popsickle and stokedness

Now the previous post has been up for long enough, and I feel OK talking about POPSICKLE. POPSICKLE was amazing. A couple hundred sweaty people, a couple hundred sweaty beers, 25ish sweaty poets and fiction writers. If you are on the Facebook, please look through my album of photos -- but here's a couple of my favorites, of the non-reading part (because this is my person blog!):

Me, and Rohin, and Eve.

Yours truly is icewater-sopping and this really nice guy doesn't mind, which is pretty much the greatest.

I feel so lucky that I am in this scene. As someone (maybe Jean-Paul Pecqueur) remarked in his intro before the reading, no other place is like this. No other place tolerates a day of being cooped indoors in an industrial space for 100-degree weather for the sake of poetry. This event makes me the happiest! Now I am the happiest! Now go listen to this!

amy winehouse

I know this has been posted a million blogs over, but Amy Winehouse. Rarely does the semireality of celebrity death affect me in my real brain and heart. It is usually just a strange feedback loop, and the most it makes me want to do is close my computer.

But the death of Amy Winehouse makes me cry. She was so talented. These are my favorite YouTube videos of Amy. Her 60s glam was her performance trademark and sartorial style, but in these sessions, she's just sitting on a fucking couch and then she opens her mouth and these long threads of sound begin rolling out of her throat, note after note.

Back to Black is one of my favorite albums of all time. I can play it and play it and it doesn't loosen its grip on me. I listened to this beautiful record all through one long, lonely summer when I thought I had forever lost someone I loved very deeply. That summer is, for me, riding endless bus and subway rides through the city, emerging now and again to swelter and dust, trying not to freak out all the time, listening to Amy being brutal and honest and herself, over and over. The album and its words let me feel things. I don't know how else to put it. Rest in peace, beautiful lady.

POPSICKLE 2011: From Concentrate

So POPSICKLE is happening! D. and I put it together last year, and we're resuming it this year -- it's a massive day of readings at Gowanus Ballroom, this fantastic hybrid space metalshop/gallery in Gowanus. Performers include the following:

Jason Helm | Dorothea Lasky | Paul Foster Johnson | Julia Guez | Roger Bonair-Agard | Jon Sands | Will Edmiston | Megafortress | EJ McAdams | Lonely Christopher | Ken L Walker | Becca Klaver | Angelina Dreem | Amy Jenkins | Courtney Ziegler | Jason Daniel Schwartz | Paul Legault | Carina Finn | Anna Fitzgerald | Chris Hosea | Ariana Reines | DJ Amourette . . . .

I know, right? Plus we have TONS of presses, magazines, and vendors (Supermachine | Lumberyard | No, Dear | Tea Party Republicans Press | Death Panel | Moonshot Magazine | Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop | BIRDS, LLC | Belladonna Books | Monk Books | Ugly Duckling Presse) tabling and donating prizes to the raffle at the end of the day.

I love this town's literary scene. <33333

Please check the Facebook invite. One hundred people are already coming. Are you one of them?