Friday, August 24, 2007

Slate Remembers Liam Rector

http://www.slate.com/id/2172637/fr/flyout

September starts with a Yelp

Well after spending all day and night at JFK I now find myself at my friend's house in Chicago sipping a cup of English Breakfast tea and looking forward to a completely empty day of relaxing and daydreaming- maybe even a little writing too!

September will soon be upon us and the are two amazing readings happening. The first one (T&W) I will moderate and it will also be Zach Miller's last east-coast reading for a while. The second one is the release party for LIT and CA Conrad (who I read with back in June) will be reading amongst other wonderfuls. All detailed info below:

Teachers & Writers Collaborative 2020 Visions
Thursday, September 6th 7pm- Free

Come out and celebrates the first Fall reading featuring Deborah Landau, Matthew Zapruder and Zach Miller!

It's free and there will be refreshments served after the reading so go aheand and mark your calanders now!

Deborah Landau's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely and she has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her book, Orchidelirium, a National Poetry Series finalist, won the Anhinga Prize and was shortlisted for the Foreword Book of the Year Award. She co-curates the KGB Poetry Reading Series and directs the creative writing program at NYU


Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of
poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist, selected by
Tony Hoagland as the winner of the 2007 William Carlos
Williams Award. He is also the co-translator of Secret
Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet
Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). He teaches
in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New
School and works as an Editor for Wave Books. He lives
in New York City.

Zach Miller is a graduate of the New School MFA program for Creative Writing and has published in Red China, Agriculture Reader, and has poems forthcoming in Sea Legs.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 8th Ave, Suite 2020
A,C,E, 34th/Penn Station
www.twc.org

LIT 13 LAUNCH PARTY AND CELEBRATION!

Friday, September 7th, 6-10 PM
Wollman Hall @ The New School
66 West 12th Street, NYC, 10011

Featuring readings by...

CAROLINE CONWAY
ADAM GOLASKI
CACONRAD
TERESE SVOBODA


And a special talk/reading with ROBERT POLITO
on LIT 13 feature DETOUR: A Symposium on Edgar Ulmer's 1945 PRC Film Noir

There will be dancing!
There will be eating and drinking!
There will be oohs and aahs for LIT's spanking new design!
There will be cheers for LIT's new editors, Peter Bogart Johnson and Nicole Steinberg, and tears of sadness shed for our departing prose editor, Danielle Winterton!

It's going to be an emotional evening.

***

Reader bios:

Caroline Conway edits the online journal RealPoetik. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, ology, luzmag, and the Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. The first line of "Song for the Inanimate" is taken from Samuel Beckett's novel Malloy.

But at any rate. Adam Golaski was in our Brit Lit class. We both considered him to be one of the most pretentious people we'd run across at Emerson College so we used to share Golaski stories. In Brit Lit he was one of those fucking stereotypical tossers who wore the fucking corduroy or tweed jacket with the professor elbows and would read aloud whenever the professor wanted someone to read a selection of whatever poetry we were studying with the book held up in one hand and about 3 feet away from him as though The Norton Anthology of English Literature were Yorick's fucking skull itself. He says, "Google my name for some more pretentious bullshit."

CAConrad's
childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped to Philadelphia the first chance he got where he lives and writes today with the PhillySound poets (http://PhillySound.blogspot.com). Soft Skull Press published his book Deviant Propulsion in 2006. His book The Frank Poems is forthcoming in 2008 from CHAX Press. A small selection of The Frank Poems was translated into German in 2007 by Berlin poet Holger, and is now available as a bilingual edition chapbook from YPOLITA Press (http://theFRANKpoems.blogspot.com). He is the author of several other chapbooks, including (end-begin w/chants), a collaboration with Frank Sherlock.

Terese Svoboda has published nine books of prose and poetry, including Tin God (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Her tenth, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a memoir, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, and will be published in February 2008. Next spring she will teach fiction as the McGhee Professor at Davidson College and she will teach poetry at the Pan African Literary Forum in Ghana in July.

Robert Polito is completing a nonfiction book, Detours: Seven Noir Lives.


***

LIT 13: available NEXT MONTH! Featuring poetry and prose by...

