DC Season IV: Sarah Manguso in November

Good news! Sarah Manguso and I have set a date for her reading:

Saturday, November 12th, 8pm at the Internationalist in Chapel Hill, NC.

Whoo-hoo! I'm very excited to meet Sarah and hear her read. The Captain Lands in Paradise is an outstanding collection, and she continues to put out excellent work. I first saw her work in the New Review of Literature, a poem called "What Concerns Me Now" that I immediately copied these lines from:


What concerns me know is the drag queen shouting her monologue at the sky
which is not so much "there" as it is visible to the tourists that walk under it.


I was struck, as I often am by Manguso's poems, with the deft folding of epistemology, metaphysics, and daily life -- intelligent and gritty.

At any rate, she'll be here November 12th -- mark your calendars!!

The Rant in Grant

More good news:

The kind folks at the Orange County Arts Commission decided the Desert City needed money too -- yee-haw!!

Thanks OCAC!!!

More good news on the way mehopes.....

Good News

Hot damn! The Desert City received its first grant today!! The fine folks at the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation up in Durham decided the DC needed some dough, and I didn't argue.

Thanks a lot, MDBF!!

Two more grants to hear about and one or two more to submit.

Onward.

Nice People

So some folks have been saying nice things about me lately, so from the all about me file again....

Here're some things that Josh Corey had to say about a poem of mine that was pubished in the most recent effing magazine.

Here is Reb Livingston's notes about the Carrboro Poetry Festival at the Happy Booker.

Here are some pics that Reb put on her blog. (Hint: I'm the nobody.)

And lastly, here is a response/review/little bit of wonder created around some of my poems by Jack Anders at the Cafe Cafe blog. Jack is actually an old friend of mine that I haven't been in touch with since like 1998 or so. We met quite randomly in Winston-Salem in the Spring of '97. At that time, he was one of those people who demonstrated to me that poetry transcended schooling, career, the day-to-day mundanity, or rather, he showed me that poetry could and did pervade it all, that making a commitment to poetry was possible and desirable and that whatever else I might do with my life, poetry could always be there. It was just what I needed to see on the eve of heading to an MFA program for three years.

He and I just recently got back in touch with each other, and it's wonderful to see that he's still living and loving poetry.