POETRY UPDATES!

• HOUSEFIRE – “I would like to amputate myself?”

•  Poetry Daily’s Featured Poet: Amy King

• Boston Globe award: among the best poetry books of 2011

• Coldfront’s Top 30 Poetry Books of 2011 #17

• THE RUMPUS – “Death, Is Always”

• Poets & Writers - ”Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of My Eyes”

• Small Press Distribution Poetry Best-Seller. November 2011 #8

• Small Press Distribution Poetry Best-Seller. December 2011 #8

*  Support Small Press Distribution

* Litmus Press

*  The French Exit on “The Strange Power of Lying to Yourself“

“Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined” as in Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe. If “us,” “herons,” and “dust” rhyme,  then these poems rhyme. If that makes you feel safe, it shouldn’t. Amy King’s poems are exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque. They’re spring-loaded and ready for trouble. Categories collapse. These are the new “thunderstorms with Barbie roots.”

— Rae Armantrout

Vulnerability, fragility, and anxiety are all flushed out into the open here and addressed with such strong sound and rhythm that we recognize a resilient, defiant strength within them. King puts relentless pressure on forces seemingly beyond our reach and, in bringing them closer, exposes their own vulnerable centers. This is a poetry equally committed to language as a tool with social obligations and language as an art material obligated to reveal its own beauty. King’s language does both magnificently. 

— Cole Swensen

Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the “natural” world, i.e. sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem “This Opera of Peace.” She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: “Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor,/Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged,/Let time’s contagion mar us/until spoken people lie as particles of wind.

— John Ashbery

I love Amy King’s smile in photos of Amy King, Amy King’s exuberance and looping, bashing panache (flamboyant manner, reckless courage) in the poems of Amy King, I’m going to say Amy King every chance I get in this blurb to make you think “I gotta read me some Amy King,” especially if you’re “looking for anything/that will pull the cork, boil the blood/of displeasure,” as only the poems of Amy King can in the world in which Amy King is King (and Queen).     

— Bob Hicok

The first poem I read by Amy King was “MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN” and it struck me with a force I had previously felt on encountering masterworks by Lorca and Dylan Thomas.  I won’t live long enough to see if her poetry will continue to equal the magnificence of theirs, but the fact that she achieved it once (at least) proves to me it could.     

— Bill Knott

[click here]

No Place for the Little Lyric @ The Poetry Foundation

Should Adrienne Rich be the poet laureate of the Occupy movement?

Belladonna* Benefit Performance and Auction
Tuesday, December 13, 2011, 6:30 pm

http://www.belladonnaseries.org/benefit.html

PEN AMERICAN – Poetry Roundup!

Ana Bozicevic and I are now herding poetry ephemera for PEN and for your pleasure. Here goes our first roundup. With special guests Anne Boyer, Dana Ward, Justin Marks, Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Willis, Filip Marinovich, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Matthew Zapruder, Nathaniel Otting, Stephanie Young and a other magicians. Enjoy!

~~~~~

RECENT POEMS

On Academy of American Poets site: “The Marble Faun”
In Drunken Boat: “A Woman Is an Act“
In Talking Writing: three poems
In Harp & Altar: “Necessary Instinct“
In Gaga Stigmata: “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song”

POETS AND PETS @ THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

[click here]

City Lights Bookstore

The new issue of Evening Will Come is up: 

A roundtable on poetry and race, featuring

Francisco Aragón, Jaswinder Bolina, Veronica Golos, Amy King, J. Michael Martinez, Farid Matuk, Evie Shockley, Juliana Spahr, Orlando White, and Timothy Yu.

Here: http://www.eveningwillcome.com/issue10-raceroundtable-p1.html

** AND JUST WHAT IS IT? MEDIA BLACKOUT? YOU TELL ME. **  Click the titles for info:

* “The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country … (click to continue)“

* Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1#ixzz1arm8aHPw

Join the Poetry@WallStreet on Facebook -

* Click here – TO PARTICIPATE IN FRIDAY’S READING!

* Poets Occupy Wall Street and Next Philadelphia -

* “For Me, to write is no longer enough” – Poet on Occupy Wall Street -

* OccupyWallStreet -

* Sat., September 24th, 2011 – Footage on Wall Street -

* What Occupy Wall Street does Right -

* On Mainstream Media Coverage @ Salon

* On Mainstream Media Coverage @ The Nation

* MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall Street Lawrence O’donnell with “The Last Word” - VIDEO

* Countdown with Keith Olberman: Michael Moore on support of Occupy Wall Street protest –

* Occupy Philadelphia’ joins ‘Occupy Wall Street’ effort -

* Susan Sarandon lends star power to Wall Street protests -

* The Revolution Begins at Home: Join the Wall Street Occupation -

* ‘Occupy Wall St.’ joins postal workers in budget protest -

* Occupying–Not Rioting–Wall Street - HuffPo

* Occupy Wall Street Protest Escalates On Eighth Day (VIDEO) -

* NYC Transit Union Joins Occupy Wall Street -

* Noam Chomsky on the Wall Street protests -

* Dr. Cornel West Joins Occupy Wall Street, Will Lead Meeting Tonight -

* Occupy Wall Street to Publish Newspaper to Control Their Message -

* What’s Behind the Scorn for the Wall Street Protests?

* Cornel West on Occupy Wall Street: It’s the Makings of a U.S. Autumn Responding to the Arab Spring

* Esque: The Revolution Issue – call for submissions -

SEND ME YOUR LINKS.

PLEASE FORWARD – WIDELY.

“The only war is the war against the imagination…” –Diane di Prima

