(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY

Bromige Speaks/'68 On Haight/

2012-02-14T08:27:00.000-08:00

(ed coletti w. david bromige - petaluma, ca 2007)

Hearing David Bromige Speak His Own Words Once Again

A Tribute to David Bromige, Produced by Katherine Hastings, KRCB-FM August 26, 2009

Link to Bromige, Hastings, et al

Bromige

It rained untimely

this morning early on in June

when David Bromige disappeared.

Tonight as I attempt to sleep

the wind chime outside my bedroom window

once again and endlessly recites.

(ed coletti June 4th 2009)

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Catherine Seveneau, a Sonoma, California writer follows Rick Posner's poem "!967" with her own powerful memoir from the following year. After you read this short piece, you might consider stepping up to the plate with something (any medium at all) about 1969?

1968: Positively Haight Street 1968 was the year Eldridge Cleaver published Soul on Ice (he and his wife Kathleen banked at my teller window and had the biggest hair I’d ever seen). 1968 was the year of the SDS, the Yippies, and the Black Panthers. 1968 was the year Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, sparking riots across the nation; the day after his death hundreds of black kids from Poly High rolled down Haight in a tidal wave—smashing storefront windows and overturning cars. It was the year of sweeping anti-war protests, the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre—the year the Viet Nam war ripped our country inside out. It was the year Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, the year of the Democratic National Convention and the Chicago riots, the year women were branded as bra-burning feminists. It was the year the Summer Olympics in Mexico City were boycotted by thirty-two African nations, the year Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 were launched, and the year Richard Nixon was elected.

I existed in the eye of this turbidity—not oblivious—but neither overly concerned nor connected to the world's chaos. Dressed in my starched white button-downed-collared blouse and my navy blue A-line skirt, wearing pantyhose and white flats, Coral Sea lipstick and a helmet-head Summer-Blonde flip, I watched with detached interest the swirl of humanity through the plate glass windows of my dad's five-and-dime where I had worked every summer since I was 12, and then from across the street at the corner bank before I married in ‘67.

In my world, 1968 was the year the neighborhood stores closed, leaving empty shells with boarded windows. The regular shoppers were done with fending off grungy panhandlers constantly asking for spare change to feed their mangy bandana-necked dogs. They were tired of stepping over stoned fourteen-year-old runaways who looked like five miles of blank road six days in from Wichita and they'd had it with being hustled, muscled, and rudely rustled by dreadlocked junkies, spaced out punks and blissed-out barefoot bums. The regulars now hailed streetcars to Irving or took the bus over to Market—or moved out of the Haight altogether—no longer willing to deal with the potheads vying for joints, the druggies peddling bennies and black beauties, or the dealers hawking balls of black opium, balloons of heroin and bindles of coke.

1968 was the year Daddy closed the store. The Summer of Love, the riots and the changing times did my father’s business (and my father) in. I find it worthy to note that his history, albeit on a grander scale, echoed the same song some twenty-five years before. The sex, drugs and rock n' roll that had then taken him down back then once again cracked my Dad’s foundation and walls. Once again he sold his stock, boarded his windows, and locked his front glass door, and—once again—left town.

1968 was also the final straw for my mother. 1968 was the year she ended her life in a small hotel on Whittier Blvd., closing a chapter on mine.

Raven with the Buddha's Face/Cranes/Critical Silence/Ungulations:Review/ Rick Posner's “1967”/

2012-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

Joyce Coletti Collages

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A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

- Denise Levertov

To a poet,
silence is
an acceptable response,
even a flattering one.

- Colette, author (1873-1954)

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1967

by Rick Posner

Otis sleeping in the deep six of Lake Mendota,
his body sinking under lead-vested loneliness,
his soul too rich for his own good.

Che laid out like a suckling pig
by the Bolivian cowards.
“ Shoot,” he said, “You are only killing a man!”

Lenny on the toilet with a needle hanging,
thinking about his next court date, all the betrayals
and all the fools and kings.
(Uncle Miltie smirking in the wings, whoopee cushion in hand.)

Who else bit the dust in ‘67?

Coltrane as high as you can get,
down on all fours ,
being whipped into submission by a raging cancer,
just when he couldn’t get any looser or free.

‘67 slugged it to them
‘67 dampened the spirits.
‘67 buried the muse
‘67 choked the chicken

Woody G. fading away…
Disowned by his old Oklahoma home,
his voice trailing the tears of ramshackle migrant misery.

Sandburg buried in his humility,
up to his neck in the arms and legs of humanness.
Left to the dogs of time,
lapping at his carcass.

Johnny Keane freed from making choices (in both leagues.)
No more Gibson glares when he came to get him in the eighth.
Bombing under pressure in the Bronx.
Breaking his heart like a splintered bat.

Spencer Tracy drenched in his drunken sweat as
Death began sawing down his tree with a wry smile.

Newark: burned and abused.
Blue-shirts beating their brothers.
26, dead as door nails.
No one knew their names.

Dorothy Parker, Claude Rains and countless naves and naïfs
Dead in alleys, dirty beds and hallways,
All swept by the tide,
Washed up like shriveled jellyfish.
Their last whines and wheezes
gasping for one more try
and zero thoughts of heaven-

Nineteen Sixty-Seven.

Ungulations:Ten Waves(Under The Hoof) A. diMichele & Amy Trussell (Surregional Press, Slidell, Louisiana 2011)

First, the caveat that Amy Trussell is a friend of mine. Then the apology for the disclaimer. The brilliance of friends may be overlooked when familiarity breeds, not contempt, but rather an intimacy beyond which it becomes difficult to immediately notice something much bigger. However, since I became familiar with Amy Trussell's work before I knew Amy, my respect preceded my friendship, and the latter put a face and a heart on the work. I do not know A. diMichele in the same way. Therefore, my respect for him comes from this work and his association with Amy Trussell.

Ungulations is that type of poetry book which defies, even laughs at explanation. So I will be brief here and suggest that you pick up a copy and lose yourself in it. Amy Trussell is a moon worshipper who exhalts the deer and celebrates the Goddess, but far far more deeply than do those who use the term with its typical loose associations. Amy is deeply rooted in a mythology which rises above myth. She is quite literal about the moon, "0 shamanka luna,"

di Michele and Trussell open similarly to Dante with

we take armorica bread to a descent unknown
through fogs of gel and slithering
where rainbows forget the log lit fires

and the iris and the pupil are reversed

Yoking the Christian and Pagan, saint bridhe galloped sans mare.../...spare the lilith-faeries our trespasses. And Witches abound with a fleet of cauldrons hissing and i throw comfrey in the pot with some old bones.

There are scholarly allusions done Irish-Indian-beautifully,

burning earthen waxforms of bran or kukulcan for
the yeats-ganesh rite, mashing persimmons in the night
in front of hestia's fireplace
smell of yeast rising from the middle of the earth

And, both despite and due to their being scholarly poets, di Michele and Trussell hold my interest all the more when their use of arcana also seems to pay homage to such more modern "gods" as TS Eliot with this echo,

yama yemaya am, i (one equals
= everyone, mounds, all-my-relations)

This book yokes world myths to present realities. A young witch who scuba dives while i can only douse my head. And the myths run from Irish to Indian to African and back again with what seems to be as much intimately known as it is researched. Arcane esoterica frames a horrendous auto accident,

she is driving but arianhod quasar is at this silver wheel
almanac

and we are bound for manonia

Such use of myth and ritual to describe present "realities" abounds. The authors connect Indian saints from the epic of Hanuman with a tether to domesticity,

now to bake orange hagiograpy cake

I now end as I began. Pick up a copy of this epic. Immerse yourself in it. Google its many exotic references. Learn as you go. Let your spirit rise with the soaring poetry. (Point of contact mesechabe@hotmail.com OR amytrussell@earthlink.net

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The Hass Beating/Poets & Songwriters/from David Madgalene/

2011-11-20T09:18:00.000-08:00

Flash: To the Barricades, Fellow Poets and Artists

As I write this on Sunday morning November 20th 2011, following the beating of former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass and his wife by police at Occupy Cal (UC Berkeley), I am hopeful that neither was badly hurt. If Mr. and Mrs. Hass have come through this travesty relatively unhurt, then I submit that this may turn out to be a big step toward progress in the movement toward economic and social justice in this country.

Seemingly forever in the United States, we have lamented the lack of status afforded poets and artists in the political field. While in Czechoslovakia, Russia, in fact throughout Europe and Latin America, artists have been revered and frequently have changed politics and nations for the better, here we have been second or third class citizens in terms of effecting major difference.

Now we have the example of Robert Hass and a more visible doorway into the fray. Think about it and act!

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(watercolor by Ed Coletti)

From the Very Quirky David Madgalene, the Walt Whitman of His Generation

I Can't Wait Until December 21, 2012 Because...

Every morning will be Tuesday Morning.

Atlantis will rise again and so will Lemuria and Mu.

Every man will have his own personal Britney Spears robot.

Not only that, but every other sexual fantasy you’ve ever had in your life will come true and all at once! That’s right, baby! No more sex as a spectator sport! No more porn! We’ll be doing it all ourselves! Apple will release a new program called iOrgy starring Me!

Not only that, they will remove the asterisk from Barry Bonds’ name!

The police, the CIA and the FBI will all arrest themselves!

Al Queda and all the suicide bombers are going to become Sufis and the only thing we’ll have to worry about is that when they’re whirling around they might bump into us or step on our toes!

You can eat all the high fructose corn syrup and transfat you want and not get obese or diabetes!

You can drink antifreeze and live! You can cut your wrists with a razor and it’ll be like a temporary tattoo!

Sarah Palin—whoops! I mean Newt Gingrich—whoops! I mean Obama—whoops! I mean Jeb Bush—whoops! I mean Snoop Dog will be our next President (Say what you will Obama has been a failure as our First Hip-Hop President. Obama? he aint hardly busted out any good rhymes) and President Dog is going to move our nation’s capitol to South Central LA!

We’ll unlock the mysteries of the Great Pyramids and we can all build one ourselves in our own back yard in South Central!

We’ll find Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster!

The dolphins are going to crawl ashore and take over!

You’ll never have to brush your teeth or go to the dentist again (Except to flirt with the hygienist)!

You’ll never have to work again! Even in China! They’re going to say “Take this job and shove it! I want to party!”

The dinosaurs are going to be our friends!

The Beatles will reunite! And Julian Lennon will be part of the Beatles, too!

Jesus will come back again and you and all your friends will be raptured and live forever in paradise and all your enemies and the people you don’t like will go and burn in hell! It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian or not!

Poo-poo won’t stink!

Carlos Castaneda will be on the up-and-up!

Columbus will have never discovered America!

You can jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and laugh and swim away!

George Lucas will keep making Star Wars movies and we’ll keep Gene Roddenberry’s brain alive in a vat so he can ride herd on those clowns and make sure they don’t screw up Star Trek anymore!

Aleistar Crowley is going to take over, the Illuminati are going to come clean and the Rosicrucians are going to hold a bake sale—and not only that their brownies are better than Starbucks’!

You can throw away your cellphone and your iPad and the Internet and everything else, baby!

You won’t even have to talk again unless you want to!

Because we’ll all have a chip in our heads and start communicating mind-to mind!

We won’t need cars because we’ll be teleporting!

We won’t need airplanes because we’ll be levitating!

All you have to do is Google it and it won’t give you Search Results! It will take you there! Google hell! All you’ll have to do is think it aloud three times and you are there—

And, man, no more toting all that luggage around! You know what I mean? No more giving the gift that keeps on giving! Yes! We will find the cure for herpes!

All the atomic bombs and nukes in the world are going to go off at once and they won’t even faze us no more than a fart of a baby chipmunk!

Any Hummers left out on the road are going to shrivel up and die!

O. J. Simpson will find the murderers!

And no more sidekicks! Only equals! It’ll be Tonto and the Lone Ranger! Kato and the Green Hornet! Robin and Batman! Number One Son and Charlie Chan!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer won’t slay jack! Vampires rule!

And Linda Blair’s gonna tell the priest “Exorcise this!”

We’ll find out that Harry Potter was really named Larry Potter !

And remember how I said that we’re going to keep Gene Roddenberry’s brain alive in a vat? Well, it gets better than that! Star Trek is real, I mean Star Trek is going to be for real! And I'm going to be the Captain of the Enterprise! And Captain James T. Kirk will be my bitch!

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My Favorite David Alpaugh Essay




by David Alpaugh at scene4.com


	October 2011

In Finishing The Hat, Stephen Sondheim zeroes in on the essential difference between the art of the lyricist and that of the poet: "Poetry doesn't need music," he writes, "lyrics do." Poetry is the art of "concision," written to stand on its own; lyrics, the art of "expansion," written to accommodate music.

And yet, the line between song and poem is not as firm as Sondheim suggests. William Blake called his greatest books of poetry Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Walt Whitman called the opening poem of Leaves of Grass "Song of Myself." In both cases, their work straddles the line between the genres. Blake's

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me

practically begs to be set to music, and has been by more than one composer. Whitman's great elegy, beginning

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house
near the white-wash'd palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing…

is one of the loveliest "songs" in the Kurt Weill / Langston Hughes musical, Street Scene.

Perhaps the most significant divergence between these sister arts today is the way in which poets and songwriters imagine their audiences. Whereas poetry is aimed almost exclusively at a limited number of fellow poets, hundreds of millions of men and women listen to songs on ipods and smart phones and millions more sing them in showers, kitchens, and karaoke bars. And almost none of these song lovers have ever written a song in their life.

Regrettably, too many poets are proud of their tribal isolation. Songwriting, they believe, is a commercial enterprise, aimed at the masses; poetry is the high art of the super-educated (formal poetry); super-sensitive (confessional poetry); or super-intellectual (language poetry). Poetry has always been and is at its best, they argue, when it is "caviar to the general."

