Category: books

New mini chapbook (mine)!

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I am in the middle of making a new lil chapbook. As always, formatting and photocopying are more traumatic than expected. But it WILL be ready by Saturday. About 5 people in the world are as excited about this as I am.

 

 

If you want one you should come to Agitprop on Saturday at 7pm. Or you can knock on my sideporch door any time after Sunday. Or, I can send one to you in a sort of delicious correspondence barter (you’d have to write me back). I’d do that. I have a lot of stamps.

 

($2 each, or traded for $2 worth of what you got. Photograph & cover design by my farmer, Misha J.)

 

My Saturday (song) & next Saturday (I’m reading!).

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Listening to Fleet Foxes, working hard all day on readings & poems & projects so that when Sam & Caity arrive on Tuesday I will do nothing but be with them.

 

 

Oh and San Diegans–I’m reading next Saturday night at a gallery called Agitprop, at 7pm. It’s not happening in my yard and it’s not related to SDSU–it’s like, a real reading! Please come if you live here. I’ll be selling mini chapbooks (one of the aforementioned projects getting finished today in preparation for my visitors).

 

(And so much thanks to Lorraine for inviting me to read. Makes me feel like a real poet.)

 

Brunch Sonnet 6: Patti Smith at St. Mark’s Bookshop (mine).

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Brunch Sonnet 6

Patti Smith at St. Mark’s Bookshop

 

Patti kicked the g’s off the ends of words—thinkin’,

fryin’. She had long dyed hair with undercurls of grey,

no secrets there. She arrived on time in a black beanie,

her voice skidding out of her throat like wet feet on sand.

She was amazed to have her name on a New Directions book,

she waited fifty years but it happened. Fifty years isn’t so long

for a dream. Her neighbors in Detroit used to spiff up her lawn

while she was gone on trips, she hated that, she wanted

those flowers for tea, for wine, the dandelions. The worst thing

about Detroit wasn’t the lack of a coliseum or museum, but

the lack of a café. She said she’d sit in some whitewashed

corner at the nearest 7-11 and try to read, pretending  herself

at the Café des Poètes with a mug, a watch, a bit of time,

a few sips left, a cigarette, the table wooden, stained.

 

 

Live from the east (photographs & swoons).

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At Tim’s New & Used Books in Provincetown today, I found this (“Freely Espousing” by James Schuyler, hardcover, first edition, a very rare and very exciting book to find and get to hold). I grabbed at it and threw myself on the wood floor of this tiny bookstore, set back from busy Commercial street (you have to walk down a sort of rickety boardwalk covered in vines to get there). It costs $150 and I want it very, very badly. “Does this really say one hundred and fifty dollars?” I asked the dude at the tiny desk with the cash register. The dude came over, looked at the number over my shoulder, and said, “Yes.” It’s not often that books worth so much are found on a physical shelf–mostly they’re squirreled away on some boring internet bookshelf where no one can touch them or faint over them or swoon over their very small and well-chosen fonts and the thickness of their paper and the now historical significance of their existences.

To console myself I bought “Other Flowers,” the uncollected works of Schuyler, edited by none other than JAMES MEETZE of the Summer Sideyard. I also bought the tiniest deck chair ever, because, you know, small things. They really get me.

Tuesday Update.

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Misha shaved all his hair off and we got a new chicken. Her name is Vicky. Vicky Christina Chicky-Wicky. V’Nilla and Vicky: the sideporch chicky-sissies. Is that a good name for a movie or for nothing at all?

In other news, I held two baby goats this week and they melted into my arms like butter. I also finished “Bossypants,” (by Tina Fet duh), sewed Misha’s robe, and watched the spectators of the pride parade like a granny, in a plastic chair on the corner of the sidewalk, with my other granny friends. (“Look at that lady! SO much purple! AND HER BUTT IS OUT! YEAH!!!”) Afterwards we made hot sauce. On Sunday, at the farmer’s market, I wore a mustache for three hours. I highly recommend this experience. So many jokes.

 

And last night I found this poem again. Swoon.

To the Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Summer reading list, for serious.

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I just looked at last summer’s book list, which I posted here last June. I didn’t read a single book on that list. This makes me think that perhaps I’m doomed to lose interest in any book that’s on the Summer Reading List. Or perhaps my list was made by just looking around my house at books I’ve been meaning to, but not especially wanting to, read (sometimes there’s a big difference between these two categories). This year’s book list features some books I’ve already read, so hopefully I’m not such a big liar this time around.

***

Le Summer Book List 2011.

The Fountainhead/Ayn Rand (check)

Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara (check) (swoon)

The Art of Recklessness/Dean Young (in middle of)

A Visit from the Good Squad/Jennifer Egan (as of today, check)

The Best of It/Kay Ryan (in middle of)

The Good Earth/Pearl S. Buck

Invisible Cities/Italo Calvino (this was on last year’s list too, but now I actually own it)

Collected John Berryman (all of it, of course)

Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction/ P.H. Matthews

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems/Jane Kenyon

Lighthead/Terrance Hayes

Siddhartha/Hermann Hesse

From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol(/Andy Warhol)

The Maverick Poets: An Anthology/ed. Steve Kowitt

Tremor: Selected Poems/Adam Zagajewski (again)

Truth and Beauty/Ann Patchet (in middle of)

A Trip to the Stars/Nicholas Christopher

Come All You Ghosts/Matthew Zapruder

Bossypants/Tina Fey

 

The photograph below, by Elliot Erwitt, is where I’d prefer to do all of this reading. But my kitchen table will work, too.

The book I made in an edition of 4 (poem, photograph).

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Blanco y Negro (y Gris y Gris)

What a city should be like: angles of unfolding agave.

After noontime’s whistle, the streets are ripped asunder 

and the reassembled. The grey clouds of the sea’s

factory remove appointments like gloves. Beauty’s

nothing but a startled bird awaiting snow.