Friday, May 16th @ 7pm

Morgan Lucas Schuldt is the author of Verge (Parlor Press: Free Verse Editions, 2007) and Otherhow (Kitchen Press, 2007), a chapbook. He lives in Tucson where he edits the literary journal CUE.

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi (Blazevox Books). She edits the Poetics List and moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv. She is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. Please visit http://amyking.org for more.

Betsy Wheeler currently lives in Lewisburg, PA, where she holds the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University. Her poetry can be found in Ping Pong, The Hat, No Tell Motel, Painted Bride Quarterly, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of Pilot and Pilot Books.

Frank Montesonti’s poetry has been published in Black Warrior Review, Poet Lore, AQR, Barrow Street, Spork, and Cream City Review, among other magazines

Hosted by Sommer Browning

~~~

Friday May 16th @ 7pm

Pete’s Candy Store

709 Lorimer St. (between Frost and Richardson)

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Directions: Take the G to Metropolitan or the L to Lorimer

~~~~

Currently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant new book, ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE. A series of quick excerpts from the first chapter to whet your appetite and inspire:

A profit-driven food industry has exploded and nutritionally bankrupted our caloric supply, and we long for a Food Leviticus to save us from the sinful roil of cheap fats and carbs.

A food culture is not something that gets sold to people. It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging … Our most celebrated models of beauty are starved people.

People hold to their food customs because of the positives: comfort, nourishment, heavenly aromas. A sturdy food tradition even calls to outsiders; plenty of red-blooded Americans will happily eat Italian, French, Thai, Chinese, you name it.

We’re a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health–most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country’s first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers.

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. … This book tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air. It’s not at all necessary to live on a food-producing farm to participate in this culture.

Doing the right thing, in this case, is not about abstinence-only, throwing out bread, tightening your belt, wearing a fake leather belt, or dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy. Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. Why resist that?

–from ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE by Barbara Kingsolver

Saturday, May 17th, 3-8pm
Doors 2:30 pm, $6

Ana Božičević
John Coletti
Kate Greenstreet
Sarah Gridley
Katy Henriksen
Shannon Jonas
Jennifer Kronovet
Mark Lamoureux
Timothy Liu
Chris Martin
Jess Mynes
Cate Peebles
Christopher Rizzo
Matthew Rohrer
Frank Sherlock
Joanna Sondheim
Shanxing Wang
Rebecca Wolff

& music from
The Hadacol

Hosted by Cannibal, Saltgrass, Harp & Altar, & Tight

East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin St
(btwn. Green & Huron)
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
G to Greenpoint Ave (exit at India St)
B61/B43/B42

Ana Božičević moved to NYC from Croatia in 1997. She’s the author of chapbooks Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). Look for her recent work in Denver Quarterly, Saltgrass, Hotel Amerika, absent, The New York Quarterly, Bat City Review, MiPOesias, Octopus Magazine and The Portable Boog Reader 2: An Anthology of NYC Poetry. Ana co-edits RealPoetik.

John Coletti is the author of The New Normalcy (BoogLit 2002), Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005), and Street Debris (Fell Swoop 2005), a collaboration with poet Greg Fuchs with whom he also co-edits Open 24 Hours Press. He currently is the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Kate Greenstreet is the author of case sensitive (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and three chapbooks, Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, April 2008). Her second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta in 2009. Her poems can be found in journals like Cannibal, Fascicle, and Handsome. New work is forthcoming in Filling Station, Practice, and The Columbia Review.

Sarah Gridley is Poet in Residence and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2000, where she was a Richard Hugo scholar and won the 1999 Merriam Frontier Award for excellence in creative writing. The University of California Press published her book Weather Eye Open in 2005. She has recently completed a new poetry manuscript, whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, NEO, Harp & Altar, Crazy Horse, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Chicago Review.

Katy Henriksen was born and raised in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the design editor of the poetry journal Cannibal, which she creates with her husband Matt Henriksen in their tiny railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She also helps run the Burning Chair Readings. Her music and culture writing may be found in Venus Zine, The Brooklyn Rail, Paste, Publishers Weekly, Puremusic.com, Rust Buckle, and elsewhere. Four of her poems are forthcoming in Tight.

