No One Talks About This by Carl Rakosi

They go in different ways.
One hog is stationed at the far end
of the pen to decoy the others,
the hammer knocks the cow
to his knees,
the sheep goes gentle
and unsuspecting.
Then the chain is locked
around the hind leg
and the floor descends
from under the them.
Head down they hang.
The great drum turns
the helpless objects
and conveys them slowly to the butcher waiting
at his station
for their jugular.

The sheep is stabbed
behind the ear.

Gentle sheep, I am powerless
to mitigate your sorrow.
Men no longer weep
by the rivers of Babylon,
but I will speak for you.
If I forget you, may my eyes
lose their Jerusalem.



from Ere-Voice. New Directions. 1968.

poem

from how to survive a hotel fire, by angela veronica wong (forthcoming from Coconut Books 2012)

the vase with the broken neck
the banana with the broken neck
the bottle with the broken neck
the virgin with the broken neck
the cello with the broken neck
the tulip with the broken neck
the umbrella with a broken wing
the book with its broken neck
the noose with a broken neck
and gaze, a broken neck
pencils and their broken necks
swans with broken necks
a graveyard from broken necks
a neck of broken necks
the tall letters with their broken necks
a k a d a b with broken necks

poem

The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen
by John Coletti, from Mum Halo

There by the cut green grass and a stampede
swallow whole .99 Mandarin orange
remember telling Anselm how
I'm scared of running out of problems
hardy chuckle matching halves
in heart hurt and brain pain
MoveOn's blue blossoms
then places to buckle
loving white-out way too mch
pleasant trouble
more stubborn, morep lain
will always trade new bird in
for its translation

Ofelia Hunt Interviews Me

www.ofeliahunt.com

I've been on the Best Books of 2011

Firstly,

Gina Myers listed Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV as one of her best books of 2011.



And Joshua Ware was lovely enough to list Laked, Fielded, Blanked by Brooklyn Copeland, just out from my very own alice blue books.

And then Nathan Logan listed Your Trouble is Ballooning as one of his best books of 2011, alongside A Minetta Gould's Arousing Notoriety and Brooklyn Copeland's Laked, Fielded, Blanked.


It's an honor and a privilege and a whole lotta flattery. Thank you all!

"The wordplay, even letterplay, of "someone's anemone" is part of a complex score that spans the entire chapbook."

Read Gregg Murray's complete review of Brooklyn Copeland's "Laked, Fielded, Blanked" here: http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/chap-nook-5-lerner-copeland-goetz

The chapbook is, of course, available at alice blue books.

much love, my people

Women's Quarterly Conversation

They interview me here.

a review of my book, yo

Patick James Dunagen was kind enough to review my book Your Trouble is Ballooning (see: split chap with Arousing Notoriety by A. Minetta Gould).

"Nelson's half, in turn, folds and unfolds language in a long poem-series of eight numbered sections of four parts each, testing reasoned argument against colloquial play..."

You can read the full review HERE.

Oooh. Updates and stuff...

I wrote an essay about Ofelia Hunt's Today & Tomorrow. It's called "Robots, the Scientific Method, and Dying."

You can read it here: Lit Pub.

I also read an excerpt from Stacy Doris' new book, The Cake Part, available from Publication Studio. She's an amazing poet. Also check out her other books, like Paramour and Conference. Her new book, The Cake Part, is available from Publication Studio.

You can see some other totally awesome people read excerpts from the book as well.

LAKED, FIELDED, BLANKED

L A K E D, F I E L D E D, B L A N K E D by Brooklyn Copeland





You can get a copy of your very own right here: alice blue books

While you are there, check out Issue 14.

damn

...the new issue of H_ngm_n is effing awesome.

Check it here: h_ngm_n12

(linked to a spectacular poem by Amorak Huey, who I had never read before)

Gina Myers said some nice things.

You can read it here.

thanks Gina!

NaPoWriMo 2011

It's that time. It's been going.

