Erik Campbell at NWU: Tues, Oct 2nd, 7pm

Erik Campbell
Nebraska Wesleyan University Alum
& Author of Arguments for Stillness
named by Book Sense as one of the top ten poetry collections for 2007

Tuesday Oct 2
7PM Poetry Reading
Callen Conference Hall
Smith Curtis Building

3:30 Q&A with Students
Alabaster Room
Old Main Building

The second reading in the Nebraska Wesleyan University Visiting Writers Series takes place next Tuesday, October 2nd. Poet Erik Campbell, author of the Book Sense top 10 pick Arguments for Stillness & NWU alumnus will be giving a reading of his work at 7pm in the Callen Conference Center.

Campbell’s first poetry collection, Arguments for Stillness (Curbstone Press, 2006), was recently named by Book Sense as one of the top ten poetry collections for 2007. His poems and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, The New Orleans Review and other literary journals and magazines. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry, and has been a finalist for several literary awards.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1972, Erik Campbell grew up in Bellevue, Nebraska, and received his BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1995. He had been living in Papua, Indonesia since July 2002, where he worked as a technical writer for an American mining company. He and his wife have just returned to the United States from Papua.


You can read an interview with Campbell regarding his work and his book here.

Four Face of Vietnam Photography Show Opening Today & Avishay Artsy on Tribal Shennanigans

Hello Lincoln. I think you should check out this photography show opening at the Asian Community & Cultural Center.









Also if you didn't listen to Weekend America last Saturday you should check out Avishay Artsy's story about a tribe that plays funny with their transnational history. Here's the text from the website:

Self-proclaimed tribal chief Malcolm Webber is in a federal prison in Wichita, Kan., this weekend. He's been charged with several things, including harboring illegal immigrants and attempting to defraud the U.S. government. His unrecognized Native American tribe, Kaweah, has been the hope of undocumented workers, who were told that joining could help them gain legal status in the United States. Reporter Avishay Artsy brings us the story.

It's the first story in the first hour of the episode that you can find here.

I've been thinking about that story all week. Not only because Artsy is a great reporter (& has the single best name of anyone that I've ever had a beer with in Eagle, Nebraska), but because it seems like one of these moments of creatively conflicting clash between a multiplicity of cultures. One of the nodes of strange energy that Glissant talks about. So much multiculturalism in reporting is either veiled racism or the buffed-racism of Pollyanna-ish good events. Which is not to dismiss the events, but the reporting of those events is so often a matter of reduction to essentialism, a form of putting non-white ethnicities in their place. While I hardly condone the actions of this chief, this is a novel & fascinating manipulation of cultures & Artsy's reporting does a fine job of bringing it out. All that & an illegal immigrant Christian rapper!

Dead Birds, Evil Dogs & Poems About God

On the way in to the concert hall to hear Mary Li Ma perform on the Chinese guzheng, there was a dead black bird in the middle of the walkway.

Ma was amazing, virtuosic. Her fingers dancing & slamming across the strings of the guzheng, which is kind of like a cross between a mountain dulcimer & a small harp. The music was haunting, soulful & surprisingly bluesy at times.

When we left the concert hall the dead bird had been kicked over to the side of the walkway, but not picked up. I didn't pick it up either.







Check out Typo #10. So much great work in there, but I can't get beyond Joshua Poteat's new poems yet.

Check out this excerpt:







Also, for all of you blog-hungry, fantasy-sports-&-erudite-fiction-criticism-seeking people out there, you should check out Adam's blog. His story about the evil dogs is especially haunting.

If you ever google me...

Reading through Octopus submissions, which we have deluge of & not the kind of deluge that is full of debris & brackish waters. We have a deluge of sweet, delicious, nourishing poetry. It's like trying to swim in a flood of roast beef. Or rather, it's like trying to keep up with a swarm of hornets made of SUGAR. Or rather it's like reading submissions of such high quality that I am being constantly tested & amazed by them.

We are currently looking for book reviews & recovery projects for the next issue, so if you have one or would like to propose one drop us a line at editor@octopusmagazine.com or drop a line drawing of a woman with a saber-toothed tiger into a jar of Kool-Aid & Zach & I will magically appear.



