It’s been a busy couple weeks, and I’ll come back later with some thoughts on AWP Denver, but for now, there are a bazillion links I want to share.

AWP DENVER

First up, if you weren’t in Denver, or were there, but were silly enough to miss the most entertaining pair of panels all week, here’s a video of David Romtvedt performing “El Papagayo” on the accordion:

As a response to the previous day’s discussion on aspects of cowboy vs. western performance, David read a poem from book, recited a poem, and then played one as a song.

I wasn’t smart enough to bring a camcorder to Denver, but luckily Todd B. Stevens had his.  He also recorded each of the readings from that afternoon, and that’s link #2: Documenting the AWP.  A group of writers, Todd included, were blogging every event they went to.  If you scroll down on the main page you’ll find podcasts of the readings by Jeff Streeby, Joshua Dolezal, Donald Mace Williams, Thea Gavin, JV Brummels, and the full performance by David Romtvedt.

PERFORMANCE POETRY PODCAST

All week Rattle is being featured by Mongo and Cristin on Indiefeed’s Performance Poetry Podcast.  They do three of them a week, and feature a new poem and artist every day.  Monday was “Dreamboys” by L. Lamar Wilson.  Today’s podcast is Maria Mazziotti Gillan reading “Shame Is the Dress I Wear.”  And on Friday it will be M.L. Leibler with “Allen Ginsberg’s Dead.”

I’ve been subscribing to the podcast since I found out about it back in December, and it’s something worth recommending, even if it had nothing to do with Rattle.  I don’t care if it’s spoken word or written word — it’s all poetry.  But man is it better to listen to when people know how to perform.

Each week of April — to celebrate National Poetry Month — they’re featuring work from a different American literary magazine.  Last week it was Pank, which I’ve been seeing all over the place lately.  Next two weeks — who knows, I’ll find out when you do!

REVIEWS OF AMERICAN FRACTAL

A couple new reviews just came out for American Fractal, and I’m still waiting for some critic to tear me a new one.

Over on Poets’ Quarterly, Karen J. Weyant has nothing but nice things to say.  She describes the book well, which is always a great service, concluding:

So the final question may be, do we as readers see the unfurling fern in the forest floor of Green’s collection? The answer is yes – sometimes. Yes, Green’s poems provide the unflinching beauty in order. And yes, Green examines the questions that poems are supposed to ask – inquiries about identity, loss and love. But even more certain is the fact that Green does more than find order in the world’s confusion. He is also a poet who relishes in the act of exploring this confusion, of finding the answers.

In the new print issue of Rain Taxi — which Caleb Barber was awesome enough to grab for me at the book fair so I wouldn’t have to leave my booth — Craig Santos Perez does the same, and I think understands the book even better:

Poetry, Green seems to suggest, gives us a way to recognize and understand the fractal nature of experience and perception. … This feeling — of something escaping and something holding on, of life and death, of light and dark matter — permeates Green’s collection, from the free verse poems to the sonnets.  And whether he’s describing dreams, hiking in Joshua Tree National Park, driving in Los Angeles traffic, or looking into a “mirror into mirror into mirror,” Green captures “that simplest and finest point of light.”

So thanks Karen and Craig!  The coolest thing is seeing my book reviewed right there next to reviews of poets like Lucille Clifton, Christine Hume, and Sonia Sanchez.  Am I grown up or something?

REVIEW OF RATTLE

Somewhere there was a new review posted of Rattle‘s sonnet issue, I swear it.  I saw it last week on my Google alerts, but forgot to write down the address, and now searching can find it.  Anyone else see that somewhere?  Where?

As you’ll see on the sidebar to the right, I’m hosting Lois P. Jones’s episodes of Poets Cafe, a half-hour bi-weekly radio show that interviews poets. She interviewed me for the show last spring, and liked the way I archived mine online, so she asked if I’d store some others, and I thought, why the hell not.

They’re pages and not posts, so they won’t appear in the blog as they’re updated. The archive page is here (I’ll add some bells and whistles later), and so far we’ve got five shows. Mine and Peggy’s you’ve seen, William O’Daly is the best translator of Neruda into English, and I highly recommend giving his a listen. Mariano Zaro is a Spanish-American poet who writes and reads beautifully. I actually haven’t gotten a chance to listen to Annie Reiner’s yet, but I noticed she’s a psychoanalyst, so I’m hoping she’ll send us something for the upcoming tribute to mental health professionals issue.

Anyway, it’s a cool show, full of poetry, and Lois is a really good interviewer. So check them out.

August is the busiest month for Rattle, but the weeks of September and March 15th are the busiest times for me.  We used to pay a graphic designer several thousand dollars a year to do half of what I’m doing this week — in addition to typesetting and laying out the winter issue, I’m also putting together this fall’s e-issue, and sending hand-crafted mass-merged emails to tens of thousands of people.  It’s fun work, but it’s tiring.  Already I’ve spent one night at the office until 2am, and I’ll probably do it again.

But I hate having a whole week go by without a post on here, so I’ll give a quick update about what’s going on in po-po land:

1) You have to check out Megan’s chapbook, if you haven’t already.  Yes, I’m pimping my wife.  As I’ve said before, The Beaded Curtain is one of the best collections I’ve ever read — my only complaint is that it’s not book-length, and so will never have the kind of legacy it deserves, unless she adds it to her first full-length collection, which it doesn’t seem like she want to do.  So what are you gonna do?  But it’s finally available from Spire Press, and you can buy signed copies at the bottom of Rattle‘s purchase page.  Read a couple sample poems plus blurbs here.

