pomo expo

Little Tucson-Looks-Like-LA Video

2010-03-17T18:47:00.003-05:00

TUCSON FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

2010-03-12T19:52:00.002-06:00

(i.e., where I will see LA Liminal for the first time!)

The Tucson Festival of Books takes place on March 13 and 14, 2010, on the University of Arizona campus mall. A complete list of events is available at the Festival’s website. Don’t miss this program of poetry readings, taking place in the Kiva Room in the main Student Union.

Saturday, March 13

10:00 a.m. Charles Bernstein, Barbara Henning,
& Tenney Nathanson
11:30 a.m. Panel Discussion: “Chapbooks: How to
Make One, and Why You Should”
1:00 p.m. Kim Addonizio & Abraham Smith
2:30 p.m. Poetry Reading on the International
Stage, Modern Languages room 311,
with Tedi López Mills & Wendy Burk
2:30 p.m. A Celebration of Will Inman with
David Ray & Michael Rattee
4:00 p.m. Alice Notley & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Sunday, March 14

10:00 a.m. Jonathan Rothschild & Pamela Uschuk

11:30 a.m. D.A. Powell & Becca Klaver
1:00 p.m. Rigoberto González & Maria Meléndez
2:30 p.m. Sheila E. Murphy & Geraldine Connolly
4:00 p.m. Anne Waldman & Laynie Browne

Dana Stevens on Kathryn Bigelow's Win(s)

2010-03-08T10:34:00.002-06:00

We all know what Kathryn Bigelow's double victory against James Cameron meant. Its meaning was overdetermined by so many circumstances: their genders, of course, and the fact they were once married to one another, but most of all by the two different moviemaking worlds that The Hurt Locker and Avatar represent. Bigelow beating Cameron was small beating big; art beating commerce; independent beating studio; small, restrained, thoughtful chamber piece beating giant, obvious, jerkwad extravaganza (and I say this as a non-Avatar hater, indeed a proud Avatar-enjoyer).

All of these meanings in turn redound to Bigelow's femaleness—sorry, Kitty, I want to move beyond the need to make that point as quickly as possible, but they do. If you'll just let me represent for my tribe for a moment here, Troy—and I know it's a feeling many men share, too, but, still—it's unbelievably gratifying to see a woman who does fine, small-scale work triumphing over a man who erects massive monuments to his own vanity. Bigelow's victory makes it seem like hard work is worthwhile, because someday someone will recognize it, no matter how loudly that asshole at the center table is talking about himself. And that's not a message for women alone (even if more of us are likely to get seated at the shitty tables).

--Slate

New Adult Swim Show feat. Neko Case, T-Pain, Doom

2010-03-06T18:41:00.003-06:00

[watch]

Birds, LLC launches with Gabbert & Tonelli!

2010-03-05T12:18:00.003-06:00

Here's what they've got for you:

Birds, LLC is a new independent poetry press specializing in close author relationships in order to make the most awesome books in the world.

The first two books published by Birds, LLC are The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert and The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli.

SPECIAL PRE-SALE OFFER: Buy the first two Birds, LLC releases for just $20. Pre-Sale offer lasts until March 31st. Books ship the first week in April.

About The French Exit:

It’s a pleasure to listen to the opinions of the narrator of The French Exit. Clear-eyed imagery and wit control the anxiety: “[A] boy at the counter disappears / or I can see through him.” Likewise, in a fine prose poem: “Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” The energy throughout Gabbert’s collection has the clip of the French exit itself – allons-y! – self-aware, self-sufficient, in control, in touch.

--Caroline Knox

About The Trees Around:

Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book’ll make you bloom.

--Graham Foust

NPR has great streaming music up right now

2010-03-05T11:48:00.006-06:00

Pavement: Songs We Love

(see esp. "Summer Babe (Winter Version)" -- amazing AND timely)

The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix For 2010

(You can't choose what to listen to, but you can elsewhere: Fanfarlo, Real Estate, She & Him)

Oh and here's a tiny little Gillian Welch / David Rawlings concert video.

