If your little poetic or fictional heart desires, head out to Uncommon Ground in Chicago tonight to talk about submissions and query letters to literary journals via Roosevelt's MFA group Serif.

We're glad to have anyone in or outside Roosevelt's MFA program in attendance. Good luck to everyone on their submissions. There's a lot going right now and a lot of us getting our work out there. Let us all give each other a pat on the back for our hard work!

6:30pm
March 26th, 2010
Uncommon Ground

Check out fellow MFA student Heather Cox and her poem "Ritual" on Dark Sky Magazine's Poetry Noir Collection. It definitely screams femme fatale. Congrats, Heather.

We’re reviewing Modern Times in my History of Narrative film course. This is one of my favorite Chaplin movies. I think he gets arrested about six times. This is one of my favorite scenes. Skip to about 5:00.

Also, check out my favorite modern poet Hart Crane, and see what he has to say about Chaplin.

Chaplinesque
by Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

It was a very good second day of Spring Break, and it’s not over yet. My dear friend from the days of Bowling Green State University, Tyler Jones, is once again joining forces to play music with me. We started a band at the beginning of January with my roommate Brandon, and classmate Mario and got a good list of songs down. Now we’re going to try something new and hope for it to stick. It’s definitely a duo, but Tyler is used to the style because he was in the band Man Duo, which was of course very awesome. I hope we can get some songs up soon. They’re really heavy. I like heavy. Like whale heavy.

I’m trying very authentic Indian food tonight. I’m excited, but we’ll see how that goes. Pictures to come.

Today is the first day of Spring Break. No palm trees or gambling for me, but I do plan on getting a lot done. First thing is to get some writing done and secondly, I’m hoping to get some music recorded. I used my last Spring Break 2K9 to record this. It was a lot of fun and now that I have my own 8-track, and I plan on getting busy with some tunes. I’ll let you hear what’s going on as soon as it gets moved to my computer.

Spring is easily my favorite season and I’ll start off this year’s Spring Break with a trip to Sam’s Chicken and Rib off Grandville. This place has amazing BBQ and their chicken wings are fantastic too. I might have a problem, but I wish everyone else who is on Spring Break to enjoy this time as well.

I’m taking a look ahead at AWP 2010 in Denver. I’m excited. A lot of poetry will be going on Thursday and here are a few of the panels I’m really interested to see. Several people ask me what the hell is AWP? Well, I usually just tell them imagine Comic Con, or Lollapalooza, but with a lot of bookworms and poets and writers who all usually like to drink together and read their work or talk about something ridiculous. (Example: see Bird Panel) It will be the first time going to Denver since I was 10. Treat me well Denver. I hope to explore a lot of your good crafty beers. See you in April.

R103. Inside the Box: Prose Poets on Form and Influence. (Gary L. McDowell,John Bradley, David Shumate, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Kathleen McGookey,Brigitte Byrd) Why do poets pursue prose poems? What about the form attracts and commands the attention of poet and reader alike? Through various influences and experiences, many poets from different schools of poetry have found their way to the prose poem. Five contributors to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (March 2010) will discuss how the prose poem has become abmeaningful part of their poetic lives and read from their work.

R112. The Poets Guide to the Birds: A Reading. (Peggy Shumaker, Keith Ratzlaff, Patricia Kirkpatrick, David Huddle, Rick Campbell, Holly Hughes) A raft of auks, a quarrel of sparrows, a scold of jays, a cast of falcons. Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser have edited a soaring collection—contemporary poems that focus on birds. Six poets will read poems from west of the Continental Divide. You'll hear poems from Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and our AWP Conference host state, Colorado.

R184. How to Start Your Own Online Literary Magazine: Five Editors Tell All. (Rebecca Morgan Frank, Michael Archer, Thom Didato, Gregory Donovan, Ravi Shankar) Have you dreamed of starting your own online literary magazine? Join the editors of Blackbird, Drunken Boat, failbetter, Guernica, and Memorious, five longstanding and respected online journals, as they share the ins and outs of developing and sustaining a literary journal on the web. Come hear about the unique advantages and challenges of editing in this expansive medium, and learn pointers for financing, marketing, and managing the technical challenges of a web‐based journal.

R191. The Soundtrack of the Poem. (Tim Kahl, Forrest Gander, Kristin Prevallet, Brandon Cesmat, Rodrigo Toscano) This panel will discuss the juxtaposition of music with text to elucidate the sonic qualities of work on the page. Exploring how music is foregrounded in a text, we will investigate emphasizing melody, pitch, pacing, rhythm, and counterpoint to instrumentation, and connect those qualities to the creation of meaning and emotion. Does music and language produce modes of consciousness that are therapeutic? Has multimedia's emphasis on musical qualities reasserted the primacy of music in literature?

This will be my new blog. It will dazzle and delight you. I thought my other blog was a bit too personal for what I had originally intended using it for. Hopefully, someday I can start Ghost Bike Press, and start reading manuscripts for poetry chapbooks, and create an online journal to go along with it. I’ll keep you updated with that. I need a website first, but blogging will hopefully start this. Like my last blog, expect movie reviews, book reviews, maybe some cooking ideas, hopefully a lot of photos, and updates on my writing. For the very few of you who read this, I apologize for switching to the new blog. I really intend for this one to be a lot better, and updated a lot more.

For now, I have big news. The third and final Oyez Review reading for issue 37 will take place tomorrow at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square at 7:00pm. Lydia Cesarz, Susan Slaviero, and I will be reading, so come out and have a beer, and get your face melted once again with some tasty poetry.

The Book Cellar
4736-38 North Lincoln Avenue
Friday, March 12, 2010
7:00pm - 8:00pm