2) If you missed it (could you have possibly missed it?), we announced our fourth Rattle Poetry Prize winner on Tuesday, Lynne Knight. Of course we read the poems blind, having no idea who had written what, but I was happy to see Lynne’s name when I looked up our pick, entry #1074.  We’ve published three of her poems in the past — two in issue #26, and “The Lesson” last summer, which was already the third-most-read poem in Rattle.com history.  I’ve never met Lynne in person, but she’s always been warm and friendly over email — and she’s one of those poets who hasn’t seemed to have yet gotten the attention she deserves.  For more on Lynne, check out her website.

3. G. Tod Slone is at it again, but this time I have nothing but praise.  He and P. Maudit teamed up to produce another cartoon, which I assume they don’t mind my posting, because they didn’t mind that I posted the last one.  Click the picture to see a larger version, click here to read Slone’s blog.  When he emailed it to me, I burst out laughing, on a day I could really use a laugh.  The watercolor cartoon depicts Megan and I caged in an “Established-Order Zone,” while Maudit and our friend Mather Schneider lurk in the open as trolls.  Well-designed and legitimately funny, it makes a valid point — moderation is always a cage that holds the censor in, to an even greater extent than it keeps the censored out.  In my opinion, the cartoon would more accurately reflect my new comment policy if there was a door bell on the cell, and a sign that read, “Ring for entry.”  For the record, I’m not moderating out contrary opinions, only the rude behavior that I’m tired of dealing with.  Feel free to criticize me all you want, just do it civilly — as this cartoon does, which is why I like it.  And I love the Johnny Cash look — wish I could pull it off.  But I can’t figure out why Megan is wearing a blue mumu.  Is that a judge’s robe?

4.  Speaking of Mather Schneider, he has a poem in the winter issue that I just type-set, about illegal immigration, of all things.  If we’re  censors, I have to say, we’re pretty bad censors.

5.  But the poem I’m excited about most in the winter issue is Patricia Smith’s “Motown Crown.”  It’s a full heroic crown of sonnets, meaning 15 sonnets on a theme, where the last line of each becomes the first line of the next, and each repeated line then forms the final sonnet #15.  It’s probably the most challenging traditional form in the English language, and the only other true heroic crown I’m familiar with is Marylin Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmett Till.”  You can read a bit about the history of sonnet crowns on Wikipedia.  I heard Patricia read “Motown Crown” at a breathtaking performance at the AWP-Chicago this spring, and though I never solicit poems from anyone, I’ve been begging her for this sequence ever since.  So I guess I can’t say I never solicit poems anymore — but this is worth switch to the word “rarely,” trust me.

6.  That makes a clean 30 sonnets that will appear in Rattle #32, and we’ve got every style imaginable: Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets (duh), a backwards sonnet, free verse sonnets, blank verse sonnets, clean sonnets, dirty sonnets, invented sonnets, sonnets that praise sonnets, sonnets that mock sonnets, a sonnet that uses only one rhyme-word 14 times…  Rattle has a reputation for not liking form, but I love form.  I can’t wait.

The trolls are ruining this place, and I’m sick of cleaning piss out of a carpet that I don’t even care about.  There’s no reason to waste time thinking about comments on this blog, unless it’s to participate in a discussion relevant to the post above them.  I’ve spent way too much time this summer trying to decide how to respond to what amounts to ignorant, masturbatory graffiti.  I feel like a kindergarten teacher.  Well, I’m taking away the scissors.

Comments on this blog are now all moderated.  Hopefully very few comments will actually be screened out, but there will be a delay, while I check to make sure they follow these simple rules:

1) Be civil.

2) Be relevant.

That’s all you have to do: Be civil and relevant.  Even trolls who keep their whiny rants civil and relevant can voice their opinions.  But if you can’t, your comment will sit forever in a queue gathering cyberdust.

Let this be a notice to everyone who’s been warned before:  Don’t waste your time.  I suggest making your own blog and bitching there.

And to everyone who no longer reads the comments because they raise your blood pressure:  You can come back now, the riffraff is gone.

Thursday, September 3rd, 9 p.m.

The Hive/The Apiary (map)
1402 Micheltorena
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Tomorrow night/tonight I’ll be taking a much-needed break from reading contest entries and packing — we just moved to a new apartment, if I haven’t mentioned it, and for some reason we decided to do it on the hottest, smokiest, busiest week of the year.

The cool thing about this reading is, I think it’s actually going to be a cool reading.  The truth is, I haven’t really paid much attention to it, with so many other things going on — it’s a new series, and the last of a long string of them for me.  At the end of a hectic month, it’s kind of like a let down game, like beating your arch-nemesis and then losing to the Dolphins, who are actually a pretty good team, despite having Chad Pennington at QB — like I have victory disease, the poorly named tendency to get too cocky and lose after a big win, which Megan pointed out, is exactly what happened to my softball team last weekend in the championship game.

My point?  This reading is going to kick ass, and not just my own, because it’s not your typical reading.  It’s not just poetry, followed by some golf claps and melodramatic sighs — it’s poetry followed by a comic and a short film.  Hosted by the ultra short 5-Second Films.  Plus dollar beer.  In case you didn’t get all that, here’s the line up:

1. Me
2. Comedian Barry Holiday
3. Short film by Nate and Sara Kathryn Harrison
4. Jon Worley of 5-Second Films
5. Dollar beer

One of the organizers even did an interview with me, which you can read here.

But the best part for me is that I haven’t done a reading in about a month, and the last month has felt like two months — so I think I’m officially out of the bore-myself-to-tears phase of the reading schedule, and might actually be able to find my poems interesting again.  At the last couple readings I really felt like a space cadet.  And what a strange phrase, “space cadet.”  You’d think someone training to be launched into space would have to be really focused…