We’ll leave off the week with this final item. It is true that poetry is a kind of money. Vanessa Place drilled this lesson into us this week when we found out that the first poetry-product from VanessaPlace Inc., a book of poetry made literally of money, called $20 (selling for $50), sold out at the May 3rd launch. To the poetics of gratuitous expenditure: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Over at Filip Marinovich’s WOLFMAN LIBRARIAN is a PDF of the first of Julien Poirier’s long poem “WAY TOO WEST,” scheduled to appear there weekly in serialized form for thirteen episodes. The post includes a music video! Poirier was a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he co-edited 6×6 and edited New York Nights newspaper from 2001 to 2006 (you can also read his 2005 UDP chapbook Short Stack here). He now lives in Berkeley; and we’re lucky to get this much work from him at once–good on you, Filip!

-the story of Sadakichi Hartmann, a bohemian artist who befriended both Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound! Who the heck is Sadakichi Hartmann? Well friends, The Believer‘s Michelle Legro has done the legwork here and if you thought you knew all the crazy anecdotes there are to know about the great and powerful poets Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman, boy is this one a doozy!

According to Legro, Hartmann (of German and Japanese ancestry) immigrated to Philadelphia at the age of twelve after being disowned by his German father: his Japanese mother passed away before he turned a year old. As a young boy living with his great-uncle in Philly, Hartmann paid a visit to Walt Whitman, who lived in nearby Camden, New Jersey: “I would like to see Walt Whitman,” he said. Legro writes:

The poet—with his long gray beard and open, flowing shirt, which revealed his naked chest—greeted him by sight. “That’s my name. And you are a Japanese boy, are you not?”

If literature was the passport into this new kind of modern society, Walt Whitman was the common language, and the home of Whitman is where, around the age of sixteen, this lanky, German Japanese boy with a dark suit and a pince-nez began his American pilgrimage into the dark heart of bohemia.

Pound met Hartmann in Greenwich Village and later remarked “If one hadn’t been oneself, it would have been worthwhile to have been Sadakichi.” Read all about Hartmann’s life, art, and connections to modern poetry at The Believer.

Rigoberto González

The Los Angeles Review of Books has Rigoberto González discussing the merits of the poetry contest within the context of a more diverse literary landscape–the winners of three contests in particular serve “as antidotes to the underrepresentation of minority poets.”

The first of these to be featured is the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, steered by Letras Latinas, an initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which chose Laurie Ann Guerrero for A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying; second, the longstanding Asian-American poetry organization Kundiman, who, along with Alice James Books, picked Matther Olzmann’s Mezzanines; and third, the Carolina Wren Poetry Series, which “demonstrates a clear commitment to this mission, selecting works by poets from diverse communities including women, ethnic minority, and LGBT authors. L. Lamar Wilson’s Sacrilegion is shaped by a black gay identity.”

González reviews in full each of the books. Here’s an excerpt from his thinking on Sacrilegion:

Wilson’s contribution begins with poems that cover a part of the journey when every gay man becomes aware of his difference and its dangers: school bullying because he plays games for girls in “Woe Unto Sons,” the unsettling recognition of the self in the body of another gay relative in “Family Reunion, 1993,” the innocent homoerotic fantasies that become not-so-inconsequential in the era of AIDS in “It Could Happen to Anyone: A Letter to the Boy.” But it’s with the poem “Resurrection Sunday” that Wilson’s voice and skill reaches an extraordinary pitch.

“Resurrection Sunday” weaves two visual encounters that shape the speaker’s understanding of himself as a black gay body: one is a homoerotic film in which a white director is instructing a black male to perform auto-fellatio; the other is a photograph in the book The Anatomy of a Lynching, in which victim Claude Neal (accused of raping and killing a white woman in 1934) is shown hanging from a noose, his murder made more vulgar because first he’s castrated as part of the public spectacle. In both images, “A man holds his penis in his mouth.” The poem navigates between the two obscenities — one a sexual exploitation, the other a desecration, both acts of racism. In that journey back and forth, the speaker must locate himself as an object of desire, informed by his Otherness, and claim the subjectivity of his black male identity, which is eroticized and feared by the white gaze. In other words, he must mature into a sexual being aware of the the temptation and threat of his masculinity

[. . .]

As a stunning turning point, “Resurrection Sunday” sets a tone that endures through the end of the book, even as Wilson shifts directions occasionally into the portraits and praises of the lives of women such as Henrietta Lacks, Lucille Clifton, and the important women in his life: his mother, grandmother MaMary, and MaMary’s sister, Tudda. The mother becomes particularly essential to the speaker’s identity formation. Refreshingly, the story of the relationship highlights acceptance and support, which makes the mother’s cancer all the more tragic: “You didn’t turn me away when I said His name is Johnnie / & I love him, & you never said Brown boys can’t be sissies, baby, / though I wish you had, since now a lump the size of the head / of a tack may take away the only one who hasn’t recoiled / at what comes naturally to me.”

Wilson claims an important political/social responsibility and does it well: to write about the black gay male experience conscious of his time. . . .

González also underscores the significance of his own review when he draws the books together:

Carolina Wren Press’s stress of the word “quality,” Letras Latinas’s affirmation that it will “nurture the various paths” of Latino poetry, and Kundiman’s selection by committee, are efforts to secure the best work from specific communities, that is, to make sure that the smaller competition pool and precisely-defined guidelines attract manuscripts of literary merit. The future success of these processes, however, will become evident in the critical reception of their award-winning books.

The second part of a three-part series on Rhizome explores art with its lineage in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)—but wait, this is about Apollinaire, first! A few of our favorite calligrammes are presented here. And the emotionally complex, code-based emoticon, second! For instance:

Following in the footsteps of Baudelaire—and paving the way for the Surrealists and the French New Wave—early 20th-century artist Guillaume Apollinaire cultivated a cerebral taste for the most sensational elements of modern life. A poet by calling and a publicist by trade, Apollinaire seized on the outrageous whether he found it in the avant-garde (he coined the term “Cubism” in praise of early paintings by Braque and Picasso) or mass culture (he called the serialized tales of fictional super-villain Fantômas “one of the richest works that exist.”) Apollinaire’s poetry fed on the chaos of Paris in the early 1900s. Take this representative passage from 1909’s “Zone”:

You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud:
Here’s this morning’s poetry, and for prose you’ve
got the newspapers,
Sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories,
Biographies of big shots, a thousand different
titles,
Lettering on billboards and walls,
Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots.

Apollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes delved further into its source material, imitating its typographic forms to create pictograms in which the text echoes the image. For obvious reasons, the calligrammes are notoriously hard to translate, but to give you some idea: the following picture of a woman wearing a hat is made up of a text about a woman wearing a hat:

Glossing Calligrammes in a letter to a friend, Apollinaire wrote that they were “typographic precision made in a period when typography is winding up its career brilliantly, at the dawn of the new means of representation, cinema and the phonograph.” If Apollinaire was correct that typography was witnessing a brilliant period, he was wrong that it was winding up its career.

An example of ASCII art:

Writer Tom McCormack eventually merges the two:

ASCII art only ever flourished as a truly popular genre in the form of emoticons, which in the 2000s were eclipsed by the Japanese Corporation SoftBank’s supplemental character set of “Emoji.” (Emojis will be the subject of the next and final installment of this series of essays.)

ASCII art persists now mostly as a connoisseur’s medium.

[. . . .]

Personally, my favorite piece of ASCII art, also undated, is a map of Leopold Bloom’s path through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. A painstaking labor of love, and a work that knots together its form and subject to make visible the conditions of its own historical occurrence, the image recalls the dream of a city knit together by people’s stories and desires—a world wide web that never came to fruition.

Jump to the piece to see that marvel.

If you think back to last year’s Olympics in London, you’ll recall the remarkable performance staged by the Chilean arts collective Casagrande. Yes, we’re talking about the bombing of poems over London. Our friend David Shook covered the even for us here. Now, Casagrande is hoping to publish a book containing poems from the bombing, along with images of the event:

Bombing of Poems is a performance, which consists of dropping one hundred thousand poems from a helicopter over cities that in the past have been bombed during military confrontations. At the moment, it has been held in six cities around the world. Each time the cargo of poems has been released, none of the 100,000 poems has been left on the floor: every single poem was collected and treasured by the crowd.

Today we would like to publish a book including the 300 poems and the best pictures of the performance carried out in London, 2012.

The book is a hard cover edition, and will be published in Spanish and English. The poets are from more than 200 different countries and included an introduction of Oscar Hahn and William Rowe.

To accomplish this target we need to fundraise 8,000 US dollars.

www.loscasagrande.org

There’s only a week left to help support the project. Find out more here, and watch the video!

…like those ones that are on books published by New Directions… Oh wait! Here’s one! Our friends over at BOMBLOG, recently posted a fantastic conversation between Michael Barron (Poet and Associate Editor at New Directions ) and Elaine Lustig Cohen (Artist, Designer, and Partner/Collaborator of the late Alvin Lustig: legendary book jacket designer for ND). How’d they even find each other? Barron explains:

I first met the artist and designer Elaine Lustig Cohen through the website dedicated to her former husband, the legendary designer Alvin Lustig. Back in 2006, I had been asked to get in touch with the estate regarding his jacket designs for New Directions: we were hoping to replace intermediate designs on some of our books with the original Lustigs. I was an editorial assistant at the time; New Directions was still going through a generational change. Emails were considered unofficial. One senior editor told me to type a letter, “preferably with a typewriter.” Another told me to call. But I had neither an address nor an number. So I emailed the webmaster of the Alvin Lustig site and hoped for the best. Elaine herself answered my inquiry—it was the first contact she had had with New Directions since its founder James Laughlin passed away in 1997.

That was almost seven years ago. Yet over the years, Elaine and I have teamed together in promoting the legacy of Alvin Lustig. Many of New Directions’ classic titles now proudly wear their original Lustig jackets. This May, New Directions will issue an Alvin Lustig postcard collection: 50 of his best ND designs in a box.

Since our first meeting, I have also come to discover Elaine’s incredible body of work. A couple of years after our initial contact, she invited me to her opening at the Julie Saul Gallery. The exhibit was called, “The Geometry of Seeing” and it displayed the sort of opus only a designer cum artist could develop—a prototype for a sewing kit, a giclée of a geometric Alphabet, a collage made from old train tickets, and a wooden box adorned with colored cubes, among other pieces…

This interview took place at Elaine’s Upper East Side home. The interior of her townhouse is touched with a designer’s sensibility—everything in its right place, from the curation and layout of art to the selection and placement of furniture. Speaking with Elaine is like cracking open a volume of 20th-century American design history. At 85, Elaine’s memory is as sharp as her knowledge is erudite. She speaks with a modest firmness, doubtless in her affirmation of fact, but humble about her accomplishments.

To learn more about Elaine Lustig Cohen visit her profile here. To read more of her conversation with Michael Barron, read-on at BOMB.

We’re always happy to find the occasion to celebrate the poetry of Adrienne Rich. Our excuse today is that it’s her b-day! The good folks over at brain pickings have posted Rich’s 1997 letter declining the National Medal of Arts. They write:

In 1997, to protest the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, she became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, awarded to such luminaries as Maya Angelou, John Updike, Ray Bradbury, and Bob Dylan.

We’ll give a taste of the letter but then let you make the jump to read the rest (which includes a broadcast from the radio show Democracy Now with Rich reading said letter):

July 3, 1997

Jane Alexander
The National Endowment for the Arts
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20506

Dear Jane Alexander,

I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.

Head over to read Rich’s clarification. And if that’s not enough, we have a wealth of poems, podcasts, videos, and essays by and about Rich right here!