Poets who reject such snobbery and want to achieve wider readership might consider the qualities that attract so many intelligent men and women to their sister art. Here are three that strike me as crucial:

1. Songwriters wholeheartedly embrace the obligation to entertain. They know that even the most serious, melancholy song must delight the listener; that the core emotion, even when the subject is loss or grief, is never depression, always joy.

Unfortunately, the word "entertainment" makes most poets shudder. They think there is something cheap about delighting readers and listeners. Because wit, humor, and satire are undeniably "entertaining" the prejudice against them is widespread. I have heard Billy Collins badmouthed by "serious" poets who have difficulty selling more than a few dozen copies of their own books!

Yet no less a poet than T.S. Eliot defined poetry as "a superior amusement"; and William Shakespeare, who delighted audiences that included both noblemen and groundlings, is our greatest poet and dramatist (as well as a brilliant songwriter) not despite being entertaining but because of it. Poets, like songwriters, should embrace the fact that they are entertainers. The only question is whether or not they are successful ones. We must (to re-phrase Auden) "love the reader or die."

2. Song lyrics usually minimize the specific individual in favor of a more generic, user-friendly, singable voice. Is there a single person on earth who cannot "remember April"?; who doesn't want to be danced "to the end of love"?; who wouldn't like to tell the powers that be that "the answer is blowing in the wind"? Emotion in songs is actually heightened by generalization. Pete Seeger's "When will they ever learn?" would be far less powerful were it "When will George Bush (or Anthony Wiener or Muammar Gaddafi) ever learn?"

Poetry used to be written from one human being to another. Too many contemporary poems are written in the voice of the poetry specialist speaking to his or her colleagues. Many poems are overburdened by trivial autobiographical details that discourage outsiders from reading them in the study, let alone reciting them in the shower. A poem should be as easy to "sing" as a song; but when I hear that narcissistic, self-absorbed, "poetic" voice, muttering to itself, I find myself shouting, "Hell, no, I won't go!"

3. Last, but first in importance, the primary mission of the poem should be the same as the primary mission of the song. Is it to educate? to describe the human condition? to make you laugh or cry? to make things happen? to change your life—or the world?

Songwriters know that it is none of the above. Though a song may accomplish all of those laudable deeds it can do so only after first achieving its primary goal: to make the listener want to hear the song again and again!

Click here for entire essay

New Alpaugh Essay/Makuu in Korea/Great App for Poets/

2011-09-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

David Alpaugh - Götterdämmerung for American Poetry?

Once again, David Alpaugh comes aboard as a provocative guest columnist. If you read No Money In Poetry regularly, you probably are familiar with his earlier pieces (scroll down to June 2, 2011 for) The Seven Deadly Guidelines - or the Invasion of the Poetry Editors and earlier still (March 3, 2010), The New Math of Poetry along with my own comments on the latter.

Today we have Alpaugh's undoubtedly controversial Götterdämmerung for American Poetry?
I'll begin with some meaty excerpts and then will provide a link to the entire article.

Excerpts from Götterdämmerung for American Poetry?

....Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 92; Richard Wilbur, 90; Gerald Stern and Maxine Kumin, 86; W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell, 84; X.J. Kennedy and Adrienne Rich, 82; Gary Snyder, 81. The celebrity poets coming up behind them are already in their 70s or close to it: Mary Oliver is 76; Stephen Dunn, 72; Billy Collins, 70; Sharon Olds, 69; Louise Gluck, 68, Kay Ryan, 66.

But surely there are young poetic geniuses waiting in the wings? There are, in fact, more "emerging" poets in their 20s and 30s today than our current 2500-plus poetry journals can publish. College MFA programs are cranking them out by the thousands each year. The cream of the crop get book awards and teaching posts; but, unlike Levine and the other poets just mentioned, none is attracting many readers outside their limited poetry-writing circles.

Are we about to witness an authorial twilight of the gods? Is it Götterdämmerung time for American poetry?

To answer that question we need to go back fifty years to 1961 when our legendary Modernists were in the gloaming: Robert Frost was 87; Carl Sandburg, 83; William Carlos Williams, 78; Ezra Pound, 76; Marianne Moore and Robinson Jeffers, 74; T.S. Eliot, 73; E.E. Cummings, 67. Within twenty years they were all gone, along with younger Modernists Elizabeth Bishop and W.H. Auden.

But there wasn't a hint of Götterdämmerung in 1961 because several vibrant poetic revolutions were already underway. In 1955 Alan Ginsberg had published his controversial Howl and Other Poems, followed in 1958 by Ferlinghetti's popular A Coney Island of the Mind. In 1959 Gary Snyder imported Chinese, Japanese, and Zen models in his influential collection Rip Rap. In 1960 Donald Allen published his New American Poetry anthology which introduced readers to "The Beats," "New York School," "Black Mountain," and "San Francisco Renaissance" movements via Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olsen, Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley and other strong voices busy transforming America's poetic landscape.

Nor did the excitement end there. In 1959 W.D. Snodgrass published his Pulitzer Prize winning Heart's Needle and Robert Lowell his epoch-making Life Studies and "Confessional" poetry was born. Anne Sexton joined them a year later with To Bedlam and Part Way Back. And by 1962 Sylvia Plath was at work on the poems that would appear posthumously in Ariel and Other Poems, a collection that would have as much impact as any volume of 20th century verse.

These newcomers were not writing as adoring disciples of the Modernist masters. Siegfrieds and Brunhildes on the ramparts, they were profoundly dissatisfied with Valhalla and eager to burn it down. The Modernists and their New Critic supporters didn't speak to their experience and times. They were too reticent about biographical, cultural and political matters and too constrictive and patrician in style. The new wave of poets raised diverse aesthetic hammers and smashed the Modernist mold, forging many distinctive voices, talking about all aspects of their personal lives—sexuality, drugs, war—nothing was off limits. A new generation of readers arose to greet them saying, "Here, at last, is the poetry we've hungered for."

Surprisingly, we have not had a comparable revolution in poetry since the 60s. Oh, there were and still are "the new formalists" and "new narrative" poets—but that's a reinvigorating of a past aesthetic rather than a true revolt. Some will point to the "language poetry" that began back in the 70s (now on life support); but an elitist movement limited to a tiny group of theorists is more terrorism than revolution.

Why has poetry been running in place for fifty years? Why are younger poets content to dance with the ghosts of poetries past? Why is it hard to think of poets now in their 30s or 40s who are likely to achieve the wide readership that Levine and the above mentioned poets enjoy? ....

Several More Excerpts with Comments

First of all, while the following strikes me as being Alpaugh's ongoing theme in several essays, I'd only respond that poets need to begin somewhere in order to later unleash a "New-where."

If, as I have argued, dissatisfaction with existing poetry is essential for the creation of exciting new work, degree-granting MFA programs make true creativity difficult if not impossible.

The programs naturally encourage complacency rather than dissatisfaction. Young poets flock to university campuses to learn from teaching poets because they admire them, often to the point of idolatry. They want to learn to write like their professors who would be masochistic were they to suggest that their own poetry must be rejected before the difficult work of creating authentic new work can begin.

The following conclusion is extremely important

Independent poets are rarely awarded significant honors by the professionals; their poetry is seldom taught in program workshops; nor are they invited to read at university venues. They are kept offstage, away from the spotlight. Were a young independent poet to write astonishing new poetry not many would get a chance to read it.

So, alas, it may be Götterdämmerung time for American poetry. Still, we can take heart from the fact that the French Académie eventually failed to stop the Impressionists. I'm confident that sooner or later, the purveyors of mediocrity will fail. Meanwhile I'll pull Wotan and Fricka and Levine down from the shelf and enjoy their excellent verse once again. Who knows? Having just turned 70, I may still be here when Siegfried and Brunhilde come on stage and the next poetic revolution begins.

Personally, I still reserve hope of being the different savior or even an incarnation of Eliot's il miglior fabbro. Any poet worth his/her salt does. Because I was away from poetry for a full fourteen years, I like to believe that I returned fresh. Lamentably, George Oppen, who few mention these days, returned very fresh following twenty years in the wilderness.

For me, the idea of poetry movements or of a poet's recognizable style are not what make poems or poets new. I pride myself in not attempting to practice a definable "Coletti" style. I'm constantly changing.

The "new," the "different," or the "great" have little to do with line length, great ideas, or with how much white space a poem has or hasn't. The greatness or even the newness of a poem or of a poet are qualities as evanescent as poetry itself.

Thank you once again, David Alpaugh, for your rich contributions filled with the stuff of thought, reflection, controversy, and call for response.

Press here for the Full Alpaugh Article

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Makuuu Eckert

I received this wonderful email correspondence from friend and Sonoma County unique poet-character Mark Eckert currently teaching English in Korea.

Hello Mr. Coletti (or Edwardu as you would fondly be dubbed by the local bards),

I just wanted to drop a quick note from the middle of nowhere, Muan, South Korea. Think Point Reyes, Tomales Bay and Puget Sound along the southwest coast of Korea and you have some idea of my new environs. The difference here being rolling, dense forests of pine cypress and spruce intersperced with traditional orange green and blue pagoda roofed houses, burial tombs of the next of kin behind each. Throw in the ear piercing ratcheting of the yechi (cicada) and the brayings of the tofu ladies and gentlemen and you've got it.

Watch your step, Ed or you may find yourself knee deep in one of the surprise rice terraces so ubiquitous to Chungye gu as the local province is called.And should you slip up and find yourself sinking down into the mud, just start reciting some of that fine Round Barn verse of yours and some able bodied ajima (the brazen old farmer's wives who do ALL the heavy planting and lifting in Korea) will yank you out pronto!

Send Denner on over and I'll treat him to a mountaintop temple stay in Naju which is perched magnificently on a craggy Mt. Wolchusan due north of here. Then just to cover all the bases, we'll head down below to partake of the statue of the Virgin Mary that reportedly has been weeping real tears for the past year or so. Actually, that might be more for the great Italian poet saint himself,

Tell Mr. Madgelan I will be e-mailing him next. All the best to Joyce.

Annyhashimnika,

Mark (er, Makuuu) Eckert

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Wonderful App For Poets

Featured in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of Poets & Writers, this app works wonderfully well, and I especially enjoy the category permitting searches directly by poet name, but all the features are very useful and fun.

The Poetry Foundation’s free POETRY app promises to turn your iPhone into a portable library of verse. A shake of your device reveals a random collection of poems, catalogued under intersecting themes, with various emotions and sensations—Anger, Insecurity, Joy, Optimism, and Boredom, for example—paired with topics such as Life, Youth, Celebrations, Nature, Spirituality, and Arts and Sciences. Once you’ve hit on a theme, you can call up poems by literary luminaries such as Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Pablo Neruda, and contemporary writers including Rosmarie Waldrop, Kevin Young, and Matthew Zapruder, some featuring audio of poets reading their work. A tap of the star icon below each title adds a poem to your personal favorites list, and poems can be promoted via Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail with a tap of the Share button.

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Bryant & Coletti/Stupid Poetry Book Contests/iNVASION OF tHE pOETRY eDITORS/

2011-07-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

Following a review by "Maggie" at Amazon.Com of my new book of poetry When Hearts Outlive Minds, I wanted to check out the work of William Cullen Bryant. I did so, and, in addition to Bryant's amazing "Thanatopsis," I found the following poem which somehow, in both theme and color reminded me of my own poem"Backyard Appeal."

To the Fringed Gentian by William Cullen Bryant

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

Thou comest not when violets lean
O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue--blue--as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.

Backyard Appeal by Ed Coletti

Bluest sky moment,
I paint you as words
spring maple yellow.

Photinia bush
redden my flesh, be my sun,
rain memory has fled.

Mirror of sea,
sky unblemished blue,
sing your song.

Copper fields slip
green to cyan,
oxygen’s funny magic.

Black dog come to me.
Tell me what you fathom
beneath this our common ground.

Published in Blueline (2007)

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Poetry Book Contests

Jack Crimmins hipped me to this very interesting Huffington Post article by Anis Shivani about poetry contests. By the way, my non-poet friend and reader Duncan Lee offered the following reply to my recent publication of the dismal statistic regarding the problems older poets encounter in poetry contests,

Is it necessary for a poet to win? I can see that winning a contest can add to a resume, but does a poet need/want a resume? I'm not for or against entering contests, I do all the time in my favorite pastime (auto racing). Perhaps it's just a necessary evil, how else does a poet get recognition?

Poetry Book Contests Should be Abolished: Why Contests Are the Stupidest Way to Publish First Books by Anis Shivani

Huffington Post 6-2-11

In the May/June 2011 Poets & Writers, there's a feature on writing contests. Editor Kevin Larimer (all credit to him for asking the right questions) interviews four poetry first book contest administrators, Stephanie G'Schwind (director of the Center for Literary Publishing and editor of Colorado Review), Michael Collier (director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference), Camille Rankine (program and communications coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation), and Beth Harrison (associate director of the Academy of American Poets and administrator of the Walt Whitman Award), discussing issues of fairness, impartiality, process, revenues, and results. (Full Disclosure: I've been published in Colorado Review and consider G'Schwind an excellent editor; and I know Collier from Bread Loaf).

The contest model means a poet submitting a manuscript with a fee of around $25, and being part of a pool of anywhere from a few hundred to more than a thousand manuscripts judged "blindly"--we'll see soon what that means in poetry contest parlance. The winner gets about a thousand dollars along with publication, and publicity in cloistered academic poetry circles. The 999 losers print out another copy of the manuscript and write another check to yet another contest, never giving up hope.

