ABLOOM

My tomato plants are flowering. See? Observe also the charming tenement background. Brooklyn in the summertime... if only smell could be transmitted via photos. You would really be in for a treat. It would smell like diesel, garbage, gutter water, and laundry detergent, with a little bit of fresh baked bread thrown in.

Now I just have to figure out how to pollinate these guys without getting a bee infestation. C'mon flies, time to get useful.

pox on your house

All the time, infestations of some kind. Granted, they're always harmless (fruit flies; Murgatroyd the mouse), but just because they're semi-adorable doesn't mean they aren't irritating. Now, this time, it's decidedly less cute: flies. Where did all the flies come from? I need a fly swatter.

I'm not sick of reading new books, but I am sick of the search for a good, engaging new book -- so I'm rereading Paradise Lost. With a pencil. Again.

Tonight, Rohin's reading at Cornelia Street, so if you're in the NY area, drop on by, from 6-8PM.

The Plague Doctor

Yes, friends and poetry lovers. The rains have departed, the winds have abated, and the sun has emerged from behind the clouds like a cougary neighbor from her dressing gown. It is only fitting that this is the day Achiote Press has chosen to post for purchase Garrett Burrell's new chapbook The Plague Doctor (pictured left).

Garrett, as you may know, is At-Large's shrewd and capable poetry editor (and also my sweetheart). The chap also features some lovely cover art by Elisa Carozza.

But don't take my word for it -- go read the sample poems posted on the site. And check out the other selections on the site as well -- Achiote puts out some nice stuff.

Poet Laureate

I know I'm late on this (two days! The shame...) but hey, Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate, which is very cool. She's one of the smallish percentage of women who've been chosen to hold this position -- 3 15ths: Mona Van Duyn, Rita Dove, and Louise Gluck.

I had the pleasure of hearing Ms. Ryan read a few weeks ago at one of NYC's River to River events. The reading also featured Cornelius Eady, Matthea Harvey (lovelovelove), Hettie Jones, Li-Young Lee, and musical guest mid-90s chanteuse Jill Sobule, who awkwardly (but not un-adorably) punctuated the rounds of rapid-fire reading with hella tunez. But the point I'm getting at is that Ryan was a great reader -- her poems' presence and punch came across even out loud, which is something I find "page poets" sometimes lack (myself included -- woe!). So, congratulations -- use the crap out of that luxury office and travel stipend.

Submission calls and other vague hilarities

I love the generic template of adverb-adjective to describe a film/book/etc. "Searingly evocative," "deeply moving," "angrily boisterous," "bizarrely enticing," "gregariously redundant." These are fantastic word combinations that mean next to nothing but make me laugh that half-chuckle that means something isn't really funny but you want to acknowledge its irony or meaninglessness...

In other unrelated worlds, submission calls!

Then Sweet Pine Press' adorable idea for basically an unbound poetry chap. (Unbound chaps? Wickedly sensual.) Read about it here. I don't know too much about this press, but I love this idea and wanted to share it. From the site's description:

If you have a poem you wouldn’t mind parting with, please forward it via email by August 17, 2008. Should your submission be picked for publication, you will receive an invitation to publish with us that you may decline, should that poem have been accepted elsewhere since your initial submission. You may submit up to 4 poems for consideration.

The link came to me via Rebekah S.

Second, via Autumn. Letterbox is looking for submissions after a fourteen-year hiatus (!). Details:

LETTERBOX is the same ol' semi-annual innovatively formatted paper publication that got left somewhere in the dead letter office sometime back in the early 1990s, but now LETTERBOX welcomes the newest, most cutting-edge work one can send via email and still get away with it.

After a fourteen year hiatus, the editors of LETTERBOX magazine, for Issue #4, invite you to send in new work on the topic of Juncture. Please send your work via e-mail to submissions@letterboxmag.com, in plain text format or attached as a Word or RTF formatted file. For visually or typographically complex work, please also send a version in PDF format. The submission deadline for Issue #4 is October 15, 2008.

