Hottie of the week: peter alexander of nbc/ msnbc

fellner says

...when someone is as powerful as Doty, we must offer more than an automatic acceptance of his work, as most gay poets do. If resistance is not conveyed, the gay poetry community is a twisted, useless mirage. Which it might very well be. But I’m an idealist.

jordan davis reviews paula bohince

It’s refreshing to read a book of poems where the author cares about getting the reader from the beginning to the end, from the first page to the last. It’s surprising, reading this rare kind of book, to come across poem after poem that works in almost the same way as the one before, and yet is completely individuated, shapely and moving.

4 bits

the second installment of latino poetry review. i'm really digging valerie martínez's esaay on the divide between Mexican and Mexican-American poets:

In America, writing oneself into history demanded a "poetics of displacement" (Aranda 191), a poetics that documented this displacement in remarkably direct ways. Turning away from metaphorical writing, Mexican-American poets affirmed the right of the poem to testify and document, to auto-narrate, taking a Puritan model and reinventing it, thereby adopting the mode of the oppressor, recognizing its power to stimulate consciousness about oppression and reinventing it to defy the oppressor's systems of neglect in modern times.

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two poems by j. michael martinez: white & xicano


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newpages talks a bit about palabra:

There is a kind of shimmering energy in nearly every piece in the issue. Taut rhythms (“He maps the stone with the quill of a quetzal: 39.705°-105.08°” from John-Michael Rivera’s prose poem, “This is not mano…a conversation with René Magritte”). Language that lures and seduces (“María to Mars-ico / with her mouth // factory sealed” from the Martínez Pompa poem mentioned above). Tender, lyrical impulses (“Here, an open drape / parted by fingers of wind.” from “House without Doors,” by Carolina Morales). Smart, tense timing (“Carmella Santiago begged her husband not to pull the trigger. But when he did, she fell in love with him all over again” – the opening lines of “The Lamentable Inauguration of the Honorary Santiago Freeway, short fiction from Aaron Michael Morales).

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another poem by j. michael martinez: white song.

Who cares about poetry, anyway?

...poetry brings us back into our bodies by getting us to use language and mooring us in an urgent moment; poetry is good practice for the art of physical and emotional presence. The point: Poetry is about celebrating the physical moment with language.

people like me bits

here i am. sitting in a starbucks. drinking some iced coffee. thrilling, no?
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homage for levis by paisley rekdal.
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finished a new poem last night.
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man, i really need to send out poems! i have like 8 poems ready to go. maybe i'll send to you.
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i hope naren calls me this week.
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have you seen this list of the top 100 blogs? i made the list. ha. i'm a superstar. i would like to take this moment to thank all the little people who made this possible...
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going to a poetry reading is worse than visiting somebody’s family...
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i need help: i'm blogging and facebooking at the same time.
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Hottie of the week: John Gidding

one of the hosts of HGTV's designed to sell.

bread loaf 2009

well, i got in. i'm going to the bread loaf conference. many thanks to the poet who nominated me for a tuition scholarship.
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diode

new installment is up and running.

bits for naren

arizona = hot.
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confession: i like to watch trashy reality shows. how trashy? this trashy: make me a supermodel and groomer has it.
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i sent my ms to a handful of people. i've really pruned down the collection. maybe i've taken out too many poems. i don't know. the collection is tighter and i think the four sections make sense. but the order of the poems in each section is not quite right. i think. geez, when will this madness be over?
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sometimes i want to be a lesbian.
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okay, what is the correct abbreviation for the word "manuscript?" Ms or mss???
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i finished a poem a couple of days ago. it's titled "after bei dao/ after jean valentine." i've been reading these poets intensely for the past 8 months. the more i read, the more i fall in love. their poems often function as portals to silence; a rich and vibrant quietening of the mind. silence is the first music a poet must master. and dao and valentine are close to mastering it.
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"quietening" is a strange word. it sounds right, but looks kinda of odd. like a three-armed man.
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is the new m. ward disc any good?

i want cake!

from the editors of Caketrain:

Caketrain Journal and Press is proud to announce our 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, the fifth installment of our annual creative writing contest. As we return to the poetry genre (following 2008’s fiction foray), we look forward to another year of intensive reading and fine work.

