City Lights Books: Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook

I am saddened to read this morning about the poetry reading Eileen Tabios recently attended (see her blog post here). Actually, that type of poet, what I’ll call the entitled poet, really gets me negative about po-biz and how folks get consumed about it. For more on po-biz, and the importance of each of us controlling our own careers, hence, avoiding its consuming you, do read Guy LeCharles Gonzalez’s post here. But po-biz and poetry are two different things, and I am a firm believer in the poem, the work to birth the poem, the body of poems, the book, and the connection made with the reader and audience.

OK, that’s my preface to Sesshu Foster’s City Lights Books reading from his latest book, World Ball Notebook. This is the second time I’ve seen Sesshu read; the first was with Small Press Traffic for their evening of fiction which also included R. Zamora Linmark, and so I was very happy to be co-hosting that event. I’m a big fan of his work, having come to City Terrace Field Manual nearly a decade after its release. Still, I realize I came to this book at exactly the right time in my poetics, writing process, ongoing education. At his SPT reading, I picked up Atomik Aztex, which was bloody, surreal, absurd, crazy, and dense, and really very very funny.