The Best American Poetry

Poetry on Vinyl: An Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli of Fonograf Editions [by Daniel Nester]

I suspect I know what you’re thinking, dear readers. “Poetry and vinyl records?” you exclaim. “That’s a recipe for commercial disaster!” 

To this hypothetical remark I would point out that interest in vinyl records is the highest it’s been in decades. While streaming remains the dominant way we listen to music, vinyl sales have outpaced CD sales for the first time in 34 years. Selling and listening to vinyl is no longer a niche interest for sad, middle-aged men trying to recover a mythical past; it’s for sad people of all ages!

One of the most interesting developments in the poetry on vinyl universe: Fonograf Editions, a bona fide literary record label that was founded in 2016 and has put out a steady run of superb poetry on wax, from Rae Armantrout’s Conflation to Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe’s Stray: A Graphic Tone (cover pictured here), and has recently branched out into CDs and print books such as Lovability by Emily Kendall Frey. There’s just so much to praise and cover in the Fonograf Editions universe, so I reached out to Jeff Alessandrelli, one of their editors. Over email, we talked about records as objects, an upcoming John Ashbery release, and branching out into books.

Fonograf has been around for a couple years now, and its backlist is really impressive. Can you tell me a bit about the receptions among the vinyl and poetry communities? 

Being at quite a few writing conferences and book fairs in the past few years has made clear that people are always really excited to see literary vinyl in the world—even if they don’t have a record player or really listen to records. All of our vinyl releases also come with a download card and poem/liner notes insert, so there have definitely been people who have bought our albums simply for the album-as-artifact (coupled with the electronic listening option).   

I do appreciate your whole packaging and pricing credo. You’re not going for the bespoke and often overpriced vinyl packages we see now during the vinyl renaissance,  but at the same time these are quality records with inserts and the recordings are always high quality.  

Whether it’s a book or record or t-shirt, the actual Fonograf Ed. object is supremely important to us. The goal with our albums is for them to be part of the owner’s collection for the long term. Meaning that I have a lot of literary vinyl records—from Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore to Albert Camus to Langston Hughes—and I don’t listen to them every day. I sometimes go years without listening to them. But in my opinion the point of a literary album isn’t to constantly be putting it on your turntable; it’s instead to capture a specific time and place by a writer you really like or love. Our first three albums by Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout and Alice Notley were all, to a certain degree at least, recorded live, and that exact experience will never be recreated, except in listening to the actual album. I like that concept/notion.

Where are your records physically made? Records are so much in demand that I have heard of actual shortages.

We’ve used a variety of different record pressing plants and suppliers over the years. One of the tricks is that most record pressing plants don’t also make album jackets/inserts, so what has often happened is that things are manufactured at different times and then it’s a process of coalescing everything together. That said, we’ve been lucky in that we haven’t had any major delays or anything of that sort…it’s been a learning process, though. It takes a lot of work (and $) to put a vinyl album out, 100%.   

Were there any specific record labels or publishers, past or present, that inspired you to do what you do?  

Caedmon Records was a big influence—a few years back I wrote a bit about Caedmon over here on the website TheFanzine.

OK, as they say in business meetings, blue sky thinking: what’s your dream record project? Any wish-list for releases, or is it a more organic process? 

Next year we’re putting out an archival John Ashbery LP, from a reading he gave in 76—that’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while. Our last LP release—Fodder by Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty—is one that took a while to come together and we’re super happy with how it turned out. It was recorded live in Portland in the summer of 2019 and seems to supremely speak to our present moment. As for other LP releases—moving forward we’re looking to move more into actual music, albeit music that still has a literary bent. In November we’re releasing an album of original music by the poet/musician Brian Laidlaw that takes its album concept and (translated) lyrics from the 19th century French-Canadian poet Emile Nelligan. So we’re very excited about that.  

What's coming up next—any releases you'd like to plug, or photos of your headquarters you can share?

In the future we’re actually going to be as much a book press as a record label. In the last year we’ve released full length collections by the writers Dao Strom (which included a musical album component), Mark Leidner, Charles Valle and Emily Kendal Frey, with two forthcoming debut poetry collections by Brandi Katherine Herrera and Jan Verberkmoes. Next year we have the Ashbery LP, a magazine, a chapbook by Matvei Yankelevich, a poetry collection by Krystal Languell, and an essay collection by Hilary Plum. And in Winter 2023 we’re releasing two volumes by Alice Notley—one a 600-page collection (comprised of 6 books) of new work called The Speak Angel Series and the other a volume (tentatively) entitled The First Four Books of Poems, one that collects all of Notley’s now out of print early collections in one solidified book. So we have a lot in store and are verily hustling.  

