Distribution Automatique

Sunday, April 29

As of Midnight Saturday, Amy King was leading by about 10 votes!


Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere


Voting ends by Midnight tonight!

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Thanks to
wood s lot for the link to Tom Beckett's "What are you willing to sacrifice to keep working as a poet"
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Sub-Conscious

When the history of blogging is written, one blog that no one will ever forget will be Katie Degentesh's Bloggedy Blog Blog. It's in the realm of the eternal "why didn't I think of that?"

Anyway, so I was waiting for the subway at the Grand Army Plaza stop the other day listening to a very young girl, who was walking down the subway stairs with her hand in her mother's hand, saying, in a tiny voice, but quite loudly: "I love you train, I love you train, I love you train."

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Poetry on the Bowery


Charles Bernstein and Tenney Nathanson read to a packed and pleased house yesterday afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club. Charles, whose stand-up, or "hunched over" comedian persona was in top form, did an impromptu duet with surprise visitor from Serbia, Dubravka Duric, (whose 2002 book includes translations of and writing about US poets including Charles B, Bruce Andrews, Douglas Messerli, James Sherry, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg. Rae Armantrout, Barrett Watten, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Carla Harryman, Clayton Eshleman, yours truly and many others) with Charles quipping that his translation of her poetry reflected a better understanding of her native language than the language of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Host Tim Peterson introduced Tenney Nathanson as his mentor, friend and teacher. Nathanson seemed surprisingly at ease in front of the famously picky Manhattan audience at the BPC and when I talked with him later I learned that he had lived in New York frequently over the years although he lives and teaches in Arizona now. Nathanson and I knew a lot of people in common including critic and literary theorist John Johnston. Johnston lived in the loft downstairs from me in Soho in the early 70's, when I lived briefly downstairs from artist Susan Rothenberg. Nathanson studied at Columbia under Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro whose echoes could be pleasantly heard in between the lines of his excellent poems.

Celebrities in the audience included Ted Greenwald who, as Charles B noted, founded the Segue Series with Charles 30 years ago, neither, of course, expecting the series to endure in the striking way it has. James Sherry, whose Segue Foundation has supported the series from the beginning, was present as well. Other notables spotted included Susan Bee (who will read and present her art next Saturday with Johanna Drucker including one of their collaborations). Other notables present known to me included Fiona Templeton, Mimi Gross, Corinne Robins and Sal Romano, Ann Tardos, Tan Lin, Dan Machlin, Thom Donovan, Nada Gordon, Adeena Karasik, Simon Pettet, Bruce Andrews, Mark Weiss, Gilbert Adair and no doubt many others I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting. I also spoke with poet Allen Brafman who is interested in getting more public notice for the superb poetry of his acquaintance, the great, late Frank Kuenstler, author of such classics as *Lens* and In Which.