Small Press Poetry @ UAG

SMALL PRESS POETRY @ UAG
First Friday, January 2nd

247 Lark Street
6-9pm

The Upstate Artists Guild (UAG) Gallery, as part of their January “New Beginnings” show, will be hosting a Publisher’s Open House for many of the poetry small presses producing books in Albany, NY.

Across poetics, aesthetics, and institutional status, contributing presses will include: Flim Forum Press, Fence Books, A.P.D. Press, Anchorite Press, and Albany Poets.

This will be an opportunity for interested gallery-goers to engage with some of the independent, underground, and/or experimental writing and publishing happening here in Albany today.

The show opens on First Friday, January 2nd, and will last throughout the month. Free to the public. For more information, call (518) 426-3501, or email: klane@flimforum.com.

a ship thing economy

a ship is a thing

that will take you away
blue blue blue
blue collar blue class blue sky

are you aware of
the absence of color
wheat and factory and smoke
click click click
the place where we live

pig iron
booms and busts
passage of time
country mouse and city slicker

stripped down truth
here is beauty





poem by Jennifer Karmin

see A Sing Economy

Neon

Neon (Ne)
10

New York City, Saigon
                                 consuming, air drawn, homeless light

       cher frère, draw back the signs—
                                                        December's briars iced, distilled
                        trees, merchandise-less field—

    Neon traces, ghosts (erasure's laugh),
                 gesture                               reddish-orange tracts—

                        the bone lottery blink drones on

Neon by Deborah Poe

see A Sing Economy

I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut

Against fate I put courage; against custom, ambition; against nature, man.






Even the homeless have toadies: pigeons squawk for their breadcrumbs.






Knowing a man’s true worth is like knowing his probity.






Take those who loudly proclaim themselves the honest poor. Show them your wallet, and hear them quietly lie that they don’t pain for it. It is far easier to find a rich honest man than a poor honest man; envy leads men to deception.






There are no gods, only men.






The wage earner is more curious about what he sees on TV than what he sees with his own eyes.






If you’re going to steal, steal big. Little thieves are punished ruthlessly.






Do not give money to panhandlers -- they’ll think it their salary.






Had to steal a peek the name tag to know whether it was a man or woman.






If you do business with a dog, why are you surprised if he pisses on you?






The arts: the better you are, the worse for you.




excerpted from a set by Eric Gelsinger

see Oh One Arrow and Buy Later

Secret Caves

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Prostrate Dollars

bend and
rise
(in rhythmic prayer)






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The Latrine Floor

poorest
of the piss-
poor

















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Desert Loopholes

mining lapis lazuli








• (0, 0)
Scandals

sinuous conspiracies
slosh beneath
the sand








from Secret Caves by Matthew Klane

see Oh One Arrow

Food Poem #56

A VEGETABLE   or fruit may be expen-
sive or not depending somewhat on the
item, season, and supply and whether
it is fresh, canned, frozen, or dehy-
drated.

                              The vitamin A
value in the fat of the whole milk is lacking
in these more economical nonfat prod-
ucts unless the manufacturer adds it.
     Reconstituted nonfat dry milk and
fluid skim milk have only a little more
than half the calories of whole milk—
an advantage to weight-watchers but
a disadvantage to persons needing
more food energy.

     You could save 2 cents each time you
use a cup of evaporated milk (recon-
stituted) in place of a cup of whole
milk, or 4 cents if you use a cup of
nonfat dry milk (reconstituted) instead
of a cup of whole milk.

    $3.26 if you use all nonfat dry milk
instead of whole milk bought at the
store.

     $1.64 if you mix one-half nonfat dry
milk (reconstituted) with one-half
whole milk bought in half gallons at
the store.

$0.63 if you buy skim milk instead of
whole milk in half gallons at the store.

                    In some places, one can save
even more by buying the gallon rather
than the half-gallon container.
$0.63 by getting your milk in half
gallons at the store, not through home
delivery.

                                 By
making a few changes in the way you
buy and use milk, you could make the
following savings each week in the
Washington, D.C., area in January
1965:
     Let us say yours is a family of four—
two adults and two teenagers—and
you use 21 quarts of milk a week, the
minimum suggested in the guide.




OTHER SAVINGS can be made on pur-
chases of milk.

     Eggs, dry beans, and peanut butter,
often used as alternates for meat, usu-
ally are good buys in nutrients.

Amounts of these meats usually served
may cost less than servings of average
size of other meats but do not give as
much in food value.
                           Exceptions
are frankfurters, sausages, bacon, and
some meats with breaded coatings.
     Regardless of cost, you can get about
the same food value from equal-size
servings of cooked lean from different
types and cuts of meats.

     Specials, such as those given for
chicken, pork roast, and sirloin steak,
may bring expensive cuts within my
budget limits or make inexpensive
items even better buys.
     An average serving of cooked lean
meat at this store would have cost as
little as 14 cents and as much as 69
cents if I chose from these selected
items.