~~~

“Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also ‘too big to jail.’” –Noam Chomsky

~~~

“We are your every day Americans, who are against the corporate greed that has plagued this country, and the politics who allow this greed to occur. We include teachers, college students, labor members, unemployed workers, and the other 99 percent. We are standing in solidarity with friends in New York City, and across the country.” –Occupy Philadelphia

~~~

On the process, Christian Teresi clarified last year in an interview:

We want the process to be as democratic and transparent as possible. We are always thinking about ways in which we might improve those goals. A detailed explanation of the “Selection & Scoring Process” can be found on the AWP website, but in short what happens is each committee member ranks the proposals within the given modules based on a set of defined criteria. The committee’s aggregate scores are then averaged, and the highest scoring proposals within each module are accepted.

So we are told attention is paid to each proposal by each committee member.  And that each proposal is averaged into a final score and ranked.   But at the end of the day, rejection in hand, we hopeful applicants who put in time and effort writing proposals with their justifications, having invited and convinced other writers to share their time and participate, are not privy to where we went wrong, not even a hint.

MY QUESTION:  Why is AWP capable of spending time judging, tallying, averaging, ranking and then informing each applicant of their accepted or rejected status, but it remains impossible, despite having already ranked each proposal and reached a consensus, to inform us of that ranking?  If you want the process to be as “democratic and transparent” as possible, wouldn’t sharing those final scores with your applicants be a step in making more transparent this democratic process?   It would also permit us to think about how to improve our proposals next year.

AWP, since you’ve already done the tallying, by not permitting us to know where we stand in the big picture feels like shadowy obfuscation and actually does make us wonder about the true democracy of the process.  This may sound like sour grapes, but I would like to have a vague idea where my proposal placed so that I can know if I should bother trying to improve it for next year — Or is an investigation of the influence of gender in publishing merely a subject AWP doesn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole?   Would such queries resound with AWP’s practices to boot?  With no sense of why, my speculations are left to ‘run wild’… & I don’t think I’m alone.

~~~

DAYCARE @ AWP?

In other AWP news, I return to my usual refrain:  If writers did not have access to alcohol at this year’s conference, you better believe this would be a men’s issue.  Wait!  I mean, women AND men would care, speak out, shout their demands for access from the rooftops & book fair tables, etc. 

But I hear very little outcry about the lack of daycare, which *pretty often* falls on the shoulders of writers who happen to be female (Wait!  I know some men, even personally, take care of their babies at AWP – I know – hence the “pretty often”).  This need for childcare affects attendance & participation, among other issues.  Teresi notes in the aforementioned interview that insurance for childcare is too costly, but I wonder, as AWP maps out hotels and locations, how much childcare factors into the planning (as might access to bars? etc).  Teresi states:

However, whenever possible we will provide information on local childcare providers as recommended by the hotel, and attendees can contract with them individually. We will work toward making this information available both on the website and in the conference program.

Has AWP been working on locating options for parents who bring children this year?  Did they last year?  Do they network these parents so that they might be able to collaborate and share babysitting duties, thus permitting more mobility?  To date, I see no mention of the above ‘childcare providers’ on the AWP site, nor do I see any discussion module set for parents to attempt to mobilize on their own steam on the AWP Conference forum.  I realize it’s early still, so perhaps AWP officiators will remedy this absence.  Perhaps.