Shannon Jonas is the author of Compathy (Cannibal Books, 2007) and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of Awayward (BOA Editions, 2009), selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the Poulin Prize. Kronovet is the co-founder and co-editor of CIRCUMFERENCE, a journal of poetry in translation. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Harp & Altar, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and other journals. She was born and raised in New York City, and has lived in Chicago, St. Louis, and Beijing.

Mark Lamoureux is a poet, critic and translator who lives in Astoria, NY. His work has appeared in numerous publications, both in print and online. He is an associate editor for Fulcrum Annual. He is the author of three chapbooks: City/Temple (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), 29 Cheeseburgers (Pressed Wafer, 2004) and Film Poems (Katalanche Press, 2005).

Timothy Liu is the author of six books of poems, most recently For Dust Thou Art. Two new books are forthcoming, Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 200 and Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Press, 2009). His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Liu is currently an Associate Professor at William Paterson University and on the Core Faculty at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars; he lives in Manhattan.

Chris Martin is the author of American Music. His new book, Becoming Weather, is trying to become published. His newer book, On Song, is an ongoing investigation of song’s ontological use from the Caveman Days until Tonight. He is the editor of Puppy Flowers, an online magazine of the arts, and resides near the Prospect Park Zoo with a beautiful lady and her cat.

Jess Mynes is the author of Birds for Example, Coltsfoot Insularity (a collaboration with Aaron Tieger), In(ex)teriors, and Full on Jabber (a collaboration with Christopher Rizzo). He is the editor of Fewer & Further Press. In 2008, his If and When (Katalanche Press), Sky Brightly Picked (Skysill Press), Recently Clouds, and a second edition of In(ex)teriors (Anchorite Press) will be published. He lives in Wendell, MA where he co curates a reading series, All Small Caps. His poems have appeared in numerous publications.

Cate Peebles lives in Brooklyn and works at the literary agency, Sobel Weber Associates, in Manhattan. Her poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Tin House, Octopus, La Petite Zine, MiPOesias, Capgun, and others. She co-edits the on-line poetry magazine, Fou.

Christopher Rizzo is a writer and publisher who lives in New York. Over the years, his work has appeared in Art New England, The Cultural Society, Cannibal, Dusie, H_NGM_N, and Spell among other magazines. Christopher has also authored several chapbooks, such as Claire Obscure (Katalanche Press, 2005), Zing (Carve Editions, 2006), and The Breaks (Fewer & Further Press, 2006). Full on Jabber, a collaborative work written with poet Jess Mynes, was released by Martian Press in 2007. Christopher also edits Anchorite Press, an independent poetry publisher of innovative work. He is a doctoral candidate in English at the University at Albany.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of five books of poetry, most recently RISE UP, published by Wave Books. He teaches in the creative writing program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

Frank Sherlock is the co-author of the newly released Ready-to-Eat Individual with Brett Evans.

Joanna Sondheim’s chapbooks, The Fit and Thaumatrope, were published by Sona Books in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Recent work appears in Unsaid magazine.

Shanxing Wang was born in Jinzhong, Shanxi province, China, in 1965. He moved to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue a PhD in mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley. While an assistant professor of engineering at Rutgers University, he began taking writing courses at Rutgers and later the Poetry Project, and subsequently received a Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship to attend the summer writing program at Naropa University in Colorado in 2003. His first book Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem Books, 2005) won the 2006 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. His current thinking and struggling focuses on intersections of poetry/poetics with physics/mathematics, history, visual arts, and continental philosophy. He is also a competitive table tennis player and a table tennis coach. He lives and writes in Queens and he has a blog: http://shanxingwang.blogspot.com.

Rebecca Wolff is the author of Manderley, Figment, and The King (forthcoming 2009). She is the publisher and editor of Fence, Fence Books, and The Constant Critic, and is a fellow of the New York State Writers Institute, with which Fence is affiliated. She lives in Athens, New York.

Irena Sendler

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages. …

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded. …

The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body — but she refused to betray her team.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.