Poetry contests are about the only remaining way to publish a first poetry book. And that's one way poetry is being killed in this country, reduced to consensus-by-committee, stripped of individual vision, yielding vast parchments of conformity and mediocrity, worth only as means of boosting resumes and securing academic jobs. Our poetry is haunted today by a blind adherence to lack of ambition--and the poetry contest model is part of the problem.

Is this the best way to discover new poetry talent in the country? What happens to editorial judgment, consistent aesthetic vision, commitment to particular values, building a movement, advocating for a particular style, and creating a critical mass of new writing if the contest model is allegedly based in "impartiality" and "blindness"--in other words, pretends to be the exemplar of democracy, egalitarianism, and disavowal of values? Has institutionalization gone too far? Would we all be better off--far-fetched as it sounds--if the contest model were eliminated and consistent editorial judgment were allowed to enter into the process of first book publication again? Read the full Shivani article here.

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Katherine Hastings sent along this amusing to-the-point piece by David Alpaugh. Take a look.

THE SEVEN DEADLY GUIDELINES

or
The Invasion of The Poetry Editors

1. We can only consider submissions during our reading period--July 1st to July 15th. Poems received on June 30th or July 16th--or any of our other (hallelujah!) 348 non-poetry-reading days will be tossed into our dumpster unread. (Editors have lives to live, places to go, pot to smoke; and no one can expect us to read scores of crappy poems 365 days a year!)

2. We do NOT want to see meter or rhyme. Rhyme because its huge popularity via rap, rock, slam, cowboy poetry, light verse, greeting cards, and advertising (ugh to all that shit!) might attract the great unwashed, whereas our goal is to provide 'caviar to the general' (and we don't mean Petraeus). Meter because it asks us to approach poetry as a quasi-musical composition, whereas we all know that it is merely a sub-species of prose where the 'poet' imposes an arbitrary line and stanza structure to make boring personal anecdotes look like stuff remembered from Norton Anthologies back in Freshman Comp.

2A. We ONLY want to see meter and rhyme. If you are writing antiquarian verse on stock themes--'Love,' 'Time,' 'Death'--using predictable end-rhyme and dee-dumb-dee-dumb pentameter that make your 'work' a footnote to stuff written by dead white guys centuries ago--send it along. (All we ask is that you know the difference between an anapest and an amphibrach!)

3. We adore ghazals, pantoums and other faddish imports--anything without a track record in English (faux form always raises the non-Emily-Dickinson-hair on the back of our non-poetic-necks). We abhor native forms that have produced 'The Best Loved Poems of the American People' (please, no couplets, quatrains or--heaven forfend!--sonnets). Poetry being 'what gets lost in translation,' we love to see poets like Rumi, Rilke, Neruda, Hikmet disappear in a puff of prose!

4. Before submitting, be sure to check our web site for the upcoming THEME. Our Spring 2011 issue will be devoted to Poems about Spiders. Send us a poem about a flea or tiger, and we'll return it nine months later with a note scrawled across your cover letter that WE'RE ONLY READING POEMS ABOUT SPIDERS, STUPID! (If you don't have a poem with eight legs write one!) We wouldn't know a great poem if it bit us on the ass, but, damn it, we know a passable spider poem when we see one! Besides making our job easier by cutting down on submissions, telling poets what to write allows us to piss on our bete noir--ORIGINALITY. (The theme for our Fall issue will be 'My Summer Vacation.')

5. Short poems have a much better chance than long ones. To be candid, we are not so much publishing poems as accrediting poets. Send us a superb multi-pager--a 'Howl' or 'Prufrock' or 'Mauberly'--and you are, in effect, asking us to accredit one poet versus three or six or ten. (Who the hell do you think you are?--John Fuckin' Milton?) Publication is about something much more important than readership! That job at Cuckamonga Community College or reading at the Bonky-Bonky-Bo Book Shop may depend upon it! In order to accredit as many poets as possible we frown upon 'long' poems (which we define as any piece of chopped prose that exceeds 36 lines).

6. We do require a short bio with your submission. Only a few contributors (and their Facebook sycophants) will actually read your poem--but all will want to compare their credits against yours. Did YOU win the Conkerman Prize? Spend a week at the Daughters of Robert Bly Writer's Retreat in Northern Idaho? How many of the 75,000-plus Pushcart Prize 'nominations' have you arranged for yourself over your career? (Lyn Lifshin has more than 200!)

7. Speaking of prizes, we urge you to enter our poetry contest. You can't expect us to cover even a fraction of our production costs via our seventeen subscriptions (and no one is crazy enough to waste money advertising to a half dozen or so community college adjunct instructors who supplement their incomes by waiting tables at The Olive Garden). If you and 1000 other wannabes fork out a measly $25 you'll each have a chance to win $1000 and publication in our prestigious journal--and we will gross $25,000! That should allow us to pay the winner and grand prize judge; print 1000 copies of a 60-page 4-color paperback for distribution to the 999 losers; and still have $10,000 to remunerate our editorial staff for their tireless efforts on your behalf. Everybody wins! (except the losers--but, hey, y'all have much better odds with us than with Powerball!).

© David Alpaugh 2011

Rothenberg Interview/diGiorno Collages/Age vs Success/Coletti Book/Art Exhibit

2011-04-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ed Coletti Interviews Michael Rothenberg founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change

Q: Michael, how did you dream up this ambitious project?

A: Two months ago I was chatting with a friend on Facebook, complaining about the world, and I said in desperation, "There ought to be 100 Thousand Poets for Change!" My friend replied, "That's a good idea." So I created an event page on Facebook asking my Facebook friends if they would be interested in a demonstration/ celebration of poetry to promote serious social and political change?

Q: How many countries are now involved in staging poetry events on (what's the date?)?

A: So far 170 cities and 44 countries have signed on to organize events on September 24. Nearly 100 events in the USA!

Q: How many total venues.

A: I estimate the number of venues at around 200 venues to date. In Cincinnati there will be a "crawl" down Main Street from shop to shop, an hour poetry reading in each shop. So there might be 8 venues in Cincinnati but I am not counting those! In the Bay Area there are 10 venues.

Q: What are some of the more surprising examples? (I'm going to say something like only Jupiter and Saturn not staging events)

A: Yesterday I signed on a world famous bookstore Al Kotob Khan in Cairo, Egypt. We have had very positive response from African nations, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa. And the Slam community is into the event in a big way. They are calling their events SLAM FOR CHANGE, participants include Oakland Slam poets, Austin Poetry Slam, Hilo, Hawaii slam, Boise, Idaho, Spokane Poetry Slam and Thess Poetry Slam in Athens, Greece. I expect there will be many more.

Q: Most heartwarming response?

A: I received a video in my email from Limerick, Ireland. It was a recording of a gathering of The Whitehouse Poets where they announced their decision to participate in a global movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, and expressed their desire to be the center of this movement for all of Ireland. I also liked to hear from a group in Canada who are not poets but want to read poetry about political and social change on September 24. And I am inspired by the planned gathering of the most famous poets in Bangladesh, Nirmolendu goon, Joyonta deb, Aditto anik, and Syed Shamshul hoque in Bogra, Bangladesh for September 24.

Q: Funniest response or reaction thus far?
Someone told me they weren't interested in the program because they liked to keep their poetry and politics separate.

Q: How are you coping? Are you sure you're doing enough?

A: Sigh. It is inspiring and exhausting. I am drawn in by the enthusiasm of others. I never feel that I have done enough.

Q: I was joking. I admire you for the amount of effort you put into helping poetry count both with this and your previous Katrina projects.

CORE SAMPLE 2

We want to live like movie stars

We don't trust politicians but still

Let them run our lives

What's another landfill of radios at 20 ft

Computers at 10ft. Poetry at five

Polyurethane embryos and vinyl blood

Take a sample, smear it on a slide

Bombard it with laser, atoms, literary criticism

Snow falls in Sierras 3 inches per hour

Chains required on major passes

Too late to turn back

(Michael Rothenberg 1999)

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The Joy!

Bay Area Poet Geri diGiorno also is a wonderful portrait collagist currently being featured at Big Bridge. Here's the link to Geri diGiorno collages.

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The Horror!

Check this out from Poets & Writers study "The Anatomy of Awards." Of 1,064 contest winners, 129 won prizes resulting in the publication of a full-length book. Of the winners aged 65+, a mere 4 percent prevailed! What do you conclude?

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In case you missed this on the P3, I'm very proud of the book and will repeat this here in "No Money in Poetry."

Coming Out in June!!!

Double-Click on Cover to Enlarge (so you can read review blurbs)

June Painting Exhibit

Double-Click to Enlarge

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Patrick Dunagan's Gustonbook/Jack Foley on Money in Poetry/Henry Miller Too/Indispensable Donald Hall Essay/

2011-03-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Unconnected Snippets from SF Bay Area Poet Patrick James Dunagan's marvelous and curious new book There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK

A hand moves
eye starts
words go
***
Forget order
impose nothing
onto things
***
Pulling things up
rooted resemblances
of what
***

Pilings of stuff
tangled roots
early Zephyr surf team
cutting through
pillars of burned
out Santa Monica
pier late '70s
California

When shit gets petty
get petty
right back

(for Ted Berrigan
& Alice Notley
'81-'82)
***

One makes the world
of the poem
making the world
of words the poem makes
***

Language is color
the medium resists
***

there are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as
mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of
***

A sudden brilliance

& then
***

Ideas acquire years
***

It cannot but be
***

More than
willing
this

happens
to be
just

notes that
any one
so might

accrue
of their own
asking

What's meant
isn't
***

I did this thing
I did
in the dark of light
I dig

this thing I did
***

just being here
touching me
other one
here, here
just touch
***

You would be certain
of that brick
***

bits incomplete
echo any interest
***

I am so jealous of color
***

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Now back to the title of this site No Money in Poetry

But is there poetry in money?? Check out Bay Area poet Jack Foley's humorous take followed by that of Big Sur's Henry Miller

“NO MAN BUT A BLOCKHEAD EVER WROTE, EXCEPT FOR MONEY”

—Dr. Johnson

why would you want to

tra la tra la sang isadora

publish a book

as she danced

if you didn’t want

in practically

to make money from it

nothing at all

why would you put

mi chiamano Mimi

money into it

says the pretty young girl

if there were no money

in the opera written

to be got out of it

in the hope of gaining

why would you want to

fame &

write a poem

money

if you didn’t want

you gotta eat don’t you?

to make money from it

“consider the lilies of the field”

why would you want

not everybody has a heavenly father

to paint a picture

or as we say in the theater

why would you want to write a song

a sugar daddy

(are you crazed? do you think you’re a bird?)

or golly a sugar mommy

if there were no money in it

or even a sugar nephew

why would you want

don’t be a diabetic sweetie

to do anything at all

you need something

anything at all

to put in your coffee

why bestir yourself

or your coffer

why get thee out of bed

before you get put

why make something beautiful

in yr god damn coffin

whoo the old moola

so go out there swinging

if you don’t want

shake that thing

wow the green stuff

but don’t be too bohème honey

to make money

when you show em your legs

(gimme the coin I want that sweet)

make sure they show you

why would you

their credit cards

anything

you want to be kempt

if you couldn’t anything

but you gotta be “kept”

why would you money

“better to go down dignified

publish money a

“with boughten friendship at your side”

money if you money

a poet said that and he made lots of it

didn’t money

want to money

money

(why?)

money

Make

money

money!

Money!

- Jack Foley's recent bio = Balding. "Ubiquitous." Tap dances. Writes. Erases

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I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money . and if you have money , or you don't have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money? - Henry Miller

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Indispensable Essay by Donald Hall

When I read this, I wondered what poet could live without it. Then, putting it on here, I couldn't imagine abridging it. However, since it's "longish," I'll provide it's beginnings here and add a link to the full essay. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing!

Poetry and Ambition
by Donald Hall

1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. And it seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition—a modesty, alas, genuine ... if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense. Of course the great majority of contemporary poems, in any era, will always be bad or mediocre. (Our time may well be characterized by more mediocrity and less badness.) But if failure is constant the types of failure vary, and the qualities and habits of our society specify the manners and the methods of our failure. I think that we fail in part because we lack serious ambition.

2. If I recommend ambition, I do not mean to suggest that it is easy or pleasurable. "I would sooner fail," said Keats at twenty-two, "than not be among the greatest." When he died three years later he believed in his despair that he had done nothing, the poet of "Ode to a Nightingale" convinced that his name was "writ in water." But he was mistaken, he was mistaken. ... If I praise the ambition that drove Keats, I do not mean to suggest that it will ever be rewarded. We never know the value of our own work, and everything reasonable leads us to doubt it: for we can be certain that few contemporaries will be read in a hundred years. To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

But I just called high ambition sensible. If our goal in life is to remain content, no ambition is sensible. ... If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

3. But for some people it seems ambitious merely to set up as a poet, merely to write and to publish. Publication stands in for achievement—as everyone knows, universities and grant-givers take publication as achievement—but to accept such a substitution is modest indeed, for publication is cheap and easy. In this country we publish more poems (in books and magazines) and more poets read more poems aloud at more poetry readings than ever before; the increase in thirty years has been tenfold.

So what? Many of these poems are often readable, charming, funny, touching, sometimes even intelligent. But they are usually brief, they resemble each other, they are anecdotal, they do not extend themselves, they make no great claims, they connect small things to other small things. Ambitious poems usually require a certain length for magnitude; one need not mention monuments like The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queen, Paradise Lost, or The Prelude. "Epithalamion," "Lycidas," and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" are sufficiently extended, not to mention "The Garden" or "Out of the Cradle." Not to mention the poet like Yeats whose briefer works make great connections.