Salt, a U.K.-based poetry and fiction publisher, announced yesterday that it plans to shift its emphasis in poetry from single-author poetry collections to its popular Best British Poetry anthology series. Salt has been publishing poetry collections from writers across the globe for the past thirteen years: to date, Salt has published over four hundred poetry collections. (Many of them are debut collections by emerging authors.) According to Salt’s website:

The move will mean that the business will no longer be commissioning new single-author collections, though the press is not ruling out a return to publishing some in the future. Salt will continue to support and market its extensive backlist, as well as develop other poetry anthology projects.

Before the changes take effect, Salt will publish a further dozen new poetry collections, including several debuts and this year’s Crashaw Prize winner, Lydia Macpherson.

“There’s never been a better time for poets to write,” says Chris Hamilton-Emery. “There are huge opportunities for poets to publish in new ways — and there are scores of new presses emerging, too. It’s an exciting time. It’s also the right time for Salt to take a break from our work on individual collections — we’ve done a great deal over the past thirteen years — we want to concentrate our efforts on anthology publishing, where we support poets in raising their profile and reaching new readers.”

To date, Salt has published books by poets who are no strangers to our site, including Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, and Tom Raworth. Learn more about Salt and its plans for the future, here.

David Wojnarowicz scholars and fans rejoice: The artist’s journals–archived at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections–have just been digitized! Check out one of the tweeted photos of the many; and the full list of materials is here available to VIEW. We spied this poem, “Poem to Brian Sleeping”:

GalleristNY writes that “[The journals] follow Wojnarowicz on his travels through Mexico, Europe and elsewhere (as well as include ephemera like a menu for a Chinese restaurant at 207 Second Avenue, which is now the home of Momofuku’s Ssäm Bar restaurant).” Very exciting. . . .

We done told ya and told ya, but will wonders never: Today is the last day to submit to the first-annual Wonder book prize, judged by Macgregor Card:

Please send in your submission tonight by Midnight (EST). We are accepting full-length manuscripts of any genre. The author of the selected manuscript will receive a $300 prize and publication.

Please send a cover letter, your manuscript and a $10 submission fee ($15 if you would like a final copy of the selected book). Please do not include your name in the manuscript. Each submission will be read blindly by the judge.

Do it. And while you’re at it, check out Mathew Timmons’s recent post for Wonder’s Tumblr, “About shit I wonder.”

Ahsahta Press announced the winner of the annual Sawtooth Poetry Prize contest: David Bartone. Bartone, a native of Amherst, Massachusetts, won for his manuscript Practice on Mountains, which will be published next year by Ahsahta. In addition to publication of his manuscript, Bartone wins $1,500.

His manuscript was selected by this year’s judge, Dan Beachy-Quick. This year’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize Competition received 605 entries, out of which 37 were named semifinalists, a number that was then narrowed to 20 finalists, then to this year’s winner.

In awarding the prize, Beachy-Quick wrote, “Self-knowledge requires, strangely enough, a means to quell introspection, that self-thinking of self and all that there occurs which but mimics the understanding to which it cannot arrive. David R. Bartone’s Practice on Mountains offers itself as an astonishingly vivid record of just such a practice, seeking some enlightenment it is also too savvy to trust exists. The poetry finds an oddity of voice absolutely necessary, daily speech that contains within it shards of poetic fragment, a kind of lyric discursiveness that always interrupts its own method when that method threatens to become merely such. It’s wonderfully self-searching without being narcissistic, tied into love’s agonies in ways familiar but strikingly honest, deprecating but audacious, learned but humble. It brings to its readers a primary document of the mind reading through the heart’s various damage.”

Ahsahta Press, named for the Mandan word for “Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep,” was founded in 1974 and publishes seven to ten books of poetry per year, one of which is the winner of its annual contest.

Ahsahta Press is based at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, and is directed by Janet Holmes, a poet and professor in the MFA Program for Creative Writing at Boise State.

Congrats, David! Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge will judge next year’s contest, which will begin accepting submissions January 1 and continue accepting submissions until March 1, 2014.

Hey Bay Area! Today is “Say Hey to Clay Day” at Small Press Distribution.

If you’re local, stop by SPD (1341 Seventh Street in Berkeley) any time from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM to say good-bye to Clay Banes.

If you haven’t met Clay, you probably know him from his weekly “SPD RECOMMENDS” e-newsletters that documented bestselling small press titles as they shipped from SPD’s warehouse. Clay’s e-newsletters also featured up-and-coming small presses in the subject lines and placed featured publisher’s books on sale, with special sale codes within the content of the e-newsletters.

Clay leaves his position as Sales and Marketing Manage at Small Press Distribution after five years of promoting small press poetry (and fiction), publishers, and writers across the country. As they say at SPD…

We will be celebrating the reign of Clay Banes as SPD’s Sales & Marketing Manager from 2008 until 2013. Happily for Clay but sadly for us, Clay is leaving SPD and he is also leaving the Bay Area for his native Massachusetts. Please stop by to say “hey!” next Wednesday on Clay’s actual last day at SPD on 1341 7th Street in Berkeley. Food and drinks will be served all day and if you are in the mood to buy a book you can take 30% off the usual price.

Thank you Clay!

Things were astounding enough/the passenger ferry/the steeple/enough to make you die of astonishment
—Sarah Mangold, from “I meant to be Transparent”

To be transparent, if it is a material, is to let light pass through so objects behind are made visible. To be transparent is also to transmit heat without altering bodies. To be transparent in computing is, (I imagine), a world where computers are so present and so invisible that the individual is not aware how problems have been solved. Transparent is “shining through” from the Latin transparere. It is to “appear.”

The appearance or disappearance is shot through with motion. Invisible or visible is a movement that may alter perception or position. What is a poem whose borders are meticulously redrawn, a poem that is self-consciously a process of processing what it is not seeing? A poem that keeps an eye on the periphery might require a form of astonishment or stillness, or a doubled vision, to catch the fleeing or the fleeting in its particulars.

In her post last month on National Poetry Month (NPM) Daily, Sarah Mangold wrote, “For the last five years, I head in to work an hour early and spend that hour in a nearby coffee shop writing. Everyday. Even if I’m not in the middle of some spectacular idea, I’m writing, moving, practicing.”

