Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Web-Palaces

Has it been long enough to claim antiquity from the nineties? Of course. It's been long enough to claim that from yesterday's status updates--context often evaporates faster than you can respond. But here I want to look into one specific relic, namely:

The above image is the logo for "Erin Marie's Poetry Palace!": http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/, a website dedicated to housing a collection of poems, jokes, and Fun Javascripts, like this Tic Tac Toe "app":I played it on 'Hard,' despite the warning. And, predictably, there was no winner.

One page collects a selection of "Young American Poets and Their Poetry," including Gerald Costanzo, Gibbons Ruark, and W. S. Di Piero. A young Daniel Mark Epstein begins one of the poems presented there, "At the Millinery Shop":
She wants what no clerk in the city can bring her,
a hat that will make up her mind.
I wish I had one of those. Because then I might be able to decide whether I should try to describe the uncanny nature of the text-box on Erin's home page that fills as you scroll over a new link. After the field is populated, you can use your cursor to adjust the text. But it changes as soon as the mouse moves to something else. The interaction is more ephemeral than a google search, and yet it is still an interaction--with Erin.



This has, perhaps, a purer beauty. While the poet fades, his or her work scatters, multiplies, lives on, emits nothing, prophesies.

This site is, by necessity, out-of-date. And that is where its blessedness roots--in this little palace, where time shifts visibly. Ye Olde Poesie is often blessed in the same way. Look at it >

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Sea Ranch Popsickle Island

In case you're wondering what the words in this subject line mean, let me tell you:

FRIDAY
  1. Sea Ranch, issue 3 (a biannual journal (featuring a bipolar collection (of two poets (Chris Martin & me)))) is out and coming out tomorrow @ Friday @ 7:00 p.m. @ Unnameable Books, thanks to the duo (Alan Felsenthal & Ben Estes) over at The Song Cave.

  2. Sea Ranch 3


    SATURDAY

  3. Popsickle 2011, Brooklyn's 2nd annual summer literary festival, is going (though it deserves a more active verb and preposition) down on Saturday from 1-8pm @ the Gowanus Ballroom with too many good ones to name (like Lonely Christopher, Dottie Lasky, Paul Foster Johnson—to name a few.

    A raffle will happen immediately following the 7:45pm reading finale slot with Ariana Reines, Jason Daniel Schwartz & me. What else would you want*?


governor's island


*A bookfair? Well, there will be one of those there too.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The Other Poems

Speaking of the future of American poetry (I can begin with this prepositional statement, because it is always what one was previously speaking of, if only metaphorically), in the near future of it, this new Fence book will be out.

I've made the obligatory Book Trailer, and so I present it to you herewith:



Timothy Donnelly writes:
With The Other Poems Paul Legault has produced a brilliant sonnet sequence that calls to mind the dizzying cinema of Busby Berkeley as much as it does the inexhaustibly inventive rhetorical contraptions of Shakespeare or Sidney. Rustling together a cast of hundreds as disparate as Sartre, Dolly Parton, The Little Chair under Water, Québec, Caliban, and Women with Unconventionally Long Hair, Legault has staged a spectacular form of existential sketch comedy that, for all its slapstick bleakness, proves surprisingly intent on “exploring joy and its intricacies.” Even as its characters drop such deflated zingers as “The duality of progress will deter us, / but from what exactly?” or else announce, with art-house taedium vitae, “I am going to watch a movie for a class. / Then I will eventually grow old and die,” the ultimate objective of The Other Poems is the pursuit of its own happiness—one cobbled together with extraordinary resourcefulness, spirit, ingenuity, and focus—and to show, by example, how we might each of us bask in the Klieg lights of our own devising.
You can do this*, if you want:


*Another this that you could do is ask for a free Advanced Reader's Copy [[from] fence.fencebooks@gmail.com]
**
**Sometimes if someone does that he or she does something with it but doesn't have to.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey

If you read the subject of this post and thought it might be about what I think about Christian Hawkey's new book, Ventrakl, and want to know what that is, you can do that by checking out this review on Jacket2.

I don't like that that rhymes, but I'm too tired* to do anything about it.**


*<--I went to the beach today
**Apparently not too tired to make this .gif