Octopus Magazine submissions

We're still accepting submissions to Octopus Magazine for a few more days. Send a friendly handful of poems & a cover letter to octopusmagazine@gmail.com.



If you listen to Coroner's Mental Vortex while writing the cover letter we will know that you did. And we will be impressed by your taste in death metal.



Also, I got a really great pencil in the mail today. Or actually I got it yesterday. Want to see some pictures of it?

Pictures from the Stain Bar Reading

Great reading last night at Stain bar.


Don Cherry: NU





Byard Lancaster




Dorothy Carter @ the Middle East

My Favorite Quotes from Obama's Speech

A few very small decisions.

More here Thanks for making me peep this, sarahfrybarr.

At first I didn't so much, but now I kind of like the new record from The Faint .

Gaza's I Don't Care Where I Go When I Die, which I guess is a few years old, is awesome from the first notes.

Tomorrow I start teaching here in NYC, co-teaching actually. I'm not sure how the co-teaching is going to work.

Stain Bar Reading Tomorrow Night: Ball, Chace, Mort, Moschovakis, Murphy and Yankelevich. You Should Go to This

Friday, August 29, 2008 @ 7:00 p.m.
Ball, Chace, Mort, Moschovakis, Murphy and Yankelevich

Photo by Doug Barber

valzhyna mort: born in minsk, belarus. second book of poetry “factory of tears” came out in april 2008 from copper canyon press, usa. (the first one was published in minsk in 2005 and called “i’m as thin as your eyelashes”). previously was a writer-in-residence at several international locations, also received two international poetry prizes. besides the united states, “factory of tears” was published in sweden and will come out in 2009 in germany. apart from poetry, valzhyna mort runs a black metal music label.

Anna Moschovakis is the author of a book of poems,_I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone_, and of several chapbooks, including most recently _No Medea_ , a Tinyside from Big Game Books. She is also a translator of French poetry and prose and an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Ryan Murphyis the author of Down With the Ship from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions. He has received awards from Chelsea magazine and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as a grant from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York.

Photo by Stephanie Young

Matvei Yankelevich edited and translated TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DANIIL KHARMS (Overlook, 2007). He is a co-translator of OBERIU: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RUSSIAN ABSURDISM (2006). His translation of the Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Cloud in Pants” appears in NIGHT WRAPS THE SKY: WRITINGS BY AND ABOUT MAYAKOVSKY (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008). He is the author of a long poem, THE PRESENT WORK (Palm Press, 2006) and his writing has appeared in Fence, Open City, and many other literary journals. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in New York City and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn.

stain

766 grand street

brooklyn, ny 11211

(L train to Grand Street,

1 block west)

718/387-7840


open daily @ 5 p.m.

My Latest Trite Observation about Living in New York

I have been party to or overheard more conversations concerning the aged-ness, fat-ness or otherwise unattractiveness of people in the last few months that I think I had my entire time in Nebraskus.

Oh those new yorkers & their big city ways.

Oh New York.

Oh you.

Two New Mottos for Staten Island: Staten Island, What's the Hurry?; or Staten Island, I'm Ready to Fall in Love

The ferry is the best; at sunset it makes nerds look heroic.



For a while I thought working on the ferry might be the ideal job, riding back & forth across the harbor, watching the people enter & exit the boat. It sounds wonderful. Then I forgot about that.



Keith & Jon & I went to Denino's pizza. I told them ahead of time I was going to drink a Budweiser & when we got there I drank a Budweiser.



We got cheese pizza & a 1/2 sausage -- 1/2 broccoli rabe pizza. I don't think we talked about Georgia & Russia at the table once. We did talk about them & Belarus while waiting for our table.



This is Jon looking at me over the cheese pizza.



After the pizza Jon & Keith were very satisfied. Satisfied because of eating the pizza. I was as well, but I was taking the picture, so you can't see me in this picture, despite my satisfaction.



We had a great driver. He gave us his card. His card said "Mike." He asked me a lot about Nebraska. He likes chick peas & really likes hummus. He has been to Dubai, Syria & Saudi Arabia, but he always stays with friends. Mike is not the type of guy who needs to pay for hotel rooms. I think he would like to move to Nebraska. I told him it's very clean there. And it is. If you go to Staten Island, give him a call for a ride.



If my camera wasn't so cheap this would be a good author photo. If Keith were to put out a really crappy books of poems in the early 70s.