Each year, we bring a special guest into the selection process, a writer whose work we hold in very high regard, and this year, we may have a reached a “personal best”: in addition to being our favorite poet, Michael Burkard is the author of My Secret Boat, Entire Dilemma, Unsleeping, Pennsylvania Collection Agency, and Envelope of Night. He has received fellowships from FAWC, NEA, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has worked as a psychiatric aide, a creative arts therapist, a proofreader for Bloomingdale’s catalogues. He will talk about the part of him that disappears. He do this to night too, unto night. His verbs are weak; don’t tell his heart.

The winner of the competition receives a $250 cash prize and 25 copies of their chapbook. The chapbook will be published in a 200-copy run on sixty-pound, acid-free text stock bound with a full-color cover.

full guidelines HERE.

2 reviews

Rigoberto González on Maurice Kilwein Guevara:

...enter Gertrude Stein ("How do you spell a pair a pare of glasses a pear of shoes a chair of legs made of cherry wood"), Paul Célan ("Above the highlands / moon the color of paper ash. Faint seam of blood / in the fields, apron of wind, horsemint.") or even Bessie Smith ("I could be a ghost or the crushed mouths of wild orchids"), and the poet is, like Pablo Neruda, moved from despair into love song. Poetry is salvation.

Ron Slate on Alberto Rios:

The book is one grand cycle – poems of memory, landscape, domesticity, adversity, bare essentials. The Dangerous Shirt is also a book of embraced oppositions and subtle complexity. In some poems, Ríos affably chides us for turning away from the actual. But to conclude “The Sonoran Heat, In Summer and at Night,” he writes: “We feel the sinking weight of this hot drunkenness, / The dizziness of the falling, all of us. // But we do not say so. We pretend / All is otherwise. It is the only way.” Ultimately, The Dangerous Shirt succeeds brilliantly because it creates a completely imagined world and vision of humanity, broad in scope, exact in expression.

hottie of the week: tomas tranströmer

tomas tranströmer

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

bits

i've written five 14 line poems in a week. i've never written so much before! i'm amazed. i need two more and the sequence should be complete.
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i hear it's raining cats and dogs in nyc. i'm so jealous.
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here are the titles for the five new poems in my mss:
selena
self-portrait
cayuco
monsoon
mojave shovel
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i'm becoming addicted to iced chai teas from starbucks.
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the 14 lines poems are not sonnets. and the sequence is not a crown.
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best new poets 2009

Best New Poets is an annual anthology of 50 poems from emerging writers. The 2009 guest editor is Kim Addonizio, and she will select 50 poems from nominations made by literary magazines and writing programs, as well as an Open Internet Competition.

Best New Poets will only accept submissions from writers who have NOT published a book-length poetry collection (Poets with forthcoming books may only enter if their first book's publication date is after November 15, 2009).

Work submitted may be unpublished work or work published after April 15, 2008 for which the writer currently retains all rights (allowing the writer to publish it again).

Deadline June 1, 2009.

NPR: Life Is An Act Of Literary Creation by Luis Alberto Urrea

I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached. I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy.

small press spotlight: stacey lynn brown

The South has a lengthy history of racism, but it also has a long history of dialogue about racism.

some coldfront mag reviews

Many of the poems in The End of the West seem to come from the now infamous “Dickman background”; they are built around life experiences of growing up in a rough section of town, interaction with and absence of a truant father, a single mother, romantic lust, and a great metaphysical barbaric yelp. It’s very young work...
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Who would think that avoiding vowels could make sex talk fun?
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It would be easy to find fault with the overstated, colloquial comedy of many of Frank Giampietro’s poems, but there is an endearing clumsiness about his speakers, as if they are forever under threat of tripping on their shoelaces...
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And do not forget that even a piano, to Mr. Waldrep, is a prism inhabited by a small bird, a wren, maybe.

i more than hate the iowa writers' workshop

so sez sandra cisneros in this video clip.

tip of the hat to mizz jones for the link.