Rothenberg Interview/diGiorno Collages/Age vs Success/Coletti Book/Art Exhibit

Ed Coletti Interviews Michael Rothenberg founder of 100 Thousand Poets for Change


Q: Michael, how did you dream up this ambitious project?

A: Two months ago I was chatting with a friend on Facebook, complaining about the world, and I said in desperation, "There ought to be 100 Thousand Poets for Change!" My friend replied, "That's a good idea." So I created an event page on Facebook asking my Facebook friends if they would be interested in a demonstration/ celebration of poetry to promote serious social and political change?

Q: How many countries are now involved in staging poetry events on (what's the date?)?

A: So far 170 cities and 44 countries have signed on to organize events on September 24. Nearly 100 events in the USA!

Q: How many total venues.


A: I estimate the number of venues at around 200 venues to date. In Cincinnati there will be a "crawl" down Main Street from shop to shop, an hour poetry reading in each shop. So there might be 8 venues in Cincinnati but I am not counting those! In the Bay Area there are 10 venues.

Q: What are some of the more surprising examples? (I'm going to say something like only Jupiter and Saturn not staging events)

A: Yesterday I signed on a world famous bookstore Al Kotob Khan in Cairo, Egypt. We have had very positive response from African nations, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa. And the Slam community is into the event in a big way. They are calling their events SLAM FOR CHANGE, participants include Oakland Slam poets, Austin Poetry Slam, Hilo, Hawaii slam, Boise, Idaho, Spokane Poetry Slam and Thess Poetry Slam in Athens, Greece. I expect there will be many more.

Q: Most heartwarming response?

A: I received a video in my email from Limerick, Ireland. It was a recording of a gathering of The Whitehouse Poets where they announced their decision to participate in a global movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, and expressed their desire to be the center of this movement for all of Ireland. I also liked to hear from a group in Canada who are not poets but want to read poetry about political and social change on September 24. And I am inspired by the planned gathering of the most famous poets in Bangladesh, Nirmolendu goon, Joyonta deb, Aditto anik, and Syed Shamshul hoque in Bogra, Bangladesh for September 24.


Q: Funniest response or reaction thus far?
Someone told me they weren't interested in the program because they liked to keep their poetry and politics separate.

Q: How are you coping? Are you sure you're doing enough?

A: Sigh. It is inspiring and exhausting. I am drawn in by the enthusiasm of others. I never feel that I have done enough.

Q: I was joking. I admire you for the amount of effort you put into helping poetry count both with this and your previous Katrina projects.

CORE SAMPLE 2


We want to live like movie stars

We don't trust politicians but still

Let them run our lives

What's another landfill of radios at 20 ft

Computers at 10ft. Poetry at five

Polyurethane embryos and vinyl blood

Take a sample, smear it on a slide

Bombard it with laser, atoms, literary criticism

Snow falls in Sierras 3 inches per hour

Chains required on major passes

Too late to turn back

(Michael Rothenberg 1999)

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The Joy!

Bay Area Poet Geri diGiorno also is a wonderful portrait collagist currently being featured at Big Bridge. Here's the link to Geri diGiorno collages.


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The Horror!


Check this out from Poets & Writers study "The Anatomy of Awards." Of 1,064 contest winners, 129 won prizes resulting in the publication of a full-length book. Of the winners aged 65+, a mere 4 percent prevailed! What do you conclude?





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In case you missed this on the P3, I'm very proud of the book and will repeat this here in "No Money in Poetry."


Coming Out in June!!!

Double-Click on Cover to Enlarge (so you can read review blurbs)



















June Painting Exhibit

Double-Click to Enlarge
























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Patrick Dunagan's Gustonbook/Jack Foley on Money in Poetry/Henry Miller Too/Indispensable Donald Hall Essay/

Unconnected Snippets from SF Bay Area Poet Patrick James Dunagan's marvelous and curious new book There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK

A hand moves
eye starts
words go
***
Forget order
impose nothing
onto things
***
Pulling things up
rooted resemblances
of what
***

Pilings of stuff
tangled roots
early Zephyr surf team
cutting through
pillars of burned
out Santa Monica
pier late '70s
California

When shit gets petty
get petty
right back

(for Ted Berrigan
& Alice Notley
'81-'82)
***

One makes the world
of the poem
making the world
of words the poem makes
***

Language is color
the medium resists
***

there are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as
mass, there are only
eyes in all heads,
to be looked out of
***