Jon got angry.





Then he got sheepish.

Review of Ana Bozicevic-Bowling's Document & Justin Marks' [Summer insular]

Read it here.

Memoir Proposals for Broadway Books

1.

I will bite into a burger that will taste exactly like my mouth. It will have the texture & feel of a delicious beef-burger, but will have the flavor of my mouth. The beef will taste like the inside of my mouth. The lettuce & tomato will taste like my mouth. Even the sesame seeds on the bun will taste like my mouth.

I will write a memoir about what a horrible, horrible experience this will be.

2.

I will go back in time to 2002. People will be wearing trucker hats & listening to dance-punk & telling each other that their colors don't run. It will be a disorienting experience because of the backwards nature of people. I will run through the streets telling everyone about the African American presidential candidate & that Starbucks will be closing stores. No one will believe me. I will be scorned. I will be considered mad.

This will be a difficult proposal to negotiate since the advance will have to include the cost of devising & constructing a way-back machine. However, the memoir will be very poignant because my estranged father was born in the past.

T-Shirt Idea

Jon's new movie




New Museum




Steven Karl & The World's Most Ostentatious Lampshade




JC & watermelon juice




Yndi Hala at Pianos

FMD

I live across the street from a biker-friendly bar. I keep seeing bikers with "Filthy Mad Dogs" vests. Upon googling I've found out this is old Park Slope gang that started as the dance crew Floor Master Dancers. They seem like nice enough types.

Photo page

Kader Attia

At the ICA in Boston last week I watched Kader Attia's film "Oil and Sugar." Such a simple idea -- he build a structure out of sugar cubes & filled it with crude oil, then filmed it dissolving. Such a simple idea, but so mesmerizing to watch & to continue to think about. The sugar cubes flow, warping out of their crystalline shapes & spilling over the edge of the plate with a lava-like insidiousness. I could have watched the brief video all day long. And while the metaphorical significance of using sugar & oil might seem banal, Attia's simplicity of image makes the metaphors continue to resonate for me.

Goings Ons This Weekend

Doesn't that look like a zombie NEG?


Tonight I Go Here:

Friday august 22nd 7:30 pm

85-101 N. 3rd St. #508
between wythe and berry
347-563-2060
take the L to bedford

Dan Magers has poems published in the tiny and Red China Magazine, and his chapbook Exploitation Poems published in 2007. He is a co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Sink Review, and works in publishing. He lives in Brooklyn.

Eileen Kelly recently appeared on the "Today" show and headlined the L.A. Comedy festival. She was a semi-finalist in Nick at Nite's "Search for the Funniest Mom in America," was one of Toyota Comedy festival's "NY's Funniest Women." Her solo show, My Pony's in the Garage, premiered at the NY Fringe Festival where reviewers called it, "One of the best-written and best-performed shows in the festival" and likened it to "a middle-class version of `The Royal Tenenbaums' and 'Arrested Development.'" Her writing is featured in several joke books, including She's So Funny – 1,001 Jokes from the Best Female Comics.

Steven Karl is the author of the chapbook, Lovers' Last Go Around (Peptic Robot Press, 2005), and forthcoming chapbook State(s) of Flux which is a collaboration with the artist, Joseph Lappie (Peptic Robot Press, 2008). His poems, reviews, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming from No Tell Motel, Zoland Poetry Anthology, KNOCK, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Sawbuck, Sink Review, Real Poetik, Eleven Eleven,Vanitas, Euphony, Twenty Years of the Pig, and Cold Front Magazine. He lives in New York City.

The lovely Chel O'Reilly will be our resident musician.

as always, 4 dollar donation, food and drink, and wonderful readers




Tomorrow night I go here:



Yndi Hala & Caspian
Pianos
Yndi Hala on myspace



Sunday night I go here:

Paul Chan: video artist

Turn the sound off on this one. Trust me:







One part of his Baghdad in No Particular Order, all of which is available on youtube:

Poem by Kuo Mo-Jo

I found a copy of Selected Poems from The Godesses at Second Story Books in DC, which was my favorite bookstore in Dc when I used to live there. I'd never heard of Kuo Mo-Jo before (or Guo Moruo, which seems to be more commonly used), but there was a bookmark of a receipt in Chinese marking this poem. I was knocked out by it.