I do not complain that we find ourselves incapable of such achievement; I complain that we seem not even to entertain the desire.

Please press here for the full essay!

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Jim Spitzer/Jack Crimmins/Coletti's Heart/Miles Frode/

2011-02-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man,
and he is only completely a man when he plays.
Friedrich Schiller

http://www.jimspitzerart.com/

Jack Crimmins Poem in Lilliput Review

The Sea Is Near Us

Always we are made
of what is lost.
Fractures in the soul
heal as we age.
The kites tread the air
near the vultures.
I still dance and chant
sometimes before the moon.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edcolettipaintings/

what else?

when this body is gone

gone

when any body is gone

even gone

by its own hand,

even when it’s rotted

from cancer or burned

like a witch in the fire

it’s gone

as when my father’s ashes

on a shelf in the closet

appropriately weighing

twice as much as

my mother’s ashes

next to his

on that same closet shelf

merely simulate

presence

what else

I wonder

what else?

-- ed coletti (2010)

milesfrode@gmail.com

Poetry Azul Flier by Ray Swaney
tedateamerica@gmail.com

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Mehrhoff PoemVilma/Vilma Ginzberg's New Book "Snake Pit"/Caged Mentally Ill Also in California State Prisons/

2011-01-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

That snap in the air,
some other poet
has broken the language.

- Charlie Mehrhoff in Lilliput Review

New from Round Barn Press and Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg

where the scar is

touch me where I’m tender
touch me where I yield
touch me where you mustn”t
there the scar is

touch me where I’m hungry
touch me where I hurt
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me where I’m lonely
touch me where I weep
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me where I’m frozen
touch me where I cringe
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me in the never
touch me in the not
touch me in the nowhere
touch me touch me not
where the scar is

touch me when I trust you
touch me when I ask
touch me when I’m ready
where the scar is

touch me with your kindness
touch me where I know
touch me make me tougher
where the scar was

To obtain an autographed copy of Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg's Snake Pit. send a check for $10. to Vilma Ginzberg at 316 Cypress Circle, Healdsburg, CA 95448


Some Previous Round Barn Press Chapbooks

Richard Krech - Some Global Positioning Dharma
Rychard Denner - Calendar of the Moon
Ed Coletti - Peace Planters, Family Matters 
     and Jazz Gods
David Madgalene  - Kali
Justin Adkins - Dream Climber
Bill Vartnaw - Postcards

Therapist Daniel Tennenbaum plays guitar during a prison therapy session.… (Rick Loomis, Los Angeles Times)

Objections raised to caging inmates during therapy

Prisoners with psychiatric problems must be treated, and the therapists must be protected, but many question the state's approach.

December 28, 2010|By Jack Dolan, Los Angeles Times

Before group therapy begins for mentally ill maximum-security inmates at California prisons, five patients are led in handcuffs to individual metal cages about the size of a phone booth. Steel mesh and a plastic spit shield separate the patients from the therapist, who sits in front of the enclosures wearing a shank-proof vest.

When the lock clanks shut on the final cage — prison officials prefer to call them "therapeutic modules" — the therapist tries to build the foundation of any successful group: trust.

During a recent session at a prison in Vacaville, psychologist Daniel Tennenbaum, wearing a herringbone sports coat over his body armor, sat just out of urination range of the cages with an acoustic guitar, trying to engage the inmates with a sing-along of "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay."

About a decade ago, a federal judge ruled that it was cruel and unusual punishment to leave mentally ill prisoners in their cells without treatment. Since then, state prisons have spent more than a billion dollars delivering care to an ever-growing population of inmates diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric problems.

State officials say they have not tried to estimate how much of that cost is attributable to the caged therapy. The value of the sessions, however, is the subject of heated debate among mental health professionals today.

"Those cages are an abomination. They train people that they're not human, that they're animals," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist in Berkeley who served as an expert witness on treatment of mentally ill prisoners in the case that forced California prisons to provide psychiatric care.

"It's bizarre, it has a Hannibal Lecter quality to it," said H. Steven Moffic, likening California's procedures to the measures used to contain an incarcerated serial killer in "The Silence of the Lambs."

Moffic, a psychiatry professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has written about treating patients in prisons under less imposing restraints. "I'm not quite sure what the clinicians think they are going to get out of it," he said of California's method.

Prison officials say they're doing their best to comply with the court order, which requires them to offer treatment to all mentally ill inmates, no matter how dangerous.

Money in Poetry/ ZYZZYVA Poem/Howard Junker Tribute/Raskin Chapbook/New Spitzer Paintings/Gary Snyder Sleeping 1963/

2010-10-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

Do exceptions disprove the rule?

Winter issue of ZYZZYVA

Small Tribute to Howard Junker

Howard Junker's vision "over many a
summer" as editor of the iconic
ZYZZYVA is legendary. So, sadly, I
report that Howard, in the Winter
2010 issue, proclaims, "this is my swan
song" and that he is turning over the
editorship. However, having turned over
a thing or two recently myself, I know
that Howard will make rich use of his
new-found time. I don't know how good a
poem it is, but my "Last Suppers In Texas"
is the last poem in Howard's final edition as
editor of ZYZZYVA. Thank you, Howard, not
only for honoring my poem but for showcasing
the work of so many wonderful west coast
authors over these "many a summer."

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Jonah Raskin's New Chapbook Auras

Black

The thread that
connects the living
to the dying,
the blackness
inside the whale
that swallowed the prophet,
the color that became prophetic itself,
that engulfed the sinful cities and
all their woeful sinners.

The blackness of the
whip and the chain,
the richness of blackness,
blackberries,
eaten one by one in the
delicious darkness of
the night
by the solitary visitor
from beyond the
midnight hour
who came out of the grave,
in tatters and rags,
with the smell of the grave
on his breath,
who took away
our daily light,
showed us the black letters
on the white page and
all the mercenaries stored in
the blackness of libraries,
(American blackness)
that is loveable and hate-able
that can’t be washed away,
or bleached out,
that’s the blues
on the radio that
bleeds the heart,
makes the heart beat
blacker, wilder,
with the taste of
bittersweet blackness.

To get a copy 0f Auras, send a check for $5 made out to Jonah Raskin and mailed to Raskin, Coms Dept. SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, CA. 94928. Make sure to include your address!

Comment Here on any of the above or below and read the comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous" if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name. Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.

Copies of New Jim Spitzer Original Acrylics

For Sale

jimspitzer@lycos.com

or visit the studio at
4524 Badger Rd.
Santa Rosa, CA 95404

707-538-4640

Comment Here on any of the above or below and read the comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous" if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name. Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.

Hypatia of Alexandria/Madgalene on Hip-Hop/Eddie Boy

2010-10-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hypatia of Alexandria

She is after all only a woman, thus is she taken over
by what men refer to as a mere idea.
However she, Hypatia, as woman, contains and embraces
this idea as her own and has given to it birth,
makes the idea fully her own darling while men, particularly holy men,
cannot fathom the beingness of this basal conception,
the very texture of this woman’s selfhood.

Imagine yourself a Greek Christian man
here in the early 5th century.
Hypatia, daughter of an Alexandrian mathematician,
espousing a uniquely threatening view of harmony as her own
as if she had any right to own anything when such a blasphemy
would fancy a self with rights like ownership.
But what these Christian men really despise more than reason is
just how cocksure Hypatia pretends to be when, as a scientist,
she “confuses” harmony with oneness and declares the one,
the neo-platonist one, to be something
personal and dwelling within her.
So they brand her a “pagan.”
The saintly Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria,
declares himself to be without choice, but choice after all
is a matter of ownership, something though forbidden women,
Cyril himself relishes like gold leaf, covering himself amply with it.

It is much simpler to gull men
by planting paganism’s pretension to godhood
in the corpse of this woman Hypatia
by eliminating her debauched effigy
completely forever by incineration
after furiously pulling her from her chariot,
denuding her, cutting her with shells into pieces
and finally burning these shards of Hypatia
who not only symbolizes but who is fully
in harmony with herself, who owns her oneness,
who knows all ideas to be part of who she is,
this basic uncompromising lamentably unknown but
fully knowing woman.

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David Madgalene sent me this thoughtful piece. I've added the Nas video in order to help those of you who aren't into rap and may need the audio-visual aid. But also, if you're hip to hop, enjoy anyway.

Here's Nas with "HipHop Is Dead"

The Salvation of Hip Hop
by David Madgalene (October 6, 2010)

Hip Hop has been the only true defense of rhyme and meter in my lifetime. I’m sorry, but the New Formalists have failed to make their case. However, ironically, perhaps, during the administration of our first Hip Hop President, Hip Hop appears to be dying, if, indeed, it’s not already dead, as Nas and others have already proclaimed. There is nothing unusual or untoward in this since branches of Popular Music seem to run in thirty-year cycles before exhausting themselves. For example, the 20s were the Jazz Age, the 30s were the Swing Era, and the 40s was the Big Band Era. Although be bop and cool jazz and a number of other innovations followed in the late forties and after, Jazz could never again claim to be the popular music. Rock and Roll was the Popular Music in the 50s, and Rock was the popular music of the 60s and ‘70s (at least, until, perhaps the coming of Disco).

The Eighties are problematic. 80s’ Rock was a Rock clearly in decline. R & B, nor Country, never was the popular music. I can’t make a case for Dance Music, since the leading exemplars of Dance Music, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince, made so many records that weren’t Dance Music. Although Hip Hop may or may not have been the bona-fide popular music of the 80s, I have no recourse but to champion it in this light since it was the only popular music that, in the 80s, was in its ascendency, and not decline. So I’m proposing the first great seminal outpouring of Hip Hop coming out of the New York in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by the late ‘80s becomes the Popular Music (for my purposes, and in lieu of any true contenders), and, the Popular Music, which, in its turn, is reinvented via the mid ‘90s by the West Coast Rappers, and then is reinvented yet again in the early years of the New Millennium by Eninem, who, in the agony of his genius albeit his pathology, unwittingly captures the horrific zeitgeist of the Bush II-Cheney years.

The star-making apparatus of Hip Hop is broken, and, I think, very few, if any of us, will mourn the passage of corporate-sponsored Hip Hop. My concern is not so much the salvation of Hip Hop as the opportunity that now presents itself for poets for all kinds. I propose that Hip Hop now abandon the archaic and anachronistic rhyme and meter. I propose a Free Verse Poetics Hip Hop. And, taking my cue from World Music in specific and World Hip Hop in particular, I propose an influx of world, but in especial, Latino rhythms to provide the beats (if any beats can support Free Verse Hip Hop, then it must be Latino beats). I am thinking of all genres of World Latino music, and would dismiss none out of hand, however, I am, honestly, most especially thinking of Afro-Cuban beats...although I am also enamored of the possibilities presented by the proposition of a Free Verse Poetics Hip Hop Flamenco.

Followers of Latino Hip Hop know that I am suggesting nothing new since there are already Spanish language proponents of such nascent genres. What I am suggesting that perhaps is new, at least in theory if not necessarily practice, is for Poets of all languages, but not just English and Spanish, to adopt Latino rhythms for audio presentations of their poems. I do not discourage poets from making videos of their Free Verse Latino Beat Hip Hop, but I prefer, at least for now, that the basis on our new poetics and Hip Hop be firmly rooted in what we hear and not what we see!

Now I know that some of my Latino Rapper friends may take exception with these remarks. “Who is this gringo who seeks to appropriate my culture and give it away for nothing?” I can almost hear them ask. Well, friends, when you have something that’s so hot, then it no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the world. Yes, it’s true, African-Americans invented Jazz and the Blues and Rock and Roll and Hip Hop and just about every other form of Popular Music, but, in time, these musics became the true property of the world. And who more than Latinos have benefited from Jazz? And, yes, friends, even us gringos, normally known as being so rapacious (and perhaps rightly so), nonetheless, have we gringos not given the world Shakespeare and Bob Dylan and Aesop and the Beatles and Abba, just to name a few?

In other words, forget everything you know! Especially, forget everything you know about Hip Hop and Poetry! What if Hip Hop were nothing but a 30-year prelude to the Renaissance of Poetry as the People’s Popular Art? The “higher Vaudeville” that Vachel Lindsay imagined, but did not live to see? The answer is Free Verse Poetics Hip Hop with Latino Beats!

Comment Here on any of the above or below and read the comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous" if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name. Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.

I've long been attracted to fruit crate labels, so I decided to paint my own changing a more typical "Andy Boy" to "Eddie Boy." I hope you like these plus another painting or two, all of which, of course are f0r sale. Titles in order are "Apples," "Orange," "Evolving," and "Paddle."

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William Blake/SF Examiner Article/7 Coletti Paintings (For Sale!)

2010-09-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

William Blake on Things Getting Better for Job (and Me too!)

From my experience, I'm more than inclined to agree with Blake that life gets better even in the occasional case of "that spoilsport voice in my head."

20 more years

when I brushstroke a painting
or improve a poetic image

when I realize just how much I love you
how much less I’d be without you

when my son calls me to beer and a pizza
when from nowhere good wishes cascade,

that spoilsport voice in my head
begins chiding, “you’ve got only 20 more years.”

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San Francisco Examiner Article - take a look

Paintings By Ed Coletti for sale edcoletti@sbcglobal.net

("Molten," "Lakeside," "Dead Fish," "More Dead Fish," "Pagliaccio," "Untitled," and "Evolving")

Assimilation/New Hastings Book/Mayer's Unsung&Unknown/Greg Fuchs

2010-06-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Assimilation

Eat your eyes for breakfast every morning.

This differs from Dali and Buñuel

slicing the eyeball to see differently.

This is ingesting the tools of vision,

eyes ceasing their work as portals,

begin to labor subject to digestion’s churning.

