Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

NOW AVAILABLE: Jim McCrary’s All That

ManyPenny Press is pleased to announce the release of All That by Jim McCrary. This collection of chapbooks, McCrary’s first full-length book, spans over twenty years of the author’s efforts.

Channeling William Carlos Williams, Ed Dorn, Robert Grenier, Joanne Kyger and others on and within the airwaves, McCrary has created a body of poems that snips and snaps, chuckles and guffaws, tugs and strokes, kisses and bites. Steve Tills puts it this way: “Jim has devoted his spirit and heart to pursuits decidedly antithetical to self-aggrandizement. Quietly, he has followed a most courageous lineage of others also both gentle and careful in their approach to telling the truth and making it uniquely compelling. You’ll sometimes recognize that lineage when you take up All That. You’ll frequently marvel at the quiet, substantive authenticity McCrary has achieved in the sometimes lonesome but always deeply communal turns his truly individuated, unequivocally human poeming has taken.”

Or as K. Silem Mohammad puts it: “Out of the wild Kansas plains comes a howling wind, and in that wind is a howling wolf, and in that wolf is a howling lamb, and in that lamb is a Russian doll with another Russion doll inside it, and inside that one another one, and inside that one a plastic pill bottle because one of the dolls got broken, and in that bottle one last Russian doll, and in that last doll another howling wind–and here we go all over again. Somewhere in there, probably around the first wind and the wolf, is the poetry of Jim McCrary, which is really really really really good.”

 

All That

Including interview excerpt with Tom Beckett

171 pp.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9798478-0-6

 

CONTACT AND ORDERING INFORMATION:

 

ManyPenny Press

1111 E. Fifth St.

Moscow,ID

83843

 

$15.95 + $3 postage

Make checks payable to Crag Hill

 

Bookstores should contact Crag Hill

at cahill@wsu.edu

to arrange for discounts.

 

If you would like to order on-line,

go to: http://www.lulu.com/content/4363355

Mark 08 by Spencer Selby

Call for Papers - Humour in Experimental Poetry

Why Are You Laughing?: Humour in Experimental Poetry

A Special Issue of Open Letter Guest-Edited by Jonathan Ball and Ryan Fitzpatrick

A common complaint of poetry pundits is that experimental poetry tends
to entail a humourless flaunting of critical theory. Yet within this
field, there are a number of poets that make use of humour as a literary
tactic. How exactly is humour used in experimental poetry and what are
its effects? In what ways could we theorize humour in terms of poetry
and language in general? Is humour useful as a destabilizing device, or
is it politically benign? Can humour make difficult poetry more
accessible to a general readership, or does it provide an excuse to
dismiss this work?

We are seeking submissions of essays for a special issue of Open Letter
regarding these issues. Possible topics could include (but are limited to):

  a.. humour and pop culture references in poetry
  b.. irony and/or the failure of irony
  c.. the absurd in poetry
  d.. humour as a coping mechanism
  e.. political uses of humour
  f.. humour as an attack on authority
  g.. shock humour and its poetic value
  h.. specific schools or movements for whom humour is an important tool

Please send proposals (300-500 words) by January 1, 2009. If proposals =
are accepted, then final papers will be due June 1, 2009. Submit in the =
body of an e-mail to either jonathan@jonathanball.com or =
rcfmod@gmail.com.=20

Abounding Generosity from Xexoxial Editions

To keep the entire catalogue in print, to redesign, reissue, revive the Xexoxial Catalogue (over 130 titles in 25-some years). Can't think of any other small press publisher with the such a long list with the generosity and energy to do so.

Here's a re-issue of Dict (c/o www.xexoxial.org):

 

And here's a reissue of Laurie Schneider's Swan Songs I-V:

New Book from Tim Gaze: Noology

Of which he says in an e-mail:

 my book “noology” was recently published by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s imprint Arrum Press:

http://www.lulu.com/content/3737514

 you can download the whole books (sans covers) for free.

 I’m trying to create visual poetry with a similar sensibility to electronic glitch music.

 Brion Gysin observed that literature was 50 years behind painting, until he & William Burroughs incorporated the technique of collage in their cut-ups. I could quip that literature is now only 15 or so years behind electronic music.

 Adriano Spatola’s zeroglifici/zeroglyphics could be seen as precursors to mine.

 a few other people in the 1960s & ‘70s also chopped up letters & symbols. Clemente Padín & some of the Yugoslav poets in Spatola’s journal Geiger, for example.

 I reckon I’m pushing it much further, & have created a form of music for the eyes which children & teenagers might enjoy.

 & hopefully, some of my compositions speak to people in

Asia

who aren’t comfortable with reading Roman letters.

 for today,

 Tim

http://avance.randomflux.info/

Fifth St. Haiku

two two-dimensional robins

macadam

academe

An Actual Kansas Reading Series

An Actual Kansas Reading Series is pleased to welcome two great friends and Milwaukee poets, Karl Saffran and Mike Hauser.  They'll read with Lawrence's Jim McCrary at 6 Gallery on Sunday, October 26, at 7pm.

Mike's new chapbook, Psychic Headset, and Jim's collected chapbooks, All That will both be available for purchase at the reading. 

For brief bios, links to poems, and a visual representation of each poet, please visit An Actual Kansas Blog at http://anactualkansas.blogspot.com .

It's free, as usual, but you should consider buying books from the poets and art from 6 Gallery. 

P.S. This should be the release date of the second ManyPenny Press book, All That by Jim McCrary.

Now Available: derek beaulieu's conceptual novel Local Colour

Local Colour is a page–by–page interpretation of Paul Auster’s 72–page novella Ghosts. Ghosts concerns itself with Blue, a private detective hired by a mysterious character named White to transcribe the actions of Black, a denizen of Brooklyn Heights. As Blue reports his findings, the reader becomes more aware of the intricate relationship between Black and White, and a tactile awareness of colour spreads through the narrative.

With Local Colour, Canadian conceptual novelist and visual artist derek beaulieu has removed the entirety of Auster’s text, leaving only chromatic words—proper nouns or not—spread across the page as dollops of paint on a palette. What remains is the written equivalent of ambient music—words which are meant to be seen but not read. The colours, through repetition, build a suspense and crescendo which is loosened from traditional narrative into a more pointillist construction.

derek beaulieu is the author of chains (2008), fractal economies (2006), with wax (2003) and co-author, with Gary Barwin, of frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho (2005). His conceptual novel flatland: a romance of many dimensions was published in 2007.

beaulieu’s writing is a record of reading, a trace of absence. A writing without writing.

Local Color: 8.5" x 11", 80 pages, ISBN 978-952-215-049-3, cover art by derek beaulieu. Price EUR 20.85 + mailing costs.

Check out mIEKAL aND Interviewed by C. Mehrl Bennett:

http://driftlessmedia.com/movies/wildverse_2008.mov

The man's been inspiring me for thirty years! I especially appreciate his generosity in keeping Xexoxial books in print, even when it involves the tedium of months of scanning. I can't think of any other press of the 1970s or 80s that has reinvigorated the work it brought out then while at the same time continuing to produce work that shoves at the boundaries. Bravo!

Sillimajism

Read our falling: If sky is falling, Dear Liberal Media, and sky is red (if not read, at least in print, carefully), then falling is red, or mis-read, red mist, at dusk.