Let Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Urayoán Noel, Stacy Szymaszek, and Xandria Phillips ground you in radical poetics: imagining possible futures and articulating their forms with words.
11 Poems from Divine Mimesis :: Pasolini Poems
Blazing Stadium has published a very limited edition pamphlet!
11 Poems from Divine Mimesis :: Pasolini Poems, by Stacy Szymaszek.
5x7.5
24 pages, staple bound
$11.00 including shipping within continental U.S.
Also in the series: The Saint-Nazaire Notebook, by Garrett Caples; Real Signs, by Kirsten Ihns; Torching the Pier, by Kevin Opstedal; and Detonated Mirror, by Sara Larsen.
Purchase of these VERY LIMITED EDITION pamphlets will make it possible for them to print others.
For ordering info please visit the Blazing Stadium website.
Poems in A Perfect Vacuum
I haven’t published much of the title poem from my forthcoming book, FAMOUS HERMITS, so am happy to have this excerpt published in A Perfect Vacuum. Thanks to the editor, and my friend, Judah Rubin. Also, I’m in good company with work by: Julia Wong Kcomt, María Paz Guerrero, Cesareo Martínez, and Mariela Dreyfus.
A Perfect Vacuum, October 2020 - “Always against the fascist creep.”
Recording of a short reading I did for CCA Santa Fe
Thank you to Daisy Atterbury and CCA Santa Fe/Living Room Series for hosting me yesterday. The reading was over IGTV and now a recording lives on their Instagram page . Here is a photo KA took of me while reading from Famous Hermits. First time I’ve read from it! And it felt like the first time I’ve managed to feel warmth and connection using this technology. Thx to the friends who made it so.
Photographs in 2 ZINES
I’ve had photographs appear in two zines recently and you can download them.
Marble Hill Camera Club (Thanks to Patrice Helmar).
Tucson Walks (Thanks to Amanda Meeks).
Drawings and Poems in The Poetry Project's HOUSE PARTY #15
I started drawing portraits (using pastels) of animals in May. I’m really gravitating toward birds these days. My main mode of sharing the drawings has been to send them to friends through the USPS. I’ve made a pleasing ritual of it. I was very happy when The Poetry Project asked if I’d send them some drawings and poems for one of their online projects, HOUSE PARTY. Here is the trio of birds of prey I sent them. And click the HOUSE PARTY link to read two new poems from a new series of Pasolini Poems I’m working on.
Prompts Against Anxiety 17 — TALK TO THE POETS for Woodland Pattern Book Center
It always makes me happy to support Woodland Pattern and be included in their programming and projects. Check out their Prompts Against Anxiety series here. You can sign up to receive the prompts in your inbox and also submit writing if you use any of the prompts. Pretty cool.
Poems with BLAZING STADIUM
Editors Whit Griffin and Tamas Panitz have published two poems from my forthcoming book, FAMOUS HERMITS in their new journal Blazing Stadium. Check it out here.
“Issues begin and end in conjunction with the New Moon. Continuously updated”
Elderly Magazine's End Capitalism Now
I have a poem in this thick collection of anti-capitalism poetry edited by poets Jamie Townsend & Nicholas DeBoer. It’s available as a PDF on their site. I’m looking forward to reading through it and broadening my thinking on how to work in an unjust system as it exists while subverting it in order to survive while dreaming to tear it down with experimental discernment.
Review of Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR in The Poetry Project Newsletter #261
Thank you to The Poetry Project for publishing my review of Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR (Ugly Duckling Presse) in a great issue that also has reviews of recent books by Ted Rees and Fred Moten, and an interview with Jasmine Gibson.
New: Six Ponderosas published by G L O S S
I’m very happy to be part of G L O S S, a new publishing project started by Morgan Vo that gifts poetry to people in exchange for donations to a mutual aid fund or social justice organization of the poets choice. “Our distribution pattern is meant to encourage social support.” Even though I wrote these poems in 2018, I love how a PDF press can get new work, work written in response to current events, to people in a timely fashion.
This small group of journal poems didn’t fit into my forthcoming book FAMOUS HERMITS so I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to share them. They are the last journal poems I wrote. Feels like the end of that era and area of exploration for me.
The organization I chose is Protect Native Elders because they are a volunteer run group responding to the COVID crisis that is disproportionally effecting tribes across the US. Their goal is to raise $500,000. The Navajo and Zuni here the Southwest have been very hard hit. Give them some cash if you can.
how to order
If you would like a * .pdf * of Six Ponderosas, please make a donation of $3 or more to Protect Native Elders, and send a screenshot of the receipt to: frogs.of.gloss@gmail.com
If you are unable to make a financial donation, no worries! You can email us your order, and we'll pass you the book.
From Protect Native Elders: “Operating in consultation with tribal command centers, our rapid response model enables us to deliver directly to facilities and first responders in emerging COVID-19 hotspots. In the two months since our grassroots beginning, we’ve delivered over $300,000 worth of PPE and other critical supplies to over 60 sites. We work with suppliers, manufacturers, and DIY maker collaboratives to ship masks, face-shields, hand sanitizer, food, water and other essential elements directly to our distribution hubs throughout Indian Country.”
about six ponderosas
We’re counting the days ’til we leave Missoula, we’re counting the does on the walk to and from campus, we’re counting the last cigarette. Not a catalogue, but a transmutation: the grace of numerology, the register of pain on a scale from one to ten. Szymaszek prepares us for potential encounters with wild cats, for the invasive friendliness of the local cashier, for the formative process of detailing that turns the merely adequate into something astonishing. We’re after a knowledge that can’t be known before knowing. We’re strength training in a new state.