Dan Nester on Jim Morrison

<<<
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans. The Doors, who took their name from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”), combined jazz chord changes and Latin rhythms with flamenco, surf, raga, blues, and psychedelia, all in one ’60s rock band, often in one song: “Light My Fire,” “The End,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “People Are Strange,” just to name a few. The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor.
>>>

For more, click here.

Aggressive Swans and 'Squirtier Turkey Basters': Reports from Two Readings in Atlanta by Daniel Nester

 

Greetings from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where I am waiting for my flight to the Motor City, where I will connect to my flight home to Albany International Airport, where I will be picked up by my lovely wife and little daughters.

I’ve been on a mini-tour of Atlanta and Morrow, GA. Wednesday night, I was at Clayton State University, at a series hosted by Brigitte Byrd, who was a lovely host.

I got a hold of Byrd's latest book, Song of a Living Room, published by the mighty Ahsata Press. The collection of superb prose poems leaps from folk tales to bedtime stories to semi-autobiographical meditations on language and writing (originally from France, she peppers some pieces with full sentences in her native tongue), and general alchemic ratatouille of what she calls “lyric occupation.”

I read some new memoir stuff I’ve been working on in my sabbatical year, including, as an audible at the line of scrimmage, the tale of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to my hometown of Maple Shade, NJ. Before I read, I was told the lake in Clayton hosts two "aggressive swans" (one is pictured above), which made me giggle. I suggested that if Clayton decides to have a football team, that should be their name, shortened to "Agswanns" or something. 

Brigitte and her companion Scott treated me to supper last night. We sat outside, where it was a “chilly” 64 degrees. I could get used to such chilliness, certainly in the months to come in Upstate New York.

The evening before that, I read in Bruce Covey’s What’s New in Poetry series with two better craftspeople than I: Matt Henriksen and Lee Ann Roripaugh.  I’d met both poets in the past, mostly at AWP-type clustereffs, but had not heard either read their work.

Roripaugh read from published and newer poems, including one in Spam form that had this listener in stitches. Her mention of a “squirtier turkey baster” alone made it worth the price of admission. She also read a list of “squalid things,” an imitation-homage of/to Sei Shōnagon’s pillowbook.

Henriksen read from his most recent book, Ordinary Sun, a mix of prophetic and twangy poems. It was great to hear the poems in his own voice. He also read and talked about a special section he edited for Fulcum: An Annual Poetry and Aesthetics dedicated to the late poet Frank Stanford. Henriksen provides notes towards a biography, twenty unpublished or uncollected poems, fiction and correspondence. It's fascinating stuff. He was kind enough to give me a copy and I’ll continue to read it on the flight today.

Bruce Covey was a great host, and accompanying him was Gina Myers, new to Atlanta from Saginaw, Michigan, as well as a couple Emory University creative writing fellows. As readers of the BAP Blog know, Covey a super poet—a unique meld of experimental methods with and humor and precise feeling. He’s put together a nice series at Emory, which you should go to for sure.

OK. Well, that’s the news from the airport. Hope to see you soon.

 

 

A Poetics Prosody Commonplace Post by Daniel Nester

-- Eleanor Berry, "The Free Verse Spectrum"

 

"I know some will say it is a mingled language. And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other? Another will say it wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wanteth not grammar. For grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon’s curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other tongue in the world; and is particularly happy in compositions of two or three words together, near the Greek, far beyond the Latin,—which is one of the greatest beauties that can be in a language."—Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy

 

"When Ezra Pound called for the "direct, objective treatment of the thing itself," he was in some sense echoing the historicism of late nineteenth-century thought. Historicism implicitly rejects systems, whether an ideological or a theological sort; and, in attempting to understand historical events without the benefit of any transcendent framework, it tacitly accepts the end of absolute value and absolutist authority as signaled by the French Revolution, Though Pound’s polemic addressed itself to eradicating the "emotional slither" he identified with late Victorian poetry, it inadvertently limited the poet almost exclusively to the ironic mode. Since mythical elements, and expressions of direct sentiment, would be curtailed by any rigorous adoption of "direct, objective treatment," the lyric poem might well lose the chief sources of its resonance. One way for the poet to render some justice to the complexity of experience is by turning to his own divided consciousness as his chief subject and presenting the consciousness directly while ironically qualifying the mind that discovers it. Or the poet might take different, fragmentary, but conflicting views inherent in an experiential situation, relate them to one another, dampening his own intentions and judgments, and energize the poem through an ironic interplay of multiple but partial "truths." Poets, especially ironic poets, became in some sense historicists of the imagination."—Charles Molesworth, The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry

On Two Versions of Robert Creeley's "Self-Portrait" by Daniel Nester

I.
That ambivalent, oblique, laconic way of speaking, it’s very self-defensive, but it thinks of itself as very up-front.

