White, who came into Fayetteville a few days before a wedding in Farrah's family in Hot Springs, a few hours south of here. We didn't know our new space would open in time for their reading (which we were planning to host at our house) until a week before the date. Four Square Fine Art in fact signed their lease five days before the reading. We called the event "a reading at an undiclosed location" until they signed the lease, and we didn't even have time to paint the walls or bring furnishings in. Despite our lack of promotion, a dedicated crew showed up and bought up the books (Farrah's Rising from Fourway and Jared's "Yellowcake" from Narwhal). Jared and I decided, about four hours before the reading, to run off 25 copies of "Yellowcake," which previously had appeared in Narwhal. We've been having computer problems, now resolved by a cheapo new computer, but we were seriously stalled while printing, as I had to load the printer driver an initialize programs. Anyway, as always we were sewing up to the start of a during the readings. They were fantastic, of course. And we're happy our Fayetteville audiences are so generous, engaged, and enthusiastic--even those who aren't poets or fans of more traditional poetries.

Katy and I have been talking a lot, before, during and after Jared and Farrah's three day visit, about the future of Cannibal Books and The Burning Chair. But of course mostly we've been talking about art, the variety of media, and our part in it. I was excited--and we all talked about it, including at the reading--about Stephen Burt's article in Boston Review about "The New Thing." What was exciting for us was to see our friends and poets we print talked about seriously by someone removed from our immediate company. I have a feeling Burt started exploring the Flood Editions catalog (the best small press catalog right now--the closest we have to a New Directions in the earlier Laughlin years) and found Zach Barocas' The Cultural Society (which publishes Graham Foust, Devin Johnston, Peter O'Leary, Philip Jenks etc) but also published Joseph Massey and Justin Marks. I get Burt's Massey-Barocas-Marks-Foust thread (though I see Foust removed from the other three slightly, more like Johnston, who is not much like Marks at all). I don't think his definition suits the broader assortment of poets he discusses. And it is sort of proposterous to call something "New" and a "Thing."

Farrah got us talking about a response movement, or at least the made-up name of a movement, called "The New Thingy." I think I like "Thingy" in its own quotes. I hope she puts up a syllabi of New "Thingy" poets on Adultish.

Katy came home for lunch today, as usual, and we talked about Post-Feminists. I know Post-Feminists who are Post in the way Post-Modernists follow Modernists, and I know Post-Feminists who are Post-Gender Feminists, who want to move beyond the Gender issue.

Do they fight? Are poets more vicious? "Post-Feminist" is a vacuous definition, but at least it defines a separation from its precursor. "Post-Avant" is as meaningless a term as "The New Thing." Exterior labeling often misleadingly connects poets by a critic's aesthetic premise rather than by discovering conections in the work. I do not like how "Post-Avant" asserts a split with the Avant-Garde, itself a broader term for a tradition rather than a single group. "The New Sincerity" and "Flarf" have connatative qualities that reflect the shared idiom of those poets who named their own groups. The name of a group must be somewhat misleading in order to be accurate. I don't want to be disconnected from anything, as "Post" and "New" suggest. So, I am going to call myself "Uber-Avant." I don't want to name anyone else, but everyone is welcome. I might, as the Infra-Realists in Savage Detectives, kick some of you, or all of you out. Or you can wrestle the name from me and leave me out of your anthology.

Blueberries

New baby on the way: some haven't heard yet. A girl. That dominates my thinking, and my obligations keep me underwater.

Hunting a summer job. Applied for teaching/tutoring stuff but now see myself more likely on a roof with a nail gun.

Poetry happenings:

Carolyn Guinzio's Untitled Wave is now available from Cannibal Books $7. She's one of my favorites (see many previous blog posts).

We'll have Burning Chair Readings in Fayetteville in June, August, and November. Poets include (so far) Jared White and Farrah Field, Kevin Holden, Kate Greenstreet, Farid Matuk and Susan Briante, and Adam Clay. Not 100% sure on the venue.

The Burning Chair Blog will be up and running with regular reviews soon (for the firsttime in several years).

Also, had a blast reading w/ Mike Hauser at Salacious Banter. Thanks to Karl Saffran, who took me to a Brewers game and Woodland Pattern as well. Mike's chapbook Psychic Headset from Mitzvah chap is gnarly, in the 80s hairband sense of the word. I mean it's the balls.

Otherwise, Wisconsin was sort of a bore.

This was supposed to be an inspired blog post. My feature of Frank Stanford for Fulcrum is done. I guess I'm worn out from that.