Is it wrong of me to think that this is the best closing gesture to a cover letter ever?

If ever you google me, for whatever reason, I am not the corrupt staff sergeant convicted of police brutality in Toronto back in 2000, by the same name.

No. No, it's not.

Jack Spicer

Q: Well, I was a little confused. Are you concerned right now that the ghosts aren't operating you? Or do you want to be totally operated by the ghosts?

JS: I just want to lead a simple life.








JS: As I said, if a Martian comes into a room and sees a baby's alphabet blocks, he'll obviously use them to communicate. He won't understand what they're for or anything else. He'll simply rearrange them into an order which makes very good sense Martian-wise, and doesn't too much Earthman-wise, and he'll just use them. No, obviously, baseball is not going to last as long as these poems. If they're good poems they're going to last. But I don't see any of it makes too much difference.

ET: I know what I feel in the last section of the Festival poetry. It's that the cautions and warnings that I so often feel in other poetry - I don't know whether it's there or not, but that's how I feel - aren't there in the last three poems.

JS: Yeah. It scares me too.

Brunch with Man's Last Great Invention

Next Sunday MLGI will be playing a brunch show at Benson Grind in Omaha: 6107 Maple Street. Right across the street from The Slowdown.

Ambient-experimental music to shine your eardrums while you gobble down some eggs & other brunch-related foods! Toast! Jam!

You can listen to some of Man's Last's music on the links above & hear/watch some clips of our Predator show here.

We played with two great Minneapolis bands on Friday, The Themes & A Whisper in the Noise, both of whom you should check out if you like your music to be the kind of music you like to listen to. Which I think you do. I think you have a problem keeping your skin on tight. The Themes will help you with that. A Whisper in the Noise will help you find your way home when your home is a box of antique goose feathers.

but the birds very birds don’t know don’t know how to help us and us and us

Sawako Nakayasu gave an incredible reading last night. She is a poet of such versatility & wonder. Her poetry is a constant search for new ways of discovering, explaining & participating in the world. No matter what her aesthetic parameters are to a project she always conjures an intense amazement for what the world reveals. During the Q&A with my students she talked about how poetry is a way of filtering the world into your unique experience & how this is a necessary aesthetic process for engaging the world. The work of art is the work of participating in the world--of creating the individual experience from the relational experience. There is so much teaching of poetry that tends to focus on the craft, on the work of it, the way a poem can be taken apart & put back together stronger, but I feel like without an understanding of why one should write there is really no point to the craft.

Check out this ant poem of hers. She opening the reading with it. It is lovely.

Battery


We get lost in the desert, lost very lost, and although we aren’t going to tell anyone that we can’t possibly be any more than two miles from civilization, the fact remains that we are lost very lost in the desert very desert, and the car very car is having a hard very hard very hard time getting started up again, and so we kick it very kick it in its ass very ass and the car is still having a hard very hard time and we are feeling lost all the more lost very lost in this desert very desert, and there is no one around us no no one very around us at all very all and there are birds very birds of which there are many very many, but the birds very birds don’t know don’t know how to help us and us and us help start the car very car and we are more lost more lost and we need help need very very help need very very help help and there is no no no one aroud us except if you count count count those ants in the ant hill that is all we have all we have are the ants very ants and then we wire them up yes wire them up yes I said wire wire wire and with the force of all the ants all wired all wired up and then on the count of three we all yell “CHARGE!”

Also, check out this cool interview with Patty Paine, editor of the new online journal Diode.

