CruelestMonth.com

BEA Approacheth & Assoc.

The weekend-eating juggernaut that is BEA has finally lumbered into the present.  I've chosen a modest handful of panels, readings, and other some such to attend.  I somehow doubt I'll even make it to those.  It's just too hot.  And all I want to do is dance.  What?  If you do plan on attending, I suggest you go either Saturday or Sunday, since the prices for Friday have been jacked up to discourage commuting publishing people from overrunning the place.

In celebration of BEA, Reading the World will hold its annual party at the German Consulate General at the UN.  Pictures TK (maybe).

Tit-for-tat: the New Yorker's Spring Books Party happens this Friday, so does the "Brooklyn Style" BEA party thrown by powerHouse Books, MTV Press, Vice Books and a slew of Brooklyn indie-publishers (A Public Space, Akashic Books, Archipelago Books, BOMB Magazine, Cabinet Magazine, Soft Skull Press, and Tin House).

BOMB Magazine celebrates their 100th issue this Sunday at KGB.

The 2007 PEN Literary Awards are up.  Each award is accompanied by an audio.

Planning ahead: Wednesday, June 20th, 7pm.  POETIC CITY: Celebration on the Waterfront by the future home of Poets House in Battery Park City.  Reading by Chris Abani, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Suji Kwock Kim, Carol Muske-Dukes, U Sam Oeur, Mark Strand & Franz Wright.  Music by Taylor McFerrin.

Again

Another long day.  An interview with Tao Lin coming soon.  But this should tide you over: "The Signorelli Trap." 

Fishing

I hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend.  Not too much going on here other than a collective reacclimation to the office.  I was up in Hopewell Junction, NY for one last barbeque at my sister's current home.  My allergies were bad, but reacquainting myself with the pace of not-NYC was worth it.  Figuring that I don't want to force what's not coming, here's a link that speaks to my present mood: "Powerful Lines: the poetry of fishing:"

The reality, however, is that fishing is about the closest you can get to physically experiencing poetry. It is a pursuit based on contemplation and solitude that involves an appreciation of the elements; it is a game of chance, hope, escapism; a step into the murky waters of the unknown. It is the perfect symbiosis of man and nature and there is little difference between the angler setting forth on a misty dawn and the poet staring at the blank page. Both are hoping for greatness, but will settle for a brief silvery flash of the transcendental brilliance that lies beneath the surface.

via Silliman

"If No One Can Find My Book, Does It Exist?"

The aggressive moves of Perseus Book Group has many small presses worried about the distribution of their books.  Travis Nichols, writing for PoetryFoundation.org, provides a thorough account of the change and its implications for American poetry.  Despite the overall glumness of the news, the piece begins with a spirited perspective from Noah Eli Gordon:

Noah Eli Gordon, a young poet living in Denver, believes he’s found the best way to get his books out to potential readers.

“I give them all away for free,” Gordon explains. “Instead of money, I ask the publishers for books, and then I mail them out to other poets I admire.”

Gordon frames his giveaway as part of a long poetry tradition rather than a symptom of a troubled marketplace.

“It’s like in Vita Nuova,” Gordon says, “when Dante writes about how a young poet would write a poem and then send it to the other, older poets in the community. If the poem was good enough, the young poet would then gain entry into their world.”

God, it feels good to read that.  The more poets evoking Dante in regards to book distribution, the flippin' better.  (Can that be our collective fun task this weekend?  To evoke Dante in some act of ours, small or large.)  In somewhat related news, Harper Perennial will publish Noah's next book, Novel Pictorial Noise this fall.  I'm very excited about its publication as it's the first book of which I am the editor (which might be news to him).  Though, all I really did was shepherd it through the assorted passages of corporate publishing (work enough).  But what's strange, or good, is that every where I turn, there is Noah Eli Gordon.  Just after reading this article, literally the next thing I did, I flip open the Spring 2007 American Poet to find, what else, a review of Inbox by Noah Eli Gordon.  It was the first thing!  And if that wasn't enough, there he is playing in a video in the post below. So long as he continues to say, and believe, things like that above, let him be everywhere.

The Continental Review

"The Web's first Video Forum for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics."  Great direction. Great content.  To echo Clay, please click this link.  And now I'm sharing:

Lunedi Links

Here's a welcome new service, BooksPrice.com.  The website finds the "best price for new & used books and textbooks at major online stores."  I've done a few experimental searches; and it makes no false claims.  Very useful.

Poet Desi Di Nardo explore the birthplace of a classic Leonard Cohen song: "Suzanne takes your hand..."  Very Canadian.

Drunken Boat #8, which has been out for a little while now (maybe more than that), has a feature on Oulipo: "What happens when thinking about potentiality becomes contagious?"  I love Queneau, so expect random Oulipan links.

And, since I sometimes borrow links from this site and don't credit the source often enough, pay a visit to the poetry hut blog for enough links to last you.

*Hirsh shouts me out: "A Gruesome End to All That".

GOTHAM BOOK STORE AUCTION

Again, I've been bumped out.  The entire stock is up for sale in order to repay the landlord and has been broken down into 100 or so lots.  If you were interested in purchasing a single souvenir or some such, this isn't the platform to do it.  One lot may encompass 10,000 volumes, or one half of an entire floor.  The $1000 for "browser's insurance" will be refunded if you don't purchase anything, but it still isn't a sum large enough to guarantee any one lot (maybe it will get you the bathroom).  So unless anyone wants to spot me a fat mille, I'll be stuck fogging up the display windows.