Sunrise

Fiery clouds girdle the rim of the sky
like crimson dragons roving the air,
like crimson lions, whales, elephants, rhinoceroses.
Perhaps you are all outriders of Apollo?

And you, blazing headlights of motorcars,
you twentieth-century Apollos,
have you not changed your mount for a car?
I would be your driver, will you engage me?

Ah! The vitality of light!
Agate morning birds scatter before my eyes.
Light and dark are divided with the clean cut of a knife.
For light there are floating clouds, for dark there are floating clouds.

Both are floating clouds, why then dark, why light?
I hold my gaze on the darkness of the clouds:
all are dispersed by Apollo's potent beams.
Then I saw that the cockcrows all about me have a deeper meaning.

March 1920

Trans by John Lester & A.C. Barnes, Second Edition of the Foreign Language Press Edition.


I need to read more than just this slim selection of poems.

I'm always surprised by the roses hiding inside rhinoceroses.

Lots of Wonderful Things

New Issue of Rabbit Light Movies

Rabbit Light Movies is now online with over 40 short films of poets reading from their work.

The newest episode includes:

sasha steensen | christopher stackhouse | claire becker | michael rerick | matthea harvey | john keene & christopher stackhouse | mary jo bang | k. silem mohammad | christine deavel | anthony hawley | juliana leslie | johannes göransson

and earlier episodes include videos of:

ana bozicevic-bowling | jason bredle | nicole burgund | julia cohen & mathias svalina | christian hawkey | j.w. marshall | kristi maxwell | joyelle mcsweeney | robyn schiff | dana ward | stephanie young | joshua poteat | catherine wagner | j'lyn chapman | jaswinder bolina | chuck stebelton | eric baus | lily brown | sommer browning | george kalamaras | allison titus | jon woodward | zachary schomburg | nathan bartel | sawako nakayasu | andrea rexilius | kate greenstreet | julie doxsee

The next episode, coming december 2008, will feature
eleni sikelianos | philip jenks | lily brown | ed roberson | laura goldstein | lisa fishman | abraham smith | richard meier | arielle greenberg | john keene | dan beachy-quick | tim yu | ben doller & sandra doller | nathalie stephens | nicole wilson | patrick culliton | susan scarlata

please check it out:
http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com



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New Issue of Diode Magazine


Please check out diode's first anniversary issue featuring:


Kazim Ali
Maureen Alsop
Abayomi Animashaun
Rane Arroyo
Sheila Black
Elena Karina Byrne
Juliet Cook
DJ Dolack
Susan Elbe
Noah Falck
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Leslie Harrison
Sean Patrick Hill
Dan Kaplan
Dorothea Lasky
Dorianne Laux
Caleb Puckett
Doug Ramspeck
Lee Ann Roripaugh
Justin Taylor
G. C. Waldrep
Yun Wang
Susan Settlemyre Williams
David Michael Wolach

http://www.diodepoetry.com




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New Issue of Trickhouse is up!

In this issue:

visual artist: Gisela Insuaste
writers: Akilah Oliver, Kristen Nelson, Brenda Coultas
guest curator: David Banash with William Davies King
sound: Paulo Hartmann with Orchestra Descarrego
video: Ed Bowes - "Against the Slope of Social Speech"
correspondent: Robert Anasi
interview: Elwood Beach with George Hildrew
experiment: David Lowe


Also they'll be having an event here in NYC soon:

Please join us for the Trickhouse launch event at the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC on August 30th from 4:00–6:00pm. There will be readings, performances and a video pinata. If you are in the area, please come!

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I received Jesse Ball's Parables & Lies from The Cupboard. A set of taut, riddling short prose pieces that point toward story while creating a mist of rhetorical distance through beautiful writing.

"Our lies are precautions. Our sentinels are doubts that dredge a living sea."

Buy it at The Cupboard website





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Chapbooks from Mitvah Chaps




I received Chuck Stebelton's A Maximal Object & Anne Boyer's Art is War, both of which display (in very different ways) wonderful writing & beautiful design.

Get your own copies while they last at The Mitvah website.


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Tinysides!



When I was in DC the gracious Maureen Thorson gave me an envelope full of tinysides! great poems by Buck Downs, Anna Moschovakis Brandon Brown & many more.

Buy them all at Big Game website

Library of Congress Photos on Flickr

Don't click on this unless you have nothing to do for the next few hours.