I have been going. And going. Thank you Slash Pine Festival for letting me read. For introducing me to new people who also happen to write poems. For your book table where I spent more than I made. And thanks, also, to If Not For Kidnap, in Portland, and its beautiful hosts for hosting me, and The Tumblers and their guitars, and the people from Boise who skyped in. Reading there was a great joy.

Now it's April. And if I see that it's "the cruelest month" in one more blog...gah...

Anyway... I've written a poem a day for the month of April for the last 3 years and this year I am doing it again. Sort of.

I'm writing fragments. Everyday. Sometimes just one. Sometimes multiple. In a notebook.

Usually, I do NaPoWriMo publicly. On this blog.

Usually, I write poems, whole.

Now, fragments. I think it's a product of the way I'm existing in time.

And that time is spent always going from one place to another.

My space is in motion.



***


I am also preparing to prepare for STP-- otherwise known as Seattle to Portland-- a long, long bike ride. Or, at least, that's a long bike ride for me. Now I'm preparing to regularly bike 2 hrs a day. And then even longer bike rides on the weekend. I'm most definitely not in shape for this.

Most definitely not.

But I'm looking forward to that shapeliness.

linktastic

A few updates to my literary career:

Both Your Trouble is Ballooning, and Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV are in print and available for purchase. Which is rad.



Brooklyn Copeland was kind enough to publish a poem of mine in her beautiful, hand-made lit chap Taiga which is available for purchase here. And you can read a short interview with me here. (And see a giant picture of my face.)



Also, I was interviewed for the poetry podcast "The Moe Green Discussion" and you can listen to it here. Or you can get it off itunes.



And finally, a selection from my sequence "Dutch Baby Combo" is being featured on No Tell Motel this week and I am super excited about it.

poets should read this short story

from "The First Sally (A) OR Trurl's Electronic Bard"
by Stanislaw Lem

"Trurl had once had the misfortune to build an enormous calculating machine that was capable of only one operation, namely the addition of two and two, and that it did incorrectly. As is related earlier in this volume, the machine also proved to be extremely stubborn, and the quarrel that ensued between it and its creator almost cost the latter his life. From that time on Klapaucius teased Trurl unmercifully, making comments at every opportunity, until Trurl decided to silence him once and for all by building a machine that could write poetry. First Trurl collected eight hundred and twenty tons of books on cybernetics and twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry, then sat down to read it all. Whenever he felt he just couldn't take another chart or equation, he would switch over to verse, and vice versa. After a while it became clear to him that the construction of the machine itself was child's play in comparison with the writing of the program. The program found in the head of an average poet, after all, was written by the poet's civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it."

...

"During the next two weeks Trurl fed general instructions into his future electropoet, then set up all the necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better of it and started the machine himself. It immediately proceeded to deliver a lecture on the grinding of crystallo-graphical surfaces as an introduction to the study of sub-molecular magnetic anomalies. Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more electromotive; the machine sobbed, went into hysterics, then finally said, blubbering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world this was. Trurl intensified the semantic fields and attached a strength of character component; the machine informed him that from now on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add six floors to the nine it already had, so it could better meditate upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philosophical throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after endless pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite something: "I had a little froggy." That appeared to exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated, disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could think of, and the machine presented him with a poem that made him thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't there to laugh—imagine, simulating the whole Universe from scratch, not to mention Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful doggerel! Trurl put in six cliche filters, but they snapped like matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum steel. This seemed to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an alternating rhyme generator—which nearly ruined everything, since the machine resolved to become a missionary among destitute tribes on far-flung planets. But at the very last minute, just as he was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was struck by an inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine simpered a little, whimpered a little, laughed bitterly, complained of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it was fed up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how sorry they'd all be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen and paper."

... and so it continues.

alice blue

I S S U E  T H I R T E E N

P O E T R Y

jennifer stockdale
thomas patrick levy
ruth williams
dana guthrie martin
trey jordan harris
jenn marie nunes
daniela olszewska
nate slawson
russell jaffe


P R O S E

katie jean shinkle
sam martone
karin gottshall
michael k meyers
jenniey tallman
nate liederbach
reynard seifert

Your Trouble is Ballooning

Something cool!

