Last night Brandon Downing read his new long poem last night. I think its called "At Me," but last night it was called "Jar Jar Dump."

I love Brandon. He breaks poetry.

Tonight is the opening of his art show at Flying Object, called BETA Pearls. Some videos will be shown. This is my favorite.

There is Yes

Blake Butler is a crucial dude. One of the nicest dudes I've met. The type of guy that makes you happy to be a part of the writing community because you get to know, by email or face, good humans such as he. And there is no one who can write like him. No one. His new book THERE IS NO YEAR is out today from Harper Perrenial. Im glad "the man" is paying close attention. It feels like victory. For one and all. So glad things are happening for this guy. Couldnt happen to a better human/writer.

Im trying to not think about my computer crashing (which it did) and losing all of my writing (which happened).

For the month of April you can get any three chapbooks from Horseless Press for only $12.

The last of three poems is up this week at REALPOETIK.
Those poems are -

Moon Above The Law

Creeleys Face

It Takes Longer To Gather Light

Thank you so much to Claire and Lily for letting me stick around for so long.

Speaking of Lily, she has two great poems in Transom, a new journal.

I’m on my shoulder.
Hope is a thing with
force between us.

When you come home,
wonder on your face,
I, underwater, will.

And Ben Kopel has 3 sick sutras in Everyday Genius

to get born / with or without a war / I love to you / when you say / waiting is so beautiful / you don’t believe you / but from my brightest eye / to my blackest heart / I do

from the Black Ocean Blog

BRONWEN TATE: I've been thinking, reading your book and just in general recently, about how words name things that exist in the world (bees, the moon, a table), but also are constantly in play with other uses of the same word in other writing. And poetry is sometimes trying to slough off those allusions and make the reader actually see a moon (not a symbol) and at other times relies on allusions to make meaning or create depth. Can you talk a bit about how this works inOrdinary Sun? Do you see your writing moving in one direction or another? Is a knife ever just a knife?

MATTHEW HENRIKSEN: A knife is never a knife as long as I cannot say for certain what a knife is. What does a knife do? I can say that it cuts, but I have not been cut by a knife. Therefore, I have no intimacy with knives. I know what a person is because I know what a person can do. A person loves, and I have been loved by a person. I am a person because I have inflicted my love intimately upon another. In poems, I am not comfortable with "knife" as symbol or as word. If I believe in the holiness of poems, I find holiness in the literal presence of the image, which is neither of the word "knife" itself or what "knife" suggests. The image is the event of a group of words flashing upon the brain and creating a "place" where shapes, colors, and sounds--conceivable sensations--occur. The act of impression, not merely the result, defines the image's presence. If a knife gets into my brain as an image I know what it is. The image is always intimate, inflicted by another and leaving a scar of memory. In "Copse," I do not talk about a knife but my friend's table, "where knife-gnaws never healed." I can't make the reader actually see that table, but I can try to impress the knife-inflicted damage on the brain of another. The image does not come from the actual table or the moment when I saw the table but from the scar of memory that coincided with writing that line. Images are more like ideas than facts, which is lucky for us, because we cannot posses a fact as intimately as we can an idea. The idea of my friend's table made me sad, and the image contains rather than symbolizes that sadness.

burds

"Stockhausen is a motherfucker" -Miles Davis.

Rhythm: The relationships between points in time defined by sonic events.

Harmony: The relationships between two or more sounds occurring simultaneously.

Melody: The relationships between two or more sounds occurring in succession.

Color: The relationships between frequencies perceived as a single sound.

These expanded definitions allow for aesthetic comparisons between the most varied kinds of music.

David Hanner:

"Listening Room, written in Northern Cyprus in October 2002, was premiered by the Ensemble Aventure in December of the same year in Bludenz, Austria.

"The main challenge for the players lies in the fact that each of the twelve musicians plays from the full score, that the score has no bar lines, and that even a conductor is not required to realize it ... The musicians are given extensive responsibility in recreating this 'imaginary landscape' through listening carefully to their sounding environment. They are also given back some freedom to control and shape their own sounding events, just like any soloist would do -- and in fact, every musician loves to do, but too often does not have the time, given the reality of living in impatient times."

Listening Room

from Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino (1923-1985)

"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."

"Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx."

from Harriet via Kenneth Goldsmith:

Bök next showed an image of Steve McCaffery’s “William Tell: A Novel,” which is simply a lower case “i” with a colon atop of it instead of a dot. He recalled the story of William Tell and then conflated it with the William Tell episode of William S. Burroughs, where he shot his wife dead playing William Tell. Bök examined the linguistic implications of “the mark,” in terms of self-expression, in relation to a target, as well as a graphic manner of mark making. And then he further extended these metaphors to examine the tension between literatures “will” and how much a work of literature “tells.”

Bök divided writing into four categories:

A. Cognitive Writing: works that embody, as values, both intentionality and expressiveness. These works are both self-conscious and self-assertive. Their authors exert control over both what they “will” in the text and what they “tell” in the text.
B. Automatic Writing: Works that embody, as values, less intentionality and more expressiveness. These works are not self-conscious, but self-assertive. Their authors exert control, not over what they “will” in the text, but only over what they “tell” in the text.
C. Mannerist Writing: Works that embody, as values, more intentionality and less expressiveness. These works are self-conscious, but not self-assertive. Their authors exert control over what they “will” in the poem, but not over what they “tell” in the poem.
D. Aleatoric Writing: Works that embody, as values, no intentionality and no expressiveness. These works are neither self-conscious nor self-assertive. Their authors forfeit control, both over what they “will” in the text and over what they “tell” in the text, doing so in order to maximize the discrepancy between what the Self might intend and what the Text might convey.
Bök claimed that these four categories: Cognitive, automatic, mannerist, aleatoric—this “quadrivium” of literature exhausts every means of permuting the relationship between intentionality and expressiveness.
He concluded by stating: “If conceptual literature has already explored each concept of writing beyond the “cognitive,” perhaps, such literature must now imagine unthought varieties of writing beyond these four categories in order to imagine a new way of playing ‘William Tell.’”

One Eyed Dad

I have a new poem up today at RealPoetik. Number two of three. I won a dare by by titling it as i did. Eat that Gizzi.

Happy birthdays today to some good Aries friends Dottie Lasky & Emily Pettit.


Im going to go to a coffee shop and read Abraham Smiths' HANK for the rest of the day. Happy Sunday.

I have three poems from THE CONSTITUTION up at Action Yes


I have a poem, "Moon Above the Law" at RealPoetik.


Here is an early version of a TOTEM at I am a Natural Wonder.

Horse Less Press has a new website. Thats where you can learn how to read THE CONSTITUTION. BUT also can buy this fantastic book by Richard Froude.


Brave Men Press had a reading at Flying Object on March 12th, 2o11. Chris Martin, Ben Kopel, Michelle Taransky, and I all read.

Ben

Chris

Favorite Poems Heard in 2011

1. Spasmodic Tragedy by Macgregor Card
2. This is Also a Dolphin by Ish Klein
3. The poem ZS read about "a sack of potatoes"
4. Tick by Julie Carr
5. The poem/story JD read at AWP about "flings"

I went to LA for I had some theme music.

I had some love.

I am going back real soon. Promise.

Tomorrow, Friday 3.4.2011, i am reading at The Multifarious Array in Brooklyn with Chris Carrier, Jared White & Chris Hosea.



Brave Men Press is also being a reading on March 13th in Hadley, MA. We are celebrating. Chris Martin, Michelle Tarakansky, Ben Kopel and me will be reading. There will be videos and bacon. Also a limited book celebrating the reading with 2 new poems by each poet, free if you come. If you come.

Did I say?

Brave Men Press has a whole lot of new things for sale. New chapbooks by Chris Martin, Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Lily Brown. Ben Kopel's sold out in a day. But you can get it in this box set.
This is why we're celebrating.





The 3rd issue of Evening Will Come is. A good interview with Hoa Nguyen, which I learned at AWP you pronounce as "Wong Wei". That was all I learned at AWP this year.

I remember having a conversation with an x girlfriend about when you were most happiest in your life. For her, it was listening to ska punk. I can remember one day living in Boston, almost spring, in my apartment on Westland Ave, behind Symphony Hall, listening to Cornelius while making skateboarding moves in my room. No one else was home. That was some happiness. He is happiness in inertia and non inertia. I remember leaving the apartment and trying to carry that feeling with me. I remember it wasnt warm our enough yet and it didnt work. I miss Cornelius. Download these awesome screensavers he scored to a multimedia art show. Very beautiful.

