Attention revolutionaries in Venice Beach, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, and New York City!

I will be traveling all over in the next two months reading poems to start a revolution from my award-winning collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, chosen by Heather McHugh as the Minerva Rising 2015 chapbook winner. I will also be reading from my American Dissident chapbook, forthcoming in the 2016 edition of Poetry International.

March 11th, Beyond Baroque, Venice Beach, California

March 16th, Unchaste Reading Series, Portland, Oregon

March 31st, Coagula Curatorial, AWP off-site reading

April 15th, Ping-Pong Free Press launch, Howl! Happening, NYC

April 17th, Page Poetry Parlor, Torn/Page Residence, Chelsea, NYC

Check my calendar here for details!

Orange-crowned Fairywrens

The men bring petals to their lovers while staying loyal to their wives; here come
our flames, they’ll teach us latticework,
uneven brokenness. Read More >

i don’t think it important

to say you murdered malcolm

or that you didn’t murder malcolm

i find you vital and powerful

i am aware that you use me

but doesn’t everyone

i am comfortable in your house

i am comfortable in your language

i know your mind   i have an interest

in your security, your civilization

compares favorably with any known

your power is incomparable

i understand why you would destroy

the world rather than pass it to lesser

people. i agree completely.

aristotle tells us in the physics

that power and existence are one

all i want is to sit quietly

and read books and earn

my right to exist. come—

i’ve made you a fantastic dish.

you must try it, if not now

very soon.

Welton Smith, who was born in Houston, Texas, is the author of Penetration (1972), a collection of poems, and The Roach Riders, a play. His poem sequence “Malcolm,” which was included in the historic 1968 Black Arts collection Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka, is one of a number of elegies written after Malcolm X was killed in 1965. Its tonal shifts help make it one of the most memorable and one of the more inventive poems to come out of the Black Arts movement.

Jesse Goodman has been producing benefit concerts for the Henry Miller Memorial Library since he brought Patti Smith there in 2004. The past few years he has been bringing poets in as the opening acts of these shows, which as you can imagine, pleases us here in the Republik of poets to no end. This year he is bringing in legendary San Francisco poet, David Meltzer to open for Pink Martini in this year’s benefit on December 8th at the Golden State Theatre in Monterey, California. Get your tickets baby, they’re going fast . . . So, to honor Jesse’s mad genius we are featuring his story as well as poems by David Meltzer and his wife, the poet Julie Rogers. Scroll down for his story, but first: the poets. Enjoy. Read More >

Here’s a sneak peak at the interview I conducted with Anne Waldman forthcoming in this issue of Ping-Pong! I am also apoplectic with joy that she will be performing and giving a workshop at our 2 Day Speech is Not Free event!

ARTIST ON THE PULSE: Interview with Anne Waldman

by: MARIA GARCIA TEUTSCH

MGT: What is the role of the artist in the 21^st century? Read More >

(Last) Letter from the editor 2015

Greetings wonderful reader,

First of all I would like to say that after 10 years of presiding over this wondrous journal of art and letters I am resigning. It’s not that I don’t love the editing process, I actually do. For reals: I edited my undergrad lit journal, The Atlantis, and my grad school journal, The Cold Mountain Review. Then when I moved out to California in 2000, I began editing the Homestead Review out of Hartnell College in Salinas, where I accepted a position on their faculty. Read More >

This month’s featured poet, Joanna Fuhrman asks, among other questions “the meaning of the space/between the prongs of the unplugged iron?” What shouldn’t we allow in? In this age of surveillance and sophistry, what remains sacred? What profane? Does one bleed into another? Is all the world a stage? and if so, then must we let everyone watch? Where do we locate the real? Post a poem, video or story that reveals that every elusive commodity: truth. Yeah, I know you’re thinking about John Keats right now, we know what he has to say about truth, but what do YOU, tiny human giant, have to say? Read More >

The Executioner

stands in a lake

of silence.

Hours termite

into hollow trees.

Published in The Dressing Room Poetry Journal

Read More >

Brian Henry is a poet who likes to play. In the following piece, you will note lines of precisely 5 syllables in length. He once told me he wrote a sonnet a day for a year for fun, I think. Or maybe it was a story Hayden Carruth told about Ezra Pound who once wrote a sonnet a day for a year and then threw them all away. Carruth told the workshop he was guest-teaching, “and if you can’t do that, then you’re not a poet.” Either way, as the wondrous Tomaž Šalamun would say, it’s good mythology. In this vein, I am asking my poetry students to write their own small offerings, inspired by Mr. Henry’s piece (Brian might say here, Mr. Henry is my father), of 5 syllables per line, and at least 5 lines in length. You can play along too…

Thanksgiving

Revenge is no dish

and should not be served

at all, much less cold.

But as a guiding

principle, revenge

can cast quite a light.

Although it begins

in darkness, it breaks,

so timely, toward

any little shine:

may your object of

revenge be standing

or, better, kneeling

in front of you when

that light breaks to sun.

Poet, translator, and editor Brian Henry earned his BA at the College of William & Mary and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His collections of poetry include Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), Graft (2003), Quarantine (2006), In the Unlikely Event of a Water (2007), The Stripping Point (2007), Wings Without Birds (2010), Lessness (2011), and Doppelgänger (2011). An advocate for Slovenian poets and poetry, he has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (2008) and Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things (2010). Henry’s translation of Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers received a 2011 Howard Foundation fellowship.

Henry edited the collection of essays On James Tate (2004). He is the cofounder and coeditor, with Andrew Zawacki, of Verse Magazine. Henry and Zawacki also coedited The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture (2005).

Henry’s poems, essays, and translations have been published widely in journals such as Jacket, the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His honors and awards include a Distinguished Educator Award, a Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and a George Bogin Memorial Award. He teaches at the University of Richmond.

The intersection of nature and technology is a place inhabited by poets. Whitman created links in his poetry between ancient religions and modern technology, Yeats questioned the worth of technological advances famously in “The Second Coming,”  and now we have Brenda Coultas and her tree. In order to see technology from a vastly different perspective think about how you would describe the world if you were a bird? a rabbit? a pampered dog? a cockroach? or whatever. Or just enjoy the beauty of this lovely poem:

My Tree

I found a pearl and wore it in my ear
Deep ocean echos sing like a seashell

A girl promised a purse filled with jewels, if I would be her friend Purses open secrets as priceless as pills in a jeweled box

Loose pearls, enough to imagine what a great loss that necklace was or was not Read More >