–from Polish Holocaust hero dies at age 98

Yes, I want to help children and families in Myanmar.

Myanmar junta hands out aid boxes with generals’ names

State media say 23,335 people died and 37,019 are missing from Cyclone Nargis, which submerged entire villages in the Irrawaddy delta. International aid organizations say the death toll could climb to more than 100,000 as conditions worsen.

The junta has refused to grant access to foreign experts, saying it will only accept donations from foreign charities and governments, and then will deliver the aid on its own.

Despite such obstacles, the U.N. refugee agency sent its first aid convoy by land into Myanmar on Saturday and began airlifting a 110 tons of shelter supplies from its warehouse in Dubai, it said.

Two trucks carrying more than 20 tons of tents and plastic sheets for some 10,000 cyclone victims crossed into the country from northwestern Thailand, said the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

“This convoy marks a positive step in an aid effort so far marked by challenges and constraints,” said Raymond Hall, UNHCR’s Representative in Thailand. “We hope it opens up a possible corridor to allow more international aid to reach the cyclone victims.”

A total of 23 international agencies were providing aid to people in the devastated areas, said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“It’s a race against the clock,” Byrs said. “If the humanitarian aid does not get into the country on a larger scale, there’s the risk of a second catastrophe,” she said, adding that people could die from hunger and diseases.

Health experts have warned there was a great risk of diarrhea and cholera spreading because of the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation.

“We have had a week to convince the regime to behave reasonably, and they are still blocking aid,” he said. “So the international community needs to wake up and take bolder steps.”

–from Myanmar junta hands out aid boxes with generals’ names

~~~

Cyclone victims face ‘long-term’ food shortages

Myanmar’s rice-growing heartland has been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, threatening long-term food shortages for survivors, experts said Wednesday.

CNN obtained the video in which the survivor said she walked a trail dotted by dead bodies to get to safety, passing a group of about 1,000 homeless people who slept on the street.

“Yes, there is tide coming along. Trees fall over people,” the survivor said. “There are many dead bodies lying under trees. Yes, all people I saw are crying too much and searching for bodies of loved ones. There is bad smell from dead bodies on the way we came from.”

Myanmar, formally known as Burma, last held multiparty elections in 1990, when Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy handily won. The military junta ignored the results.

–from Cyclone victims face ‘long-term’ food shortages

~~~~

In an unusual move, Red Cross criticizes Myanmar

Usually the Red Cross complains confidentially to governments about such abuses, leading to criticism of the agency for failing to disclose severe violations. Its silence during the Holocaust was an extreme case, but more recently it was criticized for failing to go public with its knowledge of U.S. abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

In denouncing Myanmar, the president of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, said it had repeatedly complained to the government about the abuses, “but the authorities have failed to put a stop to them.”

“The persistent use of detainees as porters for the armed forces is a matter of grave humanitarian concern,” Kellenberger said. “The actions of the authorities have also resulted in immense suffering for thousands of people in conflict-affected areas.”

The armed forces have also committed “numerous acts of violence,” including murder, against civilians in these areas, the Red Cross said. “They have also forced villagers to directly support military operations or to leave their homes.”

The United Nations and Western countries have long accused the junta of human rights abuses, like forcing people to do unpaid manual labor and to serve as army porters, but this was the first time the Red Cross has been so direct.

The Red Cross said it based its complaints on observations made by Red Cross representatives and numerous allegations of abuse it collected during private interviews with thousands of civilians and detainees.

In an unusual move, Red Cross criticizes Myanmar

~~~~

Jim Carrey’s Call To Action for Burma - support the world’s only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Aung San Suu Kyi. Jim appeals to viewers to take action and e-mail the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to coordinate a strong response by the United Nations Security Council to the situation in Burma.
Please send Ban Ki-moon an email at inquiries@un.org — The Human Rights Action Center and U.S. Campaign for Burma

~~~~

Like the South African leader Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi has become an international symbol of heroic and peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.

For the Burmese people, Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, represents their best and perhaps sole hope that one day there will be an end to the country’s military repression.