~~~

UPDATE:
SANDRA SIMONDS started an online petition for on-site daycare here – click and sign. 

ALSO:

That should actually read, “GIVE THEM SHEEP FOR MY BIRTHDAY!”

So I had a blast on my big bold beautiful day yesterday, the day of my birth, August 3, 2011.  Loads of items and well wishes and Ana may have created a monster with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a wine we’ve thought about since its first amusing scene in an episode of Midsomer Murders.  Among other bounty, I also received a gorgeous female unicorn that we have named “Leonora” (Ana says ‘an Amy King poem is like looking at a Leonora Carrington painting!’) made by the hands of Janis Mars Wunderlich, who now knows how often I teach the stellar documentary she is featured in, “Who Does She Think She Is?” –much to my delight!

But the icing on the birthday cake was the “surprise party” I found in another envelope.  Well, I have given to Heifer International in the past and have been meaning to ask others for awhile.  But I neglect, I neglect.  For my big day, Ana secretly created a registry page in my name and asked a small handful of friends to chip in.  They did!  And now three families have, in Ana’s words, “received three (3) wonderful, wooly, milky, meaty sheep!”  According to Heifer:

What makes Heifer’s approach different is Passing on the Gift, where a family is required to pass on the offspring of their animals to another family, creating a sustainable circle of hope.

I echo that wish for those familes and extend the same to my friends and anyone who gives two shakes of a sheep’s tail!  So this blog post is ultimately a shout out and THANK YOU to the peeps who bought the sheep and to anyone else who would still like to contribute any amount on the occasion of my 40th year, here!

Thank you, Michael Steinman & Lorna Sass, Aimee Darrow & Caroline Harmon, Justin Marks & Meridith Rohana, E. Tracy Grinnell & Julian Brolaski, Sampson Starkweather & Paige Taggart, Amy De’Ath, Matt Rotando, and Vanda, Miran & Angela Bozicevic  — lovely peeps, thanks for the milky sheep!  And as Ana notes, “Sometimes humanity is the best bestiary.” 

p.s.  There are 40 candles on that drawing!

Nijinska created choreography for the highly acclaimed Diaghilev’s production of ‘Le Train Bleu’ (1924, aka… The Blue Train), a ballet about the exodus of Paris society to Riviera in the South of France each summer on the train called ‘Le Train Bleu’. In that production Nijinska created a special ambiance through the language of dance, she introduced angular and geometrical movements and organized dancers on stage as interactive groups, that alluded to images of sports activities , such as golf, tennis and recreational games on a beach. Nijinska herself performed in the role as Tennis player. In ‘Le Train Bleu’ Nijinska worked with plot writer Jean Cocteau, composer Darius Milhaud, and with costumes by Coco Chanel and monumental stage curtain designed by Pablo Picasso and executed by Prince Shervashidze, the largest of all canvasses signed by Picasso, who also wrote on it a dedication to Diaghilev.

Phyllis Siegel, 76, right, kisses her wife Connie Kopelov, 84, after exchanging vows …

Congratulations to all of those New Yorkers who exercised their long-overdue civil rights yesterday and got married!  Especially the Manhattan couple, Phyllis Siegel, 76, and Connie Kopelov, 84, – together for 23 years!

I hate to break the news though, the U.S. Federal Government doesn’t think you’re actually a couple!  Neither do my relatives in the south … 

Kudos to folks like Mayor Jason West, who (before he was 30) said he considers it his “moral obligation” to issue marriage licenses to gay couples back in February 2004 — and did it before it was cool.  That’s true “punk,” no?  Even today, West gives credit elsewhere, “I got a lot of attention for the marriages,” he says, looking back. “But I came late to the game. There’s people been working on this for 30, 40 years.”

