to be in attendance at the Wave Books Three Days of Poetry event, which happened this past weekend in Seattle. I’m positive that a lot of amazing and hilarious and super groovy things went down, over there across the land in the Skyspace.

But I do feel much better about missing out, now that I’ve read these posts on Lisp Service, Evelyn Hampton’s blog. She’s done a wonderful job of recounting the experience of going to a reading: how the mind wanders, what the memory retains, and how you start to think about poets once you’ve been in the same line for coffee.

And here’s a review, finally, and a smart one, of Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize.

Look! Today there’s a little interview with me (Rebecca Wolff) about the making of A Best of Fence up on Omnivoracious, the Amazon flog.

in Jacket:

 ”What can a poem do that a body can’t? Or, what can a poem do with a body? What can a poem do with a body unleashed in an altered, staged setting that releases, or refuses, charactered and personalized representation — in a poetics theater, that is?”

“Reading Collapsible Poetics Theater isn’t completely satisfying; and watching a CPT performance may leave some performance studies enthusiasts wanting more embodiment with more self. The tightrope walk between these radically different impulses is Collapsible Poetics Theater, which, though it may collapse into its small covers at the end of a performance, will not collapse into an easily digestible rearticulation on one side of the text/body fence. This is its enduring contradiction, and as contradictions spur us on and refuse flattening into simple meanings, CPT will continue to open spaces of alterity by refusing to evacuate multiple personae.”

by Seth Beinarauskas Boyles

–well, I’ll tell you!  You come and start packing envelopes, and sometimes you read some poetry.  And truth be told, it’s been enlightening.  I’ve often wondered what exactly goes on behind the doors at periodicals.  Not so much the actual putting of the physical book together—I’ve worked on Carnegie Mellon’s literary journal for the past three years, so I’m somewhat familiar with that aspect of it—but I was always perplexed as to how journals actually get to their subscribers—it seemed like there would have to be an inhumane amount of mailing to be done that there must be some kind of machine or robot that did all the labeling, sealing, etc . . . and now I realize interns are those machines.  Of course, that’s an exaggeration . .  there’s a lot of mailing that I don’t do.  Rebecca is telling me now that she uses 4 or 5 (!) companies just to keep track of all the subscribers and to have the journal sent out, and while that still seems extremely complicated, it doesn’t seem impossibly so.  I’ve one more semester to go until I get my B.A., and everyone’s been asking about my big plans for the future. I’ve been playing with the idea of starting a periodical myself. I’ve always been concerned about how contemporary fiction is represented in public high schools, and I’ve always thought that if kids don’t read these days, part of the problem might be because they don’t realize that there are contemporary voices out there that relate more to the time they are living in than most of the authors they are reading in their classrooms. I know I didn’t . . . it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I began to suspect that people alive today were still writing fiction and poetry.  And so the concept is this:  a monthly (or so) periodical that collects contemporary literature that has at least been previously published in literary journals, selected specifically with high school readers and the public school setting in mind. The journal would be sent directly to high school English teachers across the country, for free. It would simply be meant to serve as an easily available resource for them, so that they might be tempted to introduce any of the included stories or poetry to their classes. I know teachers are often very busy and it’d be difficult to find the energy to search for good contemporary literature, let alone good literature that would fit in the classroom. This would, I hope, make their job a little easier. 

 So if I wanted to get contemporary literature to students this way, I’d have to first figure out how to get it to the teachers.  Either Rebecca needs to give me a list of those distribution companies, or I need to get me an intern . . .

artwork by seth

by Nick Demske–Our Man in Wisconsin

Well, really, this is a dispatch from the literary capital of the world, Racine, Wisconsin. But that’s close enough to allow me to pay lowly ol’ Chicago a visit when they put on extravaganzas for the word such as this, the Fifth Annual Printer’s Ball. For those unfamiliar, this is a free event, which includes readings, demos of printing press machinery and the like, as well as scores of free literary journals just waiting to be adopted into a loving home like yours. It’s the kind of event you bring a backpack to. Among the tons and tons represented: The Hat, Make, Hanging Loose, Cannot Exist, Eleven Eleven, ACM, Opium, Columbia Poetry Review . . . and that’s barely a fraction of the journals and presses represented. Kid in a candy shop.

This is the first Printer’s Ball I’ve gone to and I didn’t know what to expect. After February’s AWP in Chicago, I thought there would be much of the same literary stuffiness, along with a few dazzling programs of non-boredom thrown in. This event was not your typical literary conference, though—for better or worse. It seemed more to offer an alternative to your standard AWP type fair; a younger crowd running the programs with a much more punk influenced atmosphere, overall. Which, I’ll give you, sounds like a breath of fresh air—an escape from the ivory tower tombs of lit conferences.  Unfortunately, though, it looks better on paper than in person.

Here are just some of the high–and low–lights of the Fifth Annual Printer’s Ball in Chicago:

–Readings in the elevators, brought to you by a group called Elevated Diction.

–Two girls in old-school ball gowns completely constructed out of paper shreddings, etc.

–A “Literary Death Match,” hosted by Opium, in which poets and writers simply read works and then were judged against each other on the works’ merits.

–A series of readings hosted by ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), accompanied by a drummer with full kit (the drummer was not the poet Philip Jenks, as was promoted, however).

–and the night wrapped up with the Chicago Reading Series Face-off, hosted by the curators of the Quickies Chicago series

While, again, all of this sounds like a pretty cool alternative to your run-of the-mill reading marathon, there were times when I found myself cringing, longing for that run-of-the-milliness I’ve come to abhor. My hat is off to anyone who tries to breathe new life into the tradition of the literary reading—a tradition that I feel has all but become a joke. It’s just that most of these attempts, I would say, fell far short of their potential, resulting in gimmickry more than anything substantial. The elevator readings never really made it past an awkward stage; the two girls in ball gowns harkened back to some weird, suffer-for-fashion, woman as object ideals; the literary death match was basically taking a slam concept and applying it to work not typically associated with that culture (a culture I personally find pretty bankrupt); and the readings accompanied by the drummer were completely dominated by crashing cymbals (not symbols) making it impossible to decipher most of the readings.