A sudden brilliance


& then
***

Ideas acquire years
***

It cannot but be
***

More than
willing
this

happens
to be
just

notes that
any one
so might

accrue
of their own
asking



What's meant
isn't
***

I did this thing
I did
in the dark of light
I dig

this thing I did
***

just being here
touching me
other one
here, here
just touch
***

You would be certain
of that brick
***

bits incomplete
echo any interest
***

I am so jealous of color
***

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Now back to the title of this site No Money in Poetry

But is there poetry in money?? Check out Bay Area poet Jack Foley's humorous take followed by that of Big Sur's Henry Miller

“NO MAN BUT A BLOCKHEAD EVER WROTE, EXCEPT FOR MONEY”

—Dr. Johnson

why would you want to

tra la tra la sang isadora

publish a book

as she danced

if you didn’t want

in practically

to make money from it

nothing at all

why would you put

mi chiamano Mimi

money into it

says the pretty young girl

if there were no money

in the opera written

to be got out of it

in the hope of gaining

why would you want to

fame &

write a poem

money

if you didn’t want

you gotta eat don’t you?

to make money from it

“consider the lilies of the field”

why would you want

not everybody has a heavenly father

to paint a picture

or as we say in the theater

why would you want to write a song

a sugar daddy

(are you crazed? do you think you’re a bird?)

or golly a sugar mommy

if there were no money in it

or even a sugar nephew

why would you want

don’t be a diabetic sweetie

to do anything at all

you need something

anything at all

to put in your coffee

why bestir yourself

or your coffer

why get thee out of bed

before you get put

why make something beautiful

in yr god damn coffin

whoo the old moola

so go out there swinging

if you don’t want

shake that thing

wow the green stuff

but don’t be too bohème honey

to make money

when you show em your legs

(gimme the coin I want that sweet)

make sure they show you

why would you

their credit cards

anything

you want to be kempt

if you couldn’t anything

but you gotta be “kept”

why would you money

“better to go down dignified

publish money a

“with boughten friendship at your side”

money if you money

a poet said that and he made lots of it

didn’t money

want to money

money

(why?)

money

Make

money

money!

Money!

- Jack Foley's recent bio = Balding. "Ubiquitous." Tap dances. Writes. Erases

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I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money . and if you have money , or you don't have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money? - Henry Miller

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Indispensable Essay by Donald Hall

When I read this, I wondered what poet could live without it. Then, putting it on here, I couldn't imagine abridging it. However, since it's "longish," I'll provide it's beginnings here and add a link to the full essay. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing!

Poetry and Ambition
by Donald Hall

1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. And it seems to me that contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition—a modesty, alas, genuine ... if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense. Of course the great majority of contemporary poems, in any era, will always be bad or mediocre. (Our time may well be characterized by more mediocrity and less badness.) But if failure is constant the types of failure vary, and the qualities and habits of our society specify the manners and the methods of our failure. I think that we fail in part because we lack serious ambition.

2. If I recommend ambition, I do not mean to suggest that it is easy or pleasurable. "I would sooner fail," said Keats at twenty-two, "than not be among the greatest." When he died three years later he believed in his despair that he had done nothing, the poet of "Ode to a Nightingale" convinced that his name was "writ in water." But he was mistaken, he was mistaken. ... If I praise the ambition that drove Keats, I do not mean to suggest that it will ever be rewarded. We never know the value of our own work, and everything reasonable leads us to doubt it: for we can be certain that few contemporaries will be read in a hundred years. To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

But I just called high ambition sensible. If our goal in life is to remain content, no ambition is sensible. ... If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

3. But for some people it seems ambitious merely to set up as a poet, merely to write and to publish. Publication stands in for achievement—as everyone knows, universities and grant-givers take publication as achievement—but to accept such a substitution is modest indeed, for publication is cheap and easy. In this country we publish more poems (in books and magazines) and more poets read more poems aloud at more poetry readings than ever before; the increase in thirty years has been tenfold.

So what? Many of these poems are often readable, charming, funny, touching, sometimes even intelligent. But they are usually brief, they resemble each other, they are anecdotal, they do not extend themselves, they make no great claims, they connect small things to other small things. Ambitious poems usually require a certain length for magnitude; one need not mention monuments like The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queen, Paradise Lost, or The Prelude. "Epithalamion," "Lycidas," and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" are sufficiently extended, not to mention "The Garden" or "Out of the Cradle." Not to mention the poet like Yeats whose briefer works make great connections.

