ROCKPILE

Please check out the new ROCKPILE Website & Blog at Big Bridge, www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/

ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer - poet, musician, essayist, and more - and Michael Rothenberg of Big Bridge Press. David and Michael will journey through eight cities in the U.S. to perform poetry and prose, composed while on the road, with local musicians and artists in each city. ROCKPILE will serve to educate and preserve as well as to create a history of collaboration. It will help to reinforce the tradition of the troubadour of all generations, central to the cultural upheaval and identity politics that reawakened poets, artists, musicians, and songwriters in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. The project will end with a final multimedia performance celebration in San Francisco.

The ROCKPILE Website & Blog will tell you all you need to know about the ROCKPILE project including performance dates, venues, artist bios and performance clips of some of the musicians we will be meeting and performing with in each of the cities.

Once we hit the road, we will be posting travel photos, journal entries, performance videos, interviews and more, daily, on the ROCKPILE Blog, so log on and join us as we travel around the country. Write us, comment on the blog, and let us know you are with us, let us know you care!

Now if everybody did this.....

Pelican Dreaming

Suggestion/Comment

Thanks for getting a copy of Mark Young’s Lunch Poems, both he and Michael Steven (publisher of Soapbox Press) are great. You should get Mark’s collected poems as well.

Library Answer

Thanks very much for your recommendation. We have now ordered a copy of Mark Young’s Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008, published by Meritage Press. Feel free to place a request on it. We also hold a copy of The Right Foot of the Giant in our collection which contains his poems from the 60s to late 70s. New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre has an excellent web page devoted to him containing a bio, a bibliography and lots of his poems for you to read. Enjoy!

Cynthia Bishell
Collection Services Manager

Canterbury University Library in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Apocrypha (from the Greek word ἀπόκρυφα, meaning "those having been hidden away")

My current fixation with the word apocrypha is that I'm putting together a book of odds & sods that haven't really fitted into my other books — small prose pieces, vispo, pwoermds, etc. — which I'd decided to call An Apocrypha.

I used the word for my perceived sense of its meaning as "that which has been left out", more aligned with the definition above rather than either of those used in the post below. In fact, my book flies in the face of Athanasius' categories. I see it as a part of my canon, hope that it's edifying, do not see it as heretical.

But in light of the modern lay meaning of apocryphal as "spurious" or "of uncertain authorship", I'm rethinking my title. Though it'll probably stay—I've a pretty good cover design in mind, with big capital As all through it.

"Athanasius spoke of three categories of books: canonical, edifying, & 'apocryphal' - meaning heretical works to be avoided altogether. Jerome on the other hand, used the term 'apocryphal' for the second category of books, those which are edifying."

an obituary / for all seasons

he
was 90
& had a

hole in his
ass. shit
came

out of it.

any publicity is good publicity?

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by John Sandford have also purchased Trust Me by Jeff Abbott. For this reason, you might like to know that Trust Me is now available.

Common enough email. Not so common though is the review excerpt that is quoted in the email. I would have thought that Amazon would be selective in their accompanying information, not offer a review that contains the following....

From Publishers Weekly
...in this furiously paced if less than compelling thriller... the story strikes a number of false notes—convenient plot twists, hard-to-swallow dialogue and a main character who all too easily goes from wimpy grad student to brawny crime fighter over the course of just a few days.

Really makes me want to buy the book.

the / Roadrunner meets / George A. Romero

zoombie

One of my pet hates

is the journalistic practice of using nouns as verbs. (Maybe I should have written that as verbing nouns.....)

I'll be generous & put it down to the sub-editor—do they still have sub-editors?—part of whose job is to come up with a snappy headline. & most of those I've noticed tend to appear in the business pages.

But it's spreading. In the entertainment section of today's N.Z.Herald:

US band to helm fundraiser for
stroke-hit godfather of NZ rock

one of the corners I retreat to

in a pause
in the pulse
of the
beating wings
of words
I
play
J.S.Bach
Air
on the
G String
it is
music of
great beauty
it is
music of
a
great beauty
who walks
towards you
in a
measured
but
elegant
way
until
she reaches
that
last step
when she
could
reach out
touch you
stop
your pulse
blur
your words
forever
instead
she
pauses
time
stops


from The Oracular Sonnets by Mark Young & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
a Meritage Press e-book

the / death of / Anna Nicole Smith

a trophy bride
atrophied

one for Crag Hill

revisitited

Today the
postman brought
me a grassy
knoll & a Presi-
dential motor-
cade. Now
all I need
is a fall guy.

The bireme anchored in an inlet somewhere on the coast of Ithaca.
          The song. On song. Sirens. Syrinx. Goats grazed on / the hillside.
   Drained. Drying up. Deserted. Dessicated. He yearned, not for rain but for contact. "There must be some way out of here."
The train to Bratislava was running late.
Goats grazed on / the syrinx-deserted hillside. The train to Bratislava was running late. He yearned, not for rain but for contact, for song. The bireme anchored in a drying-up inlet somewhere on the coast of Ithaca. "There must be some way out of here."

Lars Palm does it again

Now ready for download from Lars Palm's ungovernable press

Tom Beckett's
Another Shadow?
http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/

Sex is
a text
(in Braille
and Martian).

Dr. Chen he say:

Heli-
copter day.
Sikorsky Sea Kings.

Hey, please, get off of my cloud

Probably only the fabled Prieuré du Sion has guarded its secrets as closely as The Cloud Appreciation Society. Now some of its members, tired of the secrecy, have decided to open their texts and visions to the world. In this slim volume, edited by Márton Koppány and Nico Vassilakis, we see for the first time what has previously been hidden in the clouds.

Apparently, The Cloud Appreciation Society doesn't appreciate people who appreciate The Cloud Appreciation Society. I have received an email from Lulu saying they were withdrawing the above book from their lists. The why came in response to my email asking what was going on. I've extracted from them below. The first paragraph is from the second email.

"We have been contacted by Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the The Cloud Appreciation Society. He has informed us that this book is not affiliated with The Cloud Appreciation Society in any way. Your book also contains images taken, without permission, from their website."

"As a result, we have removed your content from availability, as per our Membership Agreement, which states 'Lulu reserves the right to refuse to permit your publication on the Site of any Content that Lulu, in its sole discretion, deems in violation of the terms and conditions set forth above.'"

Regards,
Questionable Content Team, Lulu.com

Silkworm Faeces

Dr. Chen he say:

桑蠶屎可以是最有利諧調和溫暖中部區域。
發行拉緊并且鎮定頭腦。

That is just so! I, first son of Dr. Chen, now translate into the English for our American friends. He say:

"The silkworm excrements may be harmonizes advantageously with the warmth middle the region. And release tautness calm brains."

Tautness brains become so calm as in picture of shrine temple. This benefit only come with most beneficial Chinese medicine herbs. You are ordering them now. American friend, if you want tautness calm brains just order Bombycis faeces now! Get warmth middle soonest possible with these fine excrements. Dr. Chen is always guarantee best outcome. Silkworms feed upon the leaves only of the mulberry tree, and most pure are their excrements. For centuries past have the concubines of emperors used these faeces to strengthen warm middles and to prolong moments of clouds-and-rain. The mind is eased. The spirit is oxygenated. The teeth become white, the navel becomes shapely, the nostrils open.

por_betrayal

A further bookish note

Lars Palm's comment on my post about local bookstores has reminded me that I found a recent Sara Paretsky novel, Bleeding Kansas—not a crime novel, btw—on the discount/remaindered table at the local newsagent.

A single copy. First & only time I'd seen the book for sale in town.