A really charming guy last night, one of the musicians, said to me ‘Hey, man, you got a really interesting voice.’ You know, I was very charmed. And he said, ‘Yeah, the way you really push it out there--you can hear every beat.’ [laughs.]

That’s terrific. That’s the way I feel it.

These words, taken from an interview with Anne Waldman in Ron Mann’s 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, come from the most laconic of 20th century laconic American poets, Robert Creeley.

Creeley’s sound-driven poetry is in a sense halfway between Cage’s silence and, say, Michael McLure’s shaman-fire. As a twentysomething wanna-be poet commuting to Rutgers University’s Camden satellite campus, I first saw the film on a VHS tape rented from TLA Video in Philadelphia. The documentary was 4-5 years old by then, and I rented it on countless occasions, accumulating some serious late fees. Sometimes, I took the train across the Delaware River for the sole reason of hearing the clip where John Giorno yelps his poems over a prerecorded track or Jayne Sanchez duels with Jamaaleen Tacuma’s bass.

The documentary’s angle or thesis was that poetry, as a heard form, can be freed from the academy’s grip, which according to several of the featured poets, is “so hard to understand.” As someone forced to read Pound and Eliot at a premature point of my writing life, I agreed with these assertions wholeheartedly. Watching the film again, I also recall feeling that I was somehow more hip than the academics.

Creeley, a poet in academia almost all of his writing life, at first seemed staid and laid-back to me, certainly not as viscerally satisfying as the poets reading with the bells and whistles, like Ed Sanders of the Fugs, for instance, with his "musical tie." Creeley’s comments that immediately follow his reading of “Self-Portrait,” however, have always helped me appreciate the poem. On the surface, the speaker does seem rather coy, “laconic,” and “oblique” in his meaning and intention. Over the years, I grew to like the poem more and more as my ear changed; Creeley’s pauses in his performance and line, after tens of listenings, I learned, provided a perfect form for the sound and meaning contents of the poem. It indicated deeper ambiguities. Here's the poem:

Self-Portrait

He wants to be
a brutal old man
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the “oh
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on
his own two dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.

Daniel Nester, Guest Blogger September 11-17

This week we welocme Daniel Nester as our guest blogger.  Daniel is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction. His first two books, God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Salon.com, The Morning News, McSweeney’s, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, and Bookslut, and has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. He edits the group culture-slash-literature blog We Who Are About To Die <wewhoareabouttodie.com. Find him online here.

In other news . . .

Save the Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011 - The Best American Poetry 2011 Launch Reading. 7 PM, Tishman Auditorium of the New School (66 West 12th Street, NYC) Series Editor David Lehman and Guest Editor Kevin Young will be joined by John Ashbery, Cara Benson, Michael Cirelli, Michael Dickman, Farrah Field, Major Jackson, Jennifer L. Knox,Katha Pollitt, James Richardson, Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, Bianca Stone, Mark Strand, and Lee Upton.

Tuesday, 27 September 2011 - Deemed Truly Nefarious (To Us Hilarious)": Daniel Nester, David Yezzi, Elizabeth Gold, and Ernest Hilbert read at Robin's Books, 110 South 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107 (215) 735-9598, hosted by Lynn Levin. Details here.

"Good Bad Titles"

On May 30, 2008, in this space, Dan Nester posted about an afternoon he and Jonah Winter spent sending up the titles that adorn poetry books. The titles that occurred to them "all seemed so aggressively portentous, imbued with such fawning obsequiousness," Nester wrote. "To exorcise ourselves of the real-life titles we were mentioning, titles that shall not be mentioned here, we played a word association game wherein either Jonah or myself would think of the second word of a two-word poetry book title, which would after after whatever the other participant named as the first." The "after after" in that sentence is hard to parse, perhaps deliberately, but the list of titles that follows clarifies the idea and gives us a window into the lads' minds that day: "Technical Vulva," "Variegated Cock," "Airport Beaver," "Stiff Flowering," "Tremulous Beaver."

The best of the list formed a category of their own: "good bad titles." Such was the thought of Corey Zeller, who approached a bunch of other poets to see whether they would produce self-parodying titles on order. Zeller's objective: "to write a book of serious prose poems" borrowing the deliberately bad titles. That She Could Remember Something Other Than _________, a Nester / Winter nominee, is the working title for Zeller's collection. 