Fully mixed with urgent acids,

eyes transformed to soup

release nutrition into blood which, rising to the brain,

resumes its seeing newly

charged with matter from assimilation.

(Ed Coletti in Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review)

New From Katherine Hastings

Updraft (Finishing Line Press - order at www.finishinglinepress.com)

Katherine Hastings is one of the most impressive poets writing in America today. Her poetry astonishes by the metaphysical clarity of the images from daily life and the intellectual power of her wit. Her affection for the living and her compassion for the dead vividly depict the world as it is while allowing her to project the freedom of transforming love. The language shimmers; the endings shine; the book announces a brilliant talent.

F.D Reeve, Author of The Toy Soldier and Other Poems and The Blue Cat Walks the Earth.

Here is a brief selection from Katherine Hastings' Updraft:

White Horse


Through the woods of Annadel,
past trees gently arched,
trunks and stones moss-matted --
comes the fair stallion steady on the trail

One angel on a treetop sings
one note, repeated,
repeatedMilky surface of stream,
little wall of water
falling into it,
and the white horse
coming nearer
with a steady sound
beating under the boughs
in the darkness of woods
as if by magic
moving towards
to where, upon the ribbed edge,
he passes
trails a veil of light
that shakes us
as though wind
as though ecstasy

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Following the back and forth we've had recently about methods of "judging" poems and who, among the critics and publishers are discovering the truly great poems,(see below Inviting Readers to Comment on "The New Math of Poetry" by David Alpaugh) it was my good fortune to come upon Andrew Mayer's take on this subject and others in the following poem.

In Praise of the Great Unsung Unknown Poets

by Andrew Mayer

Imagine you’re there when Rumi dances to the Friend,
spinning poem after poem not yet written down,
words formed by a Great Unsung Unknown Poet
dancing into verse the air you breathe.

Enjoy the inspirations, observations, visions, and revelations,
insights and beauty exquisite in compositions
of Great Unsung Unknown Poets.

Living on in the spirit of Frank O’Hara’s great poems
scribbled on napkins, discovered after death in his drawers and cabinets,
Unsung Unknown Poets writing great verses,
awesome discoveries and powerful rants kept under wraps in handmade gift books
to a few friends, or scribbled in notebooks unseen
for personal art filled with tremendous talent
or self-published in cheap chapbooks or limited edition printings of paperbacks,
or revealed at open readings and spurious slams.

Unknown poets preoccupied with day jobs driving taxis
or teaching toddlers to sing, or driving semi trucks full of frozen foods
to Tonapah, Red Wing, Tehachapi, Reno, Truckee and Tahoe while reciting poetry
on the road late at night to stay awake. Poets on the night shift
nursing at the hospital or security guarding garbage trucks at the dump,
waiting tables at all night diners, or changing diapers and soothing baby’s tears
in the middle of the night and the heart of day.

Pay attention to the great poems of Unsung Unknown Poets,
victims of unfair economics, or overwhelming life responsibilities,
of shyness, social phobias, fear of failure or success,
distaste for business, disorganization, or just plain lack of motivation,
depression, exhaustion, children and family demands, or addictions,

unkown poets with terrific sonnets,
haikus, raps, villanelles and quiet reflections all written better
than the anthologies that shun them, publishing circles of friends
in cliques and clubhouses of certain styles and academic territorial turf war protectors.

So drop your judgmental inner critics
and external egos of accomplishments
and just listen to the great poems
by unsung unknown poets unpublished by prominent distributors.
and support their efforts with a donation, buy their chapbook, visit their website,
share kind words and give them hugs to show your appreciation.

So many forgotten voices of unknown great poets
lost out of posterity,
but their great poems
live on in the minds
of readers and listeners
and the surprised hearts of browsers, perusers,
and poetry loving passers-by.

So listen to the great poetry around you,
uncredentialed, uncertified, even unrefined
but powerfully true and beautiful,
by Great Unsung Unknown Poets.

Notice intricate innovations and true to life stories
by Great Unsung Unknown Poets
whose poems live long in your mind,
move your heart throughout time
transforming your life,

that poetry you love in the moment
with potential unlimited
from the Great Unsung Unknown Poets.

Mother's Day
by Greg Fuchs

From the Venus of Willendorf to Kiki Smith

You are totally now, even if others seem more now,

Now is inclusive: the center & the margin

The profitable & the not, the sublime, ridiculous, & grotesque

In the golden house beneath the clouds lives mother nature

From which all beings spring holding within all feelings

Of creation & annihilation like Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave

Holds abstraction & representation in the beginning

I fall in love with you over & over again through time

Like when you casually describe speleology in France

Amidst Uncle Baby’s thrift store art collection

Simply without pretension, totally natural

Your beautiful son is a reflection of you

Even when he loves the sun by frowning upon the moon

Greg Fuchs who wrote this intelligently beautiful poem is a NYC poet and friend.

Gil Fagiani/Jim Carroll/Poetry Azul/The New Math of Poetry/

2010-03-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

Here's the long-awaited collection of his early works from that great poetic voice of the barrio, my cousin, Gil Fagiani

"Out of the squishy swamp of dead personal lyrics that is contemporary American poetry, Gil Fagiani's hard-boned zombies rise out of his poetry collection, A Blanquito in El Barrio. His poems of a white junkie in East Harlem are crafty narratives that sing the music of sex, compassion, friendship justice, mercy, comedy, betrayal, dope and more dope. Fagiani is a poet of unusual power. These poems have strong heart and deep soul. A Blanquito in El Barrio is that rare good thing name— a necessary good book."

— Angelo Verga, poet, author of A Hurricane Is, 33 NYC Poems, and Praise For What Remains

CUCHIFRITOS

by Gil Fagiani

I had the sizzle in my chisel for Nilsa,
dug her big eyes, moist, meaty lips,
color and curves like sculpted teakwood.
One night I took her to Papo's Cuchifritos.
She'd been playing hard to get all summer long
and I figured a belly full of spicy pig parts and fritters
might open her up to other bodily pleasures.

I'd eaten cuchifritos once before
after a night of blowing weed
and tossing down Bacardi with Manny and Count
the former president and warlord of a local street gang
--"We even had our own social worker "--Count boasted.
We'd finished harmonizing such doo wop classics
as "Deserie," "Wind" and "Gloria,"
under the archway of the Park Avenue El
when Count pulled out a wad of bills
--birthday money, he claimed--and said,
"let's grit at Papo's," a cuchifrito joint on 116th Street.

Beneath blazing light bulbs over front window metal bins,
Count pointed to orejas, rabitos, morcillas,
acapurias, pastelillos, rellenos de papa.
Juggling white cardboard boxes dripping cooking oil,
we sat on car fenders and ate pig's ears, pig tails,
blood sausages, fritters and meat-filled potato balls.

The swagger of that night stayed with me
as Nilsa and I walked into Papo's
and copped squats on steel shiny stools.
I pointed to half a dozen bins
and soon cuchifritos were piled high in front of us.
Before I could pick up my fork
Nilsa grabbed a fire-red bottle
and bathed a bacalaito--codfishfritter--
with Louisiana hot sauce devouring it in three bites.
Then she picked up the tip of an oreja
and began to chew on the rubbery cartilage,
her teeth making loud crunching sounds.

Next she chowed down on two blood sausages
thick and black as a policeman's club.
Then she picked up a fried pig's tail
and ate it like an ice cream cone,
strips of pork sticking out the side of her mouth,
lips a blaze of yellow grease.
I sat quietly nibbling on a potato ball.
"What's the matter, no tiene hambre —
you're not hungry?
I smiled as a drum roll by Tito Puente
blasted from the jukebox,
Nilsa keeping time by tapping
her knife against the side of her water glass.

Never learn too well the works of a poet,

for, somehow, the works of the masters have

infiltrated the systems of those who are

dangerous and covert. They have turned lines of

beauty and love into codes of identification.

Security is maintained in the detection of

a flawed meter, and messages of coercion and betrayal are delivered in iambics.

- Jim Carroll - "Homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins"

Inviting Readers to Comment on "The New Math of Poetry" by David Alpaugh

A good friend sent me this thought-provoking article from The Chronicle (of higher education) Review, February 21, 2010. Alpaugh's essay continues a theme that has been discussed here in No Money In Poetry, not only by myself but by such luminaries as Richard Silberg, Michael Rothenberg, and David Madgalene. Additonally, many readers have commented on the theme and its issues. I invite all readers to take a look and express your own comments on the basic question of whether or not there can ever be too much poetry published and also what might be done about the world not losing hidden gems. Here's a link to the full article followed by several excerpts.

"...Those in charge of undergraduate and MFA programs have cast themselves in the role of poetry-writing cheerleaders who are busy assuring tens of thousands of students that they are talented poets who should expect their work not only to be published but to win awards as well." (Ed: "There are worse problems.")

"...More than 100,000 poems will be published in 2010." (Ed: "OK")

"...Scribner's Best American Poetry...The notion that a guest editor or team of screeners would read 100,000 poems is absurd. A look at the journals BAP routinely draws from gives a good clue as to methodology.In BAP 2008 , for example, just 10 of 2,000-plus journals and magazines available for consideration accounted for 37 of the 75 poems selected --49 percent....The probability that such a sliver of journals would continue to yield the lion's share of the "best" American poetry year after year were objectivity in play is unlikely.

"Given that guest editors are faced with the impossibility of reading even a fraction of the poetry being published, it should not shock us if they favor the work of students, friends, and colleagues. (Ed: Now Alpaugh is on to something and continues the theme.)

"...Of course, many literary journals and presses don't bother to nominate -- especially if they've noticed this zinger at the end of Pushcart's dexcription of its modus operandi: 'We also accept nominations from our staff of distinguished Contributing Editors.' There are a whopping 232 of them listed for 2009, most employed by college writing programs.

"No surprise that 28 of the 30 poets in the 2009 edition chosen by the creative-writing professors Phillis Levin and Thomas Lux are college teachers or retirees, in most cases from writing departments...One 'winner' boasts a nomination by his wife (she uses her maiden name).

"Keep in mind that, when it comes to the new math of poetry, we can see only the tip of the iceberg. Unfathomable are the countless self-published chapbooks and collections printed each year, to say nothing of the millions of personal Web sites, blogs, and Facebook pages where self-published poetry appears. (Ed: Don't worry, Alpaugh is not going for snobbery here. I like what follows.) I remind readers who believe that such poetry can be dismissed unread that William Blake self-published his Songs of Innocence and Experience, Walt Whitman his Leaves of Grass, A.E. Houseman his A Shropshire Lad, and that many of the poets who appear in prestigious journals today routinely self-publish their chapbooks." (Ed: And why not? Lot of exciting stuff in those pages!)

"The most common rebuttal to this critique can best be summed up as 'The more the merrier.' Instead of complaining about an embarrassment of trinkets, we should shout, 'hallelujah!' Doesn't the test of time always separate the silver and gold from the dross so that great poetry can emerge, if not for current readers, then for future ones?"

"My answer is that time has never been asked to test the astounding number of poems being published today, let alone what promises to be published in the future." (Ed: Well the article is about "math" after all.)

"...Perhaps the most sinister fact about the new math of poetry is that it allows the academic oligarchy that controls poetry to impose a non aesthetic, self-serving scoring system without attracting notice or raising indignation. (Ed: I am becoming indignant!) Since no one can possibly read the vast number of poems being published, professionals can ignore independent poets and reserve the goodies -- premiere readings, publications, honors, financial support -- for those fortunate enough to be housed inside the professional poetry bubble." (Ed: As I was transcribing this, I had to look back, did Alpaugh write "bubble" or "brothel"?)

"Marginalizing independent poets and the diversity of life experience they bring to poetry may help bolster MFA - teaching careers; but how healthy is it for the art? Almost all of the world's great poetry has been written by independents, and most of the poets writing today (myself included) remain unaffiliated with any institution. Still, when it comes to the major awards and premier publication essential for wide readership, there seems to be little room at the top for independents. Apparently 'Where does this poet teach?' is an easier question for committees to answer that 'How good is his or her poetry?' (Kay Ryan, poet laureate of the United States, is the exception who proves the rule.) (Ed: Absolutely! And, when Kay was appointed, I wondered how they had found her who we knew so very well here in the North Bay and how justice actually had been done.)

(Ed: Here comes the best part!)

"If Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' were published next week by The New Formalist, Alan Ginsberg's 'Howl' by Gnome: the online journal of underground writing, and Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' by Women Writers: A Zine, but none of those three poets held teaching posts in creative-writing departments, I'd wager that their poems would not appear in The Best American Poetry 2010 or The Pushcart Prize XXXIV or make it into a Norton anthology. Three of America's most widely read, genuinely loved poems would be published -- but the event would be more like a funeral than a birth.

"...Every now and then someone asks me, 'Who are the best poets writing today?' My answer? 'I have no idea.' Nor do I believe that anyone else does. I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art. That would be the most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable.

Ed's Jazz Gods/Henry Miller/Ideas For Readings/

2010-01-28T09:23:00.001-08:00

A couple of poems from
the most recent book from
Round Barn Press

Jazz Gods by Ed Coletti (January 2010)

Now available at
the San Francisco Beat Museum

or

by sending $9. (includes return postage) to

Jazz Gods, 2134 Vintage Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95404. I'll immediately send an autographed cy.

Comment Here on any of the above or below and read the comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous" if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name. Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.

just one of those things
(for charlie parker)


simply another

thing

just one of
those crazy

things

purely one more of
those crazy
gossamer
wing-thing
bells-ring

things

you keep on
blowing out there,

bird!

