Round-up of My Latest Publications & News

January 31 Update:  I tried to fix a line break a few minutes ago and voila! the entire page disappeared.  I'll recreate the content but it'll take me some time.  Bummer.

Jubilant (stem of jūbilāns, present participle of jūbilāre to shout, whoop). What is jubilantly  whooped herein is news of a recent event and recent publications.

FIRSTLY, the first PoetryAssembly held outside of Zuccotti Park was a great success.  We were given a free slot at the Bowery Poetry Club, and we filled the club.  A few poets used the People's Mic, but otherwise, stood and addressed the circle.

The rest of my news:

3 poems in Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture.

2 poems in Truck: RESOLUTION/REVOLUTION, curated by Larissa Shmailo.

1 short story, "An Archive of Paranormal Inquiry Into Coping," previously published in The Writing Disorder, now anthologized in The Writing Disorder, Anthology, Volume 2, 2012.

1 essay and 2 poems published on Poets on the Great Recession.

My AWP: The Wall, Lincoln & Washington, a reading of awesome proportion, a chance to boo the Heritage Fdn thimk tank

Wednesday night's reading at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. was great. Wonderful editors (Reconfigurations' Scott Howard among them), blessedly attentive audience (fellow readers A.J. Patrick Liszkiewica and Daniel Tiffany among them) and a venue sympathetic to the written word and serving up tasty dishes. Swift in-city passage provided by D.C.'s Metro. That's one impressive subway system.

Then Thursday. While everyone else was at AWP, I saw three monuments. My goal, since it was built, has been to see The Wall, the Vietnam War memorial. As I approached I liked that the grass was brown and trees stripped down like old cars. There were ducks grazing on pond murk and the water was more restful in a Siddhartha kind of way than the Hudson. I don't know why.

And there it was, sunk into the ground and of it, the simplest, most elegant and most easy to overlook monument I know of. I cried as I read names on each light-reflecting stone, not that my reaction means anything compared to the huge number of death in that war, but there you have it. Maya Lin's design is genius, the tribute is raw and meditative.

I also went to the Washington Monument, that spindly stunning obelisk with views of 30 miles. He was a good man, George Washington. Seems to have been humble and craved peace. Quotations of his were inside. And also  the memorial for Lincoln, our secular saint. The very famous statue is larger than life in one sense, but not really. 

I walked r/t, most of it on pebbled concrete, wearing fancy leather boots. I was wearing the fancy leather boots, alas, and not the concrete. The weather was gorgeous.

Shortly after I started out I passed the Heritage Foundation on Massachusetts Avenue. It's a conservative thimk tank, where Rush Limbaugh and thimkers like him thimk. I stood in front of the little building that looks like a realtor's office in Connecticut and booed. A lower life-form both noxious and bilious scurried off.

Passing by both Houses of Fools and various and assorted housed bureaucracies, I got a sense of how impossible it is to get anything accomplished. It's so big. Like soooooooooooooooooooo big.  I did see a few men in fifties CIA-chic, but most everyone else was jogging. I was in a business park, essentially.

Maybe by next year I will be AWP-ready. For me, a solid reading, new friends, two presidents I can truly admire and The Wall sufficed.

"In our sky, women not ignored." I should change my socks but I'd rather write to you, my dears

Sarah Sarai is on a bus headed to Washington, D.C.  Out the window--trees at their most humble. 
Wise, too. They know what's coming. The melted butter petals of forsythia have been spotted. Spring with her seven thousand greens and earth that's brown, not white, are in order in the natural order.

It's still an adventure for us all, trees, earth, Sarah Sarai. Ice, storms, the grainy spectacle of human dreams of domination. All to be witnessed; withstood.

My feet are cold.  It was an icy slog from my apt, but now I'm in a warm bus with wifi.  Can you imagine?  There's little traffic, the driver knows what he's doing, it's getting even warmer here. My feet are still cold.

Tonight I'll read at Busboys and Poets, 1025 5th Street at K, NW, www.busboysandpoets.com/ . I'm going to a museum tomorrow. Crocuses will be here soon.

I'm going to change my socks now, if you don't mind. I leave you with a few lines from "Our Pointillist Galaxy" which along with "Are the Roses Doing Nothing" is in Reconfigurations. Reconfigurations is the journal inviting me to read tonight.

Throw myth and a caution to the midnight sapphire,
light the stuck fires to warm goddesses and their rapists.
In our sky, women not ignored.
__________
Sarah Sarai

Read "Our Pointillist Galaxy" in full here:
http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/2010/11/sarah-sarai-2-poems.html

And please keep your feet warm.