More information on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at Dassk.com.

~~~~

THE STORY:

In 2007, the ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery and began starving him to death.

For several days, the ‘artist’ and the visitors of the exhibition watched, emotionless, the shameful ‘masterpiece’ based on the dog’s agony, until eventually he died.

Does THIS sound like art to you?

But this is not all… the prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of Central America decided that the ‘installation’ WAS actually art, so Guillermo Vargas Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action for the Biennial of 2008.

Let’s STOP HIM!!!!! Sign the petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/ea6gk/petition.html

Here is another petition that is 2 million signatures strong. Please feel free to sign it as well:
http://www.petitiononline.com/13031953/petition.html

Please do it. It’s free of charge, there is no need to register, and it will only take 1 minute to save the life of an innocent creature.

AND, for those of you saying “This is all a hoax, etc,” here is a direct quote FROM THE ‘ARTIST’ himself!:
“I knew the dog died on the following day from lack of food. During the inauguration, I knew that the dog was persecuted in the evening between the houses of aluminum and cardboard in a district of Managua. 5 children who helped to capture the dog received 10 bonds of córdobas for their assistance. The name of the dog was Natividad, and I let him die of hunger in the sight of everyone, as if the death of a poor dog was a shameless media show in which nobody does anything but to applaud or to watch disturbed. In the place that the dog was exposed remain a metal cable and a cord. The dog was extremely ill and did not want to eat, so in natural surroundings it would have died anyway; thus they are all poor stray dogs: sooner or later they die or are killed.”

~~~~

To be fair (with lots of comments from Costa Ricans):

In his defence, the artist has claimed that what he was attempting to prove was that those who saw the suffering of the dog just walked on by and that if it had been left on the street to die, no-one would have even known of its existence.

It has also been reported that the dog did not die but escaped, and that it had been fed by Vargas and was only tied up during the gallery opening times. It has not been possible to confirm this.

The Managua exhibition attracted worldwide attention and many people believe it to have been an act of cruelty rather than art. A petition has been started in an attempt to prevent Habacuc’s involvement in the 2008 Biennial and from repeating the spectacle.

If you would like to sign the petition, visit: http://www.petitiononline.com/ea6gk/petition.html

–from Artist Guillermo Vargas - Habacuc

/film: Blogging the Reel World

Ben Affleck called comedian friend Sarah Silverman after completing a sit-down interview with a person he was told was a “very famous openly gay fashion journalist”. Ben called the interview “the weirdest sit-down he has ever had with a reporter” explaining that the interviewer’s (wholm he refered to as an “idiot”) first question was “How Do You Like N–s?” After a stunned silence, Silverman asked Affleck “Was this guy’s name Bruno?” Then and only then did Affleck actually realize that the whole thing was a gag. There is no doubt that this interview will be featured in the final cut, which is currently scheduled to hit theaters in October 2008.

–from /film: Blogging the Reel World

~~~~~

Brüno vs. Neo Nazis - Hmmm, he ends the interview below by asking one of them, “Do you think that there are any skinheads that aren’t gay?”

“Get ready for another economic shock of major proportions — a virtual doubling of prices at the gas pump to as much as $10 a gallon.” –The Sun

~~~~~

From: “Jeff Whitty”
Date: April 21, 2006
To: (Tonight Show email address)
Subject: For Mr. Leno

Dear Mr. Leno,

My name is Jeff Whitty. I live in New York City. I’m a playwright and the author of “Avenue Q”, which is a musical currently running on Broadway.

I’ve been watching your show a bit, and I’d like to make an observation:

When you think of gay people, it’s funny. They’re funny folks. They wear leather. They like Judy Garland. They like disco music. They’re sort of like Stepin Fetchit as channeled by Richard Simmons.

Gay people, to you, are great material.

Continue reading “”Dear Jay Leno…fags…I think you can do better”" »

In a scene dubbed “a bit too precious” by one reviewer, an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” makes an appearance in the excellent film, L.I.E., above.