I do not complain that we find ourselves incapable of such achievement; I complain that we seem not even to entertain the desire.

Please press here for the full essay!

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Jim Spitzer/Jack Crimmins/Coletti's Heart/Miles Frode/

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man,
and he is only completely a man when he plays.
Friedrich Schiller



http://www.jimspitzerart.com/


Jack Crimmins Poem in Lilliput Review

The Sea Is Near Us

Always we are made
of what is lost.
Fractures in the soul
heal as we age.
The kites tread the air
near the vultures.
I still dance and chant
sometimes before the moon.





http://www.flickr.com/photos/edcolettipaintings/


what else?

when this body is gone

gone

when any body is gone

even gone

by its own hand,

even when it’s rotted

from cancer or burned

like a witch in the fire

it’s gone

as when my father’s ashes

on a shelf in the closet

appropriately weighing

twice as much as

my mother’s ashes

next to his

on that same closet shelf

merely simulate

presence

what else

I wonder

what else?

-- ed coletti (2010)

milesfrode@gmail.com






















Poetry Azul Flier by Ray Swaney
tedateamerica@gmail.com

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Mehrhoff PoemVilma/Vilma Ginzberg's New Book "Snake Pit"/Caged Mentally Ill Also in California State Prisons/

That snap in the air,
some other poet
has broken the language.

- Charlie Mehrhoff in Lilliput Review


New from Round Barn Press and Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg



















where the scar is

touch me where I’m tender
touch me where I yield
touch me where you mustn”t
there the scar is

touch me where I’m hungry
touch me where I hurt
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me where I’m lonely
touch me where I weep
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me where I’m frozen
touch me where I cringe
touch me where you mustn’t
where the scar is

touch me in the never
touch me in the not
touch me in the nowhere
touch me touch me not
where the scar is


touch me when I trust you
touch me when I ask
touch me when I’m ready
where the scar is



touch me with your kindness
touch me where I know
touch me make me tougher
where the scar was


To obtain an autographed copy of Vilma Olsvary Ginzberg's Snake Pit. send a check for $10. to Vilma Ginzberg at 316 Cypress Circle, Healdsburg, CA 95448

Some Previous Round Barn Press Chapbooks

Richard Krech - Some Global Positioning Dharma
Rychard Denner - Calendar of the Moon
Ed Coletti - Peace Planters, Family Matters 
     and Jazz Gods
David Madgalene  - Kali
Justin Adkins - Dream Climber
Bill Vartnaw - Postcards

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comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous"
if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name.
Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at
edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.

• 

Therapist Daniel Tennenbaum plays guitar during a prison therapy session.… (Rick Loomis, Los Angeles Times)

Objections raised to caging inmates during therapy

Prisoners with psychiatric problems must be treated, and the therapists must be protected, but many question the state's approach.

December 28, 2010|By Jack Dolan, Los Angeles Times

Before group therapy begins for mentally ill maximum-security inmates at California prisons, five patients are led in handcuffs to individual metal cages about the size of a phone booth. Steel mesh and a plastic spit shield separate the patients from the therapist, who sits in front of the enclosures wearing a shank-proof vest.

When the lock clanks shut on the final cage — prison officials prefer to call them "therapeutic modules" — the therapist tries to build the foundation of any successful group: trust.

During a recent session at a prison in Vacaville, psychologist Daniel Tennenbaum, wearing a herringbone sports coat over his body armor, sat just out of urination range of the cages with an acoustic guitar, trying to engage the inmates with a sing-along of "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay."

About a decade ago, a federal judge ruled that it was cruel and unusual punishment to leave mentally ill prisoners in their cells without treatment. Since then, state prisons have spent more than a billion dollars delivering care to an ever-growing population of inmates diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric problems.

State officials say they have not tried to estimate how much of that cost is attributable to the caged therapy. The value of the sessions, however, is the subject of heated debate among mental health professionals today.

"Those cages are an abomination. They train people that they're not human, that they're animals," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist in Berkeley who served as an expert witness on treatment of mentally ill prisoners in the case that forced California prisons to provide psychiatric care.

"It's bizarre, it has a Hannibal Lecter quality to it," said H. Steven Moffic, likening California's procedures to the measures used to contain an incarcerated serial killer in "The Silence of the Lambs."