Sawako Nakayasu: Thursday Sept 20th, 7PM

Nebraska Wesleyan University Visiting Writers Series

Presents a poetry reading by Sawako Nakayasu

Thursday September 20th, 7pm
Callen Conference Center, Smith-Curtis Building
Nebraska Wesleyan University

Q&A with the poet
3:30 Alabaster Room
Old Main Building, Nebraska Wesleyan University


This Thursday, Sept 20th, at 7 PM poet Sawako Nakayasu will be reading poems at the Callen Conference Center in the Smith-Curtis Building of Nebraska Wesleyan University. Earlier in the day she will be discussing poetry and translation in an informal setting.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books include Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press), So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press), and Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, forthcoming). Books of translations include For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, forthcoming 2008) by Takashi Hiraide, Four From Japan (Litmus Press), featuring four contemporary poets, and To the Vast Blooming Sky (Seeing Eye Books), a chapbook of poems by the Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa. She is the 2003 recipient of the US-Japan Creative Artists’ Program Fellowship from the NEA, as well as a 2007 NEA Literary Translation Fellowship and a 2006 PEN Translation Fund Grant for translating the poetry of Chika Sagawa and Takashi Hiraide, respectively. Her own writing has been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, and Vietnamese, and she is currently working on an insect-based project featuring ants.

Jake Gillespie & Nolan Tredway Opening at the Sheldon, Tomorrow 5-7 & Welcome Diode!

Jake Gillespie & Nolan Tredway at Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery
Upcoming Exhibitions

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska
September 14th — October 14th

Opening reception September 14th, 5-7 pm

For more information, go to the Sheldon's website.






Check out Diode, a new online poetry journal run by Jeff Lodge & Patty Paine. It's a great first issue with a wild range of aesthetics:

Chris Abani, Laura McCullough, Rick Barot, Amy King, Bob Hicok, Frankie Drayus, Allison Titus & Rob Schlegel, Julie Doxsee & Mathias Svalina, Eve Rifkah, Peter Jay Shippy, Suzanne Frischkorn, Jake Adam York, Susan Settlemyre Williams, Tara Moyle, Matthew Wills, Karen Schubert, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Joshua Ware, Rich Murphy, and Didi Menendez.

More Things to Assuage the Crushing Pain of Existence

1.

Rob Mclennan is posting some fascinating, in depth interviews with a cool set of Canadian & American poets at his blog. He even interviews those with double-jaws.

2.

Andrew Kenower runs A Voice Box, a great site of recordings of readings, which includes Brenda Hillman, Octopus Books author Lily Brown & Dr. Skeleton Gloves himself.

3.

Kenower also started a chapbook press called Trafficker Press, which released a wonderful chapbook by Esther Lee called Blank Missives. Check it:

Dear _______pling,

All year long winter threatens the eggs. For the heatless bird I'm drawn to I fatten up against the wind. As the bus halts, a stranger says, If i don't see you tomorrow, it's because I've jumped off a bridge. I don't need that kind of burden, the man I loved once said. Then I do see him tomorrow. And the stranger tomorrow too.

Yours,

_______pling

Order it for $8 from 1639 woolsey street berkeley, ca
or contact them at: akenower at gmail

4.

Nebraska Wesleyan University Visions & Ventures. Check out this lineup:

Tuesday, September 11

* 9 p.m., Videos, “Fast Trip, Long Drop” and “Habit” by Gregg Bordowitz, Associate Professor of Film, Video, and New Media, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Olin B Lecture Hall. Free and open to the public.

Wednesday, September 12

* 7 p.m., Chiara String Quartet performance, O’Donnell Auditorium.
* 8 p.m., Chuck D, Founding member of Public Enemy, “Race, Rap and Reality,” O’Donnell Auditorium.

Thursday, September 13

* 9 a.m., Gregg Bordowitz, Associate Professor of Film, Video, and New Media, The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, “Sentiment, Belief, and Medium,” O’Donnell Auditorium.
* 10:30 a.m., W.J.T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago, “Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” O’Donnell Auditorium.
* 3 p.m., Pat Graney, Founder of Pat Graney Dance Company, “The Prison Project: Art as Transformative Learning for Incarcerated Women,” O’Donnell Auditorium.
* 7 p.m., Suzan-Lori Parks, Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright for the Broadway hit “Topdog/Underdog,” “An Evening with Suzan-Lori Parks,” O’Donnell Auditorium.


CHUCK D!!!!
CHUCK D!!!
CHUCK D!!

I hope that this space will soon have a photo of me standing beside Chuck D, smiling.

5.

