effing blog

i don't mind ingesting things and getting spooky tonite.  i rather like it that way.  and if by fright you mean that dull realization that trauma is right around the corner then okay, i want to play that too. 

small press poetry publishers

I've added a list of micro and small press poetry publishers in the right hand column here.  If you have a small press or know of active presses I did not list please let me know. 

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Also, check out this interview with Michael Carr & Dorothy Lasky of Katalanche Press at Jess Mynes' fewer & further blog.  Katalanche is one of my favorite micros and has a similiar tragectory as effing it seems.  I always look forward to receiving their new books, not only for the poetry they publish but also for their designs which are original and complimentary to the work itself.  If effing had a sister press (and why shouldn't it) I suppose Katalanche would cetainly be a contender.

from effing press: WORLD JELLY by TONY TOST

World Jelly
6x9, 32 pages
w/ oversized, offset covers & lilac end papers
cover art by Philip Trussell
(contains an unbound broadsheet of notes for the poem)
$7.00

from the poem :

Words taken
away from families

Worlds hover
above us or not at all

Edgy stress of the social reach
love's little kite
what's the swinging

As we now know our medium is
not a making or change
as a parallel I think
you can talk

Rhetorical answers
to actual headlights
in the unbroken slowing
too cold for the animals
to decompose

Moving not the objects
but the rugs beneath them

Method dealer

Augury towers
or how to write
mistakes only

This line imagined
as beneath the feet

________________

To order simply click the Buy Now button in the right column of this site or visit the effing press website.

Those in the NYC area can check out Tony Tost and Lisa Jarnot this Saturday at the Burning Chair / Typo reading series.  Info on the reading and series can be found here.  There will be copies of World Jelly at the reading too.

from Hot Whiskey Press

My buds and fellow micropublishers Jennifer Rogers and Michael Koshkin of Hot Whiskey Press in Boulder have released Joe Massey's Bramble (a book of lunes) and damn if it doesn't look fine.

See the cover and find ordering information here.

Here is the release note from Hot Whiskey:

Bramble (a book of lunes)
published by Hot Whiskey Press
5.5" x 7", 52 pages, stab bound. Covers letter-pressed at Naropa's Harry Smith Print Shop.
First five buyers have the option of receiving a limited edition black cover version of the book.
Cost of the book: $6.50.


* * *


Post-Slacker, Post-Post-Avant, Post-Smiths, Joseph
Massey is the Li Po of the Beaten Generation. Pithy,
angular, and always sincere, these small poems reward
reading (now) and rereading (after a few pints).
Massey writes, breathes into being "what's between us"
-- these poems are not personal, but Personist in the
best way, giving a calm, steady voice to moments most
of us miss. In Bramble, stillness gives way to
communion.

--Anthony Robinson


* * *


In the tiny space of just 13 syllables, each poem in
Bramble takes the reader straight into the thicket of
sight sounded and sighted sound, that wide awake eyes
and ears peeled attention to what presents itself in
each moment: a memory, a dry-rotted garden hose, a
bumblebee, nameless blooming weeds on the lawn of a
burnt-out house, even the slippery in-betweenness of
the act of listening/reading itself...

   here, the one speaking
& the one
      listening, is you

Given the strictures of the lune form, what's
particularly exhilarating about this crisply
constructed book is how inclusive Massey manages to
be. Echoing Darwin's admonition, "Never say higher or
lower," squashed ants, wads of gum, and pigeon shit
find their rightful place alongside the earthy ups and
downs of the human realm in a seamless web of
democratic particulars. Taking dictation from the
weather, Massey's disciplined and deeply ethical
poetics steers clear of the all-too-human temptation
to fiddle with, fix, or prod the world (think of
Whalen's "You'll only make things worse...") into an
anthropomorphized Disney World of how we'd like things
to be; he knows, like few other poets, how to leave
things alone. Bramble reminds us musically,
humorously, and humbly not to miss the this of "this
is all there is."

--Tyler Doherty



* * *


Indeed there is "the page behind the poem" and there
is the poem behind the poet or perhaps it's the poet
behind the poem. Difficult to say. One can be easily
be lulled into feeling Joseph Massey's chapbook is
transparent only to let her guard down and slowly be
penetrated by his whisper-like magic. The lips of
Bramble say "this is all there is" but its eyes say
"behind each breath your life lets go."