These sentences have lingered in me for the last few weeks. They lead me to her work. I read her poems in fragments on a computer screen because that is how I move through poems these days, five minutes here or two minutes there. This form of reading does not follow the kind of intention that Sarah Mangold maintains in “writing, moving, practicing” but it makes me think about the appearance and disappearance of “things” in poems. I’m trying to think about the perceptive eye, the roving body, and the intention that is practiced as I look to versions of the world around. My eyes are crossed in peripheral terms, peripheral times, if that makes sense.

One speaks of transparency and perhaps the images that arise signal, in time, to silhouettes, traces, and refraction. The truth of transparency is also the untruth in what falls to the sidelines, and what remains in the shadows.

magistrate building/sitting neatly as adults/the body as message writes Sarah Mangold in the same poem.

One must, in reading these lines, develop a slow-motion tactic, so that one floats with the edges guiding the eye. The static is an illusion or is it a frame of reference to something else? There is very little distance between body and the bodies. I have already admitted to reading with a fragmented eye. What is revealed is astonishingly moving, and as clear as language permits, as clear as one can be when things appear or are brought out of the shadows of illuminated bodies.

An emphasis falls on silhouettes/trenches lilies/substituting for an original body and voice.
—Sarah Mangold, from “I meant to be transparent”

Poet and artist Jill Magi writes about Rodrigo Toscano’s latest title, Deck of Deeds (Counterpath 2012), at her blog, noting that he “dials in to a wide range of frequencies we use to explain ourselves. It seems Rodrigo has been paying attention and listening for years, gathering the gestures of these anxieties.” More about the book from Counterpath:

Deck of Deeds is comprised of seventy poetic prose image captions (without images) whose titles are inspired by the popular Latin American loteria card game. Written by a poet who logs in an average of ten thousand miles of air travel each month working as a union trainer and coordinator throughout the U.S., the “cards” reflect a dizzying array of cultural-geographic locations, each one acting as a scene-setter for highly dystopian portraits of “people” caught in a tangle of industry-specific “predicaments.”

Magi writes:

An urge to hush. Follies laid bare. Shame. Sensation collectors. Culture vultures. Their fumblings. Their guilt. Ours. Mine. The language of this soupy mess.

Deck of Deeds—it’s a deck, so shuffle these identities as you’d like because there is no hierarchy, only the chance you’ll be one or the other—is sharpest when pointing out the unsubtle moral showcasing on the part of those out to do “good.”

The phrase that goes something like this comes to mind: “and ye shall know them by their deeds.” The very Protestant ideal of “doing.” This is highly valued cultural currency: being a person who is not lazy. Who is an activist, who sets out to prove that they are not uncaring, not un-acting.

For example, I was aware that I impressed boys at parties in the 90s on the Lower East Side when I said, “I teach adult literacy in the South Bronx.” So the good deed may also be a proxy for or preamble to good sex in the Protestant-inflected mind.

Also, the irony of the obsession with deeds, but confusion around “the worker.” For example, I worked for Rizzoli Books on West Broadway back in the day, and one night as I was shelving books, bending down, unpacking boxes, a shopper began to make small talk with me, flirting, telling me about his antique business. Looking right at my armful of books, he asked, “And what do you do?”

Who am I in the Deck of Deeds landscape?

Take the plea of LAS HERMANAS:

[…] I want you to de-codify me—especially in the nether regions of “performance poetics.”

Or LA IMAGEN, who is quoted and quotes—so much so that I couldn’t keep track of where I should place quotes in transcribing—and so Rodrigo troubles “voice”—one of the many addictions of this deed-based world:

To actually feel yourself turned into re-pixellated portions of an anonymous force’s self-image, switch-packeting you onto the internet just as you’re about to declare a lyrically lush “love of humanity in general”—is something that could grab your attention, but also make for a pretty damn good “(doctored, distorted) ‘weirdly gorgeous’ poetic offspring” in need of a storyline.

Or LA EXPERIMENTALISTA:

Anywhere and everywhere, that’s her thing now, to work it—whenever.

I could be any of the above. Maybe I have been or I am.

There’s more beautiful prose where that comes from–Magi goes on to consider desertion as opposed to quitting, as well as Jackson Mac Low’s 154 Forties, which we wrote up not too long ago (also Counterpath). Read it all here.

Oh yes, hi, is this thing on? Yes, hello, we’re coming to you live from Song Cave: that’s S-O-N-G-C-A-V-E. Song Cave, a small press publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, is edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. In addition to chapbooks by poets and writers among the likes of Lisa Jarnot, Rod Smith, Dana Ward, and Jennifer Moxley, Song Cave has produced its first, two, spectacular full-length books this year. Say hello to My Enemies, by Jane Gregory, and A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal.

Jane Gregory, read from My Enemies at University Press Books in Berkeley this weekend and she sure knocked our socks off. You may find your heels far from the ground listening to her read, too. Or, in the Song Cave’s words:

Jane Gregory’s My Enemies records a poet’s search for meaning in a landscape of combined and dissolving definitions. Affirming disaster and its beyond, these poems sing toward belief — a self-made belief that will not rely on any static symbol or logic or idol. Gregory’s dynamic, unpredictable enactments of the modern world avow vulnerability to a belief compatible with self-consciousness. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes overcome or self-ruinous, My Enemies never halts in its search for definition, even when it claims to not have been written—as in the serial “Book I Will Not Write” poems. Each poem here establishes a new, necessary material and mode for our uncertain world that can offer its readers something to believe in; despite forces internal and external that try to undo us, Gregory’s poems redo that undoing until “my enemies” becomes instead “my eyes many,” a new sonic way of seeing.

And there’s another one! Like the best of celebrations, this additional, newly minted Song Cave collection arrives to us bearing the old and the new, one we’ve already mentioned here. Yes, we’re talking about Alfred Starr Hamilton:

Though Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print. His poems appeared in small poetry journals during the 60s, 70s and 80s; two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal present a collection of Hamilton’s poems from these publications, along with many of Hamilton’s poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks.

