03.07.2019
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new words

Allison Cardon has a tremendous essay on Anne Boyer in the new Tripwire.

Maria Garcia Teutsch included a few of my poems in her final issue of Homestead Review. This isn’t the first time MGT has published my work. It’s good to be known, better for me, lately, to be remembered. Firsts and lasts: Mark Lamoureux was in this final issue. A fun little issue of Lamoureux’s Cygist Press was my first meaningful publication. In my first browse through, I was struck by poems from Joanna Penn Cooper, Dylan Krieger, Joanna Fuhrman,  Alich Rosenthal, and adrian nichols.

My poems are from a cluster I wrote alongside a big academic project, following the research and autoethnography in my last book, Someone’s Utopia. Working to get the MS done this summer. It will have some sort of center in the city of Buffalo, I think.

Lines from my poems:

“Occupation”

…You are preparation

getting away with it, cutting

banks, trespassing, giving

 

all you were hired to sell

“Lv Poem”: “There are small flowers sprouting / from the moss in my tendons and they are turning / their heads to you. You are buying vegan mayonnaise / and doing jumping jacks. I am so bent out of shape / I am missing those jumping jacks and Buffalo”

“2029 Buffalo Alt Ending 3”: “Harper Bishop became mayor, threw up / shots with stoned teens and undid  / the whole executive branch/spectacular decider thing.”

 

29.05.2019
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some thoughts on poetry from someone in 1965 imagining what poetry would be on a post-apocalyptic planet at the end of war whose enemy was imaginary but whose casualties were real

I’ve been falling asleep to Delaney for about six months. Hoping it will irrigate my dreams. And also looking for poetics in unexpected places. Like out of the mouths of characters in a science fiction novel. These are some of my favorite poems, I think. The ones that move characters but whose actual words remain submerged. Anyway, here are some thoughts on poetry from someone in 1965 imagining what poetry would be on a post-apocalyptic planet at the end of war whose enemy was imaginary but whose casualties were real: “A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-covered fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately their poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damage” – Vol Nonik, City of a Thousand Suns (1965) // “They were very lucid, very clear—and put wild and dispersed matter into a verberating order that came very close to me” (126-7). Clea on Vol’s poems.  //  Kocik, Robert: “When words mean only what they say, we die” (293) Supple Science (2013).  // This was Delaney at 22 // Need some new statements of poetics, I think. And to return to those that matter to me as I mend another book. Not the poem but propositions about how poems might unfold. What’s new?

13.05.2019
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Reading in Denver / Death Horse 13

I’m performing in Denver this Saturday w/some rad folks at Death Horse 13.

Death Horse 13.

Here’s some details:

The Time: Saturday, 5/18/19, 6-8 p.m.

The Place: Bar Max, 2412 E Colfax Ave, Denver, CO 80206

Kate Colby is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Arrangements (Four Way Books, 2018). Dream of the Trenches, a book of critical poem-essays, is just out with Noemi Press. Fruitlands won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2007. She has also received awards and fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, where she was the 2017-2018 Creative Fellow. Her work has been featured at the Beauport Sleeper-McCann, deCordova, Isabella Stewart Gardner and RISD museums, and her poems and essays have recently appeared in A Public Space, The Awl, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, PEN America, Verse and the DIA Readings in Contemporary Poetry Anthology. She was a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts, where she now serves on the advisory board. Colby was born in Boston, grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches poetry at Brown University.

Joe Hall is a writer, teacher, and researcher in Buffalo and Ithaca, New York. Joe has authored three collections of poetry: Someone’s Utopia, The Devotional Poems, and Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean 2013 & 2010). With Chad Hardy, he co-authored The Container Store Vols I & II (SpringGun 2012). With Cheryl Quimba, he co-authored May I Softly Walk (Poetry Crush 2014). With Ryan Kaveh Sheldon and Angela Veronica Wong, he participates in Hostile Books, a publishing collective dedicated to radical materiality. His poems have been translated into Dutch and he has done readings at universities, bars, squats and rivers in most of the 50 states as well as Canada and Washington, DC. Hall has taught community based creative writing workshops through the Worker Center in Buffalo and Just Buffalo Literary Center. Joyous Shrub 666, a 3 piece surf punk outfit, tolerates his bass playing.

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the lyric novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noem Press, 2018) and the family history project Zat Lun, which won the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021. She is completing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Denver and will be teaching at Amherst College in the fall as a visiting writer.