Thursday, December 30, 2010






I talked about some books I enjoyed this year

A new Rabbit Light Movies is up. I like the look of this full length poem film by Zach. I dont know what it is exactly, but I see a lot of faces I know.


Im reading in New York next weekend with some friends from our MFA program at UMASS. That'll be good. We're on break now and I miss them.



Today is Dara Wier's birthday.

Happy Day Dara.

Here is one of my favorite poems of hers, taken from Fou (whatever happened to that magazine?)


Chinese Restaurant on Fire

There they were sitting in the shade of a twisty gingko only more it was he

and less it was she conversing, only is it conversing when one does all of the

listening and the other does all of the talking, it probably is in some and not

in all circumstances. These were the subjects and the subjects were many:

his recent move, his eating habits, his phone manners, his headaches, his

sleep apnea, his poor eating habits, his non-cooking ways, his laundry

phobia, his desire to have children, his house hunting activities, his failure to

receive results in this endeavor, his apartment complex, his mother’s

dependence, his inheritance, his brother’s mental ill-health, his wife’s long-

suffering, his several ambitions, his many good qualities, his friends in

important places, his past of dark and glamorous drug addiction, his bad

knees, his dental work, his plans for future projects, his preferences in

footwear, his reading habits, his fear of failing to succeed, his ambitions, his

history of past successes, his taste in music, his this that and the other which

went on uninterrupted as the smell of smoke accumulated and eventually

insisted on gaining her attention which did nothing to deter his continuing

his involvement with his it turned out to be nothing less than all he could

find in his mind at the time, each piece of it leading to another, while she

had by now looked in the direction from which the smell of smoke was

coming to see rising up out of the rooftop just over her shoulder Chinese

cooks frantically scrambling from out of what must have been some sort of

escape hatch, it looked as if they were ascending, smoke did this to them, it

created an aura of beauty around their danger and it looked as if they would

successfully free themselves in time to survive as he continued talking

though it had become difficult to hear him above noises of people running

and by now at least three different kinds of sirens so she said look the

restaurant is on fire and he ignored her and kept right on talking as if none of

this registered as he was so lost in his thoughts nothing could derail them or

stop their headlong streaking into the future where everything was in flames,

everything in ruins, uninhabitable.



Sunday, December 5, 2010


Lilys book is finally available. You can get it here.

Julias book is finally out. You can get it here.

I couldnt be more excited about these books. These are two of my favorite poets out there right now and these are their first books.

If you live around my neck, come see Julia and Lily read with Cynthia King on Dec 19th at Flying Object in Hadley, MA. details here.

This event is one of the last Im going to put on in the area for a while. As of next year I'll be co-running the JUBILAT reading series at the Jones Library in Amherst.