Moved to mypoeticcareer.blogspot.com

Zinc

Christopher Stackhouse & Erika Recordon
Zinc 90 W Houston Sun 3/4 at 7 PM

Best American Poetry 2007 Watch!

So far:

Chad Parmenter
Carol Novack--{possibly Australian}
Mike Dockins
Sharon Dolin
Nicky Beers
Ben Lerner (two poems?--has *that* _ever_ happened before?)
Natasha Sajé
Galway Kinnell
Kazim Ali
Julie Carr
Matthea Harvey
Brian Turner
Geoffrey Brock
Adrienne Miller (TWO POEMS?)
Louis Bourgeois
Jeannette Allée
Danielle Pafunda (in case you're keeping track, that's 3 BAPs for this former Lehman assistant. I love you and like your poems DF, but that's 3--as many as Bollingen winner Frank Bidart)
Peter Pereira
Sabrina Orah Mark

Here's Dockins':

Dead Critics Society

Zooks! What have I done with my anthologies? I'll need a
year of sleep after writing my millionth review (with aplomb).
XX bottles of moonshine litter my bedside table like arsenic.
Why no lilting iambics in contemporary poetry? Only dead,
vermin-ridden prose riddled with autobiographical treacle.
Under my bed, the skeleton of Browning. I use his broken-off
tibias as walking sticks. For hundreds of scenic miles I drag
sensitivity, & marvel. Content must be pounded into a rich
risotto of form—evident rhyme scheme & equal stanzas. I
quote Keats: "Gasp! I'm dying!" Were he as prosperous as J.
P. Morgan, he may not have suffered so. These days, a black-
out of good taste, a dimming of metrical etiquette, a dismal
nerve of postmodern surrealism, whatever that means. I'm
mad! I raise one of Browning's femurs in revolt! I've a notion,
ladies & gentlemen, that our language has crumbled into
kindling—a few tiny sparks, maybe, but no thick log to keep
joy in prosody truly alive. Meantime, I'm just about up to "Q"
in my encyclopedia of literature: Quixote, etc., but still I gather
hives hunting hopelessly for my beloved poetry anthologies.
God knows Browning would have understood—what a saint.
Five finger bones claw the floor under my bed, searching. You
entertain such a relic, you pay the price—each knuckle a shiv
digging for inspiration in the floorboards, scraping shallow
crosses into my skin as I slumber. I should lock him in a box!
But then nothing would remind me of my own bones—O my
awaiting death—the only theme suitable for a poetry buzz.

It's a reverse z-a poem. Get it? Zooks!

Bidart Wins Bollingen

Congrats, Frank.

AWP Blind Item #1

To celebrate the current careerist convergence upon Peachy Atlanta, we offer up this as a prelude to a sequence of blind items. Let the wild rumor-mongering abound. This one is from last year's Austin AWP...enjoy....

______ kept teasing Joe Massey's cock. In fact, _____ tried to
dry hump everyone. All the men were scared "Why is she always trying
to dry hump me?" I think she just likes to say dry hump.

How Your Cats Doing?

remembering kari edwards: DELAYED

Due to my curatorial malfeasance it seems like I screwed up kari's
mem: let's delay it so we can do a better job getting the word out and
do something worthy of kari's memory. I apologize for my end. I am not
nearly the organized curator I used to be (probably never was) but a
ny event where people can celebrate kari (maybe 5/13) would be great.

Let me know, my apologies.

Please do come and hear Michael Marchinkowski and Jane read at Zinc Bar SUN 2/25 at 6:37 PM.

Jimmy