one of my dearest

Please consider supporting Anna Vogelzang's next album. She is a lovely & talented person. Keep an eye out for our Gigantic Sequins kickstarter page, coming soon! In the meantime, check out Anna. She will make you glow inside.

On Major and Minor, by Anne Carson

Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the name of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct ...time. There are more major things than minor things over all, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.


-- Anne Carson

so it goes

The new issue of Matchbook, in which I have a tiny Batman poem, is now available for purchase.


I have a new post up at the Gulf Coast blog, entitled When We Were Very Young. This may be the most purely sweet piece of prose I have written in years.



Last night I was sitting on a curb with my transgender friend E., bemoaning some of what's going on in my life. E. said that he is broke, so he can't complete the transition yet from F to M, which he's been wanting to do for years. I think I'll make a funny-looking guy, he says, I'm so short. I have to look at him like he's crazy, because he'll be attractive no matter what. It's his spirit that's attractive, his faith. I talk a little more about my issues & start to cry out of frustration, even though I'm also somehow calmed by the warm night, the little dot of the moon. E. asks me if I want to trade problems. I don't even think about saying Yes. We hug and say goodnight. He gets on his little yellow scooter and zips off. I get in my silver car and count my blessings. As tangled as they may be.

let's just call this a teaser

http://giganticmagazine.wordpress.com/


While writing submissions are closed at Gigantic Sequins, we are still open for ART & COMICS submissions for issue 2.2. This is because we do not get as many of these as we do writing submissions, and we can always use more.

Keep an eye out for an upcoming announcements about 1. our Kickstarter page 2. our 2nd annual fundraising raffle...

I left the world & felt a world

Below is a poem that Major Jackson brought to his craft talk yesterday in the Honors College at U of H. These InPrint craft talks are always scheduled smack in the middle of my class on poetic forms, but yesterday's talk was partially a continuation of a discussion we'd been having in class about line length. Jackson kept using the term utterance, a word that I love for its type of stuttering sound and scoop, the implication of gravity. "It is the structure of one's utterances," said Jackson, "that elevate beyond the conventional." The Philip Levine poem below is a precise example of this. The movement of the first five lines, in contrast to the fifth & sixth. This sweeping, continuous, specified but not quite grounded action, followed by - plop - a name, a normalcy, a jeer. There's more to say but I have work to do. Anyway, here you go. Great fuckin poem.


M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School--Detroit, 1942
by Philip Levine


He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
diagonally downward and stood back
to ask, looking as always at no one
in particular, "What have I done?"
From the back of the room Freddie
shouted, "You've broken a piece
of chalk." M. Degas did not smile.
"What have I done?" he repeated.
The most intellectual students
looked down to study their desks
except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised
her hand before she spoke. "M. Degas,
you have created the hypotenuse
of an isosceles triangle." Degas mused.
Everyone knew that Gertrude could not
be incorrect. "It is possible,"
Louis Warshowsky added precisely,
"that you have begun to represent
the roof of a barn." I remember
that it was exactly twenty minutes
past eleven, and I thought at worst
this would go on another forty
minutes. It was early April,
the snow had all but melted on
the playgrounds, the elms and maples
bordering the cracked walks shivered
in the new winds, and I believed
that before I knew it I'd be
swaggering to the candy store
for a Milky Way. M. Degas
pursed his lips, and the room
stilled until the long hand
of the clock moved to twenty one
as though in complicity with Gertrude,
who added confidently, "You've begun
to separate the dark from the dark."
I looked back for help, but now
the trees bucked and quaked, and I
knew this could go on forever.

often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. / nobody is ever missing.

Over at Gigantic Sequins, where I am the poetry editor, we are getting ready to close the doors on this submission period & snuggle up to the work we think has got that je ne sais quoi. But - you have 4 MORE DAYS to submit your writing and art. For more information, hop on over to the Gigantic Sequins site. You can purchase issues online over there, or at the following fine bookstores:

Trident Booksellers & Cafe | 338 Newbury Street, Boston, MA

St. Mark’s Bookshop | 31 3rd Ave. New York, NY

bluestockings | 172 Allen St. New York, NY

Flying Object | 42 West St. Hadley, MA

We're revving our tiny journal engine & kicking this thing into the next gear. If there is an independent bookstore near you that you think would be a good match for Gigantic Sequins, please let me know.


Speaking of matches, check it out:



that's me holding Matchbook 3, from Small Fires Press, in which I have a tiny poem about Batman. I love love love tiny things, so it's very lovely to be published in this particular handmade form, an obvious labor of love. This issue debuted at AWP and will soon be available for purchase online at Small Fires Press.

I have been living inside this poem by Robert Duncan for a year

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow


as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.



(I have been sick on & off for two weeks. IV antibiotics, fearful nights, hundreds of dollars. I am sitting in my apartment again, feeling sick. I was sick at this time last year, for what felt like months. I don't say this to ask for well wishes. I think I need a medicine man. I need a spirit journey to search into the cause of my continual sickness, why my body so easily breaks down. I need to go into the desert and howl.

In the middle of all this sickness, I saw the best movie that I've seen in a long time, Biutiful. I can't stop thinking about it.

Whole and Without Blessing | Linda Gregg

What is beautiful alters, has undertow.
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet.
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.




( listening: Banditas )
( reading: Rules of the Dance )

hi ho the glamorous life

Illness knocked me out this week. I saw parts of Houston that I've never seen and/(and/or) may not be visible except to the very ill. My eye swelled up. I took to calling it Quasimodo, or Quasimodi, really. Now at least I can see and stay awake for more than 4 hours at a time, but I'm not in DC in the literary world whirlwind, I'm in a little heat cave in Houston, healing with lots of school work & a little ginger ale.


If you didn't already know, Nick Flynn's new book of poetry "The Captain Asks For A Show Of Hands" is now out. Go get it. If you have no prior introduction to his work, listen here. And now go.

If you are in DC - look for Gigantic Sequins, OH NO Books, Small Fires Press/Matchbook, Lo-Ball, Pilot Poetry, etc. etc. & get the inevitable hotel spins for me. Stay warm, chickadees.