The Quickies Chicago event left me with few complaints: true, a whistle was used to get readers off the stage at 5 minutes, but that’s their whole schtick and, after 6 hours of readings, not altogether unwelcome. True, also, that I found much of the work showcased there to be screamingly sub-standard (one reader, who shall rename nameless, even commented afterwards, “Wow. I really had no idea what I got into here, I guess”), but that’s because, it seems, they were a bit over-inclusive and invited representatives of all the Chicago reading series to participate. So, despite having to sit through some really poorly constructed work, I ultimately view that as a good thing. But this brings me to the one issue I was disturbed by, during the Quickies reading and throughout the Printer’s Ball as a whole: the reading line ups were—not exclusively, but remarkably—racially homogeneous. Considering how inclusive the Quickies showcase seemed to be, this fact was all the more perplexing. How is it possible that a city like Chicago, in all its literary diversity, produced an event so unrepresentative of the city’s writing culture at large? This question isn’t rhetoric. It’s the most important, staggering thing I took away from that night. I have my own suspicions, but would be much more interested in seeing what readers of this blog hypothesize instead. 

Lest all my moaning dismay you, let it be known that there were many top notch moments during the event: the mighty Ish Klein represented the Danny’s Reading Series with all the mania it deserves; Daniel Borzutzky (representing Mandorla) demanded the audience “don’t clap” and “stop talking” in between fragments of his brilliant poetry; Gabe Gudding’s insane pseudo-rap (for Make) and Paul Killebrew’s single sentence poem “Dead Black Men” (for Canarium) kept the Literary Death Match on track; and Simone Muench represented Poetry magazine with a wicked fury that I didn’t really know that magazine was capable of.

For my money, the night rested on the shoulders of Canarium Books–a very young press that can already boast Ish Klein, Paul Killebrew and Suzanne Buffam as authors, among others.

Finally, my number one highlight of the night was Nick Twemlow, editor for Canarium, representing Jubilat with his poem “I Love Karate” (which will be included in the next Best American Nonrequired Reading, an anthology edited by high school students, under Dave Eggers). Twemlow is one of my favorite poets bar none. The fact that he doesn’t have a full collection out yet is a crime against humanity. Sometimes I consider starting a press just so I could try to get in on that ground floor. I’ve read he has a chapbook coming out on Spectacular Books, though. Hats off to Spectacular, if that’s the case.

I’ve included a video of Twemlow’s reading, along with his crafty incorporation of the drums that drowned out most readers.

For good measure, I’ll also include a video of my lowlight: John Beer’s reading. John’s not a bad poet—totally contrary—he’s excellent. However, he was the first to read with the drum accompaniment and, thus, suffered the worst fate. You can barely make out long passages, which really bummed me out. I’m sure it would have bummed John out too, if he hadn’t found out during his introduction that his first book would be published by—guess who—Canarium Books. I sense a theme here . . .

Nick Demske lives in Racine, Wisconsin, and works there at the Racine Public Library. His work may or may not have appeared in Action Yes, Sawbuck, Knock, Fact-Simile, Queef and other fine literary journals. He helps curate the BONK! performance series in Racine and is the editor of the online forum boo: a journal of terrific things. Visit Nick sometime at nickipoo.wordpress.com

edifying long interview between Ben Lerner and Aaron Kunin on The Mandarin, in Jacket.

Am I preaching to the choir when I say that everyone I know should go see the movie Food, Inc.? I think I’m preaching to something like an orchestra, made up of people that have heard the song but have something stuck between it and their bodies. If the instrument were made of corn and antibiotics, this would make more sense.

What I do know is that I’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve lived on a CSA farm, I have a garden and I buy grains and keep them in jars and feel rather righteous about it. But Food, Inc. slapped me hard on my big grass-fed cheek and said “Don’t  you dare forget how real this is! People working 14-hour-days in slaughterhouses, cows with their big kind eyes all piled on top of each other, ankle deep in shit, children with Type-2 diabetes because the Dollar Menu is cheaper than vegetables, new forms of e-coli prospering in corn-filled ruminants!”

… and more and more and more. Please go see this film, please be charmed by Joel Salatin’s suspenders, and please encourage the people you know to see it as well. In Albany, you even get a $5 co-op coupon, which makes the movie cost only $2.50 to see. Really, now.

is coming to Albany on Wednesday night, and I’m trying to write something incredible about my dollar store item, which is possibly the coolest item I’ve ever been sent by someone who doesn’t know me. That I didn’t order online, I mean. It will be cherished a long time.

But the trick now is to write something worthy of it and of the tireless writers who’ve been traveling with the amazing Dollar Store Show as it meanders around our great nation.

In Albany on Wednesday, we’ll host:  Aaron Burch, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc, and Patrick Somerville, along with local writers Shane Jones, Daniel Nester, and moi. Please come out if you’re in or near this neck of these woods.

THE DOLLAR STORE SHOW

&nbspWED. JULY 15th at 7 pm

 @ VALENTINE’S (on New Scotland Ave., near Madison)

Big ups to Blake Butler, who gave big ups to this issue of Fence over at the htmlgiant blog, which I eat a healthy dose of everyday. Always various, crunchy, and full of the snickety snark. Go there NOW and leave your favorite text message if you want to be part of Ryan Call’s Dollar Store Show appearance. Viva la dollar store show!