Stuart Moulthrop on Electronic Poetry

An essay by Stuart Moulthrop in Electronic Book Review on electronic poetry and internet writing, including a discussion of my book The Front (Roof, 2009).

Applications being accepted for the Institute of New Writing \ Ashland (INWA) summer program through May 15th.

Sonnagrams Chapbook

My Sonnagrams 1–20 chapbook, published by Slack Buddha Press, seems to be unavailable, and some customers have reported paying via PayPal and never receiving anything. Further, the Slack Buddha website has now disappeared.

I am attempting to contact the relevant parties, and hope to have a solution soon. In the meantime, if you are one of the affected parties, please send me an email (my address is below the little green cat on my sidebar), let me know how many copies you ordered, and any other relevant information. I don't know yet quite how to resolve this, but I hope to find a way to make sure that anyone who paid and didn't receive anything gets satisfaction eventually.

Abraham Lincoln 7

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

issue the seventh
winter 2012
42 pp.
$5 + $1.00 s&h

A gorgeous gallery of gallant inventions, garnished and decked with diverse dainty devices, right delicate and delightful, to recreate each modest mind withal: first framed and fashioned in sundry forms by diverse worthy workmen of late days, and now joined together and builded up.

featuring work by

Bruce Andrews
Adam J Maynard
Rebecca Wolff
Adam Moorad
Wendy Trevino
Ernst Herbeck (trans. Gary Sullivan)
Brittany Dennison
Lanny Quarles
Magdalena Zurawski
Allyssa Wolf
Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
Ryan Walker

Purchase Options

current issue $5.00 USDtwo issues (1 year) $10.00 USDsix issues (3 years) $20.00 USDten issues (5 years) $30.00 USDlifetime subscription $50.00 USD

Unsolicited submissions out of my uterus!

West Wind Review 2012

West Wind Review 2012 is now available!


Featuring

Scott Abels, Amanda Ackerman, Shane Allison, Bruce Andrews, Brian Ang, Rae Armantrout, Nathan Austin, Maurice Burford, Allen Edwin Butt, Susan Calvillo, Sylvia Chan, Heather Christle, Rita Dahl, Tiffany Denman, Heather Dubrow, Andrew Durbin, Phil Estes, Nava Fader, Farrah Field, Shaun Gannon, K. Lorraine Graham, Lauren Hilger, Sean Patrick Hill, Gavin Hollingsworth, Janis Butler Holm, Tiffany Denman, DJ Huppatz, Megan Kaminski, Jacqueline Kari,Adam Katz, Nicholas Katzban, Tao Lin, Patricia Lockwood, Travis Macdonald, Kendra Malone, Matt Margo, Adam J Maynard, Adam Moorad, Chris Moran, Eileen Myles, Mel Nichols, Jessy Randall, Megan Ronan, Jess Rowan, Sarah Sarai, Estee Schwartz, Jamie Sharpe, Ara Shirinyan, Jesse Tangen-Mills, Andrew Terhune, KC Wilder

Editor: Zeke Hudson
Faculty Editor: K. Silem Mohammad

180 pp.
$12.00 (+$1.00 s&h)

Bruce Andrews

Generous

when you can’t have it all  /  after all  / finders keepers  / we swallowed it  / better stop  /double-click  / neon clit  // between the not yet // & you promised / a could be heart / anybody // don’t you always want too much // turn in your freedom / & / or / stop inside time / teeter-totter // fill me up / iffy now / under oops // get used to no me // shut up about / in the nick of / action replay / it hurts to understand // signal lost / because I hope / shock the shock / any friends / I for I // hittin’ it / & quittin’ it // give me a hand / below the belt / without the world // careful what you wish for // trip to the penalty box // reshuffle & // the enemy of my enemy... is // home is your homicide // my brain is killing me // it wasn’t normal / nothing can not happen / your mouth is on // pinball time / nice fat target / synapse / twist-off / nothing matters

Emergent Forms: Dana Ward

7:00pm
Thursday, February 16th
Schneider Museum of Art
Southern Oregon University

FREE ($5 donation suggested)


Sponsored by West Wind Review & SOU English & Writing Program

Writers' Routines

http://writersroutines.tumblr.com/post/15051771867/k-silem-mohammad

Twenty Recommended Poetry Titles from 2011

Twenty books of poetry from 2011 that belong on your shelf.  (This was originally two posts of ten titles each, but I've consolidated them into one list.)

