Marisa Crawford is the author of The Haunted House, winner of the Gatewood Prize for Poetry, and published by Switchback Books. She grew up in New York and in Connecticut, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts, where she studied Creative Writing and Women's Studies. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco where she works as a retail copywriter and sometimes teaches high school students about poetry & feminism. Some of her poems have appeared in Action, Yes, Shampoo, and Invisible Ear.
RIDING IN CARS WITH MONSTERS
I got hit with the ugly stick, and stuff. Woke up in a pool
of monster sweat. The monster finds love so easily. The
monster finds real love everywhere. Under rocks and buried
in sand, behind trees, tangled in seaweed, love, love, love.
The monster has
a) enormous hearts for eyes
b) a locket with my picture in it
c) a fever
The monster has
a) enormous hearts for eyes
b) a locket with my picture in it
c) a fever
A 37-second video of the entire history of art from Prehistoric through now (English and German captions, no speaking). From a speech/performance I give where I teach the entire history of art in an hour and a half.
Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). Her full-length collection Night Songs was released by Gold Wake Press, 2010.
"I WAS LIT AS IF FROM THE INSIDE"
But the room stayed dark. I'd noticed the cellist's luminous cufflinks, the uncanny whiteness of his shirt. As the concert ended, I heard nothing but his music, & the cold night pulled each silver pin from her hair. That was when the curtain fell. The audience could only murmur before its folds of dusty velvet. Outside, the evening had been opened like a black umbrella.
Pentagon investigators are reportedly still searching for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who helped release a classified US military video showing a US helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. The US military recently arrested Army Specialist Bradley Manning, who may have passed on the video to Wikileaks. Manning's arrest and the hunt for Assange have put the spotlight on the Obama administration's campaign against whistleblowers and leakers of classified information. We speak to Daniel Ellsberg, who's leaking of the Pentagon Papers has made him perhaps the nation's most famous whistleblower; Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament who has collaborated with Wikileaks and drafted a new Icelandic law protecting investigative journalists; and Glenn Greenwald, political and legal blogger for Salon.com.
Visit Democracy Now to read transcript.
Lina ramona Vitkauskas has authored Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press), and THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press). She is the 2009 recipient of The Poetry Center of Chicago's 15th Annual Juried Reading Award, judged by Brenda Hillman, and was nominated by Another Chicago Magazine for an Illinois Arts Council Award. She has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and her work has appeared in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), The Prague Literary Review, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris), The Chicago Review, ACM, Aufgabe, Drunken Boat, and many others.
MOTHERFIXER
To dusky chalk legs,
to orgasms under trenchcoats,
to the execution of lively girls,
to the return of the green native:
let go of my hair.
To black holes
which are not portable,
to Ariadne's dismantling,
to my seahorse hair lifting
fondly the color of your lining.
I am your pasture girl,
your pleasure brigade,
This interview with Jason Koo about his poetry book Man on Extremely Small Island was conducted during the month of May, 2010 by seven poets: Wendy Burtt, Cory Phare, Robert Petrick, Robyn Sablosky, Claire Potter, Sean Thomas and John Rossiter.
Q: Please talk about your decisions on stanzaic structure. You use a lot of indents, staggered lines, floating lines, etc. I'd like to know what drives those decisions beyond formal appearance. If it's helpful to use a concrete example, please refer specifically to "2046 Love Songs of Wong Kar Wai," since the structure varies throughout the poem.
Jason Koo: Well, the indents in "2046" were easy because that poem is in syllabics. If you go line by line, you'll notice there is a specific number of syllables for every indented line—so whatever lines line up contain the same number of syllables. "Cell" is also in syllabics. But the poems work differently in that the lines rotate in "2046" whereas they are set in the same order in "Cell." I wrote "Cell" first—that was the first poem I'd ever attempted in syllabics. I'd been writing a lot of poems in free verse using indented lines, mainly to create this shuffling back-and-forth effect; I liked the feeling of movement and energy those lines created, and many poets I admired at the time were using those types of lines, such as Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and my friend Steve Gehrke. But after a while the indents started to feel a tad arbitrary, or lax, so I wanted a new challenge. And I thought, What the hell, why not try something in syllabics? This was incredibly difficult at first. "Cell" drove me effing crazy. It was mainly because I couldn't change the number of syllables, and the order was set for every stanza. But it kind of made sense for that poem because the subject is partly about how one can go insane trying to conform to this absurd, warped language of text messaging—the syllabics represent the insanity of that shorthand. And the obsessiveness of it.
The only son of two chemists, Bruce Covey lived in Connecticut and New York before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, where he now teaches at Emory University and edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut. Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books, 2006) is his third book of poetry. He is also the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and Ten Pins, Ten Frames, as well as the forthcoming Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books, 2010) and Reveal (Black Radish, 2010).
ELAPSING SPEEDWAY ORGANISM
Revolved to require to reverse, hip at the apex of triangle
All web to funnel, to spin around & under circumference
To advocate the many that drop, pennies fluttering through oil
& wet behind the ears, green. Meant stripes as favor
Curved at the top & lips. All the skins peel with it,
Erik Johnson, Union & Canal Street in Pilsen, Chicago, 2010
Erik is the one of the artists on Bravo's new show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist" , which premieres Wednesday 6/9.
Becca Klaver was born and raised in Milwaukee and now lives in Brooklyn. She holds degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, and is now working on a PhD in Literatures in English at Rutgers University. A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is the author of the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009) and the full-length collection of poems, LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010)
STARE TOO HARD & THE BAD FEELINGS CREEP BACK
When I finally arrived at the cataloged town, prefab
and fabulous, anticipation had already wrecked me,
warped my steel. I'm sure I'd've been
an okay denizen if the whole goal hadn't been
a primping hope of discovery, the chance
scouts would sling their crossfires on me
as on a pouty skinny thing at the mall. As it was
I built things wrong, I loved things wrong—