Send ‘em roses! Or… We Do! Or, or, well, why not read it yourself here: SONG CAVE. Send ‘em a line and sign up for their mailing list, too, while you’re at it!

Hyperallergians, fear not! Barry Schwabsky has reigned-in the poetry for this weekend’s installment of the epic arts and culture newsletter. Check this:

Ezra Pound said poetry was news that stays news. I thought that in gathering some notes on poetry I’ve read this year I’d bring a bit of news and only after doing so realized to what extent those notes would indicate how today’s poetry can be entwined with medieval Moorish Spain or fourteenth century Tuscany or Elizabethan London or sixteenth century Japan. Sometimes, apparently, poetry can also be ancientries made new again.

Who knew one could doth speak of Ezra Pound on thee internet and still sound fresh?

We’re still working on it ourselves but read more of Schwabsky’s notes to catch up on his thoroughly-contemporary thoughts about Cathy Wagner’s Nervous Device; Quite Frankly: After Petrarch: Canzoniere 1–28, by Peter Hughes; Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature, edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour; Sonnagrams 1-20, by K. Silem Mohammad; As Long As Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen; Portuguese by Brandon Shimoda; and Andrea Zanzotto, Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione, edited by Anna Secco and Patrick Barron.

Let this word-byte from Schwabsky’s thoughts on Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature, serve as one example:

This book, tracing more than two millennia of literature in North Africa but concentrating on modern times, may seem a stranger bearing many strange things but there’s good reason why it appears as the latest volume in the great Poems for the Millennium series. This series began with two big volumes of “modern and postmodern” poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, published in 1995 and 1998. It then backtracked to the nineteenth and even the late eighteenth centuries for a collection of romantic and, yes, “postromantic” poetry in 2009, edited by Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson. The backward extension of the Poems for the Millennium brand to modernism’s immediate precursors in Europe and North America — albeit in incipient dialogue with Asia—was at once logical and revelatory; the sideways leap to a tradition essentially unknown to most Western readers comes as more of a surprise. And for just that reason, the book is even more of an eye-opener.

Be all about it at Hyperallergic!

If you weren’t able to make it out to Chicago this past weekend for our “Sitting Between the Sea and the Buildings” symposium, which celebrated Joan Mitchell’s relationship to poets and poetry, our friends at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery are hosting an exhibition that looks at Jane Freilicher, another painter-friend to the New York School generation. The exhibition is already up and running (starting as part of National Poetry Month) and will chug along until June 14th. A little about the exhibition from Tibor de Nagy Gallery:

The exhibition will closely examine painter Jane Freilicher’s pivotal role among the poets of the New York School, particularly John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, along with Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Freilicher was in many ways a catalytic and consequential presence. Unlike Larry Rivers or Grace Hartigan, who engaged in direct collaborations with the poets, Freilicher played a subtler, more nuanced role, one that is difficult to pin down precisely.

It will be the first exhibition to explore in depth Freilicher’s relationship to the poets and their work. It will comprise the artist’s paintings and works on paper, including portraits of the poets, many on loan and exhibited for the first time. It will also include a selection of original letters between Freilicher and the poets, as well as films, book covers, and photographs.

Freilicher, now 88, was not only the poets’ closest friend and confidante, she was also their muse. As has become clear in early correspondence, a selection of which will be exhibited for the first time, Ashbery and O’Hara regularly sought her advice for poems in process. Urbane, affectionate, and gossipy, the letters put the artist’s legendary wit on display.

Make your way here to read more about the exhibition, and do try to make it.

The life, death, (and after-life?) of Federico Garcia Lorca continues fascinate readers. Jacket Copy reports that Carlos Rojas’s novel The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell, translated by Edith Grossman, is now available for the first time in English. The book was original published shortly after Spain’s return to democracy, following the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Jacket Copy describes the novel:

In Carlos Rojas’ splendid and wildly creative novel… the dead writer watches his last, fateful days replayed in a private theater in the underworld.

Decades have passed, and Lorca is aware of his posthumous fame, and how his death torments those who outlived him. All he wants is to sleep, finally and forever, but instead he’s trapped with the memories of his life, and of all the art and literature he created.

“Here and now, in the interminable wakefulness of my own death … I perceive with dismay the close correspondence between dreams and eternity in the warp where life and death are interwoven,” Lorca says. “I would also affirm … that literature is the closest key to the labyrinth where the living and the dead are commingled.”

And:

Woven into these existential musings is a faithful and evocative re-creation of Spain falling into the abyss of a bloody civil war. Lorca sees the real-life characters from history who arrested him and who tried to protect him. The result is a painfully human portrait of a country where people on both the right and left struggled to retain their sense of humanity and honor amid senseless violence. “If we must devour one another like wolves, I’d only hope that we don’t lie to ourselves as men,” says the official who holds Lorca’s fate in his hand.

And with the publication of the third edition of Poet in New York from FSG this year, readers are certain to have some great, Lorca-themed summer reading (whether on the beach or through a Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude). Enjoy!

Last week, after approximately nine months of competition and more than 375,000 competitors, Langston Ward of Spokane, Washington took top honors as the 2013 Poetry Out Loud National Champion. Ward wowed the judges—and the crowd—with recitations of “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee, “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” by Walt Whitman, and “The Bad Old Days” by Kenneth Rexroth. Kristin Gecan interviewed him just after he pocketed $20,000.

Kristin Gecan: What are some other poems you really like, or poets you like?

Langston Ward: I’m a Carl Sandburg fan… [I also like] “Chicago,” which I read about a year following. Beyond that, though, Sam Green—who was our first Washington poet laureate—I was introduced to him at the state competition this year, and I was really drawn to his work.

KG: Do you share poetry with your friends or family?

LW: Not really. This has kind of encouraged me to get more open about poetry with other people. This is the only format that I’ve really opened up with sharing poetry.

KG: What would you tell students interested in Poetry Out Loud who haven’t yet participated?