Your Trouble is Ballooning by Amber Nelson

38 pages
80 pages
6 x 7.5"
Split side with A. Minetta Gould
cover art by Kelly Packer
Official release date 01/11/2011
preorder in mid December

Advance praise from Stacy Doris, author of Knot:
Amber Nelson works in the tension between meaning and making.: a music of shifts and sleights. Intention is not imposed but what emerges, not the isolate personal "I" but the pulse of American culture and history. "In the correspondence of assassination/ In the simmer green floor that jettisons" –- please read!

About the book and its author:
Your Trouble is Ballooning is comprised of eight sections of dense and lovely mysteries. Nelson is the co-founder and editor for alice blue. She has recent work published in H_ngm_n, Coconut, and Columbia Poetry Review. Another chapbook, Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV, will be available from Slash Pine Press.

Like, woah...

2010 Open Reading Winners & Finalists

We’re thrilled to announce that we have chosen Amber Nelson and Harold Abramowitz for publication in the upcoming year. Nelson’s Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV and Aramowitz’s A House on a Hill  will appear in late 2010 or early 2011 much to our delight.

We’d also like to congratulate our finalists whose work we read with great excitement and debate: 

• The Hawk You See May Be Your Own by Temple Cone
• A Practical Guide to Contemporary Economics by Joshua Ware
• Late Sermons of the Ego by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
• Grimm Realities by Ellen LaFleche
• Midnight’s Marsupium by Michael Leong
• Folding In by Renee Emerson
• (aviary) by Genevieve Kaplan
• A Portable Model of How Memory Works by Joseph Mains
• Seven Pictures by Ben Berman
• Heaven as Nothing but Distance by Joshua Robbins
• Sham City by Evan Harrison
• :Odyssey & Oracle:by Jenn McCreary

Thanks to everyone who submitted a manuscript for consideration. Without the range of wonderful work to choose from, there would be no press and no one to wow our socks off. The following titles are the finalist manuscripts. Unfortunately, we had to pass on many good manuscripts.   But please, as always, consider sending a new or revised manuscript during our next reading period in 2011.

Best,

Slash Pine Editors

 

PoetLife

Some poets can't go a day without writing, and a week is monstrous. These poets tend to be monstrous themselves, when not writing.

I am not one of these writers.About twice a year I go weeks, perhaps even a month or two, without producing a single thing. Maybe even not writing. The thing is... I just get tapped, mentally drained, nothing left to give. I call it recuperation. Writing is mentally and emotionally exhaustive... at least for me. After the end of a period of mass production (because normally when I'm writing I write a lot), there's just not a lot left in me for much of anything. Like, really. Anything. Usually I sit around watching spectacularly bad tv, which I enjoy immensely. Usually I don't read. Usually when I finally have the energy to read again, it indicated writing was around the corner.

But then there was grad school... 2 years of wild productivity, reading, writing, everything. And then a thesis. 2.5 years passed and January rolled around and I could write no more. And I didn't write anything more. Except a quickie chapbook in March. A one off. And then NapoWrimo... which was really just an exercise in futility. Realistically, I say I havent' been writing since January. That's going on 7 months. Above and beyond my usual points of recuperation. And I was starting to feel bad, like I might never get it back.

But I've been reading, for pleasure, for a while now. And recently dipped my toes back in to reading poetry. And I wrote something today.Whether it's good or worth bothering with doesn't matter. It was the impulse to write and I took it. And it's possible it might stick this time. And it's possible it might not.


A sample:

                                     "The ache of corn starch.
Dreaming of clean lines—I enter the breach and
reconceive the whole. The whole thing is burning down.
Everyone is burning down.

But your wilderness.

It keeps growing."

Some Quick Press:

So, Lucas Farrell, of alice blue numero 9, & alice blue books (see The Blue-Collar Sun) was selected for inclusion in

Dzanc Books Best of the Web!

Yay. Congratulations Lucas!