Among those who have responded to the summons thus far are  Dean Young ("Tears of My Shadow"), Major Jackson ("The Shoeshine Chronicles"), Nin Andrews ("Beta Male Ballads"), Kim Addonizio "What Color is Your Vagina," "What Do Assholes Want?" "My Despair"), Arielle Greenberg ("Four Thousand Short Notes on Heidegger") as well as Joe Wenderoth, Dana Levin, Tim Seibles, Matthew Zapruder, and Joyelle McSweeney. A few conclusions can be drawn. Heidegger, who figures in several titles, handily beats out Descartes as the bad philosopher of choice. Sex, body parts, and bodily function retain their ancient popularity, with Dean Young's "My Mother's Thong" rivaling Dorothy Lasky's "Sitting by Your Mom's Bush in Broad Sunlight" but topped in tastelessness by the simplicity of Peter Markus's "On the Rag."

Here are some of the titles Jim Cummins has punfully proposed:

NOSTROMOSEXUAL
THE INTERPRETATION OF JEANS
PRIMO LEVI'S
THE LIVES OF A CELLO
ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PERSONS

Jim also suggests some plausible pseudonyms, chosen from the imaginary "tablet of contents" that he has been tinkering with for years. W S Merlot pours well. With Kenneth Joch you wonders how to pronounce the surname: Jock? Joke? Josh?

 Not one to shirk a challenge, I came up with titles for books, not necessaerily poetry books, that might appear in a publisher's catalog:

-- USEFUL CANADIAN REVENUE-SHARING PLANS

-- DO-IT-YOURSELF DENTISTRY, Volume 1

-- DEAD MONEY: PFIZER, CISCO, AND OTHER VALUE TRAPS

-- THE SINUS HANDBOOK

-- SHAKESPEARE'S HAPPIEST COUPLE: MAC AND LADY MACBETH

The last on this list was prompted by the proposition that the Macbeths may be Shakespeare's happiest husband and wife -- in the tragedies at least. 

Speaking of Shakespeare, I thought of another such title during a phone conversation with John Ashbery. We were discussing a decision he had made and I called it shrewd. He couldn't hear what I said and asked me to repeat the adjective. Shrewd, I said, "as in 'The Taming of the Shrewd'."

Oh, the photo illustrating this post is -- Hmmm. Why don't I invite guesses from the blogosphere? -- DL

What's Happening to Poetry at "The Paris Review"?

There's been an editorial change at The Paris Review -- and a good deal of controversy attending the new editors' decision to reject previously accepted poems that had not yet appeared in print. The same thing happened in 2003 but on a lesser scale and with much less of a hue and cry. Here's Daniel Nester on the subject.

On the left you'll find the cover of the Spring 1968 issue of The Paris Review (# 42),  It means a lot to me, because it was my first appearance in George Plimpton's legendary magazine. -- DL 

Getting to Know: Ernest Hilbert [by Daniel Nester]

In which we interview writers asking the same questions asked of Ashley Tisdale by Juliette, editor of Miss O and Friends; see the original interview here.

Close to 20 years ago, Ernest Hilbert and I attended to the same satellite Rutgers campus in Camden, NJ, but at slightly different times. People would mention Ernest to me, and people would mention me to Ernest.

It wouldn't be 10 years until we finally met. I thought it would be some diva encounter between Linda Evans and Jackie Collins, both of us sizing each other up the way writers do; instead, we just drank 100 beers and made jokes about death metal bands and our old teachers.

Ernest, or Ernie as he is known to friends, wears so many hats he qualifies as a freaking milliner. He works for Bauman's Rare Books, the antiquarian bookseller that takes those full-page ads on the backs of issues of The New York Times Book Review. He runs E-Verse, a multiplatform website empire that is email, video, and blog all wrapped in one.  And he's editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, a smart, idiosyncratic publication dedicated to poetry criticism.

Oh, and he's an excellent poet. His first book, Sixty Sonnets (Red Hen Press), uses a sonnet form of his own tweaking, and name-checks everything from Zippos to Star Wars figures to Plato and Thomas Eakins. Franz Wright calls it a "touching and intelligent book." Ernest took time out from his hat-wearing to talk about important issues of the day, and we're glad he did.

Age: 39
Sign: Aries
Birthplace: A violent but inspiring midnight storm, in Philadelphia. “Once more to seem slight and alive / Since in lightning and rivers I began.”

You may know me because: I have a blog and vlog called E-Verse Radio, a book called Sixty Sonnets, and a tendency to be the last one at the bar still gabbing when they throw on the lights and lock the doors.

My house is: a lovely century-old brick Colonial Revival right next to the tracks that divide West Philly from South-West Philly. You get the idea. Still, it’s a place to keep my books and my cats.

Jabbereffy, Turing, Sign-off.

Drawing by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Dear Future Boyfriend.

Take the Turing Test here.

What is Jabberfucky? Go here and fucking find out.

Bookmarked here at your guest blogger's computer: Tony Hoagland's "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of our Moment."

Some results from my previous call for new-ish literary journals, suggested by our readers:
The Lumberyard, Cave Wall, Bateau, Chatauqua, Caketrain, GUD, Atlas, 1913: A Journal of Forms, and New York Tyrant.

