Poets on Teaching

Many thanks to Joshua Marie Wilkinson, poet and editor of the forthcoming anthology, Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010). My essay, “Some Thoughts on Teaching Poetry to Spoken Word Artists,” has made the final cut for this anthology. Certainly, this is timely in that I start teaching again at the end of next month, and while I will not strictly be form oriented, nor will I be poetry-specific, there is still some time to “tweak” my syllabus a bit to include some traditional (and not so traditional) poetic form.

Some (quick) thoughts on curating publication

[Addendum: Speaking of curating publication, if you haven't gotten your copy of OCHO, here is incentive to do so. Didi Menendez has lowered the prices on recent issues, including OCHO#16.

OCHO for ocho dollars, folks, and you get to read dope new work by Tara Betts, Brian Dean Bollman, Sasha Pimentel Chacón, Ching-In Chen, Linh Dinh, Sarah Gambito, Jessica Hagedorn, Jaime Jacinto, Nathaniel Mackey, Craig Santos Perez, Matthew Shenoda, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Truong Tran, Dillon Westbrook, and Debbie Yee.

So do get to it and support your indie publishers!]

Curating I suppose is another way of saying editing but also something else on top of editing? I am thinking about Silliman’s post on annuals, journals, and anthologies, and whether/how we can differentiate between them. His post caught my eye because of his lukewarm thoughts on Zoland Poetry, which is one of the annuals/anthologies in which some of my work is included. So I don’t mean to come to Zoland’s defense, as much as to say that I believe the intent of an “annual” is similar to the intent of an “anthology,” in providing something of a snapshot of literary scene or even a community.

Silliman brings up the now defunct New Directions Annual, and this reminds me that City Lights Books once had, along the same vein as the NDA, the City Lights Review, which I remember seeing in the bookstore back in the day. Dig this list of contributors for Ends and Beginnings: CLR #6, edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and published in 1994:

Robert Anbian, Amiri Baraka, Alberto Blanco, William S. Burroughs, Andrei Codrescu, Susan Etlinger, Dario Fo, Barry Gifford, J.T. Gillett, Allen Ginsberg, Howard Hart, Elaine Katzenberger, Phillip M. Klasky, Steve Kowit, James Laughlin, D.H. Lawrence, Subcomandante Marcos, Kaye McDonough, Daniel Moore, Norman Nawrocki, Mimmo Paladino, Julian Palley, Pier Paolo Pasolni, Nancy J. Peters, Mark Petrie, Pina Piccolo, Ezra Pound, Jeremy Reed, Arthur Rimbaud, Ed Sanders, Alberto Savinio, Andrew Schelling, Laura Stortoni, Mark Terrill, Ingeborg Teuffenbach, Allen Tobias, Nanos Valaoritis, Georgii Vlasenko, Ron Vroon, Anne Waldman.

Thoughts and Additions: Flip Lit and continuing brain dump

Disjunctive.

(1) Most recent additions to the Flip Lit page are as follows (not in order):

• Pineda, Jon. The Translator’s Diary. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2008.
• Barot, Rick. Want. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2008.
• Lozada, Edwin A., ed. Field of Mirrors. SF: PAWA, Inc., 2008.
• Vengua, Jean. Prau. Saint Helena, CA: Meritage Press, 2007.
• Gotera, Vince. Fighting Kite. San Antonio, TX: Pecan Grove Press, 2007.

I didn’t know Vince Gotera had a new book out until out of curiosity, wondering what he was up to, as I wonder what a lot of Filipino American poets are up to in publishing, I google searched him.

So it’s great knowing that authors who are Filipino American are continuing to publish, beyond first books. And it’s also great knowing that we occupy different, and diverse places in the publishing world/industry. This continuing growing presence partly assuages my yesterday’s feeling of being an American poetry industry misfit.