Protests over yesterday's marriages were met ...

p.s.  Despite the elimination of DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell), military personal of any “not heterosexual” orientation will not receive benefits afforded to the “normal” people:  ”Military gay couples won’t enjoy benefits” — Let freedom, and all of its select bonuses, ring!  

~~~~

p.p.s.  Um, are the attacks on Elizabeth Warren any indication of the threat she poses?  I’d say yes but will let you decide.  Follow the links and do your own research:

1. )VIDEO: Rep. Cooper on “Rude and Disrespectful” Treatment of Elizabeth Warren by Oversight Committee

2. )White House will not name Elizabeth Warren to lead consumer bureau

3.) Elizabeth Warren to ‘think’ about Senate run against GOP’s Scott Brown

Articles (click titles) on The Count @ VIDA:

1.)  The Lack of Female Bylines in Magazines Is Old News – Katha Pollitt @ Slate

2.)  Being Female – Eileen Myles @ The Awl

3.)   How To Publish Women Writers: A Letter to Publishers about the VIDA Count — Annie Finch @ Her Circle

4.) ‘Numbers don’t lie’: Addressing the gender gap in literary publishing — Jessa Crispin @ PBS

5.) On breaking the literary glass ceiling — Jessa Crispin and Michael Schaub @ PBS

6.) Why There’s Gender Bias in Media-and What We Can Do About It — Margot Magowan @ MS. Magazine

7.) Women in Publishing: What’s the Real Story? — Kjerstin Johnson @ Bitch Magazine

8.) Women Get Published and Reviewed Less Than Men in Big Magazines, Say Red-and-Blue Pie Charts — Jim Behrle @ The Hairpin

9.) Bitches Be Trippin’ — Roxane Gay @ HTML Giant

10.)  The Sorry State Of Women At Top Magazines — Anna North @ Jezebel

11.)  Gender, publishing, and Poetry magazine – Christian Wiman @ Poetry Foundation

12.)  VIDA: The Count Roundup @ The Rumpus

13.)  Why It Matters That Fewer Women Are Published in Literary Magazines — Robin Romm @ Double X

14.) Women at Work — Meghan O’Rourke @ Slate

15.)  The Numbers Speak For Themselves @ Women and Hollywood

16.) Do četiri puta manje tekstova žena! — BROJKE NE LAŽU @ Kultura (in Croatian)

17.) Submitting Work: A Woman’s Problem? — Becky Tuch @ Beyond the Margins

18.)  On Gender, Numbers, & Submissions — Rob @ Tin House

19.)  A Literary Glass Ceiling? —  Ruth Franklin @ The New Republic

20.) Research shows male writers still dominate books world — Benedicte Page @ The Guardian

21.) Gender Balance and Book Reviewing: A New Survey Renews The Debate — Patricia Cohen @ New York Times Arts Beat

22.) Tickets to an Awesome Future Are Free: Gender, Literature, and VIDA’s Count — Carolyn Zaikowski

23.) New Yorker, Harper’s, NYRB and TNR Editors on the Dearth of Female Bylines — Elissa Strauss @ The Jewish Daily FORWARD

24.)  How Does It Feel To Be  A Problem?: The Vida Study — Michael Washburn

25.) The Gatekeepers and the Glass Ceiling, Notes Toward an Essay on The Count — Sina Queyras @ LemonHound

~~~~~~

ARTICLES WITH AFFINITY (please send suggestions!) –

–SECRET BEDROOM RECORDINGS REVEALED! — Katy Henriksen @ Brooklyn Rail

–Rethinking Gender Bias in Theater – Patricia Cohen @ The New York Times

–To Write As a Woman Is Political — Roxane Gay @ HTML Giant

–After Backlash, SXSW Adds More Women Comics to Their Lineup — Jessica Grose @ Slate

–The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies @ Feminist Frequency

–Lisa Cholodenko Talks Women Directors: “There’s a Kind of Fundamental Misogyny in the Culture” @IndieWire

–Overlooked and underread: Five great reads by women — Jessa Crispin @ PBS

–In Which When I Went To Iowa I Had Never Heard of Faulkner – Flannery O’Connor’s Letters @ This Recording

–The primer on why literature in translation matters goes something like this — Anna Clark @ Bookslut

–Men who explain things — Rebecca Solnit @ Los Angeles Times

–How to Turn a Great American Novel Into a Great One — Gabriel Brownstein @ The Guardian

Lorna Simpson talks about her career, including her recent practice of appropriating and restaging mid-20th-century photographs.

* Why Black History Month Still Matters

* Pollitt speaks on women’s equality struggles

* Women Stage Massive Protests Across Italy: ‘The Sexism Is Intolerable ‘ (Video)

* Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and “Fun” Feminism

* Hatem addresses emergence of Islamic feminist movement

* Poets putting feelings on paper - “The Young Basadzi project has created a platform for young women to come together and share their stories.”

