effing blog

And we're back.

Hello Citizens.

Took a much needed breather from press work and book slinging these past few weeks / months  and have been laying low, living large, hanging with friends,  not quitting smoking, lovin, steaming mussels, printing,  reading, poetrying, neglecting, ignoring, supporting, hiding, loafing, bathing, braying, driving all over this city  and fighting the police.

Ramping up with the good work now and proclamate labor and salvation in the form of collectible, sexable literary pap from the effing press to your mailboxes and hands. Your pretty pretty hands.

The summer was slow and dusty. Book orders and printing jobs were little and the money was none. It's still dusty in central T but the orders and printing work are starting to flow in again (and out) so there is fuel for the engine of bookmaking. Praise Ganesh. Fearhimlovehim.

The effing website will be updated shortly as well.

In the works (to repeat myself from months ago):

An Amiri Baraka essay in booklet form called "Ed Dorn & The Western World" (co-published with Skanky Possum Press).

A two poem flip book by Marcia Roberts.

a new collection from Hoa Nguyen called Kiss a Bomb Tattoo.

a wry beaut from Dale Smith called Cosmograph.

and finally, the David Meltzer collection Angelize that has been difficult (for no good reason) to produce.

Currently working on some fine printing for the upcoming Frank Stanford Literary Festival in Fayetteville, AR -- a broadside of a Frank poem as well as the program cover, both designed by Katy Henriksen of Cannibal. Just about ready to order the plates and papers.

I'll be at the festival as well and am looking forward to the poems/poets and the Ozarks in autumnal chaos.

Finishing up a piece of mine own lingua to be published as booklet in this year's Dusie Kollective chapbook swap. Punching the keys. Staring into space. Poet labor.

My bud Richard Owens (of Damn the Caesars and Punch Press) has a new book out from BlazeVox in Buffalo, NY called Delaware Memoranda.  It was my privilege to design the covers for this fantastic book of poems. Check it oot.

Also, the craftmaster Friedrich Kerksieck of Small Fires Press has put out a second edition of my poem Some Bridges Migrate with artwork by Austin artist Cherie Weaver. Bound and letterpress printed as nicely as the first edition, but for this run Friedrich The Wizard has made the cover paper with his own two hands. And it's great, this Friedrich-made paper.  Supporthimpraisehim.

There is more news and talking from our heads. There will be more.

The dow is down but not you.

Effing Night w/ Chris Vitiello

Please join us at 12th Street Books this Friday at 7pm to mark the release of the seventh issue of Effing Magazine and some new effing book titles . Our featured guest will be Effing Magazine editor, North Carolina poet Chris Vitiello.

Effing Magazine #7 contributors include

Nicholas Manning (France)
Mary Burger (Oakland, CA)
Brent Cunningham (Oakland, CA)
sueyeun juliette lee (Philadelphia, PA)
David Need (Durham, NC)
kathryn l. pringle (Durham, NC)
Mike Gubser (Virginia)
Orhan Velhi (Turkey, 1914-1950)
Jordan Davis (New York City)
Joseph Donahue (Durham, NC)
Chall Gray (Asheville, NC)
Guillermo Parra (Durham, NC)

effing magazine #7
80 pages
thread-bound
$8.00

***(the new issue will be shipped to subscribers and made available on the effing website next week)

our featured reader:

CHRIS VITIELLO lives in Durham, NC. His first book, NOUNS SWARM A VERB, was published by Xurban Books in 1999, and his latest, IRRESPONSIBILITY, is just out on Ahsahta Press. A former editor of Proliferation magazine, he makes a blog at attentionwithoutame.blogspot.com. He is concerned with, among other things: clarification, light, stars, the sky, clouds, wind, trees, birds, deduction, eyes, leaves, people and their observable behaviors, grasses, the soil, flowers and their growth, description and representation, vegetables, skins and peels, seeds, nuts, cross-sections, dictionary definitions, synonyms and antonyms but especially synonyms, utility, analysis, skepticism, kindness, goodness, quantity, measurement, direct commands, questions, and fact statements. He has recently edited the latest issue of effing magazine.


We'll also be showcasing the latest Effing book BE SOMEBODY by Lester.

Copies of effing magazine and Be Somebody will be available as well as several other great effing titles. Other readers for the evening may or not be Scott Pierce, publisher of Effing Press.