Ornette #3 R.P.D.D.


knife blade shine
                 scratching meat off bone

riffing riffing
all round that bone
                white and pink with bone meat
                    separating from solidity

switch blade of a saxophone
slashing  sculpting
round and round
                     all round that bone


Some Previous Round Barn Press Chapbooks

Richard Krech - Some Global Positioning Dharma
Rychard Denner - Calendar of the Moon
Ed Coletti - Peace Planters & Family Matters
David Madgalene (photo) - Kali
Justin Adkins - Dream Climber
Bill Vartnaw - Postcards

...I revisited an old friend of mine, a painter in Paris.
He is definitely not what one would call a successful artist.
He is still painting in the same miserable
garret as of yore; his studio looks more like a rat's net than the workshop of an artist.
His style of painting hasn't changed appreciably since the days
when I first knew him - thirty or more years ago. All he needs by way of subject matter,
according to his own words, are a few animals - horse, dog, cow -
a few peasants, trees, sky, and water. Rarely does he sell a painting. Rarely does he have an exhibition
of his work. Is he unhappy? Is he filled with spite and envy?
Not in the least. On the contrary, he is so imbued with his mission
on earth - just to paint! - that he has taken to sleeping in his studio instead of going home to join
his family. He can't wait till morning comes and begin painting afresh. He loves what he does,
and he does it over and over again, like the variations of Bach.
In my opinion this is a successful artist, whether the world
acclaims him as such or not.

(Henry Miller, "Paint As You Like and Die Happy - 1965)

Rosemary Quinn

HOW TO READ A POEM

First:
From a point of stillness,
Breathe. . .
Feel your feet.
Look out and see your audience. See, and feel again.

Second:
Caress!
You chose these words (or they chose you!),
So caress each one… They are your children.
Give them space. Respect.
Give them what they need.

Some want speed. Some, volume…
Each is unique.
Do not be steady and relentless (unless you want).

Third:
W o r d s are S o u n d s… and each has (and must have) a pitch…

Which pitch
will drop that word deep
in the listener’s ear?

Fourth:
Before you read:
Read your poem again and again,
over and over,
always aloud.
Poems are meant to be spoken.
We are in the oral tradition of storytellers,
ten thousand years around the fire.

Fifth:
Lay your poem on the page.
Adjust your line lengths, type size, punctuation.
Give yourself a road map to follow.

Six:
Let each reading be new.
You have your road map now. The directions are clearly written.
You can follow on the fly.
Now…Let go!

Depending on who is in the room…
and whether or not you had coffee
or a nap
or a good night’s sleep
or a fight with someone on the way over…

depending on whether your feet hurt or are comfortable in your shoes,
your waistband too tight or your slip too loose

depending on whether you are sure
you picked the right poems, or
whether the person before you was just too damn good

depending on the espresso squeal,
who just walked in,
the baby’s cry
the coughing …

FLY! ENJOY !
This is your moment! Breathe! Don’t miss it!

Seven:
Never lift your finger from the page—to do so is to court disaster.

Instead, slide it gently down the margin.
Lift your eyes to make contact,
and return, safely, to the proper line.

Eight:
DO NOT STEP ON THE LAUGHTER.
As the laughter dies,
Raise your voice and continue.

Nine:
Say Thank you . . .

Step back . . .
Take your applause.

Enjoy. . .
You do this for love.


October 2009 Chico, CA


Ed Coletti's Recent Instructions to Himself at Readings

I will repeat the initials SDS to myself at my readings:

S  Smile.  People will be more into me and my work.

D Read Dramatically to emphasize the importance of my words.

S  Stare or look at my audience at the end of each poem
in order to let the full import Sink in.
(don't just shuffle through papers)

Mum Halo/Blake's Motto/Jonathan Penton/

2010-01-07T11:43:00.000-08:00

My Son

John Coletti's

Latest Book

from Rust Buckle Books

John Coletti is the author of Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs, 2005), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further, 2008), and now Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010) which is available in pre-release at http://rustbucklebooks.blogspot.com/lebooks.blogspot.com/. He recently finished serving as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Mum Halo
John Coletti

ISBN 13: 978-0-9843468-0-6

102 pages, cover and interior art by Zachary Wollard

~~$15~~
$12 with free shipping

http://rustbucklebooks.blogspot.com/

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William Blake's Motto

I must Create a System or be enlav'd by another
Man's.

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create."

Jonathan Penton's Motto

Never forget that beauty is destructive,

and poetry is its most destructive form.

Poets do not ask permission.

When you sing Ave Maria in the library, sing it loud.

“Deep Throat Nihilism” was first published on kagablog and later in the anthology poem, home (An Anthology of Ars Poetica) Paper Kite Press ed by Jennifer Hill and Dan Waber

Check out my two poems in Jonathan Penton's quirky journal Unlikely Stories.

Ed Coletti

7-Poem Dad Suite/Teknologee/Wendell Berry/

2009-09-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Ed Coletti 9-9-09 edcoletti@sbcglobal.net

7-Poem Suite For Dad

So Many Poems
(for John J. Coletti)

My father lies dying
(so many poems)
His chest rises and doesn’t
(so many poems)
then rises again
(This is our moment)
My beacon now phoenix
(so many poems)
I draw him,
soothe him
(so many poems)
I sponge his lips with cranberry
He sucks on it
(honey bee)
So many poems
he’ll never read —
has never read —
so many.

Sailing Towards My Father Dying

My beacon
a faint flicker
will sputter
extinguish
leave me utterly
beyond vision
stranded.

No Bullshit

Think you’ll make it
to your 95th birthday
next week?

I’ll try

Do you want to, Dad?

I don’t care

You okay with that,
no fears?

Nope, When you’re dead, you’re dead!”

our father

my younger sister
tendering farewell
one last time

the dying

day primeval
progenitor’s flame
failing bed beside
me writing something
of a forbearer nearest
then and now
no more always
this day tomorrow

Becoming Friends

As with death himself
I too sit close
to my father —
death all too close
I breathe hot to his cold
jealous we must share
my father, me exhaling,
death inhaling
No contest,
just a rhythm

My Own True Father Passing

I watched my father die
unencumbered by the Catholic hell
he provided me. He meant well.
I doubt he ever fully
swallowed communion
or my school named
American Martyrs
for Jesuit missionaries
(eyes boiled away by Huron Indians
who did not understand
this other hell)
and for an Indian maiden —
Katherine Tekawitha —
protecting her sacred virginity,
saved but for her life.

So as I prepare for my own death,
I recall my father,
both eyes open
to his past and future
unafraid
unexpectant
fearless.

What lesson can I,
exposed to childhood myths,
horrid legends disguised as truth,
learn?
How do I wager all eternity
upon the premise of integrity?

Just being here informs me
that I know my own open
blissfulness far outweighs
that remotest hell.

Why would I ever want to spend eternity
with a vengeful monster
whose idea of a relationship with mankind
includes narcissism, sado-masochism?
He ain’t no father

Why pretend to choose
to believe a fiction,
over my own true father passing?

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For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. Alice Kahn

How To Be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

- Wendell Berry

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David Bromige 1933-2009

2009-07-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

(Ed Coletti & David Bromige Petaluma Poetry Walk September 2007)

Just a Very Few of My Favorite David Bromige Passages

Step out of that frame
Tear free of that backing
It's your only chance
To start establishing your big mistake

(from " 'Then he was led, blindfold, into the predicate' ")

3 Ways with the Same Sentence

I've been looking for perfection
but still am permitted to sleep
on our mattress with its
broken spring next to the
completion of your body.

Not so much lately since
circumstance has seduced me
away from the initial fervor but
in youth as with a mission
invited debauchery & remember
incidents of tenderness &
sanity that baffled me.

Godknows—god of my fathers
I have questioned all I could
yet still found means to live
when I woke up this morning nor
hold much hope things won't
once I am gone continue.

I Read This Someplace

The lyre bird
amid the eucalyptus
listening for every sound he hears
to trip him into sound he makes.
He has no call or song
his own. He imitates. Each time
he utters something chances are
it is his soul that speaks.

The Death of Poetry

The bad news came.
You got thinner with each day
and less substantial.
The end in sight,
painful breathing from the next room
came and went throughout the night,
and with morning
much to our surprise
you were standing in the doorway
wearing a headdress of duckfeathers
and an oversize pair of British Wellys.
Your were off to compete in the triathlon.
We said, "That's poetry for you!"

2 Brief Passages from Spade

In these pictures of Cambridge
They'll say, 200 years from now,
"Look at that old bridge—& Bromige,
There, next to that wall...Now
This guy here I don't know what
He's on, he cd talk very well w/o
Slipping up, but it never meant
Anything, a phantom language"...

I wish I shared my co-author's
Faith in afterlife upon afterlife.
We will never see, hear you
Again, dear Thom (ed: Gunn).
Never write this poem again.
And you will never read it—
Lucky you!

The Crux

We assume
what we can leave unsaid,
What can we assume —
one day we'll be dead.

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Rockpile Michael Rothenberg (also see below) reminds us of his wonderful world tour with David Meltzer. Check out this link.

Henry Miller Died Happy//Poets' Forum/Swede&Haiku/DiPrima (scroll down to see everything)

2009-05-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Flash: Congratulations to our good friend Amy Trussell selected as a finalist in the Crazyhorse Linda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize competition.
Henry Miller On Painting
The more I paint, the more I appreciate Henry Miller and his philosophy of painting. These are 3 of his. What follows are some of his remarks and those of others in his great essay "Paint As You Like and Die Happy."

"Usually what is taught in school must be unlearned...life is the teacher, and one of the first questions thrown at one is 'Who influenced you? That one looks like a Chagall.'....another looking at the same painting says 'I see that you have been influenced by Paul Klee' (Ed: I've gotten both of these)...certainly I (Miller) have, but there are hundreds of painters who have influenced me."

And Lawrence Durrell in his preface says "If you wished to draw the arm of a chair or an airplane, you closed your eyes and wished for it to form under your brush. Also you used whatever resources you had of memory or drawing... but the main effort was just to will the image...this image would form itself...without all the effort of building it by rule or precept but taking it as one...not a life class...one had short circuited all the drudgery of practice by this immoral and low down procedure...but I must not pretend that it was infallible...it did not always fall out as you might wish...sometimes obstinacy set in, and, instead of what you wanted, you got an unwanted Japanese umbrella or a runaway horse or a forest fire...in this instance, nothing could be done but to have good humor and fall in with the inevitable ...you entitled the work "Fire At Night" and people praised your 'savage realism'...but what's to be done, you just nodded gratefully and walked away. Henry and I consoled ourselves with the realization that many of the masterpieces of this world were accidents or at least semi accidents and that even the expectations of the great artists did not match their works...Sometimes too, haphazard work deviated into sense dropping the original intention....

"I never had formal training, and the lessons I took from artist friends convinced me that I am incapable of learning through instruction, that I must find out for myself through trial and error. In other words, I learn as I go along, absorbing only what I need for the time being. I alwaysread with glee that certain painters I adore were failures at the academy -- sometimes pronounced "hopeless" by their instructors. And who were their instructors? Their names are unknown or forgotten. One thing is certain: they never became great painters (Even a great painter like Gaugin, who was also a great teacher, could get nowhere with Van Gogh.) Usually what is taught in school must be unlearned, life is the teacher.

"Naturally in the work of self taught artists there occur what might be called "monstrosities" -- monstrosities that are accidental, not willed-- in such paintings, all the canons of art seem to be violated (Now, David, you understand why I shrink a bit from you and Harris attempting to emulate the "canon" something like Harold Bloom, who, by the way, is a valuable critic) One might imagine that such products are the work of an insane person but if one is really familiar with the work of the insane, one would not make such a mistake.

"In the case of my own work I must confess that these monstrosities often grow on me, that I get to like them and appreciate them more than the more successful ones. (Success, of course, as judged by my own standards of realization.) I have friends who request me to save my 'failures' for them. Months later, when I see these failures framed and hanging on their walls, I realize that they have qualities that I never dreamed of when I tossed them aside. What I regarded as the bad elements in them suddenly acquire charm and distinction. No real artist could make such mistakes, such meaningless forms or patterns, as these failures reveal. The very wrongness adds spice to the painting, it would seem. After one has acquired some mastery over the medium it is obviously difficult to do the wrong thing. To my amazement it has often happened that another artist, a good artist, looking at one of my failures has spoken warmly of it. Sometimes I have even heard them murmur, 'I wish I had the courage to do one like that!' Which makes me think about why we are so often bored with so-called good people, or with artists who are perfectionists. Or why, sometimes, we have to admit to ourselves that a touch of evil in an individual lends him a magnetic quality....

"...What I am trying to point out is that these failures, or monstrosities, are a result of my faith in the virtue of letting things happen. When looking at these products many individuals think that I am expressing my sociological views. They look for ideas, for signs of protest, for rebelliousness. They do not want to believe that the painting in question just happened. Or, if they concede this, then they begin to talk about the subconscious or such-like twaddle. There must be a reason for everything, even the accidental, they think. Perhaps there is; perhaps the spectator is capable of telling things about one's work that the creator himself does not know. But my quarrel with these analytical individuals is, why can't they accept what they see without trying to explain it? After all, the truest thing one can say about creative work, in whatever field, is that there is an element of magic in it. Pure reason leads nowhere, unless it be to the analyst's couch. The necessity to analyze, to understand, to categorize, answers to some basic need in the onlooker. He cannot rest suspended in thin air. He must know,know the reason why, and in doing so he kills what he sees. How much more interesting and instructive it is to ask a child what he thinks of one's work. Often, after a session with intellectual individuals I feel like saying, 'It's your problem. Don't ask me what it means."