* ‘Womanist’: Saying Who We Are

* Join The Feminist Press at CUNY on Facebook

* From Tahrir square to Dakar and back again [video]

* Positive signs for Islamic feminist movement

* My Body is Not a Democracy

* Stand with Planned Parenthood

* A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism

* Men Explain Things to Me

“NECESSARY INSTINCT“

@

Harp & Altar

“That’s what inspires me — people still at work, and dreaming.”

READ MORE AT VIDA:  WOMEN IN LITERARY ARTS

(CLICK HERE)

Just ask Ana Bozicevic to create your new site!  See AmyKing.org and Esque Magazine!  New design for each issue as well – Esque #2 is brewing!

~~~~

Want the sexiest review in town?  A visit to Marthe Reed’s review in CutBank Reviews gets you there!

— “VERSE BROADENS THE MIND, SCIENTISTS FIND“

— “The Contiguous Image: Mapping Metaphor in Haiku” by Matthew M. Carriello (Thank you, Denise Hill)

— “Should MIT Teach Poetry?” by John Lundberg

— “This Is Your Brain on Metaphors” by Robert Sapolsky

— “Present and Tense: Fiction vs. Poetry in Recovery“

— “CLOSE CALLS WITH NONSENSE:

— HOW TO READ, AND PERHAPS ENJOY, VERY NEW POETRY” by Stephen Burt (Thanks, Kathleen Ossip)

— Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury” & Cathy Park Hong’s “How Words Fail” — From Metta Sáma: Hong because she talks about what it means to “find your voice” and Lorde because she clearly explains why poetry is “necessary to our existence”

— From A Hundred White Daffodils — “Thoughts on the Gift of Art” (pg. 138) (Thanks, Scott Rex Hightower)

— The Heart Aroused by David Whyte (Thanks, Caroline A LeBlanc)

— From Matt Rotando:  Norman Fischer’s “Do You Want To Make Something Out Of It?” is pretty superb. Almost any chapter from Octavio Paz’s book THE OTHER VOICE.

— From Heidi Lynn Staples:  …not a direct treatment of the question, but the implication seems pretty obvious to me:
“‘Shrinking’ the Climate Problem” by Andrew C. Revkin

Also, relevant to the question of academic curriculum is the scientific work done on poetry therapy. A book by the same name, Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice by Nicolas Mazza, has lots of articles on the scientifically proven health benefits of expressive writing.”

— Poetry Evaluation Project (Thanks, Diane Lockward)

— “A Poet Came to Our Class” (Thanks, Diane Lockward)

— “It’s pure poetry: FSU outreach targets kids at-risk, raises scores and more“ (Thanks, Diane Lockward)

— “In Yemen, Fighting Illiteracy Through Poetry” by Kim A. O’Connell  (Thanks, Diane Lockward)

— “Poetry’s Place and the Poet’s Participation with Fields of Knowledge” by Rosemary Winslow (Thanks, Diane and Rosemary)

— “Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

— Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”

SUGGESTIONS WELCOME!

TUNE IN – PDF POETRY!

 The Equalizer – First_Series Entire Issue (click to download), including work by:

Emily Anderson, Stephanie Anderson, Nathan Austin, Owen Barker, Jim Behrle, Aaron Belz, Mark Bibbins, Summer Block, Amick Boone, Samantha Caan, CAConrad, Macgregor Card, Laura Carter, Adam Clay, Shanna Compton, Joshua Corey, John Cotter, Matt Cozart, Cynthia Cruz, Barbara Cully, Alana Dagen, Peter Davis, Richard Deming, Buck Downs, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Katherine Factor, Noah Falck, Lucas Farrell, Carol Fink, Corrine Fitzpatrick, John Gallaher, Allison Gauss, Henry Gould, Whit Griffin, Shafer Hall, Matt Hart, Mike Hauser, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Matthew Henriksen, Brian Henry, Ernest Hilbert, Mark Horosky, Andrew Hughes, Curtis Jensen, Douglas Kearney, Evan Kennedy, Amy King, Mark Lamoureux, Katy Lederer, Ada Limón, Reb Livingston, Travis Macdonald, Chris Martin, Kristi Maxwell, James Meetze, Jason Myers, Alexis Orgera, Cate Peebles, Craig Santos Perez, Christopher Rizzo, Christopher Salerno, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Ravi Shankar, Don Share, Kevin Shea, Evie Shockley, Carmen Giménez Smith, Lytton Smith, Cosmo Spinosa, Janaka Stucky, Maureen Thorson, Tony Tost, Jo Turner, Eric Unger, Cody Walker

