Line tamer.
I had my first class today in the Letterpress Printing & Fine Press Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers at the Center for Book Arts. So much fun! Sarah Nicholls gave a nice introduction to the center and passed around some of the chapbooks from the award series and the broadsides from the reading series. I Read More …
One of the things I appreciate about having web presence as a poet is being able to connect with other artists and writers outside the U.S. Two recent stories of connecting with people you should check out: 1. The photographer Ellen O’Connell (originally from San Francisco but living in Zurich, Switzerland) contacted me via my Read More …
I found this lovely commentary on my poem “Two Men On a Bed” over at Steve Fellner’s blog Pansy Poetics. It’s a thoughtful close-read, and it’s refreshing to have someone identify the source inspiration (A. R. Ammons, who I was reading heavily at the time I wrote this poem). Alice Fulton is a huge influence Read More …
Jon took me to my first NYC Ballet performance on this rainy cold June night and I enjoyed it immensely. The first piece was “Glass Pieces” set to the music of Philip Glass with choreography by Jerome Robbins (all the pieces tonight featured his choreography). I’m not really sure how to write about dance, but Read More …
I’ve had a great weekend heading into my birthday: starting Thursday night, wandering around the Chelsea art galleries with my new friend Jon and finding these amazing paintings at Axelle Fine Arts. I’ll do a post on the artist soon, but we spent most of our time admiring the work and had a great conversation Read More …
I sometimes pop into MoMA during my lunch break and catch a quick exhibit. There’s a fascinating show on the 6th floor called “Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schende” which runs until June 15th. Both draw inspiration from language, notably the written word but also finding visual equivalents for language that is spoken in their Read More …
Around the time Narcissus Resists was released poet Andrew Demcak wrote his five-part poem sequence Pink Narcissus in response to the 1971 James Bidgood film, which I also reference in the “Celluloid” section of Narcissus Resists. Andrew was kind enough to dedicate his poem to me in celebration of the release of Narcissus Resists (very sweet Andrew, thank Read More …
I couldn’t attend most of the chapbook festival events last week, but I did manage to escape from my day job for a few hours on Friday to attend the workshop “Chapbook Now: Producing Chapbooks.” Rachel Levitsky, Sharon Dolin and Ryan Murphy all gave some notes on the chapbook, both as poets who have their Read More …
One of the many images informing Narcissus Resists is this massive drawing by the artist Jess (Burgess Collins), poet Robert Duncan’s long-time companion and lover. This is all graphite on paper and collage paste-up; Jess began it in 1976 and finished it in 1991: I first saw it at SFMOMA back in March 2005 when I was Read More …
There was this viral post floating around Facebook to name your top 20 poetry books. I tweaked it; 20 felt too limiting, but 25 felt about right. I excluded more recent discoveries/obsessions/influences to sample some of the books that were important to me during my “formative” years (1998-2004). I limited myself to one book per poet, Read More …