Now try this on from Jean Dubuffet as quoted by Miller:

This much is sure, a picture interests me to the degree I succeed in kindling in it a kind of flame -- the flame of life of presence, or existence, or reality, depending on what we take these words to mean. To be sure, it often happens with me that my picture lacks this quality...In any case, I go on working, I add and I take away, I change, I revise (notice that I work empirically, like a blind man, experimenting with every kind of means), until a certain extraordinary release occurs in the picture, and from then on it seems to me endowed with this very life -- excuse me, reality. How can this be accounted for ? I have no idea. I never know how I produced it, or how to repeat the same effect. It is a mysterious happening, and because of its very mysteriousness it drives me again and again to renew the experience each time I make a picture....

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Poets' Forum (water color by Ed Coletti)

If you're a poet and missing, take comfort that so are Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.

fyi - Diane DiPrima is San Francisco's New Poet Laureate

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George Swede's Guidelines for haiku:

Swede makes it abundantly clear what he thinks constitutes a good haiku. In the Global Haiku intro, he outlines eight commonly used haiku guidelines, then eliminates a few to come up with his five ultimate rules of good haiku.

1. haiku must be brief: one breath long

2. haiku must express sense of awe or insight

3. haiku must involve some aspect of nature other than human nature

4. haiku must possess sense images, not generalizations

5. haiku must present an event as happening presently, not past or future

As long as the haiku gives the reader short yet sensual images, a haiku can be effective.

A few examples of Swede's work:

on the face
that last night called me names—
morning sunbeam

almost unseen
among the tangled driftwood
naked lovers

Young widow
Asks for another
fortune cookie

first warm spring day
I take my shadow
for a walk

Madgalene's Kali/Herron's Osiris/ 7 Coletti Paintings

2009-04-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Kali by David Madgalene published by Round Barn Press April 2009 (cover art Ed Coletti's Streetcar)

Mattie Sue
(from Kali)

Say I never knew a gal like you Mattie Sue.
Say you sure knew how to do the do.
No, I never loved a gal like I love you,
but, Mattie darling, no, you couldn't do right.
You had to go and pull out your knife.
Didn't have no money for the funeral home,
so me and my brother, yeah, we did the job.
We took you on down to the burying ground.
We dug us a hole and we laid you down.
Then we threw the mud all in your pretty face,
but not before I got me one last kiss…
Couldn't find no preacher say a prayer for you,
so I got me a Bible did the best I could.
Say “Jesus, sir, Mattie Sue didn't please you,
but I got something I want you to do.
Hear me, sir Jesus, Lord, hear me well—
If you can't take Mattie Sue in Heaven,
Send me straight to Hell.”
Then I went home and I got my shotgun.
I went and shot the white trash that shot you.
Say I shot his mama, shot his daddy too.
Aint no white trash mess with my Mattie Sue.
Say the posse gonna string me up tonight,
but, Mattie baby, I don't care to fight.
Sheriff leave me hanging but that's all right—
cause my brother he know what to do.

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Elizabeth C. Herron's If Osiris

If Osiris

As if he had been dismembered
and reassembled by a team
of drunken surgeons, his skin ridged
with red welted scars reminded me
that once a god lived and died each year

in the round of earth’s growing cycle,
his severed limbs -- his feet and hands
and head and guts, his fingers and knees
thrown to the fields that the soil might be fertile.
You could take my heart and cut it into giblets

if you could make something of it,
if you could cast the twisted pieces of your own
with all that is salt and sunder between us,
if you could gather our dismembered lives
and make as good a harvest as the earth we eat.

elizabeth c herron

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8 Ed Coletti Paintings

I've decided to post these here because No Money In Poetry is not updated as frequently as the P3, and therefore constitutes a less changeable place to send folks who want to view my paintings.

""Quetzalcoatl," "Rare Bird," "Firebird," "Rose Window XII," "Paddle," "White Spaces" and "Nafisa"

Ocean/Two by Lu/ Jack Foley on Inaugural Poem

2009-01-28T10:55:00.000-08:00

Painting "Ocean" by Ed Coletti (watercolor and archival ink)

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Two Poems by Luis Garcia

(Photo of Lu Garcia reading in Santa Rosa
at Ed Coletti's SoCoCo at the Toad series 1-11-09)

STILL

I still love to walk in the sun
with a story on the tip of my tongue.

I still love to walk in the sun
with a song on the tip of my tongue.

I still love to kneel
in the presence of the sun

with a blossom on the tip of my tongue.
I still love to seek out

those sacred times,
those sacred places.

THIRSTY

Trying
to write poetry
for me

has always been
and I think
will always be

like trying to squeeze
the last drop
out of a forgone conclusion

or the word ill
out of the word
illusion

or water
from the dry mouth
of a thirsty bone

or speech
from the empty mouth
of a rolling stone.

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The following letter to inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander was written by notable Berkeley poet Jack Foley on January 27, 2009 and is reprinted with his permission. It will also be published in Contemporary Poetry Review--an online magazine.

Dear Ms. Alexander,

I have long considered whether to write this note about your inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day.”

It may well be better to let the matter (and the poem) be forgotten, as I believe they will be. Or if remembered, remembered only as still another dull poem written for still another presidential inauguration. I wondered whether you showed the poem to anyone before you decided it was “finished.” Surely a clumsy line like “We need to find a place where we are safe; we walk into that which we cannot yet see” might have been improved. From a purely musical point of view, didn’t you have difficulty saying “we walk into that which we cannot yet see”?

Nobody sets out to write a bad poem, yet, unfortunately, many bad poems have been achieved. Just about any poet of any distinction is guilty of writing badly at times. And I realize that you’ve written far better poems than the one you displayed for the entire nation to see.

But that is what is depressing about it.

Here was an opportunity to show millions of people—millions of people—what an exciting thing poetry is. Look at what you gave them. Look at what you gave all those people who think poetry is dull, genteel, a form of little interest—a dead thing. You gave great affirmation to their opinion; without meaning to, and I’m sure with the best of intentions, you drove still another nail into the coffin of poetry.

I'm sorry to be writing this because I think you are basically a good poet. But now a bad, banal, rhetorically dull poem will be presented to the American people as an example of the high reaches of the art. What a shame.

Sincerely,

Jack Foley

P.S. If you wish to find out anything about me, there’s a Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Foley_(poet)#Biography

Madgalene's Response/Whalen Tribute/SoCoCo At the Toad

2008-11-12T07:05:00.000-08:00

Reminder: SoCoCo Reading Series Resumes 2PM Sun. Jan 11th as "SoCoCo At the Toad" Toad In the Hole, Santa Rosa with Lu Garcia, Gwynn O'Gara, Ed Coletti, David Madgalene, Mark Eckert, and Centa Theresa.

San Francisco Bay Area Poet David Madgalene Responds

November 6, 2008

Dear Ed,

I want to respond to Joseph Bednarik’s lament, “The Law of Diminishing Readership,” which you posted on your blog. I can’t help thinking about a recent concert I attended by South African drummer, Baba Shibambo. Shibambo asked us all to dance, to clap, and to make noise. He said, “In my village, there is no audience. We all participate.” With Shibambo’s encouragements as my touchstone, I should like to counter Bednarik’s argument that the fact more people are writing poetry while less people are reading it is a bad thing. I have to believe that the more people writing poetry, regardless of readership, or lack of it, is all for the best. Because that means that more people are attempting to enunciate their own experience for themselves rather than to have others do it for them. While it truly is a shame that many good poets, such as most of my friends, and, I might as well say, with no false modesty, in my opinion, a good poet such as myself, will never get the audience that we think we deserve, isn’t it better for us that we are at least trying to write poetry rather than just to live in sycophantic adoration of someone like Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost? And by the same token, if I believe that, must I not likewise extend the same courtesy to some young poet (or perhaps not-so-young poet), and believe that they, too, must be better off writing their own poetry, however humble, rather than to merely in live in sycophantic adoration of my own humble efforts? I am not Robert Frost, and I may not have one iota of his poetic gift, yet nonetheless, is it not a good thing that I write poetry anyway? Should indeed there be some misbegotten young sonneteer out there who has not one iota of my poetic gift, is it nonetheless not a good thing that he or she is writing poetry anyway? If nothing else, is not an act of true courage for someone like me, a mere pygmy at the feet of Robert Frost, to nonetheless, utter, “I AM…?” Is it not nonetheless an act of true courage for a mere pygmy at my poetic feet (if such a thing were even possible, I’ll grant you) , to nonetheless utter, “I AM…?” True poetry, I believe, is written for the self, regardless of readership, or lack thereof, while I am still generous-hearted enough to empathize with anyone, who bitten by the poetry bug, honestly thought, encouraged by family, friends, or teachers, could possibly write poetry to a world that had even the slightest trifling interest. However, I, for one, will never, never bemoan that fact that more people seem to be writing poetry than reading it. I’d prefer to echo the words of Baba Shibambo, and declare that I should rather wish to live in a world where there is no audience for poetry, because we are all poets!

David Madgalene

Santa Rosa Philip Whalen Tribute Reading/Word Temple/Copperfield's Books/Nov. 7, 2008

If You're So Smart,
Why Ain't You Rich?

I need everything else
Anything else
Desperately
But I have nothing
Shall have nothing
but this
Immediate, inescapable
and invaluable
No one can afford
THIS
Being made here and now

(left to right Gail King, Phyllis Meshulam, Pat Nolan, David Bromige(sitting), Clark Coolidge, Terri Carrion, Bill Hawley, Michael Rothenberg, Brian Howlett, Katherine Hastings, and Ed Coletti)

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Avanti Popolo

2008-11-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

Avanti Popolo (Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus) Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2008. Includes writing by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Ed Coletti, James Tracy, Gil Fagiani, Lawrence DiStasi, Thomas Centolella, Kim Nicolini, Kim Addonizio, Giancarlo Campagna, and many others.

Columbus, the Mafia, & Denial

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the Ocean blue.

1.

Columbus Circle
June 29th 1971
Joe Columbo
shot into 7-year coma
not by
Laughing Otter
nor by
Green Rock Woman
not even Crazy Horse
or
Crazy Joe Gallo
but by
an African-American
Jerome Johnson.
It was about
Columbo’s thing
not our thing
as in my thing
but Cosa Nostra as in
Mafia’s Thing
as in
Christopher Columbus’s
thing, that made-man who
dwells among us ever since.

Joe Columbo
only 40
youngest mob boss ever
maintained to the press
“There ain’t no mafia
no cosa nostra!”
And that Christopher Columbus
was a “great Italian role model.”
Today we might call him
A made-man
by those
Cappi di Tutti Cappi,
somehow Spanish
Cabezas de Todas Cabezas
Jefes de Todos Jefes”
who kissed Cristobal
on each Italian cheek
The naming is the creation:
“Let there be
Cristobal Colon
from Cristofero Columbo,
And there was.
Hence forth this
Made-Man
to make our History!

2.

Indians! Indians! Columbus cried;
His heart was filled with joyful pride.

Columbus announced,
“When you ask for
something they have,
They never say no.
Give me, give me
Gold, Gold, Gold!
Give me, give me
Slave, Slave, Slave!”
And I seriously doubt he ever said,
“Please.”

3.

He made the trip again and again,
Trading gold to bring to Spain.

Joe Columbo and the Gambino gang
Traded in heroin all over Harlem.
They didn’t bring it to a king or president.
They just brought it along with
Protection, prostitutes, and numbers rackets.
“Their ain’t no mafia, no cosa nostra,”
Columbo cried, but La Cosa Nostra
Sails on and on like those
Three little ships...(that) left from Spain
(Columbus, this poor excuse for an Italian)
Sailed through sunshine, wind, and rain.

by Ed Coletti in Avanti Popolo, 2008

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Shnozzes &Knowing/Poetry Bailout/ Foreleg Eardrums/

2008-10-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

Fewer & Further Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ed's son John Coletti's Same Enemy Rainbow. Same Enemy Rainbow is 30 pages, hand-sewn, and printed on laid paper in an edition of 200 copies, 40 of which are special editions.


Copies can be purchased for $8, postpaid.  Please visit the Fewer & Further Press site for an excerpt and cover image.  Payments can be made through the site with Paypal.

The special editions are signed by the author and include a small double-sided broadside, for $10. If you would like to purchase a special edition, please contact the editor for availability.

If you would like to pay by check, make check payable to Jess Mynes, and mail it to:

Jess Mynes
121 Lockes Village Rd
Wendell, MA 01379

Thank you very much.

Jess Mynes, editor

Schnozzes and When We Know by Ed Coletti

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Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

By Charles Bernstein in Harper's September 26, 2008

From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008, held last night at The New School, in New York City. David Lehman is the series editor of Best American Poetry, and Robert Polito is the director of the writing program at The New School.

Chairman Lehman, Secretary Polito, distinguished poets and readers—I regret having to interrupt the celebrations tonight with an important announcement. As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.

Charles Bernstein’s most recent collection of poetry is Girly Man. His poem “Pompeii” appeared in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine; his essay “Wet verse at The New Yorker” appeared in the November 1989 issue.

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.

The risks poets have taken have been too great; the aesthetic negligence has been profound. The age of decadence must come to an end with the imposition of oversight and regulation on poetry composition and publishing practices.

We are convinced that once we have removed these troubled and distressed poems from circulation, our cultural sector will stabilize and readers will regain confidence in American literature. We estimate that for the buyout to be successful, we will need to remove from circulation all poems written after 1904.

This will be a fresh start, a new dawn of a new day. Without these illiquid poems threatening to overwhelm readers, we will be able to create a literary culture with a solid aesthetic foundation.

I’m Charles Bernstein, and I approved this message.