Michael Schiavo is spreading poetry via email / Pdf blasts!  Lots of good work within; just click on the links where each issue is uploaded:

The Equalizer 1.15

*

The Equalizer is an occasional poetry series.

• Sign up for The Equalizer: First Series mailing list to receive sections as they’re released throughout October 2010. Email theunrulyservant@gmail.com. Visit michaelschiavo.blogspot.com for more information, including updates & links to websites that will be hosting some or all of The Equalizer sections. Follow @Michael_Schiavo on Twitter to download sections too!

• If there’s a poem in The Equalizer that you really love, please contact the poet and let him/her know.

• If you’re a teacher, please consider using The Equalizer in the classroom to prompt discussion about contemporary poetry and/or publishing.

• If you’re an independent bookstore, please consider making the The Equalizer available on your website to readers by uploading the PDFs, or via the following links:

The Equalizer 1.1   Summer Block, Jim Behrle, Macgregor Card, Mark Bibbins, Emily Anderson, Aaron Belz, Don Share, Cody Walker, Christopher Salerno, Amick Boone, Adam Clay, Buck Downs, Stephanie Anderson, Owen Barker, and CAConrad. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.2   Matt Hart’s “Write This Today While You Were.” (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.3   Joshua Corey, Stephanie Anderson, Buck Downs, Shanna Compton, Laura Carter, Peter Davis, Alana Dagen, Reb Livingston, Cody Walker, John Cotter, Craig Santos Perez, and Chris Martin. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.4   A selection from John Gallaher’s Guidebooks. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1-1.5 Cynthia Cruz, Reb Livingston, Allison Gauss, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Cody Walker, Buck Downs, Barbara Cully, Peter Davis, Lucas Farrell, Stephanie Anderson, Noah Falck, Carol Fink, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Matt Hart, Maureen Thorson, Amy King, and Chris Martin. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.6   Lucas Farrell’s “The Dual-Shade of Six-Prong.” (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.7 Whit Griffin, Shafer Hall, Stephanie Anderson, Brian Henry, Amy King, Richard Deming, Chris Martin, Buck Downs, Christopher Salerno, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Matthew Henriksen, Evan Kennedy, James Meetze, Matt Hart, Cody Walker, and Douglas Kearney. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.8   Sonnets & sonnots from Nathan Austin, Jo Turner, Ernest Hilbert, Kevin Shea, Samantha Caan, Matt Hart, and Curtis Jensen. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.9   Mike Hauser’s Samples. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.10   Mike Hauser, Buck Downs, Stephanie Anderson, Katherine Factor, Maureen Thorson, James Meetze, Mark Lamoureux, Katy Lederer, Alexis Orgera, Ada Limón, Kristi Maxwell, Cate Peebles, Richard Deming, Carmen Giménez Smith, Matt Hart, and Cody Walker. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.11   Evie Shockley’s “the cold” (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.12   Andrew Hughes, Chris Martin, Stephanie Anderson, Buck Downs, Jason Myers, Richard Deming, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Carmen Giménez Smith, Cody Walker, Christopher Rizzo, Travis Macdonald, Matt Hart, Ravi Shankar, and James Meetze. (HTMLGiant and Maureen Thorson)

The Equalizer 1.13   Henry Gould’s Lanthanum 4 (Maureen Thorson)

Women don’t travel and write about it, or so the New Yorker’s Bill Buford might have us believe via the Best American Travel Writing 2010.  Actually, the truth is that one of the 20 essays included is written by a woman.  My bad.

We’re still watching what the rest of the 2010 “Best of American” series editors select…

But for the moment, I’ll give you one guess how many women have been interviewed for the Paris Review over the years (1950s to the present)!  Ready to be shocked?   Visit the horse’s mouth to find out for yourself!

What women writers would you interview?  Suggestions?  I’m all ears!

