screwing up

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, writes about “The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up.”

free rad

Lloyd’s blog has a new look!

homeless blankets

“Homeless Blankets,” an essay by Stephen Vincent. Photos taken in and around Dolores Park, San Francisco.

uke cloud poetics

this ukulele
is a hand tool
it does not
compute

it runs on a cloud
of its own
making

no hardware

no big thing

it can sing, bend,
bark, meow
hammer on
and off

those endless
tunes thru
evn yr
tn ear

looking back on the 1990s

After looking at the hyperrealistic sculptures webpage:

(Innocence Togusa talking with Donna Haraway).

roman holiday

Eileen Tabios’ new chapbook from the new publisher, Naissance. And what a lovely drawing on the cover!

NAISSANCE CHAPBOOKS ANNOUNCEMENT

Naissance Chapbooks (Kingston, PA) is pleased to announce the release of

ROMAN HOLIDAY
By Eileen R. Tabios

In ROMAN HOLIDAY, Eileen R. Tabios brings us a numbered sequence of prose poem Synopses that strike the mind’s eye like an oil-filled kaleidoscope. Patterns merge and emerge in shifting repetitions that succeed in what all poetry attempts: to cover more ground than they should have been able. An excerpt:

from Synopsis #7

It transcends the feminine gesture. [Consolation defined as the bat never reappeared]. She totters on ice despite thick ankles. [By his face, one can tell he’s about to deliver the boot.] He has a gaze like a mirror. [There is nothing like an infant tugging on a daddy’s white whiskers.] “Sulpicia, a Roman woman writer, wrote elegies in Latin that had been attributed to Tibullus.” [Whatever. True love is never chaste.]

ROMAN HOLIDAY is Tabios’ 17th print poetry collection. It features a front cover reproduction of a drawing by her 13-year-old son Michael, as well as a back cover reproduction of a photograph of the author’s family during a “Roman Holiday”. The chap’s witty design facilitates the author’s long-held ludic approach to mixing real-life references with poetic personas.

ROMAN HOLIDAY can be ordered through the Naissance Chapbooks site at http://chapbookpublisher.com/shop.html for $10 (includes standard shipping within the continental USA). Other new releases are No L by Jennifer Hill and Two Poems by Michael Aro.

hyperrealistic

sculpture….

why paint?

“…material sensuality, figurative depiction, hand labor-intensiveness, and intellectual, spiritual and emotional expression. Painting has not suffered in light of recent technology but seems to have flourished because of it.
The primary difference in recent years seems to be the newly asserted cleft of responsibility between the fact-based, technological representations of the media, and the more personally expressive or reflective representations found in painting. Now, more than any time in recent years, painting exists as a thing in itself, as Painting: free from having to validate its place in human drama, free from the media’s “burden of proof,” free to assert its sensuous and hand-made traits in various forms of portraiture, abstraction or language.” — from Why Paint?

emerging poets

I like how you surprise me by
appearing
        out of nowhere, on the IM
or reflected
in the window of the Lemongrass Cafe.

            I like how she sends me
her love, even though I know
she doesn't love me that way
   but maybe
              another way.

   Language contracts and expands
         I don't want to put
             a corset
               on it

Let it move 

0 1

Two halves of a butternut squash
lay open, scraped clean, on the blue
china dish. Between the two halves--
a cartoon tree of life.   

I'm a one-woman self-indulgence
party today. 

         What is an "emerging poet"
anyway? Just this morning, in fact,
I emerged. Who is this person?
What does she write? Where
will the poem fail?

It's obvious

The curve of belly fat, Whitman's love handles

Or she needs the discipline. Let's call that
contraction.

Lines can only go so far on a WordPress blog,
                                     then they disappear 

Rendezvous

So what the hell was I talking about?
      sounding out, coughing. Four years ago today,
      blogging out loud about time passing
                     and Claude LeLouch's Rendezvous;
black and white films that taught me once about the down
side of love; but one could at least do it fashionably.
Save this draft; it might be something
you'll want to remember.
          However, Magritte's
          train emerging from the hearth
          carries more heat---
                More heat than Pacman's right?
          No just different.
I feel like a fish with legs.
A three-legged Belgian fish.
          I want better lighting for this scene,
          please. If I post it, will it fly
          like Luis Francia's wine glass? We
                watched it pitch out the window
into the dark. Then we sat on the floor
and later he read. And Eileen read.
Sunny tweeted.

I was fascinated with the fish in the bathtub
and especially the kudzu vines.
                  And the showerhead fountain
                  ---a fountain of youth

Dame la verdad!

I wanted to sit there forever
listening to the "rain."

I heard the heels of a dancer
stamp on the floor. Joselyn
wanted to go outside; I found a door
there was an alley, but
      they wouldn't allow it.

               Luis' voice
is somehow unforgettable

there is a pause

He looks like my father

My reading earlier was actually forgettable
   and I was wearing that unfortunate shirt
---that's how it goes. I remember the oxtail
soup. Oscar and BJ doing
                          an impromptu tango

like writing on the floor
End scene. Is that how
they say it? 

cool distance

Recovering from this virus thing. This is always an interesting period, when one feels sort of wrung-out, but getting better. I’m functional, but everything seems to exist at a cool distance. A good time for comfort food, and a pleasant movie. Also, it feels like winter; the temperatures have dropped. Shadows are long. The kids next door are mostly quiet.

ugh

Sick with a virus….