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Foreleg Eardrums
by Amy Trussell

Stop and put your shirt on the fence and look heavenward.
They say there is a hexagon at the top of Saturn’s pole,
though your naked eye doesn’t register it. Trust it anyway,
like your affection for another person, embedded
with a type of gem not found inside the earth’s dark muscles.
You cannot bear it away to keep forever.
It will not melt away on the tongue like mousse from Maison du Chocolate,
But softens the blow of any tumble and pops the rib back into place
when the heart is large and broken.
It sets sail with a full mast,
and it’s anchor does not break coral.
Listen, the grasshoppers hear your tale of survival
with the delicate eardrums on their forelegs.
They invite you to come through the wormwood,
the sprouting hemlock, and the wreckage of Fall still
lying in the yard.
Release strife and be glad of the bees’ return,
their hives oozing with royal jelly, oblivious to cell phones.
Dig the afternoon when the gods of light come on like honey,
nodding at your delicate capture and release fishing.
When you get home, throw the black drape off of the piano
and pound the keys as if it were your last song, or your first.

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Oblivious / More On "Glut "/Petaluma Poetry Walk, City Lights, etc.

2008-08-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Oblivious by Eddie C.

Petaluma Poetry Walk
& 2 Other Readings

Ed Coletti will be reading at

Petaluma Poetry Walk - Sept 21st
with Michael Rothenberg & Terry
Carrion at the Apple Box 6 Petaluma
Blvd N. at 1 PM.
Diane DiPrima
will read at Apple Box the following
hour. Here's a link to the full
2 pg Poetry Walk Brochure.

City Lights Books - SF - October 13th at 7PM - Avanti
Populo Reading - In addition to
Ed Coletti, also the great Diane Di
Prima, James Tracy, Kim Nicolini,
Cameron McHenry and Giovanna Capone.

Arrividerchi Restaurant - San Rafael - Monday Nov. 3d - 6 PM - Ed Coletti and great Italian Food!

Triolet On Time

“For boys add to their woe by sitting still”
Was the best line of my youthful poem.
Now age and illness ask again why will
Such boys add to their woe by sitting still?
You’d think of this they’d had their awful fill
And, dreaming dreams of life they’d finally sow them.
“For boys add to their woe by sitting still”
Was the best line of my youthful poem.

(October 13, 1985 - uncovered July 08)

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More On So Called "Glut" Of Writers

It took awhile, but I finally got Poets & Writers to get me the following very interesting article on our recent subject of supply and demand. By the way, many of you believe (correctly) that it's better to have lots of artists rather than lots of almost anything else. I, of course, agree. And none of us is going to stop writing just because there are so many of us, however...

The Law of Diminishing Readership

by Joseph Bednarik

As marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, the thirty-four-year-old independent publisher of poetry in Port Townsend, Washington, I am required to read a lot. While most of the titles on my reading list are poetry collections, I recently read two nonfiction texts that got me thinking about the "economics" of creative writing.

So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (Paul Dry Books, 2003), by Mexican poet and business consultant Gabriel Zaid, and Reading at Risk, the sobering report published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2004, articulate the challenges faced by the swelling legions of creative writers longing to find a readership. Consider the following statements extrapolated from Zaid's book and the NEA report:

1. Production of creative writing far exceeds consumer demand.

2. Accredited MFA programs in creative writing continue to proliferate, while the practice of literary reading is in steady decline.

3. Many publishers require underwriting to produce and distribute literary titles because sales do not support production costs.

4. Publishers can, with relative ease, attract a thousand manuscript submissions-plus reading fees-by sponsoring book contests.

What's wrong with this picture? If you're running an MFA program, a book contest, or a writer's workshop, or selling other goods and services that support the writer's life-absolutely nothing. If you want your book published and read by an audience other than friends and family-everything.

In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many "good poems" were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems-not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.

Read Complete Bednarik Article

Here's someone attempting to disprove the title of this site -- "No Money In Poetry"

POETS REFINE MONEY

after reading in Baltimore, photo credit Michael Ball

There are thousands of Americans everyday who are looking for a safe place to invest their money. Poets are the best source for removing negative charge from your wealth, and raising the collective conscience of the planet. You can change your life FOREVER by sponsoring a poet today! CAConrad is one such American poet serious about making poetry a lifelong quest, ready and willing to refine your money! If you are interested in sponsoring this poet, call (215)563-3075, or write to CAConrad13@AOL.com. You won't believe the difference a poet will make!

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No Poetry In Money Either

2008-08-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

(art by eddie 2008)

The Operative Word Is “Skillions”

Because of the network of creative writing workshops,
there are skillions of good new young poets each year
...and no money in it. (Richard Silberg 7/11/08)

So is the world a better place for this?
There was a time I craved coffee houses
with Italian espresso machines
like in North Beach and Greenwich Village,
And it took such a long time
but we got them with a Starbucks
on every block in San Rafael and Stockton,
Coffee so burned that overroasting
became the standard for mediocrity
unchallenged until skillions of MFA
poets competed to cave-dwell
in cramped musty corners —
New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review,
VQR, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review —
And so it goes with coffee and with poetry.

- Ed Coletti / July 2008

The following response comes from friend and wonderful poet Jack Crimmins

Ed, thanks for the ancient Chinese madman poem (See Du Fu's poem below and also Jack Crimmins' poem "The End of Poetry.")! I liken it somewhat to your ancient Open Mike Max madman poem which I think captures City Max very well.

And re "Skillions", it is very interesting to me at this time about the world of poets, poems and money.

The poet Jack Gilbert has said that money ruined poetry, i.e. that the money in it for those who make it; teaching at universities, publishing w/trade presses, big prizes (gary snyder just won $100, 000 from somebody), has made poets keep producing the same work/ same books over and over, when sometimes they had only one good book early on but needed to keep going to make money.

And Silliman cries out that the big publishers keep giving the prizes to writers who publish with their presses, like Robert Haas, cuz it keeps people buying their books.

And money, lack of money, lately has me asking myself questions about my own publishing. Whether to put one's own money into books, then hawk them oneself, and really thinking I probably won't do that much more. There are so many poets now that to find a publisher that is willing to pay for producing a book is a crap shoot, and highly unlikely w/out moving in the right circles, mostly teaching, or some kind of post-avant press world, or getting a huge write-up from Silliman.

Which then makes me question why then write poems except for the joy of it. Jack Gilbert only published a few books, in part saying he thinks publishing takes some of the joy out of poetry. Of course, if one doesn't publish, there is no money, no anything, except the joy of writing.

Which then makes me think, why not go body surfing instead? Anyhow, check out the attached poem.

Best, jack

I Am a Madman

My thatched cottage stands
just west of Thousand Mile Bridge

this Hundred Flower Stream
would please a hermit fisherman

bamboo sways in the wind
graceful as any court beauty

rain makes the lotus flower
even more red and fragrant

but I no longer hear from friends
who live on princely salaries

my children are always hungry
with pale and famished faces

does a madman grow more happy
before he dies in the gutter?

I laugh at myself -- a madman
growing older, growing madder.

- Du Fu (712 - 770)

The End of Poetry

emptiness no emptiness
done again
with words done
fire outside of time
the shallow end
pools of desert water
fool’s gold
a fever
in the mountains
a fortune found
writing again
emptiness no emptiness

~ Jack Crimmins / January 18, 2008

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Our New Name and "Carlos"

2008-06-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

Our New Name - "No Money In Poetry"

Well, our previous site names, "Ed Coletti's Poetry Blog" and "Poetry Venue" no longer need be used. Recall that I hate the word "blaaahhhg," and "Poetry Venue" was rather lame. So we are now "No Money In Poetry."

The new name had been staring me in the face all along. Note the long-time introduction to the site at the top, Robert Graves' quote, "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either." Then, a few days ago, Richard Silberg sent me an email about publishing and correctly observed, "no money in it." However, for Richard and most of you reading this, poetry is its own reward, thank god.

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and now something a little bit different

3 Pages From "Carlos"
(Round Barn Press 2008 - drawings by author)

Here is a tease from my long "Carlos" sequence. I began these quirky moody poems almost 20 years ago during a rough patch. They've finally gotten a home.

carlos

carlos on the turn of shore don't watch
ocean sky
drown or blaze
drifts half inch above the sand
carlos is the tidal pool, starfish mind,
carlos cool
he know he
carlos half inch 'bove the sand

carlos undercover

this me he say
to the fat man in the hat
with the gun like a hard on
up his shiny yellow coat
gonna get his today and carlos
he the law get the job done
be respectable when the law
jump the jive dude maybe give
carlos a sack of his blow
for reward and he sell it to geronimo
a little for himself, take the dough,
buy rosa and lito present.
first he got to get by
the fat man in the pink hat
with the gun like a hard on
up his shiny yellow coat.

the shore

carlos walks
the shore
like he going
to walk around the world
the shore
it don't stop
he could walk like this
all the time and keep walking
and right now carlos
need that keep walking
like it never end
the shore

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Family Matters/Other Poems/

2008-04-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Recent Release From Round Barn Press
(cover illustration by Jim Spitzer)

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

-W.H Auden “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

Eternal Gardens

Had my father written me poems,
Nasturtiums would have sprouted from my navel,
Dahlias from my rectum, and, of course, he did not,
But my children and their children
May walk in all my colors—
So many gorgeous beckoning gardens!

The most moving part of your reading was from Family Matters; I'm really enjoying the poems on the page, too. They're so honest and heartfelt without being sentimental.
- Lynne Knight author of Night In the Shape of a Mirror

2 Unrelated Coletti Poems

Kiki Smith Takes On Politics

If the sculptor or print maker
recreating the body perfectly
as pain, as pain the body is,
could apply the same chisel
to any politician’s cardiovascular
digestive and nervous systems,
she would attempt to capture only
that deep clenched grimace under
lying all such unrelenting
hyper extended artifice.

Center of the Universe

In an expansive universe similar to our own,
eyes and tongues staring speaking,
distant little planets move about
you their center star
certain all is for you,
all critiques directed towards you,
“too hot” “not enough”

Whether you shine or hide,
smaller planets hold
little sway over the sun,
perhaps a bit of a tug on a ray here or there
a deflection, an errant beam set straight.
You are all about light
but dim noticeably
when you strain to imagine
what some tiny unnoticed planet
might soundlessly
extract from you today.

And please don't forget

2008 Marin Poetry Festival - May 14-18 - including May 18th reading by Robert Bly, Eavan Boland, and Jane Hirshfield at Dominican College in San Rafael.

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Audio of Moe's Reading/Poem for Lynne Knight/The Poetic Character

2008-03-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

Second Reading At Moe's Books in Berkeley

I really enjoyed reading (my second here) with Lynne Knight at Moe's in Berkeley March 25th. Check out the following link at which you can listen to us read. Click on "listen to Ed Coletti" and you'll first hear Owen Hill introduce me. Then I'll begin, and, I recommend, in the interest of time that you pull the button about a third of the way through the reading to where I really begin picking up some steam. Here's the link with photos, bios, and audio.

Poem For Lynne Knight

I don't recall whether or not I've previously shared this here.

After a Reading About Her Mother

It’s not that I hear my conscience chiding.
I do.
It’s not about all those times
people didn’t approach me after a reading.
It is.

Not that her time spent with her dying
demented mother wasn’t moving.
Not that the child in me is too shy
or that in her vulnerability
I see my ego wanting more
than she or I or any audience can deliver.

Her poetry has rocked me speechless.
I’m not ashamed that I have no words to give her
except some day this poem.

And if tonight that’s only self-importance
then at my next reading
when no one tells me that I’ve moved them
I’ll remember Lynne Knight and how not speaking to her
freed me from my greediness for praise.

The Poetical Character

"John Keats wrote that the poetical character 'is not itself— it has no self— it is every thing and nothing— It has no character— it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.' And thus 'a Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity— he is continually in {forming} and filling some other Body.' " (Peter Ackroyd in Shakespeare: The Biography)

...A cardinal
Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
Down...

(Phillip Schuyler in Hymn to Life)

2008 Marin Poetry Festival - May 14-18 - including May 18th reading by Robert Bly, Eavan Boland, and Jane Hirshfield at Dominican College in San Rafael.

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Mom Died/2 Poems/6-Word Memoir

2008-03-02T23:29:00.000-08:00

My Mom
Anna Cavellini
June 23, 1914 -
February 26, 2008

Heaven?

This weird wonderful
weaving lattice of illusions
simultaneously held and disregarded.

My sister believes my dear
demented mother left
for heaven sometime ago.

Simply put, Mom has gone
somewhere farther away
even than New York is

from San Francisco, some
where our mother attempts to
explain from an infinitely interesting

tower of tongues as though she were
the Oracle of Delphi at the last moments
providing wisdom to her children straining

to comprehend what wandering meanings
she finds for where she’s been when back
to time she journeys home to us.

Mother

Switch thrown
dawn engulfs
mom and me.

We both toddle
in unfamiliar recognition.

My mother knows she loves,
not why this love,

Her smile beatific
looks into me,
to know
something of
her longing.

When I attempt
to remind her,

this fascination
shatters to bewilderment,

“You mean
you came
through me?!”

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Six-Word Poetry Memoir

I was tagged by Don Wentworth of the Lilliput Review to participate in the Six-Word Poetry Memoir forwarded by World Class Poetry Blog.

The game is an interesting twist on a challenge Earnest Hemingway was once offered. He bet $10 that he could sum up his life story in six words. He wrote: For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Evidently, this was discovered by Bookbabie who originated the current meme.

I'm tagging anybody who reads this and linking to a few folks below. So, if you're reading this, consider participating.

Here's my own 6-word memoir.

"Less frightened than engaged, he lived."

Here are the rules:

Write your own six word memoir
Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
Tag five more blogs with links

Don Wentworth and Lilliput Review

Big Bridge and Michael Rothenberg

Jim Spitzer's Art Gallery