Chris Alexander, Panda (Truck Books)
It's like conceptual poetry, only fun.  From the very conceptualistically-oriented Truck Books, which also released Kristen Gallagher's We Are Here (also recommended) this year.

Bruce Andrews, You Can't Have Everything ... Where Would You Put It! (Veer Books)
Another hopped-up avalanche of hard-Language hooks from the King of Pop!

Rae Armantrout, Money Shot (Wesleyan UP)
Win the Pulitzer Prize, then name your next book Money Shot.  Badass!

Guy Bennett, Self-Evident Poems (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions)
Not much more than a series of dumb reflexivity jokes.  I couldn't put it down.

Megan Boyle, Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee (Muumuu House)
Funny, moving, gross, rakish, sexy, astute.

Brandon Brown, Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya Books)
Disclosure: I haven't really read it.  I ordered it from SPD a few days ago and it hasn't arrived yet.  It's on this list because of how freaking EXCITED IN ADVANCE I am about it.

Sommer Browning, Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC)
It's like poetry, only fun.  Includes cartoons!

Robin Brox, Sure Thing (BlazeVOX [books])
One of my weaknesses as a reader is to glance at things on the page sometimes and lose interest if no obvious flash catches my eye at the level of diction or reference--in other words, if the work is heavily dependent on voice.  Big mistake!  When these poems are read attentively (preferably aloud), they thrum with textural and tonal intensity.

Benjamin Friedlander, Citizen Cain (Salt Publishing)
It's like flarf, only good.  Seriously, though, this book fearlessly explores the zones of inappropriateness that flarf sometimes is only rumored to explore, and comes out of them with something like scars.  There are structures of feeling here that don't have names yet.

Uyen Hua, a/s/l (ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni)
It's like, a great example of how a poet can be visibly influenced by O'Hara and not just sound like one of countless NY School retreads.

Ish Klein, Moving Day (Canarium Books)
Ish Klein isn't like anyone else!  This book is superb, and if you've never seen her read live, you should as soon as possible.

Bill Luoma, Some Math (Kenning Editions)
It's like having your brain Simonized with meth juice, only legal (so far).  Do it!  Do it!

Donato Mancini, Buffet World (New Star Books)
With this collection, vispo whiz Mancini departs from elegance and craft dazzle in favor of whacked-out dadaist abandon.  It's all over the map, but it's a cool map, so no problem.

Bern Porter, Found Poems (Nightboat Books)
It's about time a sizeable selection of this amazing writer's works were made widely available in a highly attractive print edition. The only flaw is that the pages are just thin enough so that the images on the back show through a little bit. 

Ariana Reines, Mercury (Fence Books)
Passionate, painful, unafraid.

Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion (Fence Books)
Yes, Reines is on the list twice.  And this book is actually a reprint of the Mal-O-Mar edition from 2007. But it still has to be on here.  For some weird reason, her 2006 debut The Cow didn't resonate with me when it came out; thankfully, her two releases this year have caused me to go back to it and see how powerful it is too.

Steve Roggenbuck, Download Helvetica for Free.Com (www.downloadhelveticaforfree.com)
This was available as a paperback too, but as far as I can see it's now just online.  Roggenbuck is a precocious showman, and I think about twelve maybe, but there's a real visionary textual sensibility at play here.  I love this work!

Camille Roy, Sherwood Forest (Futurepoem)
It's like New Narrative, only in verse.  Actually, some of it is prose.  More to the point, it's got everything you want from that genre: swagger, melancholy, and lush personal expression as raggedly formal as an old hotel's velvet-lined foyer.

Dana Ward, This Can't Be Life (Edge Books)
I can't even begin to do justice to this remarkable collection here.  If I am worth anything as a human being I will write a full review soon, but for now, let me just quote from his poem "Between Here & There": "I want to / tear the heart out of style / & put it between / utter thrall & the infancy / of all things impure."  Without being entirely sure what that means, I'm pretty sure he's achieved it.

Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP)
It has some problems, as others have pointed out.  But it's still a chunky hunk of interesting texts.  Also, I'm in it.

For publishers whose sites contain no info for the title, I link to SPD.

West Wind Review 2011 Fall Sale!