--Reb Livingston

found

While cleaning I came across this partial list of possible press names I'd compiled with my friends Lucas Anderson and Doug Warriner and another person whose face and name escape me.  I think this is from late '02 or early '03.  I remember that this list went several pages beyond these two surviving pages though I can't seem to recall any of the names that might have been on the pages that are still lost.  If you can use a name from this list for your project please by all means do. 

re: H.D.

the dream said

Get to know your dieties

It's sunny outside

scotch, poetry, and cleaning house

Semi-decent weekend here, here.  Lifted the scotch moratorium Friday night and bathed my mind in Glinkinchie 10 yr accompanied by a few drams of Chimay White and Real Ale's Fireman's #4.  The kind of top shelf drinking one does on a pay day.  It was productive for me and I got loose and loquacious and spoke my unconscious and danced with my ghosts and dirged a bit.  I spoke such a sentence as, "It is important to me that I am murdered at some point in my life" and other such (yes sometimes morbid) profundities that make the company I keep look at each other with eyebrows raised.  Went into the wee hours of the night calling everyone I'd ever known whose phone numbers I still had, ex girlfriends included (oops).  The next morning the reports suggested that my conversations and rambling voice mail messages were kind and funny and full of laughter, and that's nice.  It's good to have a full on drunk like that from time to time.

I did make the bad decision to work the paper cutter in my weakened state of eye-hand-coordination and ended up slicing the Shin Yu Pai broadsides right down the middle.  Shame nearly crept in then.  But I got up early and reprinted the b-sides and cut em soundly and all was well.

Saturday I cleaned and I cleaned and I cleaned.  Took all the furniture out of the front room and cleaned walls, floors, and ceilings.  Rearranged things and made the binding/cutting tables clean of clutter and org'd the book and paper shelves.  Made a pile of all the old notes and drawings and stuff she'd left and box'd em. Couldn't bring myself to light the match and burn it all to ash and that's okay.  I don't want to forget.

The Skanky Possum gig Saturday night at 12th Street Books was a blast with a great crowd of 45 or so.  Rex Rose read from a few of his novel manuscripts and kept us rolling.  Two things I won't forget anytime soon:

"Don't deadweight me."

and

"'Dude,' I told him."

And Shin Yu Pai (hi Shin Yu!) was a real treat.  This is one sharp poet!  I found her attention to her studies fascinating and her poetic approach incredibly competent.  The first series she read from, Love Hotel, was my favorite.  I wish I could quote from it but I can't remember the words but I learned stuff. I think we all did.  Word is that Love Hotel is coming out as a book in the spring.  Cool.  (Read Shin Yu's write up of the reading here.)

After several months hiatus for the reading series it was good to see the familiar faces.  Folks like David Hadbawnik, RJ Oehler, Paul and Foster Foreman, Denise Sczymczak, Mark Garrison, Kim Dorman, Luke Bilberry, and Dave (whoselastnameIhaveforgotten) and others.  And I finally got to meet Corrine Lee, owner of Winnows Press, who of course recently published Down Spooky by Shanna Compton (a book reviewed today in fact by Ron S.)  And Zack Tuck has come back to Austin from his brief stint of schooling at UNT in Denton.  Glad to have the Zach back in our folds!

Afterward we milled about and drank cheap beer and then went to Dale and Hoa's.  These are my favorite times in Austin with my peops and the weather is fine and the wine is sweet and the conversations have no bounds.

(Apologies to Travis and Shannon whom I was supposed to call but whose numbers I had left at my house.)

I made a smoking instrument out of a golden delicious apple and those of us in the kitchen got a little funny, talked at length of the giant squid.  (note, there is no end to the puns one can make from a smokeable apple.)  The faces were shiny and happy.  Afterward myself, Eric, Susan, and Farid went for some midnight Thai and did we dine like we owned the earth?  We did.

Sunday I cleaned more, more, more.  So deep.  And there's more to go.  The closets, for instance, need to be excavated.  I also watched Fog of War and a couple of discs of the second season of Nip/Tuck.  Can't remember why I like N/T but I do, I really do.  Some of the age/beauty/family/morality tropes are pretty right on.  I might argue as well that it has the best title sequence of any of the popular series (though Carnivale has a good one.  The Sopranos I think has the worst.)

And in effing news, the guts of Tony T's chap are printing presently and the cover design has been color separated and the plates of it at this very moment are most likely being strapped to a Ryobi by a thick, muscle-y pressman with a mustache in a warehouse shop in north Austin.  The Tom Clark proofs came back clean and that book now takes its place in the printing queue.  Now we set to designing out chaps by Gloria Frym and Jim Goar and David Hadbawnik.  I have some invites to publish going out to a few people in the next week or two as well as I start to look to the future, also called 2006.  The future.

Lucas, my bearded friend, chilled with me last night at my house.  Always nice to hang with The Beard.

And Floyd worked the couch arm most of the weekend, his integrity as an animal unchallenged and unwavering.

HD in my ear

My mind was totally blown last night in our Thursday night session when we listened to a recording of HD reading from Helen in Egypt.  If I were to hear someone around me speaking like that I would drop to the ground and lock my arms around their legs for all time.  O!

You can find the recording at http://factoryschool.org/content/sounds/havanaglen.html.

Skanky Possum Reading Series