FEATURED SHELVES at Wendy's Subway for our workshop - Poets on Jobs, Money, and Capitalism
The great people at Wendy’s have featured all the books we’re using in our workshop on their “featured shelves.” Read along!
Writing prompts for those who resist instruction
[Wendy’s Subway invited me to participate in their Writing Night series in April.]
1. Communicate (vibe) with your house plants, or if you don’t have plants, the nearest tree (can you walk to it or is the communication through a window?)—then record that communication.
2. Mysterious neighbor noises. Write about what you hear when you are home—what sound patterns emerge?
3. Write a one-word poem.
4. Write a poem called “don’t tell me what to do.”
From the Archive
I generally haven’t liked watching video or hearing audio of myself, but I can see that is shifting as I get older. Relatedly, I am less inlined to take self-portraits these days, but I still do. This all seems to be related to the ongoing project of self acceptance.
I really love this interview that took place after I read at SPT in San Fransisco on March 13, 2009. I had spent some hours before the reading steaming and soaking at a Japanese spa. I always remember that when I watch this video because I seem genuinely relaxed, maybe even care free.
If you love a salad buffet as much as I do and are curious about what usually ends up on my plate, this video if for you.
Workshop - But Could I Make a Living From It?: Poets on Jobs, Money, and Capitalism (FULL)
This workshop is sponsored by Wendy’s Subway in Brooklyn, NY, and will take place online.
In 2011, Time Magazine asked John Ashbery if he made a living from his poetry, to which he said, “Heavens no. Gosh no. Shucks no. No, not at all.” The poet is in a bizarre situation of always having to do something else to meet our material needs—maybe poetry-adjacent, maybe not. Many of the poets we will be reading in this workshop bridge the difference between making a living and making art by writing about work, registering varying manners of capitalist critique and antiauthoritarian/antibureaucratic spirit, using the tension that can arise when they have to participate, to some degree, in what they critique. The uniting factor of the readings is that all the poets (who are primarily US-based) bring an amazing vitality to the page by creating their own multidimensional, capacious, and just systems. Their lingual energy is whipped into an antidote against the despair we are meant to feel, by capitalist design, about the ordinary day, on an ongoing basis. Pandemic days are not ordinary days—the cruelty of the design has been made ever-more transparent. Poets are the artists, the inventors, we can go to for a new, un-nostalgic normal.
Some preliminary questions to answer in conversation and in writing throughout the workshop: how often, and why, is the poet asked to justify their existence by explaining the use/value/role of poetry? If you put your weekly pay, or deficit, in a poem what happens to that number? Why is the US dollar bill so creepy? We’ll discuss the reading and share our own writing inspired by the readings during class.
Some of the poets whose work we’ll read are: Krystal Languell, Ryan Eckes, Wanda Coleman, Antler, Jill Magi, Sean Bonney, Bernadette Mayer, Stephanie Young, Jeff Derksen, Maged Zahar, Lorenzo Thomas, Hattie Gossett, Mónica de la Torre, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Simone White, the Worker Writers COVID haiku project, and poems from the anthology Ritual and Capital. Participants will be able to add to a growing bibliography on the subject.
Manuscript Consultations for Poets
Just a reminder that I do MS consultations as part of my fledgling freelance practice. Sliding scale rates always but especially during the pandemic/quarantine. See more information and testimonials on this page
Poems on BAEST JOURNAL, HYPERALLERGIC & THE POETRY FOUNDATION
Thank you to Baest for publishing
CENTURION FACE
THIS IS THE FIRST DAY OF OUR LIVES!
WISDOM OF THE DESERT
and Hyperallergic for publishing BLOOD OF A POET (pairing it with a wonderful Elaine de Kooning)
and POFO for doing this short podcast for I SAW THIS DAY COMING.
Elaine de Kooning’s “Bullfight” (1959) at the Denver Art Museum (photo by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
“What Else Might Be Available”: Three Contemporary Lineages of the Poetry Project
Read Nick Sturm’s review of A YEAR FROM TODAY in his essay “What Else Might Be Available”: Three Contemporary Lineages of the Poetry Project where he also writes about Simone White and Edmund Berrigan.
futurefeed Blogger in Residence
To read my posts for Futurepoem’s blog go here: COHERENCE FOR ONE AND ALL and here: ANTIPOETRY
John Giorno: In Memory
Everyone
gets
lighter
everyone
gets lighter
everyone gets
lighter
everyone gets lighter,
everyone is light.
I’m thinking of John Giorno this morning after receiving the news that he passed.
It was an honor to read a poem I dedicated to him for an “I Love John Giorno” event in 2017 in NYC. I’m posting a link to it, as well as for a short piece I wrote about him for The Brooklyn Rail.
Photo credit: Ted Roeder
Giorno at The Poetry Project’s event “Spring Thing” on May 9, 2015.