And separately, I have been graciously granted, by Annie Finch, the Women’s Poetry Listserv moderator title that she has worn many years now:

The WOM-PO (Discussion of Women’s Poetry) List was started in December 1997 by Annie Finch with an invitation to a small group of poets, critics, and lovers of women’s poetry. These people in turn invited other people to join, and the list has grown gradually by spreading through these networks. In April 2008, Amy King succeeded Annie as List Moderator for WOM-PO. Discussion on the list covers women poets of all periods, aesthetics, and ethnicities. It has been characterized by its high caliber, relatively low volume, and openness to a diversity of aesthetic perspectives.

Thanks, Annie! And friendly interlopers, please feel free to join us!

~~~

Booger, Kitty, and Mousy look totally bored - maybe that’s why? 

Lesbos islanders dispute gay name

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.

The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally.

The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians.

Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece’s third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?

The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.

He says it causes daily problems to the social life of Lesbos’s inhabitants.

–Continued @ BBC

volume 10, issues 2 & 3
fall 2007 & winter 2008

poetry

Jesse Ferguson Mary Kasimor Davide Baptiste Chirot

Andy Nicholson Geof Huth Laurel Ransom William Garvin

Diana Magallon and Jeff Crouch Steve Roggenbuck Mark Young

Andy Gricevich Eric Weiskott Laura Harper Thomas Fink

Raymond Farr Michael Crake John Lowther Kyle Schlesinger

Adam Strauss

reviews

Mark Wallace on Maryrose Larkin

Aileen Ibardaloza on Eileen Tabios

Jake Kennedy on Andrea Baker

Laura Goldstein on Adam Fieled

]]> http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/moria-poetry-journal-new-issue/feed/ amyhappens http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/the-coconut-overfloweth/ http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/the-coconut-overfloweth/#comments Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:28:27 +0000 amyking http://amyking.wordpress.com/?p=652

NEW ISSUE OF COCONUT!

Contents

david trinidad/jeffery conway/gillian mccain reb livingston

chelsey minnis elizabeth treadwell christopher salerno

lauren spohrer terita heath-wlaz tyler carter elisa gabbert

michael ball brenda iijima sam truitt jessica piazza

claire hero matthew zapruder james sanders linnea ogden

emily kendal frey kc trommer gina myers seth landman

The Griffin Poetry Prize Announces the 2008 Canadian and International Shortlist

International Shortlist

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems • John Ashbery
HarperCollins Publishers/Ecco

Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems • Elaine Equi
Coffee House Press

The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition
Clayton Eshleman, translated from the Spanish,
written by César Vallejo
University of California Press

Selected Poems 1969-2005 • David Harsent
Faber and Faber

~~~

CLICK HERE for interview I conducted with our very own Elaine Equi!

~~~

Canadian Shortlist

The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser • Robin Blaser
University of California Press

Notebook of Roses and Civilization
Robert Majzels and Erin Moure, translated from the French,
written by Nicole Brossard
Coach House Books

Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. McFadden • David McFadden
Insomniac Press/4 a.m. Books

