Mar 31, 2008

Kung Fou

Some grad. school chums just launched a new online magazine, Fou, where you will find me, (sandwiched between two much better poets, Dottie Lasky and Brenda Iijima). There's also work by my teacher Elaine Equi, among many other worthies.

In other news, I am doing...uh...spiritual? mental? calisthenics to prepare for an honest attempt at NaPoWriMo. I have some dirty tricks up my sleeve, so I imagine I will be able to pull it off.

Mar 24, 2008

NaPoWriMo

I have been writing short descriptions of the beach at Kingsborough Community College every day I go out there (as part of a project I have been working on, namely, writing short descriptions of the beach at Kingsborough Community College every day I go out there), so I suppose I am somewhat prepped to undertake NaPoWriMo this year, despite my complete inability to write anything in the blog or answer emails ordinarily. If it does not precipitate brilliant poetry, it will perhaps at least get me back in the habit of writing on the blog. Not that anyone has missed me writing on the blog, but still, there has been a marked lack of my monotonous, whiny voice in the ether of late.

But you should steel youself for the fount of banal crap that will most likely issue forth from my fingers for 30 days in April.

Mar 4, 2008

R.I.P.

Gary Gygax drops to -10.

Mar 1, 2008

Landis Everson's WHEN YOU HAVE A RABBIT


Cy Gist Press is happy to announce the general release of Landis Everson's When You Have A Rabbit in connection with the Landis Everson Memorial Reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project on February 22nd, 2008.


(30 pp. Saddle-Stitched). 28 poems written after Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005. Edited by Ben Mazer. Cover Art by Kris Chau. $8 ppd.







Landis Everson was born in 1926 in Coronado, California. When he got to Berkeley in the late 1940s he met Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser and they called themselves The Berkeley Renaissance. Landis studied with Josephine Miles and was the editor of the Berkeley student literary magazine, Occident. Miles called Landis and his friends The Museum School of poetry. Duncan was influenced by Landis and called him The Poet King in letters to Spicer. Spicer admired the ease with which Landis wrote poetry, and wrote to Robin Blaser that Landis was a god for each member of the group. In 1951, while finishing a Master's at Columbia, Landis met John Ashbery who admired his poems and would later print selections from "The Little Ghost I Played With" in Locus Solus. The subject of Landis's Master's thesis was an imaginary seventeenth century poet called Sir William Bargoth, for which Landis concocted both the poems and the commentary upon them. In 1955, while Karl Shapiro's teaching assistant at Berkeley, Landis had the first of six appearances in Poetry, two appearances in the mid-Fifties, followed by four appearances five decades later. In the late 1950s he was introduced to a younger generation of poets that included Joanne Kyger and John Wieners. In 1960, Landis replaced Robert Duncan as the third member of a Sunday poetry group that was run by Jack Spicer and met in Robin Blaser's apartment in San Francisco. Dictated serial poetry was the order of the day. Landis wrote the sequences "Postcard from Eden" and "The Little Ghost I Played With," a few months too late to be considered for Don Allen's anthology The New American Poetry. Then the group stopped meeting, and Landis, who was only writing for his friends, turned to painting, and renovating houses. He didn't write anything for 43 years, during which time none of his poetry appeared in print. Then in the fall of 2003, Ben Mazer contacted Landis to inquire about Landis's poems, which Mazer planned to include in a feature on the Berkeley Renaissance for Fulcrum. Over the next three years, the last of his life, Landis would compose over 300 poems, comprising the book Everything Preserved, which won the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, and Book of Valentines, still in manuscript form. In the spring of 2006 Landis had the first in a series of strokes, which left him incapable of writing any more poems. He took his life on November 17th last year.




Young Goodman Brown

Young Goodman Brown was a window shade.
One side faced Paradise and Hell outdoors
the other furniture, food and shelter in.
But when Faith rolled him up
he saw himself no more.

A spider squeezed out the center and
threaded down. It yawned and opened
its eyes from sleep. All six legs flexed
wide, and like rust it farted spider dust,
which filled the house. We came in

with mops, hexes and vacuum cleaners,
until the house looked clean. But
how to kill a spider, which wasn�t ours?
It was masturbating like hell with every leg. Did
Young Goodman teach him that? Or Nathaniel?.


--Landis Everson