Join poets Nicole Cooley and Tonya Foster, poets and editors of the Poets for Living Waters initiative Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, and guest readers Jan Heller Levi,Marcella Durand, Julian Brolaski, Ana Bozicevic, Joanna Hoffman, and Brenda Iijimafor an evening of poetry and eco-poetics in the wake of large-scale catastrophes in the Gulf and the surrounding regions. The online poetry forum and activist group Poets for Living Waters features daily poetic responses to the recent oil spill; for more information, visit poetsforlivingwaters.com.

Friday, October 22th, 6:30pm
The Skylight Room (9100)
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (btwn 34^th & 35^th)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

No registration. Please arrive early for a seat. 212-817-2005

www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org

Poets and Writers Magazine — “Poets Act on Oil Spill“

Poets and Writers Magazine — “Poets Take Action in Wake of Gulf Coast Disaster“

ALSO, FEMINIST PRESS CELEBRATES “40 UNDER 40” - Join us on Monday, October 18, at 6pm at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan to celebrate our 40th anniversary.  Guess who’s an honoree?

I wrestle @ Poetry Society of America (click here).

A few others in the PSA American Poetry series:

2010

Timothy Liu

Amy King

Marcella Durand

Sarah Gambito

Allison Hedge Coke

Kazim Ali

Erin Belieu

Maria Melendez

Ken Chen

Ana Božičević

Elizabeth Robinson

Tina Chang

Brian Teare

Barbara Jane Reyes

Seth Abramson

Jill Alexander Essbaum

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Graham Foust

Sharon Mesmer

Joshua Corey

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Ada Limon

Jennifer Scappettone

Cate Marvin

1999

Bob Holman

Gail Mazur

Dara Wier

Hal Sirowitz

Campbell McGrath

Carl Dennis

Colette Inez

Eleanor Wilner

Miller Williams

Andrea Hollander Budy

Anne Stevenson

Arthur Vogelsang

James Cummins

Charles Martin

Diane Wakoski

Carolyn Kizer

Carol Muske-Dukes

Denise Duhamel

X. J. Kennedy

Suzanne Gardinier

Jacqueline Osherow

Josephine Jacobsen

Frank Lima

Karen Swenson

Lawrence Joseph

Lynn Emanuel

Rachel Hadas

Vicky Karp

Anselm Hollo

Frank Bidart

Thom Gunn

Ann Lauterbach

Marilyn Hacker

Susan Wheeler

Rika Lesser

Grace Schulman

Marilyn Chin

Andrei Codrescu

Sam Hamill

Harvey Shapiro

Henri Cole

Michael S. Harper

Elizabeth Macklin

Naomi Shihab Nye

Wanda Coleman

Ron Silliman

Angela Jackson

Mark Doty

Paul Hoover

Kenneth Koch

Sandra M. Gilbert

Maxine Kumin

Amy Gerstler

Richard Wilbur

Elaine Equi

Filed under: Immigration, Internet, Interview, Language, Lesbian, Life, Literature, Online, Poetics, Poetry, Politics, Pop Culture, Publishing, Queer Culture, Sexism, Sexy ]]> http://amyking.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/wrestling-with-art/feed/ 0 wrestling with art amyking wrestling with art http://amyking.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/we-who-are-about-to-die/ http://amyking.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/we-who-are-about-to-die/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:48:17 +0000 amyking http://amyking.wordpress.com/?p=3298 ]]>

GETTING TO KNOW:  AMY KING

I REVEAL SOME REVELATIONS.

WHERE I THINK I’M SOMETHING OF A COMEDIAN….

AND ANSWER LOTS OF QUESTIONS!

CLICK HERE!

In Melissa Broder’s Huffington Post piece:  No Alarms and No Surprises: Coming Out to Parents as a Writer (and a Human)

Entire Poem up @ Gaga Stigmata

Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song

Infected in the language with feet on the flesh-
colored linoleum floor, white tulips growl to hold
our crisp momentous maker
fully cocked and loaded,
a crash-test monument to the lion’s handshake
that resembles people of a showcase persuasion:
any trauma is an order for us to come to terms with
immanence or some tuxedo of divorcing action
that can test the bound limbs of a diffuse-but-mercurial-present.
That is why death has been cancelled:
there is no legitimate innocent event. Hear,
her claw tooth vibrates off the dust of your wig
and voice bends into your ear.

–READ THE REST OF THE POEM @ GAGA STIGMATA (click here).