If you haven't heard already, OCTOPUS MAGAZINE #09, the all-prose-about-poetry issue, is alive.

I learn too late: Bat for Lashes are playing tomorrow night at Café Du Nord.

FRIDAY NOAH ELI GORDON ANDREW JORON SATURDAY BAY AREA SUMMER POETRY MARATHON @ THE LAB SUNDAY TAO LIN STEPHANIE YOUNG

MARK WALLACE

Good news from friends is good news.

There are a lot of readings coming up.

Writing's been going well. I haven't written anything good, but I haven't written anything fake-good. Sometimes I can hear those sirens screaming.

I have long had a crush on Daniel Auteuil.

neu

Laura Carter: DÉRIVES.

A rare thing's happened, and I'm blaming Potter: I'm sick.

All the signs were there yesterday that a cold was in my vest pockets—stiff head, unhappy taste in my throat, ached joints—but I ignored them.

Hail Monday.

COCONUT NINE—featuring new poems, translations, and collaborations by Andrei Codrescu, Bernadette Mayer, Terita Heath-Wlaz, Jonah Winter, Stephen Paul Miller, Hoa Nguyen, Meghan Punschke, Louisa Spaventa, Dan Hoy, Betsy Fagin, Andrew Zawacki, Caryl Pagel, Karyna McGlynn, CAConrad, Didi Menendez, Mark Ducharme, E. Tracy Grinnell, Olivia Cronk, Nava Fader, Megan A. Volpert, Gary Barwin & Gregory Betts, Ulf Stolterfoht, Rosmarie Waldrop, Amy Berkowitz, and Tao Lin—is now live on the web.

If you missed this, it's being reissued by Zephyr Press in the fall.

What does this mean?

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL NEW MORNING

Except for that Cheney thing.

IT GETS WORSE

Dickest Cheney will be acting president for a couple of hours tomorrow.

GOD HELP ME

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, STAN!

We love you, I think!

BACK ROOM LIVE!

This month ! Back Room Live Presents ! Writing Artists ! Blake Ellington Larson ! Vicki Hudson ! Jenny Drai ! and Janet W. Hardy ! Saturday Night July 28th ! McNallys Irish Pub ! 7pm ! 5352 College Ave ! Oakland

Janet W. Hardy has lost count of her careers, but the last one was as a sex writer/educator ("The Ethical Slut," "The Compleat Spanker," "Radical Ecstasy"), and her next one, she hopes, will be as a wealthy and beloved author and college professor. Toward that end, she is halfway through her MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at St. Mary's.

Jenny Drai grew up near Chicago but spent several years in Munich before settling on Oakland. Her poetry has appeared in Five Fingers Review, 580 Split, The Tiny, and Spinning Jenny. She has just finished her first novel. Her novel is roughly 290 pp, has line breaks, but almost no commas.

When not writing, Vicki Hudson spends her time as an urban farmer and Magic: the Gathering collectible card player, both alternate potential career paths if this writing thing doesn't work out. She lives in the East Bay with partner, dog and 4 cats.

Blake Ellington Larson began writing poetry at the age of eleven. For five years out of high school he and a close friend created Picaresque, an art zine. His first and only published poem "She Slows It Down In Me" was printed in Wordworks. He just finished his first chapbook Live-In Dreams. He lives and thrives in Oakland Ca.

LIFE LONG PRESS ! OAKLAND ! JULY 2007

So that's,
Sat. July 28th at 7pm
McNally's Irish Pub
5352 College Ave
Oakland, CA 94618
(510) 654-9463
Minutes from the Rockrige BART Station and on the 51 bus line

While we await his Collected (I believe it's Collected) next year from Carcanet Press, right here, right now—presented to you by DeepDiscount.com, Michiko Kakutani, Scholastic Books and the Baltimore Sun, in splendid, glorious, living color—Stephen Rodefer's FOUR LECTURES.

You better write me. Right now I've got Harry Potter crushing my cranium.

This weekend is big. Next weekend is even bigger.

Dmitri Prigov

Get Fifty Drops of Blood from Ugly Duckling Presse while you still can.

I don't know where all the boxes are going to go.

If you weren't noticing:

• Jacket 33
• Paul Hoover's At the Sound @ Beard of Bees

It's not too early to start thinking of being this blog's 50,000th hit.

Spaßfaktor!

Ara Shirinyan

Syria Is in the World is in the world. I got dizzy walking down D to 15E to fetch it. Also new: The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny from Ugly Duckling; Jay Wright's Music's Mask and Measure from Flood; About Now: Collected Poems, Joanne Kyger from the National Poetry Foundation; Valerie Coulton's The Cellar Dreamer from Apogee; Steve McCaffery's The Basho Variations from BookThug; and A Book of Prophecies by John Wieners from Bootstrap Productions.

I thought Andrew Wyeth was dead.