LW: Don’t write it off just because it’s poetry, or [because of] what you’ve heard about poetry, or as a theater thing. Give it a chance. There are over 700 poems in the database, and it’s impossible for you to not find something that you can connect with and you can relate to.

KG: How long do you think these poems or your interest in poetry in general, will stay with you?

LW: For the rest of my life. That’s a no-brainer for me. I still remember the poems I memorized as a sophomore, and last year’s, and obviously this year’s. Beyond that, I don’t think this is ever going to go away from me.

Learn more about Poetry Out Loud and introduce the program to high school students in your area. Participants can win thousands of dollars, plus poetry books for their schools.

Now this is news: A decade of translating work from Samuel Solomon, Jennifer Kronovet, and Faith Jones has led to the publication of new translations of experimental Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin (1887-1956) at Jacket2, with an amazing note from Jerome Rothenberg on the poet:

Among the more experimental Yiddish poets in early twentieth-century New York, Dropkin (1887-1956) was significant both for her exploration of open verse as a compositional strategy & for her assertions of female desire beyond the limits observed by most of her contemporaries, both in Yiddish & in English. Born Zipporah Levine in present-day Belarus, she wrote first in Russian but turned to Yiddish on arrival in New York circa 1910, where she participated in the already active Yiddish poetry world, including the experimental In-Zikh (Introspectivist) poets, while developing more markedly transgressive themes than theirs: sexuality, depression, guilt & longing, fury, violence, even at its limits the representation of sado-masochism & other taboo, once hidden subjects. Her work in that sense is a further confirmation of Kenneth Rexroth’s observation of a Yiddish avant-garde & Futurist presence in his own early years in New York: “A good case could be made for the claim that the best writing done in America in the first quarter of the [twentieth] century was in Yiddish. I don’t think it’s really true, but it is sufficiently true to be passionately arguable in one of those passionate arguments that used to sprinkle the whiskers with sour cream in the Café Royale.” And despite Kenneth’s charmingly flippant tone, the active historical presence of two languages & their attendant poetries in a single American city is itself worth noting.

Read the poems here. Astounding work. Dropkin was also a painter; that’s hers, above. And keep your eyelids way up for the forthcoming bilingual book from Tebot Bach.

The Independent reports that one of the most exceptional diaries kept by W.H. Auden has at long-last been discovered!

Auden began the journal in August of 1939 and continued writing in it until November of that very same year. According to Edward Mendelson, an English professor at Columbia University who is also the literary executor of Auden’s estate, “The journal gives a personal sense that we don’t really have elsewhere of Auden in this hugely important era.” Get your pocketbooks ready! As The Independent explains:

The notebook will be auctioned next month at Christie’s as part of a valuable printed books and manuscripts sale. The estimated value is between £40,000 and £60,000. The auction house’s catalogue describes it as the “most significant Auden manuscript to have been offered at auction”.

It is one of only three journals that the poet is known to have kept and covers the period shortly after what he described as the “eleven happiest weeks of my life” – the honeymoon period of his relationship with the American poet Chester Kallman.

The frank details of his personal life are set against the build-up to the Second World War. He wrote: “I am happy, but in debt… I have no job. My [US] visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.”

The journal is 96 pages long and covers the background to his feted poem September 1, 1939, written at the outbreak of the Second World War. Auden gave the journal to his friend George Davis, a novelist and magazine writer, but all trace of it disappeared shortly after until it was found recently.

In the journal, Auden wrote: “Woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C [Kallman] was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland. Now I sit looking out over the river. Such a beautiful evening and in an hour, they say, England will be at war.”

Can’t wait to read what’s inside!

Stephanos Papadopoulos historicizes poetry and Greece for the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Greeks have always held onto their poets with particular tenacity and respect. No one knows where poetry will reside within this age of technology and attention deficit, but with Greece bankrupt and begging for alms, for once, it needs to look backward.” Backward:

Throughout Greece’s tumultuous history the poet has served as the voice for the silenced people. Greece has always been a hornet’s nest of trouble and corruption, as well as a victim of perpetual war and occupation. When Greece’s great poet, Kostis Palamas (1849-1943) died, Angelos Sikelianos’s (1884-1951) fiery poem and eulogy roused 100,000 citizens at the funeral into a furious demonstration against the Nazis. Later when brothers killed brothers and masked Greek informers betrayed their own neighbors during the civil war in the 1950s, poets like Yiannis Ritsos’ (1909-1990) delicately wrought poems were an antidote to suppression, violence, and censorship. In the 1960s the military coup turned the struggling republic into a police state, a shadow play of CIA operatives, torture, executions, and student massacres. At that time, poetry entered the culture through music. George Seferis (1900-1971) wrote “Denial” as a love poem, but it entered the national consciousness as a song against the military junta after the composer and songwriter Mikis Theodorakis set it to music (b. 1925):

On the secret seashore
white like a pigeon
we thirsted at noon;
but the water was brackish.

On the golden sand
we wrote her name;
but the sea breeze blew
and the writing vanished.

With what spirit, what heart,
what desire and passion
we lived our life: a mistake!
so we changed our life.

(trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

In September of 1971, thousands of Athenians marched through the city following George Seferis’s funeral procession; the entourage made its way toward the main cemetery, chanting the lyrics in protest of the dictatorship. It was the beginning of the end for the generals. Even today if someone starts the tune at a Greek dinner party, not a soul of a certain generation can resist joining in. I have attended events in Athens during which the entire audience has spontaneously erupted with this music, and this poetry. It is in the bones of every Greek who lived through the dictatorship. It is the literary equivalent of an evil eye, ex-voto, an apotropaic device to protect us from politicians and advertising. It reminds us about suffering and love.

¤

How does a Greek poet, especially a young Greek poet, grapple with the burden of history and with the giants of both ancient and modern Greek poetry? When Derek Walcott was in Greece presenting his new book he told a group of reporters that “every time a Greek poet lifts a pen he lifts a column.” Seferis had nightmares about the Acropolis being sold off by an advertisement, that the columns were really tubes of toothpaste.