~~~

TORONTO – April 8, 2008 – Scott Griffin, founder of The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry and David Young, trustee, today announced the Canadian and International shortlist for this year’s prize. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the most lucrative poetry prizes in the world, exemplifying the international spirit of the form. The prize is awarded annually for the two best books of poetry, including translations, published in English in the previous year.

~~~

]]> http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/poetry-doesnt-pay/feed/ amyhappens Elaine Equi! http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/i-named-myself/ http://amyking.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/i-named-myself/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:21:13 +0000 amyking http://amyking.wordpress.com/?p=649

“We used to go over to the railroad track and play,” she said. “We’d take straight pins, lay them on the railroad track and make little alphabets out of them. We’d know just about the time when the train was either coming or going, and the train would run over the pins and mash them together, stick them right together, and we’d have a little box of alphabets of pins…. After that, me and my brother, we’d have to cut wood. We would each have a song, he had his and I had mine. We used to sing about trains. That was the beginning of me writing ‘Freight Train,’ right about then. That was a long time ago….”

Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (January 5, 1895 - June 29, 1987) was an American musician. Her style was of the traditional blues and folk genre. However, Libba was quite original since she was self-taught and had no knowledge of conventional guitar tunings. Her unique approach to left-handed guitar playing was to hold the guitar upside down strung as standard tuning. This position required her to play the bass lines with her fingers, and the melody with her thumb. Her signature, alternating bass style is known as “Cotten picking”.

Elizabeth had retired from the guitar for twenty-five years, except for occasional church performances. It wasn’t until she reached her sixties that she began recording and performing publicly. She was discovered by the folk-singing Seeger family while she was working for them as a housekeeper.

Elizabeth Cotten began writing music while toying around with her older brother’s banjo. She was left handed so she played the banjo “backwards”. Later, when she transferred her songs to the guitar, a unique style was formed, since on the Banjo the uppermost string is not a bass string, as on the guitar, but a short high pitched string, called a drone string. This required her to adopt a unique style for the guitar, which she first played with all finger down strokes like a banjo. Later this evolved into a unique style of finger picking, and her signature, alternating bass style is known as “Cotten Picking”.

Her unmistakably original chords, melodies and finger picking techniques would go on to influence many other musicians.

–From Wikipedia

A few more tidbits:

* Elizabeth Cotten went to work, hunting for her own job door-to-door, at 11-years-old until she got one earning 75 cents a month to buy her first guitar. * She named herself Elizabeth in the classroom one day (”Her parents couldn’t agree on a name, so, she was called “Little Sis,” “Babe,” and “Shug,” until her first day of school, when she announced that her name was now Elizabeth“). * Mike Seeger later said, “Who would have known that my mother and Elizabeth, both musicians, would have met in a department store. I think that after a couple of minutes, they recognized each other. For her to come into our house, and at that time, when recorded documentation was just beginning…”. * She played with the New Lost City Ramblers, sometimes with (Mississippi) John Hurt, who can be heard by clicking here and here! * Ms. Cotten wrote many songs, including “Take Me Back to Baltimore” and “Shake Sugaree,” which Devendra Banhart does a lovely rendition of below [Click here to hear Elizabeth Cotten's version sung by her granddaughter!]:

~~~

Things the U.S. Government wants you to believe (& thus prevent you from making that call):

The Bush Administration is focused on achieving meaningful results – cleaner air and water, and healthier lands and wildlife habitats.

• The nation’s air is much cleaner today than it was in 1970 and progress will continue.
• The trend of annual loss of wetlands has been reversed.
• Restoration and redevelopment of abandoned industrial sites is accelerating.
• President Bush is meeting his commitment to reduce the National Park Service maintenance backlog.

–Um, yeah. Straight from EarthDay.Gov - U.S. website.

And since they’ll be inheriting the day that paves the way –”This page provides links to federal government Web sites for kids related to Earth Day and the environment.” A few selections from the U.S. Gov’t Earth Day site:

Energy Hogbusters: learn how to outsmart the hogs that waste energy.

Endangered species: games and how you can help.