This is my writing face.

Google hit from Oceania: fetish eyeball fucking, #5.

UPDATE: Now, since I've posted, #1.

Weirdly, I've been thinking of writing some poems again.

Em, I thought Ladybird Johnson was already dead.

Joanne Kyger this Thursday @ City Lights.

My dad in Springfield, circa 1967.


My maternal paternal great-grandfather (if you can say that), Harold L. Robinson, Sr., some time between 1921 and 1931 when Rolls Royce operated a factory in Springfield. (back row, farthest right)

Not.

Hot Whiskey #3

Tino Gomez
François Luong
Evan Kennedy
Anselm Parlatore
Sawako Nakayasu
Emily Crocker
Pierre Joris
Robert Roley
Maureen Thorson
Jonathan Skinner
Alan Gilbert
Kevin Kilroy
Matvei Yankelevich
Jane Sprague
Jamba Dunn
The Pines
Ed Baker
Peter Gizzi

Plus Norman Mailer interviewed by
Millicent Brower circa 1963

Alms.

Radio Ubu NOW.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson @ No Tell Motel.

You'll find poems by rockstars Kathryn Zurlo, John Moore Williams, Ann Stephenson, Matina L. Stamatakis, Xu Smith, Alveraz Ricardez, Catherine Paquette, Ben Mirov, Diana Magallon, Cassie Lewis, Tom Laverty, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Anne Heide, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Andrew Demcak, Martha L. Deed, Ron Czerwien, Otto Chan, Lindsey Boldt, Stan Apps, Michael Aiken, Diana Adams, and Rachel Abramowitz, along with ice creamy ShampooArt by Otto Chan.

I would rename this a shopping blog, but I just finished reading this and am currently reading this and will next read what you would see here but can't yet, because that's how poetry presses update their websites,  s  l  o  w  l  y .

Went to Amoeba but the one up here, not where Dirk played recently. I bought this, this, and this.

Went to Moe's. For six bucks bought this, this, and this.

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Michael Nicoloff & Sara Larsen

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• And on Larry King tonight, Jesse Crockett tells you how to clean silver, cat piss, etc.
• Frieda Kahlo is born 100 years ago.
• Fifty years ago, John Lennon and Paul McCartney meet.

Is it?

It's Franz Kafka's birthday. This drives me crazy.

Jumps

George W. publishes sonnet "Ode to Scooter" in the new issue of listenlight.

NEW

I Shouldn't Have, but I Did II

Smoke. Yeah. Not with contrivance—I wasn't thinking I'd just smoke one, I didn't measure and decide to become a smoker again.

I did it because I wanted to. To be bad.

So it happend. It happened, happened, and coiled. I bought cigarettes in odd shops. I stopped going out. Meantime, I've sat, and apart from the shame and embarrassment, I feel and have felt crap: headaches, bodyaches, shit breath, and reclusion. Also, technically, lying—although addicts always lie, it's what we do, so that's the least fussy part o absolve myself of. Like sneezing.

It's been a fortnight in hell.

I'm coming up for air.

Spelt out clearly.

I Shouldn't Have, but I Did

A guy wrote on Yelp:

I wanted to support the independent bookstores, I did! Honest!

But Pegasus Books let me down.

Not much of a selection, and many of the books are in poor condition, but selling for a normal price. The science section is not very large, yet somehow, the store manages to find room for dozens of books on metaphysics?

The heavy rap music playing in the background doesn't help me concentrate on reading, either.

Perhaps Pegasus will become better in the future. I will definitely check back...

I can't really say anything about the rap music. We get to play whatever we want, and some of my colleagues forget what might rile some people shopping for books. I checked the guy's other reviews and learnt he thought Barnes Ignoble was the bee's knees ("I see no reason not to like Barnes & Noble"), but even there he was unable with the condition of some of the books.

So I wrote him a note of clarification, however inappropriate doing so felt to me: Pegasus sells used books.

He wrote back:

I know, I saw that, but they were selling for the same price as brand-new books.

I wrote back explaining the prices of the used books were penciled in on the top right corner of the first white page. So he changed his two-star review to three.

What I should have done: not been bothered.

The End

Sawbuck 1.6: Sarah Bartlett, Mark Cunningham, Noah Eli Gordon, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Robert Lietz, Rebecca Loudon, Matt Mullins, Phillip Byron Oakes, Nate Pritts, & Rielly Stares

Craig Arnold
Matt Cook
Timothy Donnelly
Christopher Edgar
Nick Flynn
Arielle Greenberg
Matthea Harvey
Christian Hawkey
Christine Hume
Major Jackson
Jennifer L. Knox
Sarah Manguso
Jeffrey McDaniel
Srikanth Reddy
Tessa Rumsey
Spencer Short
Eleni Sikelianos
Juliana Spahr
Kevin Young

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