Boulder Falls

I could not have taken this picture because it was shot in 1919. But I was here.

Rocky Mountain

I did not take this picture but I could have...

Homely

Literary Journals that Have Rejected My Poems, an Unabridged List:

LIT

New Ohio Review
New American Writing
The Saranac Review
Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry
Eye-Rhyme
The Columbia Review
jubilat
Notre Dame Review
New York Quarterly

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Pages 37 - 38 of my Moleskin journal:

Lebanon's religious make-up: Sunni Muslims; Shiite Muslims; Maronite Christians; Druze.
U.S. Mint > Bureau of Engraving & Printing > Mutilated Currency Unit

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A Conversation Between Category A Members Rivera and Crosby, in Brief:

C: Aren't you a little old for a velcro wallet?
R: Don't you dare judge me, motherfucker exclamation point
C: I see you haven't refuted my judgment.
R: You obviously can't appreciate the finer things in life. Like a velcro wallet made in China. Hi-yo!
C: Sad, sad little man.
R: Your point is what, exactly?
C: If you strike me down, I will only become more powerful than you can imagine.
R: Like He-Man?
C: Loser.

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Glossolalia: n. tongue; ecstatic usually unintelligible utterance usually.

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Have a happy and healthy Memorial Day weekend, everyone.

Fast Fashionable

It's great to go through your record/CD collection and rediscover those old favorites that sound good years, if not decades, after first hearing them. For me, Depeche Mode's Violator is one of those records--vaguely detached without being cold (those damn synths!), but full of drive and raw energy (without resorting to macho bravado). And while the lyrics leave something to be desired (Dave Gahan is no Bob Dylan), there is nothing wrong with the frankness and simplicity of the following words: Words like violence / break the silence / come crashing in / into my little world / painful to me / pierce right through me / can't you understand / oh my little girl?

And speaking of music, the Album of the Week is Mirrored by Battles (see cover art, above), which is epic, sprawling, instrumental post-rock for the twenty-second century.

http://www.amazon.com/Mirrored-Battles/dp/B000OLHGBQ/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0001001-5034422?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180063931&sr=8-1

Calling all alumnaes and almost alumuses

Congratulations to the Class of 2007 from all of us here at Katz's Delicatessen...we got your tongues.

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Love to TP, my homies, FGT, and the biatch patrol.

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"I'm tired of Love: I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But money gives me pleasure all the time." --Hilaire Belloc

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Congratulations and best of luck to the Marquis de Mercury "freewriting saves all" Mystique, Marquis de "Stee-rike! Hi-O!" Rivera, Marquis de "Is that sexual?" Modig, and Marquis de "Gimme some jello I love you Myella so much" Cosby, for yet another gruel-filled semester. You've made a world of difference on my soul. XXOO

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My orange cat sleeps on my pillow next to my head while my evil cat tries to poke our eyes out from under the bed.

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"I hardly ever tire of love or rhyme--
That's why I'm poor and have a rotten time." --Wendy Cope

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I never told you this before but I've been watching you in class.

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K.I.T. Never change! Remember the fried green tomatoes!

"I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."

The above, it goes without saying, is the album cover of the year.

*

Is there anything cuter than Rufus Wainwright in lederhosen?

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Ever notice how conservatives will resort to using words like "illegal," while liberals prefer to use "undocumented"?

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Song of the Moment: CSS - "Fuck Off is Not the Only Thing You Have to Show" [Sub Pop, 2006]

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Station platform scene. What unpredictable calm--it's the inner voice.
--Tomas Transtromer

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We need not know the details of history to recognize its children.
--Tony Tost

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Dislocate, the literary journal of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Minnesota, has published "Permanence."

With this event, modern American poetry has finally suffered creative collapse.

*

I'm in the middle of drawing up a summer reading list. So far (have you any suggestions?), I've only been able to come up with the following books:

Nicanor Parra - Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Good
Various - Scoring from Second: Writers on Baseball
Eliot Asinof - Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series
Dave Eggers - What Is the What*

*denotes nearly completed; progress impeded by arrival of life events.

*

I was looking forward to a cross-country road trip from Chicago to San Diego, but will have to do with with my own plans, tired heat.

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how do we make sense
of such evil,

ashen stream over
Murray Street

Hot Wax - May 2007

Pressure Drop - "Theme for the Outcaste"
Radio 4 - "Dance to the Underground"
Young Love - "Discotech"
Liars - "It Fit When I Was a Kid (Don't Techno For an Answer Remix)"
!!! - "Yadnus"
CSS - "Alala"
Battles - "Atlas"
Moa - "Joy & Pain"
DJ Shadow - "Red Bus Needs to Leave!"
Tricky - "Demise"
Jarvis Cocker - "Tonite"
Sean Lennon - "Wait for Me"
Johnny Cash - "Further Up On the Road"
[track deleted]
Bruce Springsteen - "O Mary Don't You Weep"

Hunter College - BFA Thesis Exhibition

My brother, Steve, will take part in Hunter College's BFA degree exhibition (entitled "TEN."), which opens on Thursday, May 17. All are invited to attend.