Zach Schomburg was in town. He made my favorite movie of the year. See?

The Constitution

My chapbook THE CONSTITUTION is now available from Horseless Press. It is hot pink and only $6.00. These poems are very important to me. I hope you will choose to read them. You can purchase a copy here.

Poems from THE CONSTITUTION havent arrived yet in the places that I can show you. They'll be in Action Yes and The Columbia Poetry Journal. So for now I will show you one, and take it down when they come home.


Many thanks Jen Tynes. She is wonderful person.

You can get this book and another book from Horseless for only $10. I suggest Chris Salerno's ATM. That book is just great. At one point Chris says "The sale is inside me." I won't forget that.

I'll be doing some readings soon. On March 4th at Multifariuos Array w/Jared White. Chris Carrier, & Chris Hosea.

And on April 23rd in Denver at the Bad Shadow affair with Natalie Lyalin.

Huge Updates from BRAVE MEN PRESS

Hark Brave All,

As we plan our descent into this years AWP conference in Washington DC, we hope that you will spend some thought on the Brave Men & Women who fight for you - Chris Martin, Lily Brown, Ben Kopel, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Jennifer Denrow, Mathias Svalina, Brian Foley & EB Goodale.

It is right to say we have been up to much - four new chapbooks, a box set, posters, finer art, a massive reading. So in one fell swoop, we share with you all their awesome and our devotion, that you may now see for yourselves with your internet eyes.

Chris Martin - How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem

Chris Martin's second book of poems, Becoming Weather, is just now precipitating into material form compliments of the wonderful people at Coffee House Press. His first book, American Music, won the Hayden Carruth Prize and last year he was named one of the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets. Currently he is an editor at Futurepoem books and curator of the response blog Futurepost.

Lily Brown - Being One

Lily Brown is from Massachusetts and currently lives in Athens, where she is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia. Her first book, Rust or Go Missing, is out from Cleveland State University Poetry Center, and recent poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary and Colorado Review.

Ben Kopel - Because We Must

Ben Kopel, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where he edits Laminated Cats Press. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he is currently continuing his education at UMass Amherst. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Sir!, Forklift: Ohio, H_NG_M_N, Sixth Finch, Diagram, and elsewhere. Sorry ma, he forgot to take out the trash.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson - In The Trade of Alive Letters Mis-sent

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Selenography, featuring Polaroids by Califone's Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books, 2010). He has edited two anthologies for University of Iowa Press: Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook12x12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry & Poetics. He lives in Chicago, where he is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Loyola University.


2011 Brave Men Press Coin Library

Made up three chapbooks by Lily Brown, Ben Kopel, & Joshua Marie Wilkinson, this custom designed box set comes with an exclusive etching by Brave Men designer and artist
E.B. Goodale. Supplies are limited.


Limited edition bad ass BMP posters designed by E.B. Goodale



We will also have books on hand limited quantities of BMP titles still available, by Jennifer Denrow, Brian Foley & Mathias Svalina

Jennifer Denrow - From California, On

Jennifer Denrow has two chapbooks: A Knee for a Life (Horse Less Press) and From California, On (Brave Men Press). Her first book, California, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.

Mathias Svalina - Whatever You Love of Weapons You Love For Weapons

Mathias Svalina was born in Chicago, where his parents were both chemists. He is the author of five chapbooks as well as five collaboratively written chapbooks. His work has been published widely in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, The Boston Review, Diagram, jubilat, and Typo. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. Destruction Myth is his first book out from CSU press.

Brian Foley - The Black Eye

Brian Foley is the author of the chapbooks The Constitution ( Horseless Press, 2011) & The Tornado is Not A Surrealist (Greying Ghost, 2008). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Action Yes, Columbia Poetry Journal, Poor Claudia,Typo, H_NGM_N & elsewhere. He edits SIR! Magazine, curates The Deep Moat Reading Series, and with EB Goodale, runs Brave Men Press.

WHERE?

You can find us and these books at AWP this Thursday- Saturday at the HTML Giant table. Supplies are limited, so please plan accordingly. New titles & ephemera will be on sale on our website soon after AWP, providing we don't sell out.

READING?

On Friday night please join BRAVE MEN in celebrating WIDE NIGHT, an evening of readings with the following presses!

