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.

poetry at Okay Mountain Saturday 6/21

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 READING SERIES AT 12TH STREET BOOKS

MICHAEL ANANIA & JOE AHEARN

Friday, June 6th, at 7pm

+++

Michael Anania is a poet, essayist and fiction writer.  His published work includes numerous collections poetry, among them Selected Poems (l994), In Natural Light (1999) and Heat Lines (2006).  His poetry is widely anthologized and has been translated into Italian, German, French, Spanish and Czech. He was poetry editor of Audit, a quarterly, founder and co-editor of Audit/Poetry, poetry and literary editor of The Swallow Press, poetry editor of Partisan Review and a contributing editor to Tri-Quarterly. Anania taught at SUNY at Buffalo, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago.  He lives in Austin, Texas and on Lake Michigan.

Joe Ahearn is the author of Five Fictions (poetry, Sulphur River Review Press) and sin-thét-ik (poetry, Firewheel Editions Press). He has recently published poetry, essays, and criticism in Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Flashpoint and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry. Ahearn's poetry has been included in a number of anthologies, including CrossConnect: Writers of the Information Age (CrossConnect Press), Best Texas Writing (Firewheel Editions Press) and the forthcoming An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions). Ahearn currently holds a James A. Michener Fellowship in poetry and fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

+++

 

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.

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.

Reading for Tom Clark recap

at Possum Ego

Dale reading from Clark's Threnody

rogue blargue

Been working the hands around new effing projects, like Patrick Herron's Lester book Be Somebody. Lester is a sock puppet. The edition is printed and stacked and now we're binding the hell out of it. Release is immanent. Also we're proofing out the new effing magazine with editor Chris Vitiello and carving up blocks to use on its cover printing. It's a very

North Carolina

effing month.

Be Somebody copies under the cinder blocks.

We're taking some letterpress jobs too and have been banging out sweet two color prints for the U of Texas Writing Center and also for individuals to be wedded and for babies that have been borned. And coasters. Here's some scans of some of the UT Writing Center flyers printed - though the scans don't do the printing much justice:

prints are 7x10 on Crane's Lettra pearl stock, printed on the C&P 8x12. Designed by Suloni Roberts.

We've acquired a small AB Dick offset press and are tearing it down for cleaning and repair and hope to have it operational in the coming weeks. We'll use it for flooding paper stock with color and for underprinting on effing book covers and title pages and endpapers and who knows what else. We just need a little platemaker and we're good to go with the who knows what else.

We'll be in the studio all weekend making the paper fly.  If you are in

Austin

this Sunday this looks pretty interesting:

And if you're in San Francisco TONIGHT there is this with Austin's Hoa Nguyen and others:

Friday, April 4
Three Vietnamese Poets: Nguyen Do, Hoa Nguyen, and Truong Tran
In celebration of the recently published anthology Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions), three Vietnamese-American contributors will read their poetry. Nguyen Do who edited and translated Black Dog, Black Night with Paul Hoover, Hoa Nguyen, and Trong Tran. This groundbreaking anthology presents the true picture of a poetry that had been suppressed in

Vietnam

due to Soviet-influenced censorship. A discussion period will follow the reading.

and also this weekend in San Francisco, check out my bud's work at this wacky show:

Interactive, crank, prank, word house cosy house treehouse with a white picket fence… Sustained Simulacrum Quip is a collaborative installation piece that invites the audience to play with the monsters in their own backyard. Enter an environment where perhaps you are in control, perhaps not. Where you are not necessarily cogniscent of how your actions may play out and can only experiment…

Kent Johnson reads from Spanish translations: the poetry of Jaime Saenz

Tuesday, March 18, 8 pm

UT Campus

Joynes Reading Room

(Behind Corothers Residence Hall)

2501 Whitus Avenue



Kent Johnson grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay and worked in 1980 and 1983 as a literacy teacher in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, an experience that led to his translation of many poems from the working class Talleres de Poesia there, later collected in the volume A Nation of Poets. He is author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books and chapbooks, including three collections recently published in translation abroad. His most recent books of translation (in collaboration with Forrest Gander) are of the Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz: Immanent Visitor (California) and The Night (Princeton), both of which received awards from PEN. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a large gathering of Johnson's new and selected poems, will be released this year by Shearsman Books in the UK. He lives in Freeport, Illinois.



The Joynes Reading Room can be found off the courtyard behind Corothers/University Honor's Center Building on Whitus Avenue.

http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/uhc/

Dale Smith's SUSQUEHANNA from Punch Press

from the release note:

This book contains the first part of Dale Smith's Susquehanna, a sustained meditation on the value of failed vision -- particularly the inability of a young Samuel Taylor Coleridge to fully realize his Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the early 19th century. Thinking this failure through the cultural and technological developments of the present moment, Smith develops a methodological approach within the body of the poem grounded partly in Walter Benjamin's materialist historiography and David Antin's talking meditations on anthropology.

64 pages.

Perfect-bound with three-color letterpress wraps. Like the Wingbow Press edition of Ed Dorn's Slinger, parts of the book were set in Caslon Old Face. Parts of the book were also set in Baskerville Old  Face, Palatino Linotype, and Georgia. Interior images culled from various 18th century New England primers. Front cover image of Britain culled from John Sellers' 1690 Hydrographia Universalis. Rear cover image from Sellers' A New Systeme of Geography, 2nd Edition, also printed in 1690.

Parts of this poem previously appeared in Kadar Koli, Madorla, and Damn the Caesars.

$10.00 (Paypal. Check. Money order.)

http://damnthecaesars.org/

interview with Hoa Nguyen

at Bookslut