Pavement Reunion Tour Also Launched!

2010-03-02T01:07:00.003-06:00

Go here to relive the magic. Unless you were there, in which case I will hound you for tales of the 90s I missed. See you in Central Park in September beeotches!

Gatewood Prize Launched!

2010-03-02T01:05:00.001-06:00

Go here for details on Switchback's contest for a first or second book by a woman poet.

Happy Birthday Switchback!

2010-02-27T19:38:00.000-06:00

Four years in photos.

LA Liminal Uncovered!

2010-02-21T13:03:00.004-06:00

Starting Today Anthology Now Available!

2010-02-21T12:14:00.005-06:00

on Amazon.

My poem "I Didn't Buy It" is in there, and a recording of it should be up on the original Starting Today blog in the coming weeks, alongside those by Laurel Snyder, Diane Wald, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and others!

See the full table of contents.

Many thanks to Arielle & Rachel!

Olena Kalytiak Davis Reading

2010-02-19T11:53:00.005-06:00

The benefactresses were stiff-faced, but the rest of us were laughing pretty hard. It's not this often that a poet is so present with her audience, present in a way that lets it all in: talking as if to her friends because half the time she was talking to her friends in the audience. Hear it all -- and some of her best poems, too -- here.

Girls Take 3

2010-02-14T23:03:00.002-06:00

One of my favorite quotes about the female adolescent experience comes from the musician Rachel Carns, who said in an interview that "girls have this private thing about themselves—diaries, your room—that is really isolated and you don't share it with anybody else." If the second wave of feminism was about getting wives out of the kitchen, then maybe Riot Grrrl was about trying to get girls out of the bedroom and into something more like action.

--Marisa Meltzer, author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, on DoubleX's "Exile from Grrrlville"

Speaking of Fashion, Femininity, & Artifice

2010-02-14T22:32:00.007-06:00

If you are in Chicago and you are wise you will go to this.

Teenage Girls Tell the Truth

2010-02-14T11:26:00.002-06:00

I finally had some time to think about Kate Durbin's provocative (sexy & thought-provoking!) piece at Delirious Hem, "A Teenage Girl Speaks as a Melodramatic, Hysterical Demon," and here are my thoughts:

First, I'm really struck by the idea that your piece seems to suggest (in a bunch of different ways) that girls are the purgers (of vomit, gold coins, etc.) because the culture feeds them THE MOST SHIT. I think that is right on. It would be cool if we could convince bulimics to puke all over magazine stands, to connect the effect back to its source. That one is public and one is private makes it difficult to link them back up.

And then, of course, the other difficulty is that girls can wield the content of those publications (for magazines, insert all media outlets) in a way that you seem to have done and still do, Kate. The "arty girl" way, la via de Lady Gaga, Taking Fashion Back, highlighting the artifice of selfhood, putting the fashion back into self-fashioning. (This is when the purge goes public again??)

The other idea here that really interests me, and is something I've tried and failed to write about in a way that really captures it, is that TEENAGE GIRLS CAN ACTUALLY DO MAGIC. I mean, I'm sure some people are reading your Ouija and levitation details as the cutesy images of sleepovers, but I'm reading them like so: "Hmm, yeah, I remember when my friends and I had these powers, and then we grew up and traded them in for Lady Skillz." And of course this sounds crazy to you, reader, but that is the whole point. Nonrational powers that get buried, shoved down, when girls grow up, because they are not valued by the larger culture. They are scoffed at; you are a Crazy Lady if you still believe in or practice them. You are a nut if you teach a class on The Goddess, etc. I feel this every time someone tries to police my speech -- every time I turn back into a superstitious, crass, full-o-wonder teenage girl and dare to say something out loud in that voice, I turn around and someone's shushing me. We can't say that shit in this big bad world ruled by Logic, Reason, Progress: in most public places, there is someone there to stop us.

"won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

2010-02-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Gurlesque Anthology Available for Pre-Order!

