Teaser quote: There was an old man at the Strand, / Whose focaccia got way out of hand…
Pleased to be on this list:
I'm in the latest Little Star
Time to get serious
Interview with poet Megan Levad
Teaser quote: “And yet, the affair did not sound like much fun. The first time she and her lover had sex it was on a blanket under a tree during a drive in the country—what a trope—and I remember that she wrote it was "as pleasurable as the rooster’s entry must be for the hen," or something like that. When I read this I had no personal knowledge of such things. But the idea that she felt compelled to do something hurtful, destructive, confusing, and that it wasn’t even pleasurable for her, is still interesting to me.”
[originally posted Wednesday 17 January 2018]
Lana Turner #10 now available. I’m in it.
Teaser quote, from the Table of Contents:
§7. Wild in the Semantic Field: poems
Jorie Graham (page 236) Catherine Wagner (292) Polina Barskova (240) Shane Book (295) Joyelle McSweeney (242) Anthony Madrid (301) Kevin Holden (248) Molly Bendall (306) Nathaniel Rosenthalis (254) Douglas Puccinnini (308) Matthew Moore (260) David Need (310) Tongo Eisen-Martin (263) Martha Ronk (311) Diana Khoi Nugyen (272) Geoffrey Gilbert (313) Rae Armantrout (282) Karolinn Fiscaletti (318) Karen Garthe (289)
[originally posted Wednesday 3 January 2018]
Dr Seuss Again
Teaser quote: Imagine John Bunyan rewriting Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, nine years later, in collaboration with John Milton.
[originally posted Wednesday 20 December 2017]
The Fuzz. With pictures by Coco Picard.
Teaser quote:
Long time ago there was . . . . . . a fuzz. We say “Why?” Nobody knuzz. No, it’s a lie! The fuzz does. “Fuzz, why?” Fuzz says: Hi. I’m the fuzz. There is no because. Fuzz just is. Is and was. On the floor, and in the drawer . . . in your hair, . . . and on the air . . . I’m the FUZZ. There is no because.
[originally posted Wednesday 3 January 2018]
Announcing a special reading, Sunday 17 December 2017, at Malvern Books, in Austin
http://malvernbooks.com/event/an-afternoon-with-coco-picard-friends/?instance_id=2163
Teaser quote: Join us for an afternoon with Coco Picard, Devin King, Anthony Madrid, Nadya Pittendrigh, and Julia Hendrickson. We’ll be celebrating the release earlier this year of Coco’s graphic novel The Chronicles of Fortune.
Eight Public Cases
Teaser quote: Once upon a time, there was a block of bubble gum.
[originally posted Wednesday 6 December 2017]
On Nikki Wallschlaeger's Houses (2015) & Crawlspace (2017): A Notebook
Teaser quote: The two books, taken together, are a tour-de-force of early-thirties hateful vitality.
[originally posted Tuesday 5 December 2017]
University of Chicago Magazine Reports Local Boy Makes Good
A poem called “Bottles and Cans”
Teaser quote: “A good old man, Sir. He will be talking.”
[originally posted Wednesday 22 November 2017]
On “Oh, Susanna”
Teaser quote: And it’s not even that Stephen Foster “simply had the magic touch.” Google the rest of the song’s lyrics and prepare to be curdled. Hello, n-word. Hello, awkward as fuck. Hello, can’t even hold a candle to the good part.
[originally posted Wednesday 22 November 2017]
“Five Poets Explore the Intersection of Self and Other”
Try Never + four other books, reviewed by Stephanie Burt, New York Times, 3 November 2017.
Teaser quote: For all its semantic leaps, and its swaths of confusion—exacerbated by inter-poem echoes and compound words from German and Sanskrit—the kaleidoscope of scenes, quotations and exclamations let me imagine a poet behind the poems, a restless skeptic, aggressive talker and armchair traveler, “one of those who have a delight in / Renouncing whatever they chose.”
[originally posted Friday 3 November 2017]
“On Edward Lear’s ‘The Scroobious Pip’”
Teaser quote: “In early 1872, Edward Lear left a poem unfinished. It was very nearly complete: all it lacked of its intended five rhyming subsections were two lines and two words (not at the end). Lear left blanks in the manuscript, and it’s clear he intended to supply the missing bits at some later time. No one knows why he never did so.”
[originally posted 8 February 2014 on Anthony Opal’s The Weekly; reprinted at Paris Review Daily, Wednesday 8 November 2017]
“About as Large and Wise as a Man’s Head” (my title); “The Seventy-Four Best Entries in The Devil’s Dictionary” (their title)
Teaser quote: “Get ready for this. I, unlike you, have read every word of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)—and read it recently. And it gets better. I, at the cost of an ocean of labor, have cherry-picked the seventy-four best bits out of the approximately three thousand billion trillion entries, and I am going to give you those seventy-four: yours, free of charge, to judge and find wanting.”
[originally posted Wednesday 25 October 2017]
“Thorn Vine on the Wall” (it’s about Shijing 46, an ancient Chinese poem, and how I tried to recite it from memory to my students and couldn’t remember parts, so I just had to make shit up)
Teaser quote: “The jing in Beijing is a different jing.”
[originally posted Wednesday 11 October 2017]
Review of Try Never, by "Mark Clemens"
for Full Stop.
Teaser quote: “Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa” makes a series of intolerable dad-puns on “didgeridoo” whose grating unfunniness must have amused their author but is not contagious.
[originally posted Tuesday 3 October 2017]
Mother Grogan’s Unpunctuated Rigmarole of Numerical Spangablasm
At the Paris Review Online.
Teaser quote: “Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That’s a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.”