FALL SALE!!

Go to West Wind Review for BIG SAVINGS on the past two years' issues!

2 Readings & a Parade

I'll be giving two readings in New York state next week:

First, UB Poetics is sponsoring a reading by me at Rust Belt Books in Buffalo on Friday, Oct. 28 at 8pm;

Then, the Stony Brook University Poetry Center is hosting me at 2pm on Monday, Oct. 31.

Also, I'll be in the Halloween Poets' Parade in the West Village sponsored by Bloof Books on Sunday, Oct. 30. It starts at 6pm at the Four-Faced Liar, 165 West 4th St. (more here).

Sonnagram in The Nation

My Sonnagram of Shakespeare's Sonnet 53 ("What is your substance, whereof are you made") appears in the August 15-22 issue of The Nation. (They failed to identify it as a Sonnagram, however, so for readers who don't know about the procedure, it just appears to be a random piece of doggerel.)

PBS Newshour

I was poet of the week on PBS Newshour a few weeks ago.

Emergent Forms: David Lau

EMERGENT FORMS: A 21st-CENTURY READING SERIES

presents

DAVID LAU

David Lau is a poet, editor, and essayist. He is the author of the poetry collection Virgil and the Mountain Cat (U of California Press 2009) and the co-editor of Lana Turner: A Magazine of Poetry and Opinion. He lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, CA.

TWO EVENTS:

READING
Thursday, May 19th
7:00 p.m.
Schneider Museum of Art
Southern Oregon University
FREE
suggested donation: $10

and, earlier that same day:

INFORMAL COLLOQUIUM
with the students of WR 441 (Advanced Poetry Writing)
followed by Creative Writing Student Recital @2:00 p.m.
Thursday, May 19th
1:00 p.m.
SOAR (Southern Oregon Arts & Research) celebration
Stevenson Union Room 319
Southern Oregon University
FREE

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

Friday, April 29th
602 Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, New York

What are contemporary poetry's formal and conceptual engagements with the poetry of the past? We’ve invited four poets--Kimberly Johnson, Maureen McLane, K. Silem Mohammad, and Eleanor Johnson--each of whose work reconfigures, re-imagines, or reinvents poetic forms from periods prior to the twentieth century. They will be joined by four scholars--Jeff Dolven (Princeton), Erik Gray (Columbia), Heather Dubrow (Fordham), and Michael Matto (Adelphi)--in a day of readings, responses, and roundtable discussions.

We are planning four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, lasting an hour and a quarter apiece. Each session will feature one poet, who will begin with a short reading, to be followed by a brief response from a scholar. The session will then finish with a roundtable discussion between the scholar and all four poets.

Organized by Michael Golston and Molly Murray

Program

Session 1: 10:00-11:15
Maureen McLane and Erik Gray

11:15-11:30 Break

Session 2: 11:30-12:45
K. Silem Mohammad and Heather Dubrow

12:45-2:00 Lunch

Session 3:
2:00-3:15: Kimberly Johnson and Jeff Dolven

3:15-3:30 Break

Session 4 3:30-4:45
Eleanor Johnson and Michael Matto

5:00—6:00 Reception

Michael Nicoloff & Alli Warren, Eunoia

Together again for the first time since Bruised Dick: Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren bring the hot poetry action with Eunoia, new from Abraham Lincoln Press!

Using only the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet (and a few Arabic numerals and assorted punctuation marks), Warren and Nicoloff have created in Eunoia sixteen poems of a certain number of letters each that when read by English-speaking readers can be experienced as a series of intelligible or semi-intelligible words, phrases, lines, and sentences referring or seeming to refer to various things.

22 pp.
$5 + $1.50 s&h

I Have to Itch His Subaru

for Erika Staiti

I've got this ukulele
in a plastic bag
I'm saving it for the clungheads
and spoadies and I hope
this brave decision will be followed
by others Now yell at the sandwich
with the consistent narrative voice
your mama gave you
Sandwich, how'd you get in them jeans?
by failing to signal while holding
hands in the time of the Perseids
with the weird dude who owns
those cabins the dude who invented
coinage What a clown!
clogging the sidewalks of the republic
I remember when this bar was a horsehair
love mat or another man's noodles
what did you do to it
I harumphed
repeatedly
I missiled I'm sorry
I was high
and I totally bricked it