Thanks to John Powers, we have an anthology! A hard copy representation of gotpoetry.com for your purchase and perusal.

http://johnpowers.livejournal.com/113968.html?style=mine#cutid1

At the usual place…Alternatives Gallery, 5 So Main Street, Uxbridge MA.

7:30 – 9:30.

TONIGHT’S THEME: Possession. I will not be reading the dreadful poem on that theme I posted earlier, so it’s safe to come down.

see ya there.

let the punishment fit the crime, eh?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/23/AR2006012301967.html

Hey, NYC:

My friend Skip (drgeorge) is having a book published by Heron Clan Press, and just got this in the mail.

Pass it on, repost at will. Let’s get some folks in print.

The Heron Clan III anthology will be almost ALL NYC poets, so if you have nominees, have them send 15=20 pages of poetry to:

Doug Stuber
4404 Cedar Pass
Chapel Hill NC 27514
919.271.0727
dougstuber@aol.com

i have nowhere to go, just a bunch of phone calls to make, work on the next column and maybe get some cleaning done.

oh, and make this humble request:

if any of my hot rockstar poet friends on here can either help me score a few college gigs or give me some idea about how to go about soliciting them, i’d be much obliged. you can respond backchannel if the circumstances demand that such esoteric knowledge be only shared in private.

regards, the latest full time poet (code word for unemployed)

I’m too tired to write a poem…

But you aren’t. Write a poem using one or more of the following word pairs:

dingo logic
blacklight lips
magazine shelves
startling vacuum
forced charm

No fair splitting them up. Gotta use the pair as is, in that order.

Put ’em in your own LJ and let me know if you aren’t on my friends’ list.

I am listening (in a moment, I’m going to change it) to a show about how Native American spirituality can save the planet.

Without going into a lot of my conflicted logic as to why I hate programs like this, may i just say that once — just once — i would like someone to put together a soundtrack for one of these shows THAT DOES NOT FEATURE THE PLAINS FLUTE PLAYED IN A DEEPLY REVERENT MANNER WITH A TOUCH OF REVERB.

I play the Plains flute, I love playing the Plains flute, but I don’t wanna hear it every time someone gets on the horn and says “All my relations…”

Shit dudes…let us hear some Rez hiphop — Robbie B, whynot? — or some John Trudell. How about Joanie Shenandoah? Robbie Robertson, even? I’d even go for some Buffy St. Marie once in a while.

I hate this whole “there is a spiritual connection to the Earth that only these simple natives can teach us” thing. Not because the philosophies and cosmology are invalid — far from it — I just feel like it’s another co-optation at heart; I feel like it gives people an excuse to forget that indigenous knowledge the world over, from the Celts to the !Kung to Hawaii to the Hmong to the outback, has told the same story.

You don’t have to go exotic to find wisdom. Go ask your own ancestors to save you. It’s not rocket science, and you’re no closer to a solution just because you smudged the hybrid SUV before driving to the sweat lodge.

And God, you guys, learn to play the harmonica. You can hang a dreamcatcher off of it if you must.

For you real, hardcore, diehard policy wonks out there…

This is a link from my favorite online political site, Cryptome (http://www.cryptome.org). Cryptome is a site that provides access to public but little seen documents regarding privacy issues, the War on Terra, and other fun stuff. They also have a running calendar and names list of all the military dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, lots of photos of the war and press and family photos of the deceased…aerial photos of various key facilities and things, just to show how easy it is to find this stuff…you get the picture.

Anyway…here are the COMPLETE plans for the protection of American infrastructure. Good to have, eh?

http://cryptome.org/nipp-v2.htm

makes me SO happy…

Their punk show, “Sonic Reducer,” is one of the highlights of my week if I’m home.

They just played 7 Year Bitch followed by Black Flag’s “TV Party.”

I now wish to hear “Blank Generation.” Or, some old 7 Seconds.

1. Every time I see Regie Gibson, I swear he’s BETTER than he was the last time I saw him.

2. Tom Daley is pretty fucking good himself.

Bonus thought:

Ryk McIntyre won the slam, and did it beautifully. Let’s hear it for a no-Ramen holiday!

Why does this make me so down deep, soul enrichingly happy????

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/01/20/morales.temple.ap/index.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hey, looking for advice.

As i’ve mentioned, I’m resuming the Zero Point Zero column on gotpoetry.com.

I plan to change the format a bit from the old freeform days. I plan to use each column to dissect the process of writing a poem — looking at considerations of voice vs. craft, how things work, standard poetic devices, and the like — at least, that’s the basic plan; i’m sure I’ll go farther afield.

I want to use a recent poem as my jumping off point for the first column. Any thoughts as to which one you might like to see ripped apart?

I am serious — would love your input.

EDIT: I’m definitely thinking “Sneakers on a Wire” for the first one, then “Nuggets.” After that, I’ll probably dig into old stuff. Thanks.

Here’s the thing: I have a longstanding stubborn resistance to publishing.

Reasons:

1. I figure the effort involved in submission doesn’t always equal the reward.

2. I publish my own chapbooks, sell them at gigs. In the spirit of punk/DIY, a large part of me likes it that way. I like the control, the direct contact, the idea that it’s my hands (and the hands of my far more capable publisher, thisrabbit ) that are on the work that people get from me.

3. Money doesn’t motivate me that much.

4. Regarding #3: Good thing, I’m a poet.

5. I don’t feel like I need the validation of publication to make me feel good about my work.

6. I post most of my work here, and on the gotpoetry.com forums. I bet more people have seen my work here there than would have if I’d reserved it for publication. Poets want to be read. I’m no exception: I just suspect this gets my work more efficiently to an audience that appreciates it.

7. Regarding copyright: I don’t really care all that much about it. I figure, someone steals one of my poems (and stealing seems so silly a word for it to me), karma’s a bitch. Anyway, I can always write another one.

8. Regarding #7: My own cynical opinion is that most of the people who get freaked about people stealing their poems are the ones whose poems are least likely to be stolen.

9. If someone’s gonna steal something, copyright ain’t gonna stop them.

10. I do publish on occasion, mostly in e-zines (The Furnace Review and The November Third Club being recent examples) whose sensibility interests me. I have some work in anthologies out there, and I’m interested in putting my old columns from gotpoetry.com into a coherent manuscript for submission.

All that said, I am starting to work my way into a state of mind for more submissions to hardcopy journals, for one reason and one reason only: I am preparing a manuscript of poems for publication, I am not sure I want to self publish it based on sheer size, and regrettably, publishers generally want to see publication credits before they’ll consider a manuscript. I consider this a form of selling out — for me. But we all do it at some point.

*Please everyone: don’t think of this as a condemnation of publication in general; it’s just a reflection of one ex-punk’s insane control freak mentality. I read journals, cheer on my friends and pray for them to get what they want. It’s just never been for me.

Hey, you asked…