Beer and wine will be available for a donation.

Please come out and bask in the glow of our latest literary labors and hear Chris Vitiello read from his new work.


This event is sponsored by Skanky Possum Press and 12th Street Books.


12th Street Books, purveyors of used, rare, and out of print books, 

is located at 827 W. 12th Street (2.5 blocks east from 12th and Lamar)

 

Skanky Possum @ 12th St. Books Presents: Steve McCaffery & Karen Mac Cormack

Tuesday, May 20 at 7 PM, 12th St. Books


*About the Poets*



Steve McCaffery is the author of more than 25 volumes of poetry and critical prose. He was a founding member of both the text-sound ensemble The Four Horsemen and (with bp Nichol) of the Toronto research Group.  His most recent books of poetry are The Basho Variations (Book Thug 2007) and Slightly Left of Thinking (Chax Press 2008).  He lives and teaches in Buffalo where he is David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters.





Born in Luanshya, Zambia, Karen Mac Cormack is the author of more than a dozen  books of poetry. Titles include Nothing by Mouth, Quill Driver, Quirks &  Quillets, At Issue and Vanity Release. Her poetry appears in a number of anthologies, among them: Another Language: Poetic Experiments in the USA and the UK,  Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, Moving Borders (Three Decades of Innovative  Writing by Women),  The Art of Practice, and has been translated into  French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Norwegian. Of dual British/Canadian citizenship she currently lives in the USA and teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo.





*Venue*



12th Street Books in Austin TX, purveyors of used, rare and out of print books, is located at 827 West 12th Street, 2.5 blocks east of 12th & Lamar, between Shoal Creek and West.

review copies of BE SOMEBODY by Lester available

Review copies of Lester's Be Somebody are available to persons and parties with serious intent. Email your request por favor.

one year ago

carving out a block in the old place about a year ago. pic courtesy of jaybird.

Devotion to the Strange: Jonathan Williams and the Small Press

at Bookslut

Reading for Tom Clark recap

at Possum Ego

Dale reading from Clark's Threnody

help Tom Clark

from Dale Smith:

Tom Clark needs your help. He is stranded with no salary and no medical insurance to cover costs due to a recent stroke. He also needs funds for medications to aid in the recovery of his wife, Angelica Clark, from surgery on her hip.

After 25 years on the faculty of the New College of California’s Poetics Program, payment on his salary and his insurance was abruptly stopped when the school came under scrutiny of federal and state auditors last fall.

Tom Clark has been an important voice in postwar American poetry since the 1960s. For a decade he was the poetry editor for The Paris Review. His many books appeared with Black Sparrow for nearly thirty years, and his biographies of Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn have provided essential perspectives on the lives of these New American authors. He is a passionate and devoted teacher who deserves far greater recognition for his services to American poetry communities.

He needs your help now.

There will be a Tom Clark benefit reading in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, April 26, at 7 pm. A painting by Austin painter Philip Trussell will be auctioned, and broadsides and chapbooks by Clark will be available for purchase. Sliding scale donations are required at the door. Beer and wine will be available. All proceeds will be directed to Clark.

I am collecting donations as well from those of you outside of Austin who are willing to contribute. Please send what you can immediately to:

Tom Clark
c/o Dale Smith
2925 Higgins Street
Austin, Texas 78722

or

______________________________________

Background to the Situation

When the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) put the New College of California on probation in July 2007, I wondered what would happen to that 37-year-old institution. By November, the federal Department of Education refused to release $3 million in financial aid. That month, the school stopped paying faculty salaries. Since then, the school has lost its accreditation and it has closed doors indefinitely, stranding many former instructors with no income and a loss of health benefits. A February 28 article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides more details.

With Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman, Leslie Davis, Jeff Conant, Michael Price, and others, I attended the college in the mid 1990s, studying in the Poetics Program with David Meltzer, Lyn Hejinian, Gloria Frym, Adam Cornford, and Tom Clark. It’s a drag to think of that program’s disintegration, particularly since luminaries such as Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, and Diane di Prima had taught there over the years too.

I remember hearing Clark Coolidge, Lorenzo Thomas, Alice Notley, Barbara Guest, and others read there over the years, and I recall the cultural, material, and historic grounding of study in poetics at that time.