2010-02-10T11:39:00.004-06:00

GURLESQUE: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics

edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg

Freaky "Foam Hands"

2010-02-07T21:31:00.004-06:00

Portastatic cover w/ some krazy kids in the background, free!

This Is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like #2!

2010-02-06T11:48:00.001-06:00

Delirious Hem announces: This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like #2, where each day this week you will find new responses.

Featuring:
Monday February 1: Ching-In Chen, Jennifer Bartlett, & Kate Durbin
Tuesday February 2: Juliet Cook & Kate Schapira
Wednesday February 3: Kirsten Kaschock & Michele Battiste

Thursday February 4: Michelle Detorie & Stephanie Strickland

Friday February 5: T.A. Noonan & Theodora Danylevich
Saturday February 6: Amy King & Kirsten Kaschock 2

With more to come!

There's been no parking on my street all week

2010-02-05T19:44:00.010-06:00

because they're filming Black Swan, the new Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) movie. I don't drive, so it's not that annoying, but the guys they have guarding the doors to the Turner Towers next door (where all the blue "SET -->" signs lead) like to give me the stinkeye when I'm walking home, like I'm trying to sneak onto the set or something. At USC they let us go right up to the camera guys during Felicity filming. Anyway I thought you might like to know in case you are a Natalie Portman and/or Winona Ryder paparazzo. Yeah, I just wanted to write paparazzo. Busted.

Dusie 9

2010-02-02T10:12:00.005-06:00

could distract you from work all day long:

and tomorrow, too.

Lilith Fair Is Back

2010-01-31T10:18:00.012-06:00

in 2010 and some people aren't sure we need it, but I say, Have you ever been to Pitchfork? They do a good job of having women (and woman-fronted bands) headlining so you don't notice as much, but it's always incredibly guy-heavy.

And in spite of this, they are mean enough to say on their site about this incarnation of Lilith Fair:

we don't yet know whether we'll get to hear Paula Cole reprise her "Dawson's Creek" theme song. (Sorry. Old habits die hard.)

And in spite of myself I LAUGHED. But I was mostly laughing at Dawson's hair. That song is pretty catchy, especially if you cut someone off by singing it.

Are there other festivals you've been to where dude-centrism is really noticeable?

I'm Not Sure About Video Games Making Kids Violent

2010-01-29T11:39:00.002-06:00

but watching people smoke in the movies--especially in movie theaters, especially in black and white--has always made me want to smoke (at least during and after the time when I did smoke). In lots of cases, the way life mirrors art or art mirrors life is mysterious to me, but in this case it is very plain.

Here's A.O. Scott in this week's Movies Update:

In the movie-smoking debate, even clear positions — that children must be protected from images that might influence their behavior, or that filmmakers should be immune from censorship and interference — tend quickly to be fogged with questions of context and nuance. That is because underneath the public discussion about smoking (or gun violence, or sexual promiscuity, or whatever social problem has seized the momentary spotlight) is another, much more confused discourse: about movies and about the ways they mirror and occlude reality.

The power of movies is undeniable, but also elusive. Even the children whose fragile psyches grown-ups fret about know that what movies depict is not real, and yet even the most sophisticated or jaded viewers habitually peruse the screen in search of designs for living. The screen is, among other things, a domain of glamour, in which ordinary actions are given a luster, a charisma, far beyond what they possess in the everyday world.

--"This Article Is Not Yet Rated"

This is from like a year ago but I am re-delighted

2010-01-27T00:05:00.003-06:00

Stain of Poetry This Friday!

2010-01-19T10:49:00.003-06:00

DOOOOO IT.

Don't let the winter get you down! Ride the snow yak into the sunset with Priscilla Becker, Laura Carter, Suzanne Frischkorn, Kate Greenstreet, Becca Klaver & D.W. Lichtenberg:

STAIN OF POETRY
Friday, January 22 @ 7 p.m

Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway
(corner of Dodworth St)
Brooklyn, NY 11221-3013
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[map]

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