Well, that's it for me this week.  Maybe BAP will have me again.

Thanks to Cristin for giving me artwork and all my interviewees for being good sports. And if you're in New York, maybe I'll see you at the BAP-approved KGB Reading Series with Star Black on Monday, December 1.

Meanwhile, catch me over at my own site here.

Get Your Orality On.

Drawing by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Working Class Represent.

-- Get On The Griot Trail with Bob Holman and Papa Susso in West Africa. Mr. Holman is traveling around Africa with his griot pal Susso to film endangered languages.

-- While you are getting your orality on, check out the online Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University.

-- Play this clip of Lowell Fulson at full volume and get your grind on something.

-- I'll admit it:I have every version of Ron Mann's 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion: VHS, CD-ROM, DVD, LaserDisk.  Get this clip on, by the collective sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, remains a favorite.  (It's out of sync, I know.)

-- Get your Poetry magazine on with its November issue, with a Visual Poetry Today section edited by Schenectady resident Geof Huth.

-- I'd be remiss not to get my self-promotion on and link to this post of group sound poems composed by my students last Spring at The College of Saint Rose.

Getting to Know: Michael Schiavo (by Daniel Nester)

In which we ask the same questions Teen magazine asked then-soon-to-be-pregnant teen idol Jamie Lynn Spears; see original interview here.

Take a good look at this picture.  What do you see?  Look into those eyes. Give yourself a second. What do you see?  A scowling and confused booty rapper? Musical theatre enthusiast?  Gaffer or best boy? Off-duty narcotics cop? 

The answer is None of the Above.  It's Michael Schiavo, poet and co-editor of Tight literary journal, who has just dropped his first book, The Mad Song, a "prose meditation, bluesy elegy, sensual lament, comic colloquy, poetic memoir" that can only be written by Schiavo. Wildly associative and crafty, Schiavo's work is an admixture of Berryman and Niedecker, Pound and Baudelaire. 

Yep, he's that good.

Which is why it's deadly important we ask Michael Schiavo, non-booty rapper, non-musical theatre enthusiast, non-gaffer/best boy and non-off-duty narcotics cop, these Really Important Questions.  And we glad we did.

BAPB: You’re in Jr. High, right?
MS: Most definitely.

What are you most looking forward to?
Painting the White House black.

What kind of car do you want?
Is fudge considered a car?

What's your favorite subject?
Sexual Education.

Do you play any sports?
Cricket in season, jai alai now that the wintertime enshrouds.

Are kids in school treating you differently because of Nickelodeon exposure?
Most definitely.

You have a new puppy named Ali, right? How is she?
Short for Ali Baba. I love that Maxfield Parrish painting. She has yet to master the psycho-laser technology we've implanted, but there's always a learning curve on stuff like that!

How old is she now?
714.

She's a mix, right?
Like me.

What are your feelings about Ali?
I fucking hate her.

Where did you find her?
Conjured. Did you every see Practical Magic? Like that.

Do you dress her up?
Always. Mondays are, of course, for pirates. Tuesdays we blast into the stratosphere as Chinese cosmonauts. Wednesdays through Fridays are catch-all, but Ali Baba usually picks a sports theme—she loves the NBA—go Chris Paul!—but she also likes gladiators or Indian chiefs. The whole weekend is “Casual Friday,” i.e. lingerie!

Do you try to coordinate it with what you're wearing?
Most definitely.

What is your fashion style?
Old School

Year 'round?
Bet.

What do you like to do for fun?
Pleasuredome with my dominatrix.

Was it really scary?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. At times she doesn't obey my safe word, and while I can't really complain, the chafing does get a bit much. She lotions me after.

TV anything you watch?
God, I love that Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! It's like entering the bathroom of my mind and cowering near the toilet.

Are you watching Joey?
They made a movie out of that? Dylan never ceases to inspire. Desire is one of my favorites.

So, you have to get TiVo?
Most definitely.

Do you have an acting coach working with you?
Seth Rogen. He makes me call him “Zoe.” She's great. And she smells like a mixture of wet cinnamon and Manchego cheese. Desirable.

Is Zoe like you?
Only in that she too likes white cotton panties.

How are you not alike?
Genitalia. But the gap is shrinking.

Will that change as you get older?
Let's hope!

Have you gotten advice from mom or sister about business?
Most definitely.

Do you have a celebrity crush?
I've had celebrities crush me, if that's what you're asking, Natalie Portman.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
When I was 12, I went to see Midnight Run with my father at the Waterbury Mall. The theater wasn't overly crowded, but I had eaten a lot of sushi before the movie started. Sure enough, it hit me during the famous helicopter chase scene. Diarrhea streamed down under the seats (I always sit in the back row) but the movie was so good, I didn't get up to clean myself until after the credits were over and I had thrown up too and when I asked the usher to replay the movie he said I'd have to pay more money and it was so embarrassing!

