submission call - audio poetry

"from east to west:  bi-coastal verse" - fall '09:  Audio Poetry Our fall issue will have an accompanying audio supplement, hopefully both online and as a CD. Every poem in our audio section will be linked to a recording of the poem. Send text of the poem in the body of an email to PJ Nights (tangerine_reflections@yahoo.com) with "audio submission" in the subject line. Attach audio as an .mp3 file. If you don't have recording software, try "Audacity" (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/),  an open-source, cross-platform sound recorder. The deadline for the fall issue is August 15, 2009. Links to our current and past issues can be found at http://www.geocities.com/pj_nights until the end of October when we will be acquiring a new domain name. Thank you! PJ Nights from The Poetics List:: http://epc.buffalo.edu/poetics/welcome.html

July 25, UNM Summer Sunset Lecture

(cross posted from NM Culture Net) UNM Libraries Presents: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. 2009 Summer Sunset Lecture Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, best-selling author of "The Dirty Girls Social Club," will present a free lecture titled "The Costs and Benefits of Ethnic Identity as Genre in the Contemporary Fiction Marketplace" on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 7 p.m. July 27, 7 PM, Zimmerman Library,UNM in the historic west wing, Main Campus,Albuquerque FREE, OPEN TO PUBLIC Valdes-Rodriguez discusses the costs and benefits of ethnic segregation in contemporary American fiction, and poses some interesting questions. Is it warranted? Honest? Is it just? Is it legal? Is ethnicity the same as genre? Who gets to be a default human in American publishing? Why is ethnicity still perceived in the United States as a valuable marketing tool? What is ethnicity, and is it genetic or learned? What does such separation do to an author's career? How might an author avoid these pitfalls? How might an author exploit them? Valdes-Rodriguez is the bestselling author of seven novels, including "The Dirty Girls Social Club", "Playing with Boys," "Haters," "Make Him Look Good," "Dirty Girls on Top," and the upcoming novels "The Husband Habit" (July 2009) and "Three Kings Dates" (Christmas 2010). The event includes a book signing with the author. The Summer Sunset Lectures are made possible by the generous support of the UNM Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu

July 25-26, Poetry Workshops (Albq)

Poetry in Place: Workshops & Presentations Saturday . July 25 Workshops 1pm - 5pm . $20 per workshop Space limited. Call 505-897-8831 to register. Sunday . July 26: Presentations, 1pm - 5pm . free At City ofd Albuquerque Open Space Visitor Center, 6500 Coors Blvd. NW (at the end of Bosque Meadows Rd. between Montaño and Paseo del Norte) Download flyer

What do you call a group of booksellers?

What do you call a group of booksellers?

From BookFinder Journal, a blog about finding, buying, reading, selling books

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July 19, Benefit Concert

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Rose Ebaugh Benefit Concert, Sunday July 19, 12n-8pm, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, 9169 Coors NW, Albuquerque. Bring your own lawn chairs and blankets. Live broadcast on KUNM.

Thanks, Hakim, for sending this. How could anyone resist a group with 'Troublemakers' in the name?

light plogkeeping

But no windows... this plog doesn't do windows.

1. Online presence: Poets & Writers Picnic is now on Facebook! come by, accept our invitation to the picnic, look at the pictures, write on our wall
   
2. Plog additions - some more recent than others but not noted in a post so you may have missed them:

Video bar (at the bottom of the page) changed from Slam to Writing Poetry - check it out.

Poetry in the News (in the right hand sidebar, below Sunflowers): news feed, usually the same topic with new entries changing daily - changed for the occasion to "poetry writing workshop"

Links added or changed:

• Discover Mountainair links - added: 122 bookmarked & tagged pages about Mountainair
  
• Mountainair Lodging - added, 7 links to local lodging websites from; not complete as several lodging options do not have URLs & Chamber page does not currently include extended listings for business members. I'm working on that but expect current chamber webists to address the gap & then send me a link to post.
  
• Questions about your Mountainair information needs? Drop me an e & ask: Vanessa.87036@gmail.com
  

Drunken Boat: 10th Anniversary Issue

Drunken Boat, international online journal of the arts, celebrates its tenth anniversary with Issue#10, featuring ten folios and over three hundred writers and artists. Including archival items from the Black Mountain School (1933-1957), 100 contemporary poets, Conceptual Fiction, Electronic Arts, MisTranslation, Visual and Video Poetry, Nonfiction, arts from Asia and by Tribal Peoples, and our Best in Show, a look back at the last 10 years of Drunken Boat. Now live online and featuring a new blog at http://www.drunkenboat.com Launched Friday, July 10th at the SoHo20 Gallery in NYC to celebrate the this extraordinary issue. Thanks for your continued support! Ravi Shankar, shankarr@ccsu.edu Editor http://www.drunkenboat.com Poet-in-Residence & Associate Professor CCSU - English Dept.

2009 Picnic & Workshop Flyer

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More ....
Picnic & Workshop Flyer (pdf)

Sunflower Writing Workshop brochure (pdf)

Mountainair Sunflower Festival

Sunflower Festival Exhibitors Registration form (doc)

Coming up... meet the 2009 readers and musicians... visit past Picnics & Sunflower Festivals... read "This Town," the 2008 Workshop's group poem about Mountainair, sunflower poetry and more

