Fall of Season IV is all set my dusty Bedouins -- happy news.
We'll commence the season with the fair verses of Ms.
Brenda Coultas, author of
A Handmade Museum. Coultas's poems are often about garbage but the most beautiful, beautiful garbage:
from
The Bowery ProjectWe spoke to a man scratching the sand with a stick for marbles. He knew the history of this place, said it a was horse rendering plant and indeed on the map it said Dead Horse Bay, and it had been a city dump that became a town composed of the dump's employees, then the city closed it down stating it was too toxic to live in. Now it was an unmarked stretch of public beach that the residents returned to regularly and bitterly.
The old glass had a lot of lead and it gleamed. I tried not to be greedy and to take only what I could carry. Meanwhile I left thousands. The broken glass tinkled in the surf and if I ever were to believe in mermaids, this is where they'd be. (July 24,01)
Coultas will read in the Desert City Saturday, September 24th, at 8:00 pm.
Brent Cunningham's book
Bird & Forest just came out from
Ugly Duckling Presse. Check it out, and come to his reading on Saturday, October 8th, at 8pm. You'll
see why he's going to have lots more books:
Eleventh Oration (City of the Sun)
Ladies and gentlemen, the youths of this country are bored. You’d think just being alive and youths would excite them, but not at all. This morning the sky was clear, I was at campus, and everyone was despondent.
Are there any youths in this room? Then consider, if you will, the tide of Being behind you, those negative masses standing in your cement areas, your grassy areas, and your areas neither grassy nor cement.
Are you terrified, youths? Do you think you’re more than killable? Isn’t it irrefutable that every personal world, with its health, is destroyed four times over, all savings depleted, before there is meanwhile anything else to learn or see?
But how lovely the wind off the sea today. How tempting to lecture you on signs and calculations.
And, as
I wrote previously, the talented
Sarah Manguso will be visiting us on Saturday, November 12th, at 8:oo pm:
"Address to an Absent Lover"The boy speaks in Russian (I understand him neither in the dream nor in real life). He opens his eyes and looks at me, apologizing in English for keeping them closed.
When I wake up I think he must have seen me. But when I kiss him he looks surprised, as if he were blind.
The night I met you I wrote
It is possible I have imagined my entire life.
*
My great-grandmother's lamp is mine now. It is made of rose quartz -- that is, it is made of poetry.
More poetry: A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor. Please come back and pick it up.
More: The scar on my hand I got cleaning the house for you has outlasted you. In this way you are indelible, but only as long as I have my hand.
To be scheduled for the spring:
Rosmarie Waldrop w/ Emmanuel Hocquard (Waldrop's definite; Hocquard's tentative)
Ron Silliman (tentative)
John Taggart
Claudia Rankine
Ed Roberson (tentative)
On another note,
I (and in part the Desert City) recently received an
Indie Arts Award from the Chapel Hill/Durham/Raleigh's weekly,
The Independent. It's really quite an honor and privilege to receive the award, not to mention the flattering profile
Tony Tost wrote of myself and fellow Indie winner
Patrick Herron. It's really lovely to receive such, and I hope that the article draws some attention to the DC and NC poetry scene generally, and I can't help feeling that I don't quite deserve it. Not that I don't deserve it exactly and don't do a lot of stuff around here, but I really just want to do so much more that it's sometimes hard for me to stop to consider past success much. Nevertheless, Tost has attached his name and put into print for public consumption something which is -- in sum
and in part -- the nicest thing anyone has ever said of me and my writing, so thanks, Tost, and thank you,
Independent, for the delightful recognition -- may it spur the cause, may poetry flow into and out of us in equal proportion.
Speaking of flow,
Eduardo thinks I'm hottt enough to be in a
boy poetry blogger catalog -- thanks, Eduardo! Just the sort of objectification I need.
Also, some poems of mine have been published in various places recently (and somewhat recently) -- many thanks to the editors of those journals. There's some great work aside from mine in there, so check 'em out:
Mi PoesiasCoconutFree VerseGut CultNo Tell MotelAlso, news on the non-profit front: so apparently I have to file
documents of incorporation with the state of North Carolina to form my non-profit business. It appears that basically that means that I tell them who we are (pick a name), tell them who's responsible (me, I often use the first person plural when talking about the series), tell them where the business lives (a po box), and tell them how we make decisions (I make all the decisions; the board of directors (
I have one actually) can delay my decisions for two weeks before I go ahead and do what I want (yes, I am a dictator (highly benevolent.)) So I fill out these forms; I pay NC 60 bucks, then the DC is a corporation and on the books and ready to go. Then what happens though is that I start dealing with the
feds to get
Tax Exempt status. Creating a non-prof is pretty easy it seems, but as my non-prof documentation tells me, "not all non-profs are tax exempt." Getting tax exemption is a whole other and involved process. Apparently, it's a lot easier to do if one has a lawyer; in lieu of such, I'm going
commando. Wish me luck.