So you raised your hand to answer a question and it was wrong?
It's always wrong.

You probably haven't raised your hand since?
Only in the Black Power salute.

Favorite movie:
Zorro, the Gay Blade.

Reason?
Ron Leibman. C'mon.

Film star you look up to/like to have a career like?
Daniel Day-Lewis. Or Seth Rogen.

Do you like Hilary's music?
I love her mouth, the shape, the wetness.

If you could work with any other actor/actress who?
I'd like to do a remake of War of the Worlds with that girl from Man On Fire.

Would you think you'd died and gone to heaven if you got a part in an Ashton Kutcher/Lindsay Lohan movie?
Only if it was a “pornographic movie.” At least that's what they call them in the Czech Republic.

Something you can't live without:
Masturbation.

Play video games?
I beat Contra every day before I go to school. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right,  Left, Right, B, A, B, A, Start

Who's someone you look up to?
Stockton to Malone.

Why?
Courageous.

Mises-en-Abyme, Bly, Naive, May, Copland, Hyde.

Drawing by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Hot Teen Slut.

Night before teaching, and here's what I am up to:

-- I am looking up, for what seems to be the thousandth time, mise-en-abyme. Or mise-en-abime, wherein the i has a little chapeau thingie on it. One thought I had: Why, oh why, in tarnation is this image linked from that Wikipedia article? I know not.  But there are super discussions on this rather malleable term here and here. But it's here that got me looking for images of old Quaker Oats logos. WTF?

-- Linked from some then I end up reading bits of Freidrich Schiller's essay "On Naive [also: Simple] and Sentimental Poetry"; copies here and here.

-- Queen and Paul Rodgers have arrived in Chile. Photos here.

-- Speaking of Brian "is God" May: Really, Alex Ross?  Copland Will, Copland Will Rock You?  Read and listen here. I don't hear it--and what's more it seems it's just another rock critic's stab at making Queen out to be a pastiche factory. My wife sliced and diced Copland for months while working as the music editor for this movie--for which she should have gotten an Academy Award nomination, IMHO--and never once did I listen to "Fanfare for the Common Man" and say to myself, "wow, that sounds like the Red Special." Even when I rocked out to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer one, yo.

-- Read a little bit about Leaping Poetry for classes tomorrow; here's a little nugget from Robert Bly's essential Leaping Poetry: An Idea With Poems and Translations:

In ancient times, in the “time of inspiration,” the poet flew from one world to another, “riding on dragons”.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke. ... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.

Dragonsmoke.  Awwwwww, yeah. That's what I am talkin' about.

-- Has everyone read the Lewis Hyde profile from last Sunday's New York Times? Yes? OK.

The Albany Poetry scenes, as seen through Dan Wilcox's lens.

As a relative newcomer to Albany--we moved here from Brooklyn in 2005 when I started teaching at The College of Saint Rose--I was curious to see what the local poetry scenes were like in and around our new hometown.  It didn't take long after going to my first readings that I noticed one dude at every one.  He wore in a black beret, a flash camera around his neck, and lots of political buttons. 

That dude's name is Dan Wilcox, and he was always taking pictures. A peace activist, veteran, and former state worker--everyone seems to be a former state worker up here in New York's state capital--Dan Wilcox is one of the poetry scene's griots. He claims to have the "world's largest collection of photos of unknown poets." Some of the photos are, in fact, of very well-known poets. Here's a mini-exhibition for your viewing pleasure, with Dan Wilcox's commentary.

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This was taken at the QE2 in February 1995, where Tom Nattell (right front) ran a poetry open on the last Monday of each month.  There are a couple dead poets in this picture (including Tom), others who have moved from the area, some I don't know, some don't show up at open mics anymore & there are a few hard-core open micers & folks still writing.  Tom Nattell & the readings at the QE2, a punk rock club in a former White Tower Hamburger joint, were the start of the vibrant poetry scene that continues to this day in Albany.

Another event that Tom Nattell was responsible for organizing was the annual 24-hour reading/performance fund-raiser, Readings Against the End of the World.  He ran it from 1984 to 1993.  It was a fund-raiser for the Albany Peace & Energy Council & was in about 3 different venues during its run, around the weekend of Earth Day each year.  This is Ed Sanders reading in 1991.

Getting to Know: Michael Robins (by Daniel Nester)

In which we ask the same questions Teen magazine asked then-soon-to-be-pregnant teen idol Jamie Lynn Spears; see original interview here.

