I'm Reading Poems On e-Radio/iTunes--MiPOradio!!!

I've recorded audio of 15 poems from my book "Whirligig" and they are now spinning FO FREE! via Itunes and MiPOradio:

http://miporadio.blogspot.com/2006/12/whirligig-by-christopher-salerno.html

VIDEO

Video of last months Lucifer Poets event in Chapel Hill...the other readings are by fab fab fab Lucipo friends of mine...each with their own genius and engine and hair and attire. http://www.deeperintomusic.net/nightlight.html I read third...at the 3:20 mark (3 mins 20 seconds) into the thing...I read a new sonnet...

Self-Promotion Is A Book of Animals.

So, Barnes and Noble has picked up "Whirligig" for promotion in these* cities through January. Basically, if it goes well, they may keep stocking it. So, if you were thinking of getting it, and you live in one of these places, and you happen stroll into a B&N, pick it up and I'll literally send you something...reimbursment, interesting trades, a handmade collage, a sock puppet, a bullet casing, something. The underlying point is that this hasn't happened to Spuyten Duyvil before, and we really want Barnes to look their way more often, and in the future.

*
BOSTON MA, HOUSTON TX, BERKELEY CA , OAKLAND CA, NEW YORK NY, NEW YORK NY, ASHEVILLE NC, WASHINGTON DC, ALBUQUERQUE NM, HADLEY MA, LOS ANGELES CA, DULUTH MN, BOSTON MA, ITHACA NY, KINGSTON NY, EDINA MN, NEW YORK NY, AUSTIN TX, NEW YORK NY, CHARLOTTESVILLE VA, SEATTLE WA, KANSAS CITY MO, SANTA MONICA CA, PITTSBURGH PA, ROSEVILLE MN, NEW YORK NY, ST PAUL MN, NEW YORK CITY NY, DURHAM NC, VIRGINIA BEACH VA, PRINCETON NJ, LONG BEACH CA, WASHINGTON DC, NEW YORK NY, BETHESDA MD, SOUTH BURLINGTON VT, ROCHESTER NY, CHATTANOOGA TN, PHILADELPHIA PA, BROOKLYN NY, BOULDER CO, POUGHKEEPSIE NY, MOHEGAN LAKE NY, DEWITT NY, TOWSON MD , SALT LAKE CITY UT, SEATTLE WA, BROOKLYN NY, RICHMOND VA.

Lucipo Reading Tomorrow in Chapel Hill

Many Lucipoets and other folk will be reading at the Nightlight in Chapel Hill on Thursday 10/19

Starting at 9pm>>$5 cover

Where is the place? Check it: http://nightlight.dyss.net/index_LINKS.php



Who will be reading?
>>Brian Howe >>Ken Rumble >>Christopher Salerno >>Laura Jent >>Dianne Timblin>>Lori Reese >>David Need >>Tony Tost >>Patrick Herron >>Brad Land >>Rodrigo Garcia Lopes

Pics from Friday's Reading @ The Fall Cafe, Brooklyn

-justin marks in a red shirt of confidence...


-me looking up just this once...



















-dan hoy in a dazzle...














-chris tonelli eying up justin's teeth.

Back from NYC

John Ashbery, Jack Black, Wave Poetry Bus, The Burning Chair, The B.Q.E., H&M shopping with Brian Howe, BOOKS-BOOKS-BOOKS, on stage at CBGB'S (soon defunct), My great-grandfather's place in Williamsburg Brooklyn, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Ear Inn, and so much more.

Details and pics soon.

I'm Reading In NYC This Weekend:

Heading up to NYC this weekend to give a few readings. If you're in the area, I'd love to see you!
______________________________

Sept 29th, Fri, @ The Fall Café 307 Smith Street Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn 7:30pm.
(Christopher Salerno, Dan Hoy & Justin Marks)

Sept 30th, Sat, @ The Ear Inn 326 Spring Street (west of Greenwich Street) NYC 3pm.
(Christopher Salerno, Mike Reilly, Alison Stine)

Oct 1st, Sun @ The Bowery Poetry Club 308 Bowery, across from CBGB's 2pm.
(Sputyen Duyvil w/ Tod Thilleman, Christopher Salerno, and Julian Semilian)

RECEIVED and READING

Lyn Hejinian's Cold Of Poetry
Michael Earl Craig's Can You Relax in My House
Brenda Hillman's Loose Sugar
Laura Simms' Practice, Restraint

Every Other Day

I've been interviewed by Kate Greenstreet for her ongoing series on Poets after their first books. I've been addicted to all the other offerings there.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

From Pittsburgh

Made it to the Andy Warhol Museum...one of the spaces on the museum's many floors and rooms was currently exhibiting, "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984." This exhibit presented a range of artists with that 70's-80's distinctive “downtown attitude” toward life and art taking hold in lower Manhattan at the time--Artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers (many of whom blurred and ignored distinctions of genre and medium). A super extensive retrospective, all told. Here are some photos I took before I was asked to stop taking photos (who knew? I was only allowed to photograph the Warhol stuff, apparently).