Writing Post-Person

Don't we all get so much "disposable discourse" and "information garbage" in our mailboxes? How nice to be reminded that we can recycle it and, in doing so, refresh the language they debase and ultimately devalue. Moving on, we could do the same for press releases and marketing copy. "Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse" by Kedrick James, cross-posted from Poetics, post by visual poet Jim Andrews who writes: Writing Post-Person: Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse is Kedrick James's 2009 doctoral dissertation. It's a terrific look at the history of automated spam and how "spoets" (spam poets) are situated in that environment. He also develops very useful perspectives on informational garbage and recycling toward a poetics of sustainability and informational environmentalism. How do writers and and how does writing move forward in the age of automated, disposable discourse when writing is devalued by automated excess, and the proliferation of other, competing media? Kedrick James's thesis is hopeful, actually, in what many perceive to be a dark time for literary writing and education, and that hope is partly in what he sees arising from active engagement by writers in these issues. What I've done at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/kedrick/slideshow.htm is to take four samples of writing from his thesis, together with photos of Kedrick and some of his graphical collages, and collage them in dbCinema in appreciation of what he's doing. I've also created a stir fry text at http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/kedrick.htm from those samples of his thesis. You can read the quotations themselves by clicking on the rectangle in the stir fry or mix them together by mousing over the text I think his thesis is significant to contemporary writing and encourage you to visit his website,  http://kedrickjames.net  and his band's site http://disciplineofchaos.com -- he's  in a collaging/sampling band. The thesis is not available online but if you want to read it, contact him.

Slam Team Benefit This Sunday

Posted on NM Slam by: "damien flores" d_flores5150@yahoo.com Tue Jul 7, 2009 3:59 pm (PDT) On Sunday, July 12th there will be an Art/Dessert Benefit for the Slam Team at Chroma Studios from 2-5PM. There will be a performance by the 2009 ABQ Slam Team as well as numerous great art pieces up for auction. But the kicker is the food! We have received donations of whole cakes from Flying Star, Cake Fetish, ABC Cakes, and other local bakers to be auctioned at this event. Chroma Studios is located on 1st Street and Roma next to the old Wool Warehouse. Spread the word around, there will be great poetry, art, and goodies that afternoon. All proceeds will benefit the slam team and endeavor of getting to Florida to vie for the National Poetry Slam Championship. Thanks and see y'all there! p.s. If you are a baker or artist and would like to make a donation for this event, please reply to d_flores5150@yahoo.com or e-mail Krystal at skittleflute@ hotmail.com

PoemTalk

PoemTalk, a podcast series sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, the Kelly Writers House & PennSound.

Get the RSS feed or subscribe to email updates to keep up with new PoemTalk episodes, also available on iTunes.

For each episode, four friends and colleagues in the world of poetry and poetics convene to collaborate on a close (but not too close) reading of a single poem. They talk through and around the poem, sometimes beyond it, often disagreeing, always excited. After perhaps twenty-five minutes the verse opens up to new possibilities and gains new readers and listeners.

Listeners? All the PoemTalk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of the PennSound archive.

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Winceable Words

cross-posted from the Poetics List sponsored by: The Electronic Poetry Center & Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. I strongly recommend subscribing for resources, announcements and above all, intelligent discussion... and, while I'm at it, The Guardian Book Blog this draws from (thus explaining why it references UK poets).

Which words make you wince? Poets have been asked for their most hated words. What are yours?

'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me - 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. He even explains his animosity in suitably poetic terms:

"it violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language - it of course means "beautiful", but its meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river's flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid."

For Geraldine Monk, "it's got to be 'redacted' which makes me feel totally sick. It's a brutish sounding word. It doesn't flow, it prods at you in a nasty manner."

Both these poets understand that the key to words that make you feel nauseous is not the meaning - it's easy, after all, to hate the word 'torture' – but something else entirely. Something idiosyncratic, something about the way the word feels in your mouth as you say it. The horrors of 'membrane', for instance. Or the eccentricity of 'gusset'.

Having said that, I'm still trying to get my head around Paul Batchelor's explanation that "I've always hated the word 'APPAL' (or 'appalled' or 'appalling') because I dislike hearing the sound of my name inside other words." I can't work out if there's a case of extreme ego or extreme self-hatred going on there.

And I can't help feeling that Ros Barber misses the point with her rather po-faced reply. "Words are to be loved. Their associations may be unpleasant but words themselves are full of poetry (and history, and geography)," she says. "Delicious vowel sounds and tongue-tickling consonants. There isn't a word in the English language that doesn't excite me if I think about it long enough."

Sorry, Ros, I can't agree. I'm with Rhian Edwards on 'chillax' - "the most unnecessary and obnoxious linguistic blend to have ever been coined". Except possibly for 'no-brainer'...

Whether it's 'hubby' or 'sassy' or 'webinar' – what are the words that make you wince? (many folks are posting their most hated words in the comments to the Guardian article this excerpts - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jul/07/words-wince-hated-poets)

Reconfigurations: Call for Work

Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture is currently seeking submissions for its third issue. http://www.reconfigurations.blogspot.com/

Editor Jared Schickling writes:

In addition to the general call for work pasted below, we’re seeking a gathering of statements / questions / perspectives on the current status of poetry book reviews and suggestions for how that genre could be re-imagined, re-invigorated, etc.

We're open to any number of ways this might be approached. Pieces about reviews, email conversations about reviews, unique reviews themselves, reviews of reviews...we'd like to see it.

Please feel free to forward as you wish, and to send your submissions on this topic to: jschickling@hotmail.com. If you’re interested but the August deadline listed below is too soon, please don't hesitate to contact me.

CALL FOR WORK: Volume Three

Volume three of Reconfigurations seeks innovative works concerning immanence /imminence—that is, the phenomena of emergence & becoming, appearance & disappearance—across a wide range of signification:
matters inherent or abiding; objects intentional or manifest; perceptions noetical or pataphysical; actions impending or close-at-hand; communities realized or indeterminate.

Accepting submissions thru August for publication: November, 2009

Electronic Submissions: send to showard@du.edu. Submissions should be attached as a single .doc, .rtf, or .txt file. Visuals should be attached individually as .jpg, .gif or .bmp files. Please include the word “submission” in the subject line of your message.