Perhaps you've read the poems of Michael Robins in the best-known literary journals (Typo, Verse, Milk, Diagram). Or maybe you've read Robins' first book, The Next Settlement, which won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Or maybe you're just curious about this dude who writes, as his book's jacket copy reads, "enigmatic scenes [that] are masterfully rendered with a photographer’s eye." Or maybe you want read how Robins writes, as this guest blogger might put it, "fucked-up lyrics for a fucked-up age."

Well, either way, trust me: it's important that we ask Michael Robins, who lives in Chicago where he teaches at Columbia College, who has just come back from reading at Lewis University, and who helps edit literary journal bornmagazine, these Really Important Questions. 

Despite the time difference, Michael assured us that he was fully clothed during our phone conversation.  And, considering his dynamite answers, we're glad he was!

BAPB: You’re in Jr. High, right?
MR: Indeed. It’s been difficult during the last few decades, repeating the 8th grade year after year while my teachers get younger and younger, but I’m also fortunate that the eligibility rules for middle school football are ambiguous at best. At 6 foot and 170 pounds, I’m proud to have beaten our rivals two of the last five seasons.

What are you most looking forward to?
I’m looking forward to the end of this interview so I can get back to my homework.

What kind of car do you want?
Anything that reflects my hobbies: walks on beaches, Bill Murray, fluffy kittens.

What's your favorite subject?
What’s your favorite subject?

Do you play any sports?
Do you always answer a question with a question?

You ever heard of kickboxing? Sport of the future? Don the Dragon Wilson? Benny "the Jet" Urquidez? Mercy Mess on the Champions of Sport? I can see by your face, no…

Are kids in school treating you differently because of Nickelodeon exposure?
I remember watching the Janet Jackson fiasco during the Super Bowl Halftime Show and thinking, “Nothing like that could ever happen to me.” Let bygones be bygones, I say now. In the long run, I think that my exposure on Nickelodeon has really opened some doors for my career. At the very least, no one quite knows anymore what to expect when I walk into school each morning.

You have a new puppy named Ali, right? How is she?
She’s great, but I feel the need to set the record straight: “Ali” is merely part of her middle name, as in Daisy Jane “Muhammad Ali” Murphy. With a name like that, she now has all the makings of one day becoming commander-in-chief, that is if we can just keep her from treeing squirrels.

Getting to Know: Barbara Louise Ungar (by Daniel Nester)

In which we ask the same questions Teen magazine asked then-soon-to-be-pregnant teen idol Jamie Lynn Spears; see original interview here.
 

photo by Dan Wilcox

I, Daniel Nester, work with Barbara Louise Ungar at The College of Saint Rose.  We go to meetings and talk about teaching and all that working-at-the-same-college stuff.  I've always thought she was so serene--still waters run deep and all that.  So when I go over to her website to get some good biography-type stuff did I find some amazing details. 

I knew that she had written Haiku in English as part of her graduate school work.  I knew she has a cool son named Izaak, with whom I trade Hot Wheels cars. I did not know, however, that Barbara spent a summer on Lake Como and six months in Rome. That she lived another summer on the Greek island of Symi.  And, finally, that she spent a year in a cabin in Woodstock, NY, where she performed under the name of “Psyche.” 

Barbara Louise Ungar's newest book, The Origin of the Milky Way, published last year, won the Gival Press Prize for Poetry.  It's a terrific collection and she's reading at a lot of places across this great nation of ours.  We caught Barbara on the road to a reading in Syracuse to ask these important questions.  And we're so glad we did!

BAPB: You’re in Jr. High, right??
BLU: Have I died and gone to hell?

What are you most looking forward to?
My next meal, orgasm, or poem, whichever comes first.

What kind of car do you want?
One I don’t have to drive.

What's your favorite subject?
My boyfriend.

Do you play any sports?
Badminton and ping pong.

Are kids in school treating you differently because of Nickelodeon exposure??
Differently from what?

You have a new puppy named Ali, right?
No, actually, her name is Lola.

How is she?
She just ran away, so I’ll find out tomorrow when I get home.

New-ish Literary Journals: A Call for Lists (from Daniel Nester)

Drawing by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam.

So I am helping a librarian friend out with an article on new-ish literary journals, and I need your help, dear readers.  You know what literary journals are, right?  Those magazines all your favorite writers are published in before they put together their collections?  Those periodicals editors put together out of love, from which are culled poems for The Best American Poetry and other Best-of's? 

Anyway, here's what I need: Tips on great literary journals that have made it past their first issue and look like they are in it for the long haul--i.e., ones that librarians might acquire for their periodicals section. Do you edit one of these journals?  Do one of your friends? Enemies? Half-uncles? 

