The Cover of Poetry Magazine, July/August 2007

Welcome to our OETRY.
Notice there is no "P" in it.
Please keep it that way.

Printers' Ball Broken Up by Police

They enter wearing poem-proof vests.
Each is armed with a Poetry Magazine
totebag. In close formation
they swarm the free tables for copies of Make
and Stop Smiling. The chorus
of pixies falls silent. Smokers
are escorted to the loading dock.
No more free half-hot dogs with everything
for you, I'm afraid. We flee
wearing nothing but hard hats and suspenders.
But still the door won't
close. Disperse, they say, disperse,
like clouds in a cloudless sky.

Series A: Speaker Project Reading

Series A
presents a special poetry reading in conjunction with
Juan Angel Chavez 's Speaker Project

Thursday, May 31, 7:00 p.m.
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell

featuring

Tim Yu
Erika Mikkalo
Sarah Lang
Ray Bianchi
Joel Craig
Erica Bernheim

About the Speaker Project:
Chicago based artist Juan Angel Chavez will create a multi-directional, multi-layer sound experience at the Hyde Park Art Center from April 29 to July 8. Composed out of found material we see everyday, such as old billboard signs, wood panel siding and orange traffic cones, the large-scale speaker sculpture will turn the gallery into a laboratory for sound. Audience members are invited to hear how sculpture can change the sound and sight of music.

Byob.
For more information see http://www.moriapoetry.com/seriesa.html or call 312-342-7337.

What Makes a Poem Funny?

Originally uploaded by tympan.

Lessons learned at an evening of comedic poetry at Myopic:

1. Fixed forms are funny. The more elaborate, the better.
1a. Sestinas are especially funny (McSweeney's). Septinas are even funnier (Joyelle McSweeney).

2. Repetition is funny. Especially if you repeat the names of
2a. Animals (Aaron Belz).
2b. Body parts (Gabe Gudding).

3. Anaphora is funny.

4. Lists are funny.

Most Questionable Choice of Reading Material of the Day

A middle-aged man with frayed pant cuffs sitting in a comfortable armchair in a suburban Borders cafe leafing through the most recent issue of Autopistols.

Tim Yu & William Allegrezza @ Myopic Books

MYOPIC POETRY SERIES

presents

Tim Yu & William Allegrezza

Sunday, April 22, 7 pm
Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave, Wicker Park, Chicago

TIM YU won the Vincent Chin Chapbook Prize for his collection Journey to the West, which appears in the Winter 2006 issue of Barrow Street. His work appears in Seven Corners, 2nd Avenue Poetry, Chicago Review, and SHAMPOO, as well as in the forthcoming anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab). He teaches at the University of Toronto.

Musician, sailor, poet, critic--WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria, a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His e-books and books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Ladders in July, and In the Weaver's Valley. He occasionally posts random thoughts on his blog p-ramblings.

The First Volume of Richardson's Clarissa, As Automatically Summarized by Microsoft Word

brother's address. Solmes. father. Solmes. brother. Solmes's favour.
father's power.
Lovelace? sister, if I married him.
Lovelace. family. father's hands.
Lovelace.
younger sister. man.
Solmes.
sister.
man's own. sister loves!
virtuous man.
mother.
father.
family.
that man!
family.
father?] Solmes? family.
If you can
family.
mother. other man's favour.
brother. family. Solmes.
man? mother's. Solmes!] heart, if any man living does. * Lovelace.
If it be
Solmes.
dearest friends! Dear, dear
Solmes. If
If your
heart.
mother.
father. that man.
letter.
man.
father.
letter. If I did
brother.
MY DEAR BROTHER,
If you please. love? family.
sister--
Lovelace!

Look Out, New York

I'll be in New York from Thursday to Sunday attending the Association for Asian American Studies conference. While I'm there, I'll be doing two readings: one on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Lolita for Paolo Javier's 2nd Avenue Poetry (with Emmy Catedral, Kevin Coval, Thom Donovan, Wanda Phipps, and Sukhdev Sandhu) and another on Sunday at 5 p.m. at Verlaine for Kundiman (with Marlon Unas Esguerra, Rona Luo, and Margaret Rhee). Hope to see some of you there.

My T-Shirt

I am thinking about the parallels between a T-shirt that says

It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand

and

It's a language thing. Let me explain.

There is a whole raft of things to say here about how the label "language poet" might or might not resemble the label "woman poet" or "black poet," but you'll just have to wait for the book on that one.

Meanwhile, I guess my T-shirt would have to say

It's an Asian thing. I would explain, but I don't speak English.

Kundiman/Verlaine Reading, April 8, NYC

NYC Reading: 2nd Ave, April 7

A Shoehorn...with Teeth

I've got a few poems up in the March issue of Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, edited by Maurice Oliver. They were originally written as postcard poems in correspondence with Del Ray Cross back in July 2003.

I've been publishing a number of these poems in various places the past few months, and there's a weird nostalgia around them for me: I'm just realizing that they were written during my last month in California. There are some Stanford poems ("White Plaza"), San Francisco making an appearance as "The City at the End of the Rainbow," and glimpses of Chicago from our apartment-hunting trip ("The Magnificent Mile," in Seven Corners).

Adding to the time-warp feeling is that I've just completed my first round of postcard poems in several years--this one a sort of round-robin with my old poem-swap buddies Del, Stephanie, Cassie, and Jennifer. The postcards seem realer and more appropriate now that we're scattered (Cassie in Rochester, NY, me in Chicago or Toronto or wherever), opening up all kinds of possibilities for mishap (a few of Stephanie's postcards took a detour through Canada, and one of Jennifer's arrived with most of the pasted-on poem peeled off, creating an unintentional though interesting fragment), but also less immediate and conversational: sometimes a poem I'd send up the bay would arrive the very same day, while here I can wait a week for one. But opening the mailbox and having poems fall out is still worth it.

Seven Corners

I'm the featured poet this week in the Chicago-based blog journal Seven Corners, edited by Steve Halle. (Warning: the photo of me looking relaxed and summery can be blown up to an alarmingly large size.)

Journey to the West in Barrow Street

The new Winter 2006 issue of Barrow Street is out, and nestled snugly in its center is Journey to the West, a 15-page selection of my poems that won the 2006 Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize. Thanks to the folks at Kundiman, which sponsors the prize (and which is also sending me to their summer retreat at the University of Virginia in June). I also have to give a shout-out to Roger Pao, whose blog reminded me about the contest just before the deadline...and to Alli Warren and Del Ray Cross, whose collaborative efforts brought quite a few of the poems into being...and to Eileen for mentioning it.

My contributor's copies just arrived. I'm pretty sure this is about as many poems of mine as I've ever seen in print in one place before, so it's a bit of a strange sensation--a simultaneous feeling of pride and of looking-over-my-shoulder, is-anybody-else-reading-this embarrassment. The "chapbook" part is a bit of a misnomer, I guess; I'd been fantasizing about it as a pull-out section that you could detach from the binding with a satisfying yank, but it's pretty well integrated (not that that's a bad thing--there's a lot of other good stuff in the issue too, so you don't have to just read it on my account).

I'll be doing a reading in NYC for Kundiman on April 8 at Verlaine, with Marlon Unas Esguerra, Rona Luo, and Margaret Rhee. Hope to see some of you there, after you've rushed out to your local better bookstore and bought up every copy of Barrow Street your little hands can carry.