Great stuff. Read the full essay.

Hey UKers or those of you about to head across the pond just for this: The launch of Keston Sutherland’s new book, The Odes to TL61P, is tomorrow night at Cafe Oto in Dalston, London. Wish we could be there. Here’s event info from Enitharmon Press–you can get your ticket in advance and buy the book at the site as well.

More about The Odes to TL61P:

The Odes to TL61P is a suite of five massive, turbulent, tender and satirical odes written and revised from 2010-13. It is the explicit history of the author’s sexual development from early infancy; a commentary on the social and political history of the UK since the election of the coalition government; a philosophical account of the common meaning of secrecy in the most intimate, private experiences and in international diplomacy; a wild work of revolutionary theory that investigates in minute detail the difference between commodities and human lives; a record of a thousand revisions, deletions and metamorphoses; an attempt to radically extend and reimagine the very possibility of the ode form; a monstrous accumulation of techniques and mimeses, from the strictest and most perfected metrical verse to the most delirious and cacophonous noise music; and a devoted love song to the now obsolete product ordering code for a bygone Hotpoint washer-dryer, “TL61P”. It is the longest poetical work yet written by Keston Sutherland and his most comprehensive effort yet to transform the grammar of human existence.

Lots of good writing on this project at Arduity. “‘Stress Position’ does include some oddness but nothing quite as startling as this, the idea of a one year old Francis Bacon is in itself quite scary and the reeast takes us into the realm of the bizarre, there’s also a degree of cleverness in that the Maxifry is ‘half-empty’. Most of us will also have to look up ‘nitrocellulose’ even though we can guess at a definition and then try and work out how a cameo can be both explosive and decorative.”

… It’s….
…drumroll please…

Ryan Funk and Tom Comitta!

Yes, up-and-coming poets Ryan Funk and Tom Comitta will guest-curate two segments of the Bay Area Poetry Marathon this summer.

Based in San Francisco, the Bay Area Poetry Marathon celebrates innovative poetries through a series of readings that take place every summer.

The 2013 Bay Area Poetry Marathon will be divided into four separate, mini-marathons: in June, July, August, and September. Ryan Funk (above, right) will curate the June event, Tom Comitta (above, left) will curate July festivities, and co-founder of the series Donna de la Perriere will curate the August and September portions.

The announcement was made last night via BAPM’s Facebook page.

Co-founded and curated by poet Donna de la Perriere, the Marathon takes place at The LAB gallery and performance space in San Francisco’s Mission district (2948 16th Street at Capp, two blocks from the Mission BART station).

Past Marathon readers include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Anita Amirrezvani, Rae Armantrout, Dodie Bellamy, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Edward Foster, Kathleen Fraser, Gloria Frym, Forrest Gander, C.S. Giscombe, Jewelle Gomez, Noah Eli Gordon, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Paul Hoover, Fanny Howe, Kevin Killian, Joseph Lease, Rachel Loden, Jane Miller, Laura Mullen, Michael Palmer, Aimee Phan, D.A. Powell, Bin Ramke, Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, David Shapiro, Tom Sleigh, Juliana Spahr, Cole Swensen, Truong Tran, Anne Waldman, Tyrone Williams, C.D. Wright, John Yau, Al Young, Matthew Zapruder, and many others.

“Like” BAPM on Facebook and stay in-the-loop! (And while you’re at it, book your ticket to San Francisco too!)

The psychics among you might like this piece at The Actuary by Beth Towle–on Susan Howe, “finding doubles,” and telepathy’s interactions with poetry:

Communication, then, is reading traces. And reading traces is to make copies. And to make copies is to attempt to speak for ourselves. Perhaps then the mode of working through archival or restorative poetry takes us down an accidental path to communication in which it is the desire for communication, the failure and the poignancy in that failure, that then reveals the reader to him or herself. By extension, this is also the process of the writer working in the library, slaving over the written words or transmissions of the dead. When I work through texts or books in hopes of finding something that might inform or inspire my poetry, what I desire most is to find myself in the text. I transmit myself onto the research subject, even if I try hard to resist doing so. (One reason I think the autobiographical turn in criticism seems natural and necessary: it’s silly to think that we can ever remove ourselves from the picture. We are simply too big, too in the way of our own passivity).

The doubling happens in the desire to communicate with the dead and to then attempt to communicate the dead to the living. Many poets would call that being a medium. But I don’t think that that’s the case, at least not for the poet burrowing herself inside the archives. In that case, we become the psychical researcher, the ghost hunter. We make reports and we try to convince people that it’s the medium that’s real. After all, a citational or collage or “cut work” poem doesn’t exist in the unmediated voice of the dead. It’s participating solely in the media: the papers, the recordings, the maps, et cetera. I am not trying to prove to people that there is a life beyond that the dead can communicate. Rather, I try to prove that the medium itself communicates something far more important, and that the medium and the researcher will forever be locked in battle at who can make the most meaning out of the ghostly utterances. This poet likes to think she is the winner, but considering that she often gets in the way of her own mediation, she assumes no one will ever merge quite victorious.

Because they are rooms to be in or books to open or microfilm to spool, archives have the ability to become fetishes for the poet-researcher. Susan Howe explores this in The Midnight, where material is the thing that both connects people (her memory of her mother defined through books, for example) but also keeps them apart (the bed hangings, the tracing paper). “Ownership and ownership it / is a maxim of logic the Double / of the object is that I desire it” (Howe 12). Again, here we get both the doubling that makes research so problematic but also the desire, the longing to have objects take us somewhere. For Howe, there seems to be something always of grief or want in dealing with materials. . . .

Read the rest here.

In tech-related poetry news, Microsoft appears to be offering to purchase the digital assets of Nook Media LLC: that’s the tablet-size e-book reader championed by Barnes & Noble. If you’ve been reading le poems via Nook, according to TechCrunch:

Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book joint venture with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college book division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where Nook content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices. Speculation about the plan to discontinue the Nook surfaced in February. The documents we have are not clear on whether the third-party tablets would be Microsoft’s own Windows 8 devices, tablets made by others (including competing platforms) or both. Third-party tablets, according to the document, are due to get introduced in 2014.