The attraction to the program centered on the fact that faculty in the Poetics Program were all poets, and yet instead of teaching in the traditional workshop format, instructors taught courses in poetics and in the material production of poetry.

My first semester included classes in Shelley, Backgrounds to Romantic Culture, and Lyn Hejinian’s class in poetic theory called, “The Language of Paradise.” Other semesters focused on Early Modern, Modernist, and American Renaissance periods, providing students with a thorough grounding in the theoretical, historical, and material backgrounds to the periods studied.

One semester I took Hejinian’s class on Stein, Clark’s on Olson, and Meltzer’s class on backgrounds to modernism, in which we read about John Reed, the IWW, and other revolutionary social movements that joined art and politics to influence change. I also was fortunate enough to study the art of letterpress printing with Jeff Conant.

Students were engaged with the creative possibility provided through poetry, and we worked to discover ways to increase our awareness of the art through study, conversation, and learning the skills necessary to publish magazines and chapbooks on our own. We learned how to extend conversations in poetry to existing audiences. And we learned how to listen to the ongoing dialogues that compose much of the contemporary verse we discovered in California and beyond at that time.

My years at New College grounded me in a serious education from which I could move forward on my own once the formal course work had been completed. I wrote a thesis on Philip Whalen, took my degree, and moved to Austin, where, with Hoa Nguyen, we began to produce magazines, books, essays, poetry, and host readings. New College’s emphasis on the material production of the poem as a social tool of engagement stuck with me. And as testament to the concreteness of this plan of study provided by New College, I was later accepted to a PhD program at the University of Texas based on this prior period of study and the resulting years of production.

By academic standards, the school was funky. But in terms of what was provided intellectually and creatively, it was essential and instructive.

Help those who have seen their livelihood damaged by the mismanagement of New College administration.

Send what you can today.

Please help Tom Clark.

BRAND SPANKING NEW: BE SOMEBODY by LESTER

BE SOMEBODY by Lester7.5x9, saddle-stitched with forced spine64 pages, offset and letterpress printed covers$10 order here________________________

[T]he approach of ventriloquism goes one giant step further in the form of Lester, sock puppet extraordinaire & alleged author of the booklength manuscript, Be Somebody. Lester, obviously, is in the tradition of other wisecracking dummies from Charlie McCarthy to Triumph the Insult Dog, but also Armand Schwerner, Art Language & just possibly the aforementioned Mr. Bernstein & David Antin, &, dare I say, Spicer too falls on this side of the line, certainly in Language & Book of Magazine Verse. [...] Be Somebody [...] pokes a very hard finger into the chest of Western literary assumptions. [...] Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are . it challenges our desire for the familiar (and nothing is more familiar than my pronoun, not even my name) & holds on like a pit bull with lockjaw for the entire trip, in this instance 58 pages. [...] Someday, someone is going to publish this book & then we will all have to deal with Lester's intimate striptease of the self. Until then, it will remain, like the full-length version of Mark Peters' Men, one of the great rumors of contemporary poetry [...] you have to read the book.

        - Ron Silliman


A few years ago, the unschooled shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro flew into our millenium with a rocket pack on his back, calling himself Lester. He spoke in the most simple and transparent syllogisms, though only a few (their hands cupped to ears) were present to hear. He landed, he spoke, he fired his rockets, shot up, landed over there, spoke, fired his rockets, etc. Then he went away... Thankfully, and somewhat miraculously, his parables have been transcribed by the faithful handful and are gathered here in one place for the first time.

May I suggest that all the hip Flarf poets get down on their knees and urgently pray.

        - Kent Johnson


Lester is a smart-mouth puppet who wants to ruin the sacred truths to fable and old song. Actually, he wants to ruin the fable and old song, too. Are we an important poet? Lester seems to want us to think we have no opinions on the matter, even the ones he has laid out for us. It's no good hating Lester; this is what we get for asking goat questions and giving sheep answers. Be Somebody raises a serendipitous lake cup atop the strata of radiant steam whose luminous degeneracy we have ascertained, and then lets it fall away like a silken robe. This isn't fair. If you see this book on the road, kill it. Unless it's already too late, and you're reading this, which means it has somehow found you first, and you have not read this after all, though you are rightfully convinced you have. Lester is not Patrick Herron. This is not a blurb.

        - K. Silem Mohammad

Effing website is up

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