This sonnet by Bernadette Mayer:


Sonnet We Are Ordinary C'mere

Excerpts I love you from abstracts
So what who cares songs of one and
Experience of this is a case like
Whole and I am not from there I write
To you to say I know nothing as ever
No rhyming no everything there is
No proceeding no thinking you will be my
What will you be? And that is the end

Except for the instance
What are you wearing?
Why aren't you here?
Where'd you put the window?

C'mere
Tell me the rest of it

Two Things to Quell the Confusion

1.

Anthony Hawley's new chapbook, Autobiography/Oughtabiography
Available from Counterpath Press



From their synopsis: Through two series of poems, Autobiography/Oughtabiography explores tensions between memory, erasure, writing and the self. The title sequence tracks a speaking voice as it works through shards of its past, questioning and, at times, undermining the autobiographical act, often perpetuating its own disappearance. With the second series, “Apple Silence,” the already unstable voice becomes increasingly fragmented, deformed.




2.


Baroness' full-length debut, The Red Album
Available from Relapse



Longtime Starlings readers (hi mom) might remember I wrote about Baroness before. At the time I was thinking they had a great live show but a somewhat mediocre set of recordings. This new record is so good. Balancing the alterna-metal leanings with a healthy serving of Southern sludge.

The Cleanest Agony of Defeat

So, the Clean Part did not happen Saturday. Joyelle & Johannes got stuck in one of those O'Hare breakdowns when everything just shuts down. The planes get stuck to the tarmac, the departure screens fill up with "cancels," the water fountains spurt out fetid stuff the consistency of half-dried toothpaste. We're going to try & reschedule something with them in the future. They are really wonderful.

Now, John Gallaher is tough enough to hold a whole reading event, don't get me wrong, but we always envision these readings as places were many voices come together. So we canceled. If you showed up looking for the poetry & there was no poetry & you've been crying ever since please call me. I will comfort you. I will do your dishes. I will lend you my rubber-band ball the exact size & shape of Mt. Rushmore.

We'll have John back here soon. In the mean time you should check out his blog, read the wonderful journal he edits, & buy his heartbreaking & passionate latest book.

Here are some of the photos we received from saddened Clean Part fans:

Three Poets Whose Names Begin with J

Saturday!


Poetry in Lincoln!


Seats!




Posters by Sam Rapien.

We Will Call It By Name

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was hanging out with Hart Crane. It was Mexico-not-Mexico in that dream way & I kept trying to decide whether I should tell him about what was to come. The ship. The ocean. The opening maw of decision or accident.

But each time I tried to tell him, he would point out the flowers. He would hand me some piece of sea glass or an ornate tin box. The breeze billowing the think cotton curtains. The hum of insects, the sound of motorbikes.

My friend told me that maybe this was a message from him. Not everyone can be saved. Hart Crane died at 33. You can't say he jumped off the boat. But everyone says he jumped off the boat.

Read Betsy Wheeler's Poems on MiPo

Read them


Seriously.




Did you read them yet?
You'll know you read them because you'll be a better person.
Are you a better person yet?
Then you didn't really read them.
You need to really, really read them.

Go back here & read them again.




There. Feeling better?
Oh...



Well...


I don't really have anything else to offer.

Except a few aye-ayes:

Sat Sept 8th

The Clean Part Reading Series Returns!








Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson & John Gallaher: September 8, 7pm, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

Free & Open to the Public!

Free, just like dreams.


These are three incredible writers, all filled to the very top with passion & the magic that makes words turn into little toothy animals that bite at your ankles & ears.




also



I saw the Chiara String Quartet play last night & they were incredible. They played movements from Jefferson Friedman's Quartets 2 & 3. Apparently they'll be recording them soon, which should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Stand up, walk down the the basement & invent a new kind of clock that doesn't need time.

They'll be playing these pieces again soon. Mark your calenders. Buy a box of thumbtacks & shake them around. Hide the box beneath your pillow & you will wake with a sparrow's egg:

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 7:30pm
Lincoln, NE
The Chiara String Quartet
Kimball Recital Hall

Lincoln, NE

Chiara String Quartet Faculty Concert at UNL
Jefferson Friedman String Quartets No. 2 and 3

Go Man Suit, Go!

Number one! Number one!