I Brave Icy Roads to Read on Wed., 2/2, 6-8pm, Busboys & Poets, 5th & K, Washington, DC, FREE

Starting Wednesday, a gaggle of writers, most of whom are attached in some way to teaching / the academy, will convene in Washington, DC for an annual conference.  I'm not going.

But I couldn't resist an invitation to read, OFF-SITE, from editors of Reconfigurations. Storm or no storm, I have a ticket on a Bolt Bus, a reservation at a hostel, a song in my heart. Here's the flyer. Be there, oh please. And introduce yourself to me.

AWP Off-Site Poetry Reading:

Free Verse/Editions, Reconfigurations, and Word For/Word

*

Wednesday, February 2, 6-8 PM,
Busboys and Poets (5th and K)

1025 5th Street, NW, Washington, DC.
http://www.busboysandpoets.com/

**

Readings by:

James Capozzi, Geoffrey Gatza, Adam Golaski, Matthew Klane, Adam Liszkiewicz, Marjorie Maddox, Brittany Perham, Sarah Sarai, Jon Thompson, Daniel Tiffany, Sam Truitt, and Bryan Walpert

***

From:

Word For/Word,
http://www.wordforword.info/vol17/index.htm,

Free Verse/Editions,
http://www.jon-thompson.net/free-verse-editions.html, and
Reconfigurations,
http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/

****

This event is free. We hope to see you there.

W. Scott Howard, editor & publisher, Reconfigurations

Jonathan Minton, editor & publisher, Word For/Word

Jon Thompson, editor & publisher, Free Verse/Editions

*****

James Capozzi lives in Binghamton, NY. His poetry has been published widely, including journals and magazines such as BOMB, New Republic, Denver Quarterly and Chicago Review. His book, Country Album, won the New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published by Free Verse Editions in 2011.

Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of eight books of poetry; Secrets of my Prison House will be out in the Fall of 2010. Kenmore: Poem Unlimited and Not So Fast Robespierre are now available from Menendez Publishing. HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children is also available from Meritage Press. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his girlfriend and two cats.  http://www.geoffreygatza.com/ & http://www.blazevox.org

Adam Golaski is the author of the collections of short stories, Worse than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008) and Color Plates (Rose Metal Press, 2010). He is the co-founder and co-editor of Flim Forum Press and writes at the blog Little Stories.

Matthew Klane is co-editor/founder of Flim Forum Press. He is the author of the book B_____ Meditations from Stockport Flats Press (2008). His latest chapbooks include Friend Delighting the Eloquent, Sorrow Songs, and The- Associated Press. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY.

A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz lives in Buffalo, NY, where he is an MFA student in Media Arts Production at the University at Buffalo. He is the Assistant Editor of Digital, Visual and Sound Poetry at the journal, Anti-.

Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award) and others.

Brittany Perham is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first collection of poems, The Curiosities, will be published in 2011 by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. She holds degrees from Tufts University and from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

Of Sarah Sarai's collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), Gerald Schwartz wrote, "the confrontation and interactions with an emotional life gives the author's poems a nervy, discomfiting vitality. Their very rawness and urgency bring these poems to a kind of transcendence." Poems in Threepenny Review, Parthenon West, Mississippi Review, and others; a chapbook soon from Loose Gravel Press. She lives in her New York and dreams of her California.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits Free Verse; A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the single author poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first book of poems was The Book of the Floating World; his most recent book is a collection of lyrical essays, After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing (Shearsman Books, 2009).

Daniel Tiffany is the author of three books of poetry: Puppet Wardrobe (Parlor Press); The Dandelion Clock (Tinfish Press); and Privado (Action Books). His critical books include Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric and Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. In addition, he has translated works by Georges Bataille, Sophocles, and the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Sam Truitt is the author of numerous books in the Vertical Elegies series, including The Song of Rasputin, Falltime, Raton Rex, The Section, Anamorphosis Eisenhower, and the forthcoming Street Mete. He lives in Woodstock, NY where he edits Station Hill Press.

Bryan Walpert is the author of a collection of poetry, Etymology, and collection of short stories, Ephraim's Eyes. He holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and Ph.D. from the University of Denver. His work has appeared widely in journals, such as AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden's Ferry Review and Tar River Poetry. A recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award from the Mid-American Review, he teaches creative writing at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.