*BATEAU*

*BIRDS, LLC*

*BRAVE MEN*

*FACTORY HOLLOW*

*FLYING GUILLOTINE*

*IMMACULATE DISCIPLES*

*MINUTES*

*PILOT*

Readers include:

Chris Martin, Lily Brown, Mark Horosky, Sasha Steensen, Emily Pettit, Dan Boehl, Sommer Browning, Jessica Young, Farrah Field, Guy Pettit, Kelin Loe, Alex Phillips, Luke Bloomfield, Megan M. Garr & Francesca Chabrier!

Brave Men will be represented by Lily Brown & Chris Martin, reading somewhere near the end of the line up, for those of you planning a full evening.


There will always be a lot going on, but we really hope you stop by the table and/or reading and introduce yourselves. We've come to meet you.


Other Brave Men Happenings

Poems by Jennifer Denrow in 751 Magazine & Sixth Finch

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's new journal of poetics, EVENING WILL COME

Poems by Chris Martin in Sink Review

Sounds Thoughts & a poem by Mathias Svalina at Coldfront

A poem by Brian Foley in H_NGM_N

A book cover by EB Goodale of Aaron Burch's How to Predict the Weather



Safe travels to all traveling

Best,

Brian & Emily
Brave Men Press

bravemenpress@gmail.com

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.

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.

JACKIE!

Buy Office Work by the beloved Jackie Clark, out now from Greying Ghost, and (maybe) receive a pamphlet of a poem by me called You Are On Fired.

JACKIE!

This weekend was for hero worship. I saw the "classic line up" of Guided by Voices. Did they play "Kicker of Elves?"

No.

But they did play this.

Not all Guided by Voices songs are about elf kicking. Something that has always irked me in critical treatment of the band is the focus on Pollard lyrics as some sort of fantastical theatre. When you name songs "Postal Blowfish" or "Zoo Pie," you can see this trend forming. There is even a GBV Song Title Generator. This is where poet Tony Tost found the title for his long poem, World Jelly. But this fantasy treatment has always been reductive. Look at the song Tractor Rape Chain, which at first glance looks ridiculous by title alone. But then there are the words

why is it every time i think about you
something that you have said or implied makes
me doubt you
then i look into your cynical eyes and i know it
as if it never meant anything to me

parallel lines on a slow decline - tractor rape chain
better yet, let's all get wet on the tractor rape chain
speed up, slow down, go all around in the end

in the first place it's probably just paranoia
but there's a ghost in my room
and he says i better run
it's a thing i know - it's a thing i believe in
won't you tell it to go away?

An anthemic charge against the dissolution of relationship, of once tender eye looks now gone jaded, of workman-like routine pushing two people in separate paths. It is very human, very familiar and very sad.

That same voice sings confidence to another utilitarian object (utility & work being one of the most persevering themes in Pollard's music & common for a man who worked for years as a forth grade teacher while trying to get his band noticed, only experiencing success when closely pushing forty. That and the fact Pollard has the hardest work ethic in indie rock, release 3-5 albums a year since GBV's 2004 dissolution) in My Valuable Hunting Knife, my favorite GBV song.

I want to start a new life
With my valuable hunting knife
She will shine like a new girl
And I want to shout out our love to the world
Everything I think about I think about
Everything I talk about I talk about
With you
But you don't know what I go through
You don't know

Days, they will turn into nights
But my valuable hunting knife
It will not rust through the tears
And it will not lose its appeal over years

Pollard's music has always been about world making. GBV came from, and continue to live, in their own world. But here is a voice in post traumatic desperation, making real what's not to find a reliable commitment to his cause, which is loneliness. This feeling is echoed throughout his best ars poetica, I am a Scientist.

I am a lost soul I shoot myself with rock n roll The hole I dig is bottomless But nothing else could set me free

Sometimes it is just for the music. But GBV's best songs - Teenage FBI, Game of Pricks, Smothered in Hugs, The Official Ironman Rally Song, Don't Stop Now, Blimps Go 90, Exit Flagger, Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory - wear their self conscious loneliness for anyone to see. It is what I will always remember them for.

***

I need a camera. I went to this great restaurant with this great person. I would have liked to have shown you the fried Brussels sprouts. I would like to have shown you the copy of Macgregor Card's THE GERM #1 I found in a used record shop.

Im reading tonight with Elaine Kahn at this place. Why don't you look at the menu? Its a pretty good menu. Details are not on the menu, they are here