Kristin Abraham * Jennifer Frost Banks * Bridgette Bates * Aaron Belz * Jessica Bozek * Stephanie Brown * Mairéad Byrne * CAConrad * Caroline Conway * Wende Crow * James Cummins * Erinne Dobson * Noah Falck * Edwin Frank * Mary Gaitskill * Drew Gardner * Adam Golaski * Paul Hoover * Caitlin Horrocks * MC Hyland * Brian Kloppenberg * Joshua Land * Debra Liese * Dora Malech * Destanie McAllister * Jennifer Merrifield * Eugenio Montejo * Frank Montesonti * Carley Moore * Kirk Nesset * Matthew Pennock * David Pollock * Jessica Reed * Andrew Sage * Maureen Seaton * Kristine Snodgrass * Jason Stumpf * Terese Svoboda * Jackson Taylor * Urban Waite * Rob Walsh * Amanda Rachelle Warren * Derek White

Art by...

Brett Baker * Jeffre Dene

Plus a SPECIAL FEATURE on DETOUR, Edgar Ulmer's 1945 PRC Film Noir
Curated by ROBERT POLITO and featuring critical writing, reactions, and interviews by...

A.J. Albany * John Ashbery * Arianné Ulmer Cipes * Kent Jones * Guy Maddin * Greil Marcus * Geoffrey O'Brien * Robert Polito

Friday, August 17, 2007

So Long Fallen One

As many of you know Liam Rector took his life a few days ago. I had him while I attended The New School and he managed to make a lasting impression on me. He even appears in a poem of mine entitled, "Dear John," The New York Times write up is a little less gruesome than the details given in the New York Post.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/17rector.html?ex=1345003200&en=8c7759dc51d87632&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Upcoming this week: An acoustic show and a reading- my oh my

A reading featuring Bruce Covey and my friend Kiely Sweatt on Thursday and an acoustic performance from Anjulie (on Wednesday)- she's pretty much an r&b type of singer/songwriter so i'm not sure what to expect from the show but I'm sure it'll be worth catching.

The show:

Hey
I'm playing an intimate acoustic show this wednesday in the west
village if you'd like to come.

kenny's castaway
157 Bleecker Street btw sullivan and thompson
@ 830pm
no cover charge

x
a

www.myspace.com/anjulie

As some of you may know I am no longer involved with Word of Mouth in any capacity so this will be the 1st one I've attended since my departure. Brian Kloppenberg read at the very last WoM I was a part of. He's pretty good and has a poem in the newly released issue 63 of The New York Quaterly which also features Matthew Yeager who was another reader (twice) at WoM.

The Reading:


Word of Mouth
August 9th at 7pm
@ Bluestockings Radical Books
172 Allen St. (Between Stanton and Rivington)

Readers will be:
Bruce Covey (poetry)
Paul Rome (fiction)
Brian Kloppenberg (poetry)
Kiely Sweat (poetry)


and--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Frequency
August 11th at 2pm
@ The Four Faced Liar
165 West 4th St. (at 6th Ave.)

Readers will be:
Bruce Covey
Meghan Punschke
Gina Myers


Visit www.megpunschke.com/wordofmouth.html for a complete list of 2007 events.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Well,well

August has snuck up on me and I have yet to type a post! I've been sick most of the week- seems this summer I've been sick more times than not- such as it goes I suppose. Today I woke up hungry and have a strong craving for espresso which seems to be a good sign. I might meet Sandy at Public for brunch, but she might be getting sick so there's a possible "rain-check" in the works.

Charles Simic had a pretty good week, don't you think?

Went to Haley's BBQ on Monday and met up with Jared Hohl and Meghan Punschke (two people I hadn't seen in a while) and found out that Mark's (Bibbins) book is not a complete done deal with Copper Canyon but close to a done deal- if the more recent poems published/heard at readings are an indication of the book then Copper Canyon definitely needs to publish his book. They published Zapruder's "The Pajamist" which is one of my favorite books and also allows a not-so-smooth-seque into the fact that he's reading at T&W on September 6th with Zach Miller and Deborah Landau.

How cool is it that Claudia Rankine is judging the CakeTrain Chapbook contest and that Ben Lerner will have a poem out in the next Burnside Review. Talk about the littler zines/presses stepping it up!