Silliman's Blog

Labels: Readings

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Fresh off the airplane in Manchester, I find myself in a studio at the local BBC HQ, talking with Ian McMillan for The Verb. Presumably the segment will run this Friday. One of Ian’s questions is how do I manage all that I do – write big poems, maintain a family, hold down a job, publish a blog, etc. – and what I wish I’d said (what occurs to me now that I’ve had an hour’s sleep back in the converted warehouse that is the hotel where I & many of the Text Festival participants are staying) is that what I often wonder is why everybody else doesn’t manage just as much as this. Marooned on a planet of slackers, the sporadically industrious fellow gets a lot done. My kids will be the first to tell you I’m capable of vegging out in front of a baseball game on the telly, a behavior they find beneath contempt.

Labels: social uses of poetry

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Geof Huth

Sometime this morning, I should arrive in Manchester in the north of England, the first member of my direct line to set foot on British soil since my great grandparents left here roughly 140 years ago. I will be in & around Manchester & Bury until next Monday, when I will take the train to London. It was on a Manchester-to-London train ride where J.K. Rowling first sketched out what would become the tale of Harry Potter, a fact that once would have impressed my sons.

What I know about the Text Festival in Bury is what I’ve heard from Tony Trehy, the organizer, and from Robert Grenier, who attended a few years back. I’m expecting to learn a great deal, and am approaching this entire trip as one potentially infinite educational opportunity.

One definite pleasure that I will have – today in fact – is meeting Geof Huth, whose visual poem “The Construction of the Alphabet” graces the cover and, in various guises, some of the inner pages of The Alphabet. I have been exceptionally fortunate with the covers of my books over time, and never more so than in the last two volumes, The Age of Huts (compleat) & The Alphabet. In each case, I got exactly what I wanted & the result was stunning. (In my next life, maybe I’ll be a book designer if they still have books.)

Given that I’ve been a fan of Huth’s work for several years now & that we live in neighboring states, it’s curious that we’ve not met before. I console myself with the fact that they’re big states & that we have professional careers in different industries that never put us at the same conferences. So I bow to the inspired programming of the folks at the Text Festival.

I’m not sure just how much blogging I will or won’t do over the next ten days. My rule-of-thumb is going to be to get out and look around, and also take some time to do some writing (not of the blog variety) while I’m here. If I can get online, and if I write anything for the blog, so much the better.

Labels: Personal

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Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Diana Adams, Theaters of the Tongue, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2008

Michele Battiste, Ink for an Odd Cartography, Black Lawrence Press, Brooklyn 2009

Erinn Batykefer, Alleghenny, Monongahela, Red Hen Press, Granada Hills, CA 2009

Anselm Berrigan, To Hell With Sleep, Letter Machine Editions, Chicago / Denver 2009

John Gallaher, Map of the Folded World, University of Akron Press, Akron, OH 2009

Julia Hastain aka j/j hastain, asymptotic lover /thermodynamic vents, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2008

Rachel Levitsky, Neighbor, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2009

Chelsey Minnis, Poemland, Wave Books, Seattle / New York 2009

Sawako Nakayasu, Hurry Home Honey, Burning Deck, Providence 2009

Alberto Ríos, The Dangerous Shirt, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend, WA 2009

Michael Rothenberg, Choose, Big Bridge, Guerneville, CA 2009

Douglas Rothschild, Theogony, Subpress, no location given, 2009

George Trakl, In An Abandoned Room: Selected Poems, translated by Daniele Pantano, erbacce-press, Liverpool 2008

Sara Veglahn, Another Random Heart, Letter Machine Editions, Chicago / Denver 2009

Keith Waldrop, Several Gravities, Siglio Press, Los Angeles 2009

Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies (A Trilogy), UC Press, Berkeley 2009

Books (Other)

mIEKAL aND, Bystander: An Irreality, BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo 2008

Jay Brandon, Milagro Lane, Wings Press, San Antonio 2009

Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2008

Arnold Johnston, The Witching Voice: A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns, Wings Press, San Antonio 2009

Journals

House Organ, no. 66, Lakewood, Ohio, Spring 2009. Includes Robert Yagley, John Montgomery, Stephen Ellis, Margueritte, Charles Baudelaire, Ellen Ward, Harrison Fisher, Diane di Prima, Ingeborg Bachman, John Martone, Richard Grossinger, Stephen Ratcliffe, James Bertolino, Burt Kimmelman, Edward Sanders, Kenneth Warren, Paul Pines, A.D. Winans, Jack Hirschman, Hank Lazer, Tom Clark, more.

Zyzzyva, 85 (vol. XXV, no. I), San Francisco, Spring 2009. Includes Tauba Auerbach, Barrett Watten, Masashi Matsumoto, Ann chamberlain, Veronica de Jesus, Kaz Maslanka, Julie Watters, Robert Arneson, Rupert Garcia, Chris Burden, Harry Polkinhorn, Michael McClure, Katherine Aoki, Bryan Bailey, Sophie & Lowell Darling, David Ireland, Dennis Cunningham, John Beech, Sherman Alexie, Enrique Chagoya, many, many more.

Other Formats & Media

Geoffrey Gatza, Fantasia Lights, BlazeVOX, Buffalo & Kenmore, NY 2009 (single-page prose poem folded into a Fantasia Lights cigarette box

Labels: Recently Received

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BlazeVOX has changed its tagline,
which no longer reads
“Good books gone bad”

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