Leave journal names, top 10 lists, in the comment box below--you can also backchannel email me at danielnester at gmail dot com. You can give me reasons why you would recommend these for a library, too, although that's no so necessary.  I imagine such a compilation would be interesting for those writers who are looking to send out their work to said journals. 

I need these by December 2. Give links to their websites if you can.

And you will have this guest blogger's great thanks. 

Getting to Know: Taylor Mali (by Daniel Nester)

In which we ask the same questions Teen magazine asked then-soon-to-be-pregnant teen idol Jamie Lynn Spears; see original interview here.

Taylor Mali makes his living as a poet. Which makes Taylor Mali one of a kind.

A native New Yorker turned high school teacher, Mali joined the poetry slam movement in the mid-90s, and immediately made his mark as a pioneer in slam strategy. He led six of his seven National Poetry Slam teams to the finals stage, winning the championship a record four times. One of the original poets to appear on the HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, you might also remember him as the "golden-tongued, Armani-clad villain" of Paul Devlin's 1997 documentary film SlamNation, which chronicled the 1996 National Poetry Slam. Taylor also runs the very popular Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Recent Faves from Smalbany.

Drawing by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Oh, Terrible Youth.

Greetings from Daniel Nester, one of your guest bloggers here for the week, writing to you from Albany, which I call, alternatively, Smalbany, Alcoholbany, Crawlbany, and my favorite, Banalbany.  I have a couple things planned this week, and hopefully a couple things unplanned. 

But for now, some highlights from your guest blogger's week, poetry-related and some just poetic:

First, er, discovery: Those new Kate Winslet photos in the new Vanity Fair.  Now, I think Winslet is very talented--I think she deserved an Oscar for Little Children, for instance.  And she is smart; her turn as a potty-mouthed nun on HBO's show Extras is another recent fave. But these new photos make me think of her in a whole new way; as Garth Algar puts it in Wayne's World, It makes me feel all funny inside, like when you climbed the rope in gym class.

The concept of the photo shoot tugs on my highbrow heartstrings: Winslet dresses up as Catherine Deneuve's bored housewife-turned-prostitute character in Luis Buñuel's 1967 film Belle de Jour. The only way to make this more sublime would be to dress Winslet up as Deneuve's character from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).  Come to think of it, Vanity Fair should get on that.

Nester's Last Day (by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz)

Thanks for having me, The Best American Poetry Blog, and thank you, dear readers, for making this week an enjoyable one.  Made a lot of new email friends and reconnected with others. And thanks to Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, who sent in the above cartoon--err, graphic novel-type writing--in honor of today, my last day as BAP guest blogger (single-click your mouse on it to read in new window). She and her partner in crime, Shappy, rocked the Frequency North reading series, which I run here at The College of Saint Rose.  See you around the simulrockra, pen in hand.

Daniel Nester and Jonah Winter's proposed names of poetry books

Poet-slash-evil genius Jonah Winter and your guest blogger spent an afternoon in Pittsburgh not too long ago, talking of our lack of faith in Jesus Christ as our personal savior as well as making fun of poetry book titles. They all seemed so aggressively portentous, imbued with such fawning obsequiousness. To exorcise ourselves of the real-life titles we were mentioning, titles that shall not be mentioned here, we played a word association game wherein either Jonah or myself would think of the second word of a two-word poetry book title, which would after after whatever the other participant named as the first. 

So, for example, Jonah would say “Imprimateured,” while I kept in mind the second word for the title, “Meanderings,” thus giving us a title ready for someone’s poetry manuscript, Imprimateured Meanderings. (That's Jonah in full evil genius mode pictured up on your left, reading at UMaine's reading series awhile back; do check out his books, the very un-portentously, unobsequiously named  Maine and Amnesia.)

Sometimes we would even think of the press one of our proposed books titles might be associated.  TransDarkness would fit right beside those titles published at the experimental Ahsahta Press, for example, while Tremulous Beaver might be more feasible for, say, Knopf.

Without further ado, here’s our list. Got any others?  Add them to the Comments box.

The Orchid Sac
Lunar Guest
Concrete Pedigree
Beviled Desires
Standard Flow
Leftward Thwartings
Modified Rapture
Tremulous Beaver
Uninformed Highwayman
TransDarkness
Uninformed Tomorrowings
Imprimateured Meanderings
Sluiced Regret
The Sentinel Awakes
In situ, Storms
Alarm Morningwood
Darling; Wandering
Streaked Pugnaciousness
Variegated Cock
Woman House
Descartes’ Pancakes
Fugitive Contraband
Entering Beaver
Airport Beaver
Damage Thruway
Matchstick Haven
Unsublettable You
Earning, Toward
The Felt Apogee
Technical Vulva
Tree Entrance
Veinous Miriam
Unvisited Stickerbush
Polished Lendings
Stiff Flowering
Penelope’s Nubbin