Did I tell you?

My full-length poetry collection Temporary Yes is now officially forthcoming from these awesome blokes next year. More news is coming along that front in months ahead.


In other news, Miss Luna Miguel - one of my favorite slices of Spain - gives an interview here that nicely globalizes the now-literature that sometimes seems so strictly American.

I also listened to this podcast this morning while I was trying to not look like a girl whose tonsils sometimes leak blood.

art as poem

Jane Freilicher
Copper Sky
oil on linen; c. 1960

There is a good deal of sickness in these words, so be careful. What I like about this painting - what a poet might like, so far as the assignment goes - is its careful rearrangement. So much of Freilicher's work focuses on landscapes or still-lifes or some combination of the two. Though terribly pretty, they are most often recognizable. (A vase of flowers is a vase of flowers.) "Copper Sky" is also a landscape, but it does something different. Its colors do not follow the patterns of a traditional sky scene. Blotches of white are interspersed in blue; yellow appears unexpectedly, etc. This changes the painting's syntax, making a sky is a sky is a sky something new, something unfamiliar.

And here may we mention -- there's not an awful lot of copper for a painting (I actually typed "poem" and deleted) called "Copper Sky." What copper is there is carefully masked. In this way the artist averts the viewer's expectations and maintains a surprise-for-always look.

The adjustments Freilicher makes in her painting style for "Copper Sky" could easily - and excitedly - translate into adjustments in poetic language and thus prove inspiration for poems boasting uniqueness in style, syntax, or any number of compositional details.

further ado

When Katherine Sullivan asked me to expound upon my facebook rants on so-called neo-dadaist poets, I followed up with this long piece on the subject.

for the books

Turned 21 and aren't we all damn well glad.