Roofus the Dog’s Solar and Efficient Neighborhood: make your home energy smart.

~~~

Since Ms. Clinton began her campaign, there certainly has been a public resurgence in misogyny, starting with my long-lost father sending me Hillary Clinton jokes via email. No call on my birthday or Christmas, but I warrant jokes in which a presidential candidate ends up dead, raped, and mocked? That’s emotionally-charged action from a man worth standing up and questioning!

I don’t care if you think her politics are straight from the devil himself; what I don’t get is how so many men are freely telling jokes, using Clinton as a prop, as a basis for venting their anger toward women — and they’re doing so while the women in their lives stand by and either laugh along or remain silent. I mean, she’s just a strawman, so to speak — Clinton is being used by these guys as a cause to make fun of attributes assigned to the female population. Let’s check out a random Clinton “joke”. In fact, let’s just pull the recent one up sent courtesy of my father:

Hillary Clinton and her driver were cruising home along a country road one evening when an old cow loomed in front of the car. The driver tried to avoid it but couldn’t.

The aged cow was struck and killed. Hillary told her driver to go up to the farmhouse and explain to the owners what had happened and pay them for the cow. She stayed in the car making phone calls.

About an hour later the driver staggered back to the car with his clothes in disarray. He was holding a half-empty bottle of expensive wine in one hand, a huge Cuban cigar in the other, and was smiling happily, smeared with lipstick.

“What happened to you,” asked Hillary ?

“Well,” the driver replied, “the farmer gave me the cigar, his wife gave me the wine, and their beautiful twin daughters made passionate love to me.”

“My God, what did you tell them ?” asked Hillary.

The driver replied, “I just stepped inside the door and said, ‘I’m Hillary Clinton’s driver and I’ve just killed the old cow.’ The rest happened so fast I couldn’t stop it.”

Let’s be clear: this “joke”, like nearly all of them, has nothing to do with Clinton herself or her politics. It sounds like something Rush Limbaugh himself would have told. But nope, our fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends, uncles, and friends are guffawing over the basic elements of sexism, ageism (Women get old and become “cows”), the sexual trade in women (the driver’s reward is the farmer’s two daughters), and general misogyny (Clinton’s death is celebrated and rewarded in this joke, after all). If this joke cast McCain as the butt, would my father and his pals be elbowing each other in the ribs and mass-emailing the joke on to their co-workers and daughters? No, they’d be asking where women get off celebrating the death of a man with champagne and cigars. They’d be asking how this joke is relevant to the presidential campaign. They would be angry and demand that the idiots perpetuating such jokes be sat in a corner with the dunce cap on.

To the few women who are going along and “fitting in” with these guys, I offer this quote from Maragaret Atwood, “She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn’t a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a snarky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.” Your compliance and passivity will only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll learn to hate yourself too well. . . .

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From The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the Fourth Wave (New York Magazine) by Amanda Fortini:

Of course, we weren’t delusional. Even before Tina Fey declared, “Bitch is the new black,” before female outrage had been anointed a trend by the New York Times, many women were clued in to the numerous gender-related issues that lay, untouched and unexamined, at some subterranean level of our culture: to the way women disproportionately bear the ills of our society, like poverty and lack of health care; to the relentlessly sexist fixation on the bodies of Hollywood starlets—on the vicissitudes of their weight, on the appearance and speedy disappearance of their pregnant bellies—and the deleterious influence this obsession has on teenage girls; to the way our youth-oriented culture puts older women out to graze (rendering them what Tina Brown has called, in a nod to Ralph Ellison, “invisible women”). But who wanted to complain? It was easier—and more fun—to take the Carly Fiorina approach: to shut up and compete with the boys. Who wanted to be the statistic-wielding shrew outing every instance of prejudice and injustice? Most women prefer to think of themselves as what Caroline Bird, author of Born Female, has called “the loophole woman”—as the exception. The success of those women is frequently cited as evidence that feminism has met its goals. . . .

Who wanted to think of gender as a divisive force, as the root of discrimination? Perhaps more relevant, who wanted to view oneself as a victim? Postfeminism was also a form of solipsism: If it’s not happening to me, it’s not happening at all. To those women succeeding in a man’s world, the problems wrought by sexism often seemed to belong to other women. But as our first serious female presidential candidate came under attack, there was a collective revelation: Even if we couldn’t see the proverbial glass ceiling from where we sat, it still existed—and it was not retractable. . . .