There. Now don't say I never gave you nothin'.

state of mind

Teenage girls are fantastic and terrifying creatures. After climbing on the subway yesterday, armed with the Handy Vac and flower pots I rescued from a trash pile, I sat next to a gang of fourteen-maybe-fifteen-year old girls (a gaggle of them? a murder?). I have to say I absolutely couldn't look away. (After all, one should never look away from something as sinister as a murder of girls.) They were ingenious at not talking about anything -- they managed it from 86th St to 14th St. And they were dressed in that offhand way that we all learn to grow out of, with one flat color of eyeshadow right up to the brows and legs swathed in those (*@#&(*& American Apparel"wet look" shiny leggings. I'm honestly not sure why I'm compelled to blog about them, but I do know that I wouldn't wish teenage girls upon my worst enemy. Then again, maybe I would -- they'd distract, confuse, and trivialize the nemesis so that I would no longer have anything to worry about.

Now the Handy Vac. That's something exciting. I had been meaning to buy one for awhile, and there was a perfectly good one just sitting there, ripe for the plucking. As you can see, New York is great, and my life in it is so riveting.

At-Large!

Hilarious multi-part facebook snafus aside, At-Large is out with its new issue... make like a schoolmarm in a library and check it out! I'm especially proud of the poetry section, which features Gina Abelkop, Robert Perry Ivey, Rena Priest, Jessy Randall, and Mike Stutzman. Yay for summer readz.

Londododondondon.

London was great. Some notes:

• London men love pinstripe suits. 4 out of 5 suits are pinstripe between 5 and 7 PM on the Tube.
• ...Plusher seats have ne'er before been seen in public transport.
• ...Nor have clearer announcements been heard.
• However, Cabernet Sauvignon should not be refrigerated, not even in a Tesco, and not even if it's Californian.
• Asian-inspired drop-crotch pants are somewhat popular, meaning that they will probably be popular here in about two years.
• Comics in papers are in general dirtier. Think the opposite of the Family Circus.
• Milton is in good form and remarkably well-preserved.
• Miltonists are for the most part a gracious and accepting lot.
• I need a PhD.

Aside from the conference, I met some lovely Londoners who gave me some guiding light about the literary scene, and I feel very happy with what I accomplished during my brief stay. And, as I was checking my mail one day in the hostel's "Internet Cafe" while a furious teenager hovered above me itching to MySpace, I found out that Weave will publish one of my poems in their Issue #2, which is out in April 2009. I think I celebrated with a bag of Bombay Mix from the vending machine before heading off to bed.

rock the 4th

I think someone's exploding stuff outside, but I can't be sure -- this is Bushwick after all. No, just kidding. But it is way too foggy to see fireworks, so I just get to hear them. These guys put the "disco" in "discontent".

I worked the ol' 11-10 shift today, so I missed Sonic Youth in Central Park and whatever other July 4th shenanigans were a-brewing. But now I'm home, and it's not too hot, and I think things are looking good. I have tomorrow off, and then on Sunday I go to London, so it could be worse.

In another bit of good news, Gina from Finery took my three poems. I'm stoked, since she'll also be appearing in a future issue of At-Large, and since I'll be in Issue #5 with the darling & delightful Brooklyn Copeland (it's the first time we're in anything together, no? Other than the world). So, things are looking good, and let's we have a cheers to the US of A, where, despite everything, the small press manages to be alive and well.

bordeaux gorgeaux

I'm reading D. Nurkse's The Border Kingdom, which I am enjoying very much and which we found an advanced reader's copy of in Strand the other day. I think a review of this book will be forthcoming in some format or another.

Nurkse teaches at SLC; I had the good fortune to take his Craft of Poetry course, in which we spent a good four weeks (or a four good weeks OH) on the sonnet, its form, its function, and the way it ruptures. The class was my first at SLC, and in many ways he is a radical, but the way he taught, the class turned into very much of a professor-lectures-and-students-try-to-impress-professor kind of class. He was always kind and appreciative of the things people said, but there never was a "discussion" in the modern hippy dippy 21st-century class kind of way. Not that I minded.

There were also some weird, wonderful, memorable moments... one of my favorite days was when we read the whole of Larry Levis's "Linnets" round-robin. It reminded me of one storm-cloud of a night when I was seventeen and a bunch of friends and I (and a very tiny bottle of Bailey's) went to the Tequesta Cemetery and read through "Howl." I love incantations. So what of it.

On that same and different note, I saw the best fruit flies of their generation land on my f'ing wine glass one more time, starving hysterical for my vanilla chapstick. I am not happy with how many fruit flies we have. There isn't even that much fruit in the house. Nature turns all crazy when you put it in the city. Wtf, nature.