*Bullocks!  This auction skidded right into the dump.  The NY Times reports, "Wall-to-Wall Books, and All of Them for the Landlord":

The auction started an hour late. The inventory was divided into more than 100 lots. The first offering was for the inventory as a whole. One bid was made. The landlord’s lawyer, John Faust, stood up and placed a bid of $400,000 on all the items being auctioned. Bidding then began on individual lots. But the individual winning bids would not count unless their total surpassed the $400,000.

As the bids came in — $300 here, $25 there — enthusiasm waned, and many prospective buyers left the room, knowing what would happen.

The landlord’s bid prevailed. Still, Mr. Brown said he hoped that somehow there would be another incarnation of the Gotham.

Some who attended the auction lamented the fact that a benefactor had not appeared.

“The poets!” said Mr. Hearn, the longtime patron. “Did any of them come out and support him?”

Gretchen Adkins, a friend of Mr. Hearn’s, responded, “A lot of them are dead.”

Now we just have to track down that landlord.  What does he plan to do with all that fantastic stuff?  I smell another auction once the inventory is fully itemized.

Fare thee well, Gotham.

"Summer Night"

The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye
was bright for my friends bred in close avenues
of stone, and let us see too much.
The vast treeless field and huge wounded sky,
opposing each other like continents,
made us and our smoking fire quite irrelevant
between their eternal attitudes.
We knew we were intruders.  Worse.  Intruders
unnoticed and undespised.
      Through orchards of black weeds
with a sigh the river urged its silver flesh.
From their damp nests bull-frogs croaked
warnings, but to each other.
And occasional birds, in a private grudge,
flew noiselessly at the moon.
What could we do?  We ran naked into the river,
but our flesh insulted the thick slow water.
We tried to sit naked on the stones,
but they were cold and we soon dressed.
One squeezed a little human music from his box:
mostly it was lost in the grass
where one struggled in an ignorant embrace.
One argued with the slight old hills
and the goose-fleshed naked girls, I will not be old.
One, for his protest, registered a sexual groan.
And the girl in my arms
broke suddenly away, and shouted for us all,
Help!  Help!  I am alone.  But then all subtlety was
                                                         gone
and it was stupid to be obvious before the field and
                                                         sky,
experts in simplicity.  So we fled on the highways,
in our armoured cars, back to air-conditioned
                                                         homes.

From Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen.  On sale 5/29.

Monday Misc.

Three Quarks Daily has a great set of writers covering...well, quite a lot.  I can say with accuracy that Peter Nicholson writes the Poetry and Culture column--beyond that I'd be making a stretch.  Still, it's worth a visit, if not for the sharp, intellectually vigorous writing, than for the stellar headshots.

America's Young Theologian, or The Life and Theology of Dan Morehead, (which appeared in the comments last week) is the blog of, wait for it, Dan Morehead.  Again, I won't venture some nifty generalization of what it's about, but I heartily suggest that you pay a visit.

Reading the World, "now in its third year...is a collaboration between booksellers and publishers interested in bringing international voices to the attention" of American readers.  Ecco proudly participates along with a number of other prestigious publishers you may have heard of.  Promotions will begin in June.  If you'd like to see what books are on offer ahead of time, click the link.

To warm you up for some international literature (and to bone up on your Italian), why not visit the Italian poetry blog PoEcast, un poetic aggregatore?

And, lastly for now, my review of The Session by Aaron Petrovich is up at Small Spiral Notebook. 

American Poets Project

The American Poets Project, published by the Library of America, has made available "the most significant American poetry, selected and introduced by today's most distinguished poets and critics, in inexpensive, elegantly designed, and textually authoritative hardcover editions."  And how.  I picked up the Selected Poems of Kenneth Koch, edited and introduced by Ron Padgett, last night at St. Mark's Bookshop.  Padgett's introduction ably captures the many stages of Koch's poetry and life; a life which was "highly energized by the mystery and pleasure of being alive and by writing poetry that became a part of that mystery."  That must be the textual authority they were talking about.  I added to my purchase in a kind of "gee, look-what-I-like-to-read moment" the Times Literary Supplement.  I could tell that the cashier knew better.  After he waved goodbye to another customer, I put my things on the counter.  He looked down toward me, assuming an air of exhausted glumness that seemed to ask, "You're that kind of asshole, huh?"  The chauchy grin that had spread across my face answered him, "oh, why yes I am."  Still, they let me take the thing home after paying for it.  A review of Frederick Seidel's Selected Poems and Ooga-Booga confirmed some suspicions.  And beneath it was "Conversation", a poem by Nick Laird (a renaissance man for our times).  The conversation seems to be between two cultures.  American and British.  Not that the two sides are engaging each other directly, but that within the poem their fallible traits are represented by Laird's given specifics.

You can't believe the kind of thing
my kind go on about, and I in turn can't
understand the way your lot continually

shout, and shout each other down and eat as if
someone's about to lift their plate and smash it.

That's old news to us and not particularly thrilling.  But he saves the real observation for last.

I'd point out what we talk about we talk about

because we speak in code of what we love....

How somone else was nailed to a fence.
How they gutted a man like a suckling pig
and beat him to death with sewer rods.

Ah, so while yanks might lack some social graces, the impeccable restraint of the Brits has twisted them inwardly, gnarled their imagination around the violent and grotesque.  Or so I've taken it.  There's an incongruity in the level of insight offered by each description.  Americans are loud and eat lots.  Britains are buttoned-up psychopaths.  Maybe Laird just really wanted to express the latter and couldn't find a better place to start from.  Have a great weekend.