A greatest-hits selection provides a measure of the misogyny: There’s Republican axman Roger Stone’s anti-Hillary 527 organization, Citizens United Not Timid, or CUNT. And the Facebook group Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich, which has 44,000-plus members. And the “Hillary Nutcracker” with its “stainless-steel thighs.” And Clinton’s Wikipedia page, which, according to The New Republic, is regularly vandalized with bathroom-stall slurs like “slut” and “cuntbag.” And Rush Limbaugh worrying whether the country is ready to watch a woman age in the White House (as though nearly every male politician has not emerged portly, wearied, and a grandfatherly shade of gray). . . .

And so, in our reluctance to appear nagging, scolding, hectoring, or petty, many of us have made a practice of enduring minor affronts, not realizing that a failure to decry the smaller indignities can foster blindness to the larger ones. We then find ourselves shocked when one of the smartest, most qualified women ever to run for public office is called “fishwife-y” by a female pundit on national television. . . .

Old-guard feminists, for their part, seem not yet aware—or prepared to believe—that the younger generation is coming around. “Young women take a lot of things for granted,” Geraldine Ferraro told me . . . For another movement to reach critical mass, she said, women in society may need to experience what she calls “an accretion of insult.” But with the inequities highlighted by Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid reminding us of the inequities we experience on a regular basis, the insults may have, well … accreted. . . .

“It’s just a vibe when you’re a woman and you walk into a room and you’re in a position of power and you have to convince them of something,” a movie producer told me. “You’re constantly juggling: When you’re soft, you’re too soft; when you’re strong, you’re too strong. It’s a struggle in business and a struggle in relationships. It’s always a struggle.” . . . They may be more likable, more approachable, when playing to notions of traditional femininity (mother, wife, victim), but this doesn’t fly in the workplace. “To try to hide her womanliness or enhance it—that’s a decision Obama would never have to make,” said one woman. “I’m not saying it’s harder to be a woman. It’s just a choice she has to make that he doesn’t.” . . .

The past few months have been like an extended consciousness-raising session, to use a retro phrase that would have once made most of us cringe. We’ve parsed the gender politics of the campaign with other women in the office, at parties, over e-mail, and now we’re starting to parse the gender politics of our lives. This is, admittedly, depressing: How can we be confronting the same issues, all these years later? But it’s also exciting. It feels as if a window has been opened in a stuffy, long-sealed room. There is a thrill at the collective realization. Now the question is, what next?

–From The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the Fourth Wave (New York Magazine) by Amanda Fortini

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ADDITIONAL READING

Fourth Wave Feminism and Real Men

On-the-go Chinese women in no hurry to wed

Feminism’s Fourth Wave by UTNE Reader

Being a Feminist in Japan; Watching the Election From Afar

The New Feminists in The Observer

Globalclasshes

They must go for Hillary Clinton: Forget all the razzmatazz over Obama. The Democrats have only one option for president

Media Girl: Feminism

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P.S.  Did I mention I’m hosting this fabulous poetry reading this coming Friday?  And that I’m feeling a bit better?  And that you should come?!!!

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Brandi Homan reviews I’M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU in The Cutbank Review today (an excerpt):

Even though King does something that there should be more of in contemporary poetry—addresses the sociopolitical aspects of life in the 21st century head on—I’m The Man Who Loves You accomplishes much more. It is disjointed, beautifully grotesque, and unsparing, yet it is ultimately hopeful, kind, and entertaining. In “I Used to Be Amy King,” King says, “…we are bred to be the best neglected fun, forthcoming” (32). Believe you me, King is this type of fun. I’m The Man Who Loves You is not to be neglected. This book is for anyone who has ever stepped into, or wanted to step into, their own “long black dream.”

Thanks, Brandi!

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And Caroline Wilkinson reviews KISS ME WITH THE MOUTH OF YOUR COUNTRY over at Tarpaulin Sky (an excerpt):

Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country is a potent work not only artistically but politically, more so than King’s earlier poetry. Instead of loaded words, we get moments that bring us into a body where the borders shift. In this “country,” the “I” and “you” suddenly change because the line between the two keeps moving. The borders here are insecure because they are defended by private, piecemeal methods—“a pile of ash / that blows back into you.” This “country” is the body of a woman, and it stubbornly remains in quotes because it is a permeable thing, especially when trapped inside the home. Laws about rape and incest, ineffectual in practice, help keep it that way, as does the sexist culture. As a country, this body looks real enough, but because its borders don’t mean a great deal, it isn’t. Near the end of the chapbook, King returns to her earlier more cerebral style, turning images at a manic rate, but this idea of the body and its borders lingers. The poetry is haunted by it, like a house haunted by the idea of not being there.

Thanks, Caroline!

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Our coffee table from Ikea was on clearance for $99. The drawers slide open on the sides for your very own personal revolving artists’ books show. Or something like that.

We also have spoons for visiting poets’ palates. Just $3.99 / 6 Pack. P.S. Be careful what pic you click here - you might end up smiling.