From The District

Well, I've just returned from my Burlesque Poetry Hour reading at the Bar Rouge in D.C., and it couldn't have been more fun. Before the reading, I managed to buzz over to the National Gallery, where unfortunately I had missed the DADA exhibit (off to NY by now) but did manage to see some interesting work nonetheless. It was nice to see some of the Hudson Valley paintings I've long admired (Cole, Durand et al--I love their embellishments!) and of course some A-side Picasso and Matisse work, which one rarely sees in the provincial galleries. So little time. All that was left of the DADA exhibit were a few remaining books in the gift shop, one of which (Duchamp's Letters) I picked up for only 7 bucks!

The reading was intimate and warm. Thanks so much to Reb, Carly, Sandra, and Karl who were such super people it made it hard to leave. Sandra and Karl read such wonderful work, and I left feeling bouyed and inspired to get back to my new manuscript. And I managed to sell a few books, and meet some sweet people.

In other news, I most definitely lamed out on the big strip tease, but my shirt did fetch 30 bucks in the post-reading strip-auction. It was so hot, I was glad to see it go. Funny pictures forthcoming!!

Suggestive suggestions?

This weekend I'm heading up to D.C. to read at the Burlesque Poetry Hour reading series. The protocol at these readings dictates that the reader remove some article or accessory from his/her body following their reading (article is then auctioned to the highest bidder). And so, it's time to consider. Generally, I have little experience stripping for money. Thus far, BPH "stripped" articles have consisted of: earings, a thong, various t-shirts and other shirts Hawiian or otherwise, red silk pants (Ken, you devil), sock puppet, a belt, and an invisible cloak of poetry potential. So...?

Podcasts of two new poems to be featured at MiPOsias

"What If Marvelous Marvin Hagler" and "Foot" will be featured in the forthcoming MiPOesias...and so I've been asked to make Mp3's.

_____________________________________________________________________

Here are the podcasts I just made. It was not easy, as my mic is effing budget and my P's were overpronounced, but it's probably a better recording than when I did the over-the-phone recording for the New Hampshire Review. I think I got a call waiting beep in the middle of recording.

http://www.mipoesias.com/Poetry/salerno_christopher.html


Enjoy. They are from the new manuscript (in prog).

EXTRA, EXTRA

Chris Tonelli of REDIVIDER reviews "Whirligig" in the new issue. Redivider poems by Bob Hicock and Molly Bendall appear in today's Verse Daily! Check it.

This Seems Worthwile...

HATE is totally the new LOVE

Paul
~W.S. Merwin

Up the sea-dark avenue
at two in the morning a shadow
comes shouting oh
you mother-fucker I hate you Paul
echoes of feet and then
I hate you I hate you Paul

the old moon is sinking through
clouds beyond high wires and cornices
the buildings creak
drifting on the tunnelled hour the call
bounces ahead along
the street like a fleeing ball

there after each of the few
cars has passed over its words Paul you
can't get away
I hate you with my feet in the Paul
street like a bell I know
you are there you nowhere Paul

I am coming after you
whatever you do whatever you
think I hate you
across the street into the doors all
the way through the frozen
windows up against the wall

listen to me I hate who
you are nobody else will ever
hate you the way
I do I always hated you Paul
the whole time thinking you
could hold out on me that small

invisible you but to
me listen there was nothing to you
I was onto
you fooling with me your slick tricks all
the while and I hate you
where you are everywhere Paul

I go on hating you through
the roar of the Paul subway the red
lights at the Paul
cross streets out of sight into the Paul
night that cannot be touched
nor brought back by hate at all.
________________________________________________________________