Moffic, a psychiatry professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has written about treating patients in prisons under less imposing restraints. "I'm not quite sure what the clinicians think they are going to get out of it," he said of California's method.

Prison officials say they're doing their best to comply with the court order, which requires them to offer treatment to all mentally ill inmates, no matter how dangerous.

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Money in Poetry/ ZYZZYVA Poem/Howard Junker Tribute/Raskin Chapbook/New Spitzer Paintings/Gary Snyder Sleeping 1963/

Do exceptions disprove the rule?


















Winter issue of ZYZZYVA









Small Tribute to Howard Junker

Howard Junker's vision "over many a
summer" as editor of the iconic
ZYZZYVA is legendary. So, sadly, I
report that Howard, in the Winter
2010 issue, proclaims, "this is my swan
song" and that he is turning over the
editorship. However, having turned over
a thing or two recently myself, I know
that Howard will make rich use of his
new-found time. I don't know how good a
poem it is, but my "Last Suppers In Texas"
is the last poem in Howard's final edition as
editor of ZYZZYVA. Thank you, Howard, not
only for honoring my poem but for showcasing
the work of so many wonderful west coast
authors over these "many a summer."



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Jonah Raskin's New Chapbook Auras

Black

The thread that
connects the living
to the dying,
the blackness
inside the whale
that swallowed the prophet,
the color that became prophetic itself,
that engulfed the sinful cities and
all their woeful sinners.

The blackness of the
whip and the chain,
the richness of blackness,
blackberries,
eaten one by one in the
delicious darkness of
the night
by the solitary visitor
from beyond the
midnight hour
who came out of the grave,
in tatters and rags,
with the smell of the grave
on his breath,
who took away
our daily light,
showed us the black letters
on the white page and
all the mercenaries stored in
the blackness of libraries,
(American blackness)
that is loveable and hate-able
that can’t be washed away,
or bleached out,
that’s the blues
on the radio that
bleeds the heart,
makes the heart beat
blacker, wilder,
with the taste of
bittersweet blackness.

To get a copy 0f Auras, send a check for $5 made out to Jonah Raskin and mailed to Raskin, Coms Dept. SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, CA. 94928. Make sure to include your address!

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Copies of New Jim Spitzer Original Acrylics















For Sale

jimspitzer@lycos.com

or visit the studio at
4524 Badger Rd.
Santa Rosa, CA 95404

707-538-4640























































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Hypatia of Alexandria/Madgalene on Hip-Hop/Eddie Boy

Hypatia of Alexandria

She is after all only a woman, thus is she taken over
by what men refer to as a mere idea.
However she, Hypatia, as woman, contains and embraces
this idea as her own and has given to it birth,
makes the idea fully her own darling while men, particularly holy men,
cannot fathom the beingness of this basal conception,
the very texture of this woman’s selfhood.

Imagine yourself a Greek Christian man
here in the early 5th century.
Hypatia, daughter of an Alexandrian mathematician,
espousing a uniquely threatening view of harmony as her own
as if she had any right to own anything when such a blasphemy
would fancy a self with rights like ownership.
But what these Christian men really despise more than reason is
just how cocksure Hypatia pretends to be when, as a scientist,
she “confuses” harmony with oneness and declares the one,
the neo-platonist one, to be something
personal and dwelling within her.
So they brand her a “pagan.”
The saintly Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria,
declares himself to be without choice, but choice after all
is a matter of ownership, something though forbidden women,
Cyril himself relishes like gold leaf, covering himself amply with it.

It is much simpler to gull men
by planting paganism’s pretension to godhood
in the corpse of this woman Hypatia
by eliminating her debauched effigy
completely forever by incineration
after furiously pulling her from her chariot,
denuding her, cutting her with shells into pieces
and finally burning these shards of Hypatia
who not only symbolizes but who is fully
in harmony with herself, who owns her oneness,
who knows all ideas to be part of who she is,
this basic uncompromising lamentably unknown but
fully knowing woman.

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David Madgalene sent me this thoughtful piece. I've added the Nas video in order to help those of you who aren't into rap and may need the audio-visual aid. But also, if you're hip to hop, enjoy anyway.