The other artists in the group show, whose work ranges from painting to sculpture to performance art, are Michael Berube, Claudio Blanco, Ian Campbell, John Gonzalez, David Hudec, Jun Imamura, Jen Phippen, Norah Quinn, and Jesse Willenbring. The show is curated by Professor Gabriele Evertz.

The nitty-gritty:

TEN.
May 17 through June 16, 2007

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
Hunter College
68th Street and Lexington Avenue (SW corner)
New York, NY 10021

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 1-6pm
Telephone: 212-772-4991

Onward, Christian soldiers...

Race Carded

Last night, after Gregory's fantastic reading for EARSHOT at the Lucky Cat, Laura casually mentioned that I was "too ethnic for Williamsburg." The young poetess is right, of course; I am of foreign extraction (a big holla to all my brown peoples), and nobody would ever confuse me for a hipster (tight jeans and a single tattoo notwithstanding). Anyway, her comment reminded me of a game that my little brother and I like to play whenever we attend indie-rock shows in the city: Find the Minority.

"How does one play Find the Minority, Danny," you must all be asking yourselves. Well, dear friends, it's all pretty simple: Just find someone whose coloration and hair texture suggests that the person you have spotted has inherited genes from a much lighter pool. "That game sounds like fun, Danny, but how does one win," you question. Again, it's pretty easy. Just refer to the following points system, which can be printed out for your convenience (and hidden in the pocket of your multi-colored thrift-store shirt):

Blacks = 5 points
Latinos = 3 points
Asians = 1 point
Whites with Dreadlocks = -5 points

At a recent Black Dice show (in January at the Bowery Ballroom), I scored a total of five points (two Asians plus one Latino). I probably would have scored more, but couldn't tell the ethnicity of Black Dice's former drummer, Hiram (whose skintone approximates that of export-grade cocoa), who was spotted near the front of the stage prior to the beginning of the gig.

What are your experiences at New York City rock shows? Have you ever been referred to as a "Mexican" by white punks at a Bad Religion show?

Discuss.

The Rewards are Small

The following interview is taken from http://www.coldfrontmag.com:

The second section of Jenny Boully’s second book is titled “He Wrote in Code.” Much the same could be said of Boully. Her pioneering first book, The Body¸ was written entirely in footnotes and its blend of vision and experimentation rendered it among the only books by contemporary young writers that can be deemed a collectors item—a used copy currently fetches about $100 on Amazon. Her experimental spirit and romantic largesse were continued, perhaps emboldened in her second book, [one love affair]*, among the best and most challenging must-owns published in 2006. With a third title on tap for 2007 and a reissue of The Body in the works, Boully here addresses her love affair with the footnote, the complexity of relationships, getting by as a poet, finding meaning among remains or fragments of a fallen something¸ and the layer cake that is [one love affair]*.

. . .

JD: What to you is the most difficult thing about writing and publishing poetry in the 21st century?

JB: I think that ultimately, no matter what, you wake up most mornings and feel like a failure. To write and publish poetry in the 21st century is to oftentimes feel that you've given your life to something that isn't giving you much or anything in return, to realize that you, in this relationship, are the one who loves more. Poetry seems to love you less. You start to get older, and the youth of your twenties starts to slough and you look around and your friends are doing things with their lives. They're traveling to Europe, they're getting married, they're having children, they're buying houses, they're sitting on nice couches while you scour your neighborhood on trash days for ironing boards and bowls. Poverty and uncertainty are the most difficult things about writing and publishing poetry in the 21st century. The challenge is to fine-tune your imagination, to make-believe that life isn't as dreadful as it might seem. Luckily I live in a city full of museums and bizarre occurrences, and I've always been an avid daydreamer. The challenge is to surround yourself with metaphor and beauty, to not succumb to feelings of failure and dread. If you are a poet, it's very easy for you to be perfectly surprised and happy to see a perfectly cooked egg-over-easy. The rewards are small and few and far between. I had a poetry professor once tell me that in this business, you had better be enough for yourself. That's always stuck, and it's always what draws me to my desk to write--that, and the promise of make-believe, the thought that perhaps today I could write a perfectly cooked something.

for free love click here...no really it's not spam

http://gammm.org/index.php/2007/05/10/free-love-pics-linh-dinh

The Grand Marquis Coterie Mascot

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

Catalonian Crustaceans

Hemingway Dines on Boiled Shrimp and Beer

I'm the original two-hearted brawler.
I gnaw the scrawny heads from prawns,
pummel those mute, translucent crustaceans,
wingless hummingbirds, salt-water spawned.
As the Catalonians do, I eat the eyes at once.
My brawny palms flatten their mainstays.
I pop the shells with my thumbs, then crunch.

Just watch me as I swagger and sprawl,
spice-mad and sated, then dabble in lager
before I go strolling for stronger waters
down to Sloppy Joe's. My stride as I stagger
shivers the islands, my fingers troll a thousand keys.
My appetite shakes the rock of the nation.
The force of my fiction makes the mighty Gulf Stream.

Excerpted from FLORIDA POEMS © Copyright 2002 by Campbell McGrath.