Timing. A friend sent me this Merwin poem she found. And just this morning I was thinking about Hate. I know, it sounds strange...but I was thinking of a lesson, or of creating an exercise for my Intro Poetry class surrounding the idea of Love and Hate and the mining out of the emotional complexities in between. It occured to me, probably via some poem or someone smart giving a talk, about the opposite of Love, and what Love's opposite might be. Most people would say that the opposite of Love is Hate. However, it seems that the opposite of love is actually Indifference. Hate, really, is only for effect. When we say that we Hate, we are exposing a kind of connection to the object of that hatred, right? We are, in some sense, putting that connection on display, much like in this poem. Our hate has a history, usually a personal history...and it often can show us our own Shadow, especially in the Jungian sense. “At two in the morning a shadow / comes screaming oh / you mother-fucker I hate you Paul…” And we also read the lines, "The old moon is sinking through / clouds behind high wires..." There's a specific, almost literal sense of history in the situation of the speaker and his/her relationship to Paul, a past exposed there (in the Paul subway...into the Paul cross streets...into the Paul night...") but so too in the simple act of characterizing the moon as "old." Even that simple image conjures the personal history. And of course there is the ultimate example of the Love/Hate connection, "nobody else will ever hate you / the way I do."

I like it.

I also love the way the word Hate is deployed as an unconventional verb (I hate you / across the street / into the doors..." And I like the way Paul becomes an adjective, mostly through the blurred syntax and absent punctuation and fused phrases—together with all of this a strong voice tumbles out down the page...and a great sense of the organic nature of rage speak emerges.

Indifference, then, implies no connection at all, I guess. It's so much colder than Hate. Hate is always connected to Love. This poem could never be written out of Indifference. Probably no Lyric poems could be.

Mail

PERSONAL

It's my birthday today. I keep forgetting. And not too many folks want a piece of me, so that's good. I looked at some postcards of the Whirligig cover, read a few 70's comic books I found recently, and bought myself a few CD's: the newest Wolfparade, Sufjan Stevens' "Michigan," Bonnie Prince Billy's "Master and Everyone" (wore out a burned copy), and Tom Waits' "Real Gone.

Anyway, I want to say that while I was serious about being a C-section baby, I was not serious about the Anthology. Sorry for any confusion.

Projective Verse

Who was it defined poetry as "Deep Gossip"?

English 289

So I’ve been tweaking my syllabus for the upcoming Poetry Workshop I teach at NC STATE University. Since I haven’t yet found a comprehensive enough text (outside of the Introductory handbook we use--which contains several poems) I supplement quite extensively by creating a kind of 20-poet mini-anthology of photocopied poems. These poems I often use as examples of one sort of turn, tool, convention, mode, etc. The poets included are: Charles Bernstein, T.S. Eliot, Adam Zagajewski, Dean Young, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams, Charles Bukowski, Yusef Kamanyakaa, Franz Wright, John Berryman, Billy Collins, Theodore Roethke, Lisa Jarnot, Sharon Olds, Wallace Stevens, Robert Bly, Rosemarie Waldrop, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Wright, Jeffrey McDaniel, and A. R. Ammons.

Village Voice Gives Props

To Brooklyn's top Indie Publishers, including Spuyten Duyvil, with whom my first book will appear in June. Also featured are Akashic, Archipelago, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Soft Skull Press. Read the Village Voice article here.

School O' Quietude Def from Wikepedia

The School of Quietude is a rhetorical label first used by the Language poet Ron Silliman on his blog[1] which has been adopted by many other writers of the poetry blogosphere to describe a certain thread or tradition they perceive in the poetry of The United States. It is used as a pejorative term, as generally the critics who employ it do so in order to describe poets whose poetics they consider overly conservative. Silliman has stated repeatedly that he has adopted the term from a phrase once used by Edgar Allan Poe to describe some of his contemporaries whose ideas about poetry were a throwback to the literature of Great Britain or who were overly British in their writing style. Silliman's contention is that the present day School of Quietude in American poetry are the spiritual heirs of those Anglophiliac 19th Century poets.

This poetry-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Quietude"

Anthology: Call for Submissions: Poets Born Via Cesarean Section

Were you a C-section baby? If so, do ever feel like you weren't born? Ever feel like you are constantly taking shortcuts, never having developed the drive to face adversity? Ever get the sense that you are too large? Too slow of wit or feet? Bad with directions? Submit to this new and important collection: New Voices: An Anthology of Poets Born Via Cesarean Section.

WAVE BOOKS...Farm Poets...

