This Week at No Tell Motel

is Mister Tony Mancus.

Check out his poems.

things making my week a good one

green tea, my students' reactions to Harryette Mullen's Recyclopedia, spinach + soy chorizo lasagna with friends, books in the mail (Karyna McGlynn's I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems and On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, edited by Jonathan Culler), a black cat's new lap habit, annotating Treasure Island for my project, a swept floor, Thursday, rewatching the first episode of Carnivale

Been reading Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008) and Lee Ann Roripaugh's On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois UP, 2009) -- thanks, Lee Ann! Shaughnessy's book has some shared investments with the poems I've lately seen identified with the Gurlesque. I wonder if she's in the anthology coming out from Saturnalia Books in 2010. Her poems also have affinities, for me, with Ruth Williams' poems (see her poem the new H-NGM-N -- issue 9 -- later this week). The pictures here document dinner in Columbus when we visited the Jenike-Butts household yesterday. Josh showed us how to make dough without a mixer. Which we needed to know. (Which someone kneaded at some point.) Toppings 1: red sauce, caramelized onions, roasted garlic, mozzarella, pecorino. Toppings 2: olive oil, pepperoncini, pecorino, fresh pepper. Toppings 3: olive oil, pepperoncini, olives, caramelized onions, pecorino. Toppings 4: cherries, chopped cashews, apple, bourbon-butter sauce, pecorino.

I've been reading a photo-facsimile version of an 18th c. text. The "s" is very "f"-like and so two words are often seen: sail'd/fail'd, otherwise/other[-]wife.

Tuesday's Class

We're reading:

Christine Hume's Musca Domestica
Ashley VanDoorn's "With What Eyes" (from issue four of The Canary), alongside Hume's "True and Obscure Definitions of Fly, Domestic and Otherwise" in particular
an excerpt from Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson

I'm presenting a paper on several poems from Musca Domestica at the Third Biennial Conference of the Contemporary Women's Writing Network, so I'm particularly excited to hear what my students have to say about this week's material.

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Last week's "voyage poems" discussion went well. Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Hart Crane's "Voyages," and Wallace Steven's "The Comedian as the Letter C."

An Essay in Words and Images

What We Did on Our Almost-Summer Vacation in Brooklyn

During our layover in D.C. on Friday, M and I experienced remarkably happy flyers, due largely to the spinning wheel of prizes set up by United Airlines. We won two game books and worked their crosswords in an airport brewery. People took pictures of their flying companions spinning the wheel. O the power of a wheel.


Saturday, we went to Brett’s (and Evan’s and Jane’s, etc.) new apartment for (what turned into a twelve-hour) brunch and a reading-chain of James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem. Much laughing (much needed).

Before heading over to Unnameable Books for the reading on Sunday, Sommer, M, and I went to Le Barricou for brunch. I wanted to eat the table. I wanted to eat the breakfast nook. I took a picture that will hopefully impart this wanting to you. What I ate instead: eggs Florentine. There’s no pictures of what M and Sommer ate, but they ate a Spanish omelet and steak + eggs, respectively.
We heard several people read for the EOAGH Launch (including Thomas Cook, Pattie McCarthy, and James Belflower), then I read, then Sommer performed, then we took a reading break and went to Beast for drinks with new and old poet friends, where an even older poet friend met us. Then back to the reading. I liked the length and casualness of the reading; it seemed like every reader had a different audience. Much leaving and claiming (and reclaiming) of chairs. After the sun went down, M read. I found a new Donna Haraway book I want but didn’t get. After M read, we got sandwiches from Hana’s Deli near Sommer’s. At the deli, I had my second encounter of the weekend with Thriller. The first encounter was when Cindy played us a YouTube video of the Lego homage to “Thriller.” The second encounter came in the form of a vegetarian club sandwich (named the Thriller)—tofurky slices, veggie bacon, pesto mayonnaise, jalapenos, Colby jack cheese, tomatoes, avocado, lettuce, pickles, and seven-grain bread, triple-stacked. I told Sommer I could eat three sandwiches a day, one a meal, and I meant it. M got a tofu Rueben that was good but not as good as my Thriller so we traded one of our halves. I had half of my half for breakfast.

At the airport, we saw Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio, which seemed like a good person for us to see to round the trip off. We came home to a basket of kittens. We came home and basked in our cats.

Recently Mine (to soon mind)

Stephanie Young's Picture Palace (ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni, 2008)

Stephanie gave a reading/performance at Dana Ward's last night, part of which all will be able to experience after Michael Hennessey puts the reading bit of it up on PennSound.

Andrew Zawacki's Petals of Zero / Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009)

Sandra Simonds's Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008) and Used White Woman (Grey Book Press, 2009)

Aryanil Mukherjee's late night correspondence: a collection of transcreated poems (Cinnamon Teal, 2008)

Joshua Marie Wilkinson's The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo, 2009)

Norman Finkelstein's Scribe (Dos Madres, 2009)