Nook e-readers, meanwhile, do not appear to fall into the discontinuation pile immediately. Rather, they’re projected to have their own gradual, natural decline — following the general trend of consumers moving to tablets as all-purpose devices.

Keep your eyes peeled for further details!

Part II

I was introduced to the term “Tibetan refugee” at a young age, as the poet Tenzin Tsundue was. I understood the word to signal a feature of a sentient being, so I thought my classmates were Indian “refugees.” The word “refugee,” announced and used in English, signified fixed images of despair, displacement, and death. It did not contain the swirling and de-centered world, where every day– despite the losses deeply embedded within its structure–resorted to occasional adjustments and “situations.”

One such adjustment was language. I learned English via Hindi. English alluded to unfamiliar concepts and objects that were unnamed in Tibetan. I memorized words before discovering what they meant. Often, this process took many years. I was suspicious of English and skeptical of the world it simultaneously denied and opened to me. It was presented as the language for scholarship, future employment, and independence. It placed Tibetan into jeopardy as an irrelevant language, or a language agile only in retrieving the past. Perhaps strife and the recent national tragedy cast a somber framework upon the Tibetan present to limit its view to, at best, an unpredictable future. The lessons at home attempted to explain history and consequence through philosophy: life is impermanent; life is change; life is suffering.

English bedazzled with rhymes and knotty phrases in nursery rhymes and fairy tales. And because the realities of a daffodil or a hot-cross bun never unfolded in the way I imagined them to, I began to write about what they might yet be for me. I relied on rhymes and fancy to build a boat named Daffodil that ferried my mother and me beyond the existence in exile. In this manner, I encountered poetry. Poetry received my fear that a thing did not quite fit its own concept. It allowed objects to stray from their being.

When I state today that poetry is the present, I also mean it keeps a deep memory. A memory that looks inward for repetition and return. A memory that also demands that questions seeking to know if I am a Tibetan poet should learn to rebound with enquiries into the language, time, and place of the one asking the questions.

The position of “place” in writing occupies a precarious position in attempting to articulate self by displacing the notion of an identifiable or static position. Perhaps a Tibetan poet and a Tibetan thing must be forgotten as soon as it is mentioned. Not as a way of negating a presence but rather to indicate the limitations imposed by the desire for one or two definitions.

[Read Part I of this series here.]

LA Times’ Carolyn Kellogg profiles Ken Baumann in this week’s Jacket Copy. Baumann is star of The Secret Life of the American Teenager (an ABC Family sit-com), the publisher of Sator Press (an avant-garde small press that he founded in 2010), and the author of Solip (a novel that will be published by Tyrant Books on May 14th).

Check out this excerpt:

In Sator Press, he wanted to create the right print home for the kind of works he’d been reading online. “I knew that there was an abundance of texts floating around from authors who had trouble placing them in the larger ecosystem,” he says. He did his research into the real world of publishing, talking to veterans like Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull.

Nash recalls: “As the doctors might say, he presented as a patient with exactly the condition I expected him to be in possession of — the disease known as I Want to Be an Indie Publisher.” Nash had no idea Baumann was an actor; he saw him simply as a book lover. “He’s the real deal. It’s not like buying a quirky pair of pants; you don’t do this sort of thing unless you’re really into it.”

Baumann founded Sator Press as a nonprofit. His goals are manageable — a book or so a year, and press runs that are modest but not insignificant; each book starts with 1,000 copies. His highest-profile author is the poet-slash-aphorist Mark Leidner, whose Sator Press book was 2012′s “The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover.” Baumann is Sator’s only employee, serving as editor, publisher, operations manager and book designer.

Layout at Sator is a serious undertaking — where most books consist of text flowing down a page, Sator’s may not. In “The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney,” a novel by Christopher Higgs published in 2012, lines of text break and stutter like poetry.

“I’d say 80% of the pages are complete architecture. Almost every page is a beautiful sculpture,” Baumann says, paging through the book. “That said, it almost gave me an aneurysm, doing the interior layout.”

He’s joking, but he did have a genuine health scare last year, when an undiagnosed case of Crohn’s disease led to emergency surgery — just weeks before his scheduled marriage to actress Aviva (“Superbad”). “I’m in great health now,” he assured me in April by email. “The ironic pleasure of being really sick with an on-the-books disease is having one distinct thing to hate and fight against.”

Baumann has a bit of the pugilist’s approach to literary culture — as Nash describes it, “a little in your face, a little bit of extra grit in the teeth.” It’s a tradition that goes back to some of America’s most important publishers, like Grove Press, which challenged censors to publish James Joyce in the U.S.

“I read a very long article on Barney Rosset and early Grove, and I was just sold,” Baumann says. “I’ve found the more I do it that it’s the most rewarding thing I do: Produce other people’s work and not just focus on my own. It’s a great step away from the swamps of self.”

All this and more at Jacket Copy.

NYU Local lists its favorite “weird tweets” by NYU creative writing professors and wouldn’t you know it: A few of our faves are Harriet regulars.

Yes, “The Weirdest Tweets from NYU Creative Writing Professors” list includes tweets from poets, Eileen Myles, Sharon Olds, Dorothea Lasky and Charles Simic.

Their cyber thought-bubbles range from the anecdotal to the revelatory. Charles Simic (@CharlieSimic) writes, “twisted my ankle this morning.” Meanwhile, Sharon Olds (@Old_Sharon) exclaims, “HOW do they do it?! How can people have sex without love??” and later… “my poetry inspired 50 Shades of Grey… #yourwelcome” [hi-five!]. Dottie Lasky (@DorotheaLasky) writes, “I see all empty space in crowds as what I can run thru” and Eileen Myles (@EileenMyles) tweets, “I love chugging coffee. It’s so fucked up.”

Scope all this out and more here. Better yet: follow those Twitter handles!