This offer via Wave Books' website: "A 12-acre (uncertified) organic fruit & vegetable farm is open to poets willing to work for four good hours a day in exchange for room, board, and a new environment in which to write. There are no workshops, there is no formal or official feedback on poems, no academic credit, and no money exchanged. Our young orchards and fields are beautiful, not visible from the road. The setting for farmwork is ideal, since the land is not along the highway and the views from the back are pastoral and bucolic. (Horses next door, cows behind, with gently rolling hills and farms surrounding.) Our house, however, is on the state highway, so the setting does not appear immediately enticing. All of the beauty is out back. We live in a small old farmhouse, built in the 1890’s by Swedish immigrants, cozy but plain." More...

Your name here?

Hey, why not submit a poem and I'll post it?

The Lost "Worlds" of William Bronk--(a call for comments)

Some friends and I are putting together an AWP proposal which will be, in a sense, a tribute to the often neglected work of the late William Bronk. My leg of the thing is "pleasure," essentially. I'm in the early stages. Why read Bronk? And also, why don't we read him? As I reread and read for the first time many selections from his nine or so volumes, i'm struck by how, on the surface, he (and this is no slight) seems to have written the same poem time and again. “It is always hard like this, not having a world, / to imagine one…And oh, it is always a world and not a world” (“At Tikal"). With his unique brand of dialectics, and his often intellectual and rhetorical investigations (which can sometimes soar with their resulting abstractions) Bronk’s poems are often propositions to be tested--both asserting and yanking from under us what we may have thought was essential, was fixed to/in our lives, what was the very scaffolding of our existence. Bronk’s poems themselves are seemingly devoid of the common triggers of contemporary poetic pleasure, especially those flowing from the spring of William Carlos Williams’ famous dictum: “No ideas but in things.” And of course, Bronk’s poetry resists metaphor, largely. Yet, as readers we notice the philosophy in/of his poems riding the great wave of the lyric tradition. Bronk's investigative discourse always remains fresh, but perhaps most noticeably distinct, is that it is never afraid of size or scale. This is most honest. And for the willing reader, the wonder in Bronk’s "worlds," which are never the same "worlds" twice, is in his absolute desire for truth in them.

What do you think of William Bronk?

Back from the Carolina Wren Press Reading...

Thanks to David Need who, after my reading, tried to get me to articulate the underpinnings and process of my current project. A brilliant listener (and no doubt reader) David's post-reading questions about my process in the Downburst Summaries has started much traffic in me. Some species of collage is no doubt at work, but i realize more and more that these "summaries" are striving for what i am failing at currently in my paintings...to Realize, as in the (m)any more physical mediums, a Composition, by asserting a family of gestures, images, voices, etc...and toward an abstract Composition, yes, but with the desire to retain Sentiment...to preserve some through-line of heart (sorry)... (and these are my own observations, by the way--not Davids). I intentionally have been reading a few of these "Summaries" at my last few readings as a kind of challenge to my self...to realize them or ditch them. Regardless, David pointed particularly to this poem, with his initial question of process:


RIBBON, LADDER


Hello, a ladder is wrapped in a ribbon. Ribbon creates the site of desire. A basket in the space of two rungs—paused. One of us ties our hair back with a ribbon. Cloth of wolf. Hair parting. Two levels of belongingness and saying and English. Ladder of discussion. Basket hog. A ribbon is tied to a brick like a gift. A wheel spins inside a dug spring. Emphatic, the bum loop. Closed house history. A nest of silver wires—everything does not have that soul.

You Must Love This

Reading Last Night

Last night, at Exploris Middle School, several of the 7th graders with whom i worked on Object Poems, gave a reading of their work. Needless to say, my favorite line of the reading was, "The veins are the veins." Perhaps i was hearing, "Viviane is Viviane." I'll post my favorite of the students' poems (i demanded a copy of my favorite) after the reading. Honestly, they were all working with an incredible brand of imagistic simplicity...and clarity. Prose poems of a unique order. Robert Bly would have been proud. He also would have worn a mask of a buffalo skull or something.

Durham Arts Council

I'll be reading from Whirligig as well as from a new manuscript, The Downburst Summaries, tonight at the Durham Arts Council in Durham, NC, (directions at http://www.durhamarts.org/) as part of the Culture Crawl. I'm lucky to be reading with Chris Vitiello, thedelay.blogspot.com. The festivities begin at 7:00, and will wrap at 9:30, when the Carolina Wren Press folks will gather at the Baldwin Lofts for an open mike and various feats of poetic debauchery.