Here's Nas with "HipHop Is Dead"


The Salvation of Hip Hop
by David Madgalene (October 6, 2010)

Hip Hop has been the only true defense of rhyme and meter in my lifetime. I’m sorry, but the New Formalists have failed to make their case. However, ironically, perhaps, during the administration of our first Hip Hop President, Hip Hop appears to be dying, if, indeed, it’s not already dead, as Nas and others have already proclaimed. There is nothing unusual or untoward in this since branches of Popular Music seem to run in thirty-year cycles before exhausting themselves. For example, the 20s were the Jazz Age, the 30s were the Swing Era, and the 40s was the Big Band Era. Although be bop and cool jazz and a number of other innovations followed in the late forties and after, Jazz could never again claim to be the popular music. Rock and Roll was the Popular Music in the 50s, and Rock was the popular music of the 60s and ‘70s (at least, until, perhaps the coming of Disco).

The Eighties are problematic. 80s’ Rock was a Rock clearly in decline. R & B, nor Country, never was the popular music. I can’t make a case for Dance Music, since the leading exemplars of Dance Music, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince, made so many records that weren’t Dance Music. Although Hip Hop may or may not have been the bona-fide popular music of the 80s, I have no recourse but to champion it in this light since it was the only popular music that, in the 80s, was in its ascendency, and not decline. So I’m proposing the first great seminal outpouring of Hip Hop coming out of the New York in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by the late ‘80s becomes the Popular Music (for my purposes, and in lieu of any true contenders), and, the Popular Music, which, in its turn, is reinvented via the mid ‘90s by the West Coast Rappers, and then is reinvented yet again in the early years of the New Millennium by Eninem, who, in the agony of his genius albeit his pathology, unwittingly captures the horrific zeitgeist of the Bush II-Cheney years.

The star-making apparatus of Hip Hop is broken, and, I think, very few, if any of us, will mourn the passage of corporate-sponsored Hip Hop. My concern is not so much the salvation of Hip Hop as the opportunity that now presents itself for poets for all kinds. I propose that Hip Hop now abandon the archaic and anachronistic rhyme and meter. I propose a Free Verse Poetics Hip Hop. And, taking my cue from World Music in specific and World Hip Hop in particular, I propose an influx of world, but in especial, Latino rhythms to provide the beats (if any beats can support Free Verse Hip Hop, then it must be Latino beats). I am thinking of all genres of World Latino music, and would dismiss none out of hand, however, I am, honestly, most especially thinking of Afro-Cuban beats...although I am also enamored of the possibilities presented by the proposition of a Free Verse Poetics Hip Hop Flamenco.

Followers of Latino Hip Hop know that I am suggesting nothing new since there are already Spanish language proponents of such nascent genres. What I am suggesting that perhaps is new, at least in theory if not necessarily practice, is for Poets of all languages, but not just English and Spanish, to adopt Latino rhythms for audio presentations of their poems. I do not discourage poets from making videos of their Free Verse Latino Beat Hip Hop, but I prefer, at least for now, that the basis on our new poetics and Hip Hop be firmly rooted in what we hear and not what we see!

Now I know that some of my Latino Rapper friends may take exception with these remarks. “Who is this gringo who seeks to appropriate my culture and give it away for nothing?” I can almost hear them ask. Well, friends, when you have something that’s so hot, then it no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the world. Yes, it’s true, African-Americans invented Jazz and the Blues and Rock and Roll and Hip Hop and just about every other form of Popular Music, but, in time, these musics became the true property of the world. And who more than Latinos have benefited from Jazz? And, yes, friends, even us gringos, normally known as being so rapacious (and perhaps rightly so), nonetheless, have we gringos not given the world Shakespeare and Bob Dylan and Aesop and the Beatles and Abba, just to name a few?

In other words, forget everything you know! Especially, forget everything you know about Hip Hop and Poetry! What if Hip Hop were nothing but a 30-year prelude to the Renaissance of Poetry as the People’s Popular Art? The “higher Vaudeville” that Vachel Lindsay imagined, but did not live to see? The answer is Free Verse Poetics Hip Hop with Latino Beats!

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I've long been attracted to fruit crate labels, so I decided to paint my own changing a more typical "Andy Boy" to "Eddie Boy." I hope you like these plus another painting or two, all of which, of course are f0r sale. Titles in order are "Apples," "Orange," "Evolving," and "Paddle."














































































Comment Here on any of the above or below and read the comments of others too. Log in under "Name" or "Anonymous" if you like, but please be sure to sign some facsimile of your name. Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net if you have difficulty.