Food Poem #56 by Harold Abramowitz

see A Sing Economy

How We Saved the City

+ dishes by hand - no dishpan, inefficient + organic lettuce and carrots + she smiles at me - down the disposal - outside my neighborhood (- I make my paper copies - their chemicals) + health-food dish soap - in the brick zombies of my friends' old home (- driving to get them - don't know who picked them - for the chain store - trucked them) - lights on in the kitchen - on North Main Street - at Eagle Square - (the honor system + lingering) - in plaza geometry - good edible particles - uncertain goya and eggplant + dishwasher we don't use - driving distances - filling with swampy runoff - mosquito larva - bleaching it =



from Weird Math 1 by Kate Schapira

in A Sing Economy

drafts from receipt piece (cell phone pics)

I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut

Those without money lecture us on the rich.






All contests over ideas aspire to and simulate trade. Why not trade instead?






Happy is the man who decides to marry and stays the course, who plans a voyage and takes it, who wants to belong to the circle of an influential man, and wins influence.






Raising sons: teach them mathematics, and athletics. Business itself, and history are not essential, and can be learned later. Teach them how to make someone smile, talk nicely, how to be respectful to gain respect. Teach them to discriminate among near things, and how to use a mirror. Teach them to scorn the ordinary, but to seem contented when efficacious. Instruct them in countenance, so that no feelings govern. No piercings or tattoos or strange haircuts. Have them speak loudly when they speak, seem busy, and be busy while modestly betraying self-admiration.






In a poor man’s house, one can spit anywhere.






The poor have made leisure an affliction.




The last time I was there, the mayor included me in her toast.






A magician his tricks; a great man his wealth - know enough not to really show the stuff.






In business and in love, there are virgins and don juans.






Go about with your poverty showing, and people will say you’re mad. Go about with your riches displayed, and people will be mad to cultivate your acquaintance.






$350,000 will get you a Bentley. $2,000 will get you a used KIA.






Employees should obey their employers; patients, their doctors; investors, the trends.




excerpted from a set by Eric Gelsinger

see Oh One Arrow and Buy Later

Secret Caves

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Proxy Battlefield

box-office








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Proselytizing Wealth

petro-

apostle fuel

















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The Commodity Nexus

selling
ibex-jerky








• (0, 0)
Kalashnikovs and Korans

hand-over-fist










from Secret Caves by Matthew Klane

see Oh One Arrow

The Home Video Review of Books

Issue 2 of The Home Video Review of Books is up. Therein, editors Julia Cohen and Mathias Svalina review The Alps home video-style i.e. mettle in its hollows and alit the lattice w/ static. Take a peek.

Bookslut reviews The Alps

Gina Myers reviews The Alps in the December edition of Bookslut. Here's an excerpt:


Over-sized and heftier than typical single-volume poetry releases, The Alps uses its space well. There is a highly visual aspect to this book -- not just because of the visual poems that are included, but also in its incredible use of white space throughout. Marked by conciseness, the poems almost feel as if the words were carved into the page. Short lines and brief haiku-like poems (“every leaf / from somber wood // opens / the likeness of a grand defect”) take on an added weight from the vast blankness that surrounds them. There are even a number of entirely blank pages throughout -- perhaps giving room for the reader to pause before diving back in.


and:


There is a strong lyric mode at work in The Alps. Shimoda skillfully shifts between seriousness -- pondering death in the harsh environment of the Alps -- and lightness -- incorporating playful rhymes, “Take care to mind / listera / ovate fine,” and interesting enjambments, “What I do is organ striking no stop.”


Read the full review: here



Gina Myers currently lives in Saginaw, MI, where she makes books for Lame House Press & co-edits the tiny with Gabriella Torres. Her blog is A Sad Day for Sad Birds.

The New Media State

#2 Globally brand New Mexico as the New Media State. #3 Promote New Media business products and services to the local, regional, national, and international levels. #1 If an offer / answer / transaction succeeds, then The New Media State becomes active. I have never heard about a "proposed media state" ... it isn't written anywhere.

All those people back East may one day get on the wagon train and become a citizen of the New Media State. And if they don't, many of their children will.

Despite the explosion of The New Media State, television, due to its monopoly and to the absence of an adequate system of press distribution is by far the media state. The New Media State is selected by incrementing the media state by 1 and the disk access parameters associated with The New Media State are set up. The New Media State, where now each media is hype-linked to sites related to the media context as well as to the user context. The user can now provide The New Media State of spelling as effectively as the opposite of the birth of printing-undoing the crystallisation of spelling, taking it back to The New Media State of fluid.




from The New Poetics by Mathew Timmons

in A Sing Economy

= to th'love you make / carnival of links

john cotter & crew's december open letters is up. here find a poem, selected by john, written by michael trocchia. also essays on the alps, well, hannibal, among a slew'v fine others----

----this after the brookline booksmith open letters reading, celebrating ol's second year, with readers steve donoghue (who read this excellent essay on the subject of book reviewing), nicolas wey gomez (he read from his lovely The Tropics of Empire), and our own matthew klane (uh, B?).

now: y'r attention, please, to the open letters blog, f'r which I wrote about sir paul mccartney, who wishes to release a beatles track long archived.

also: I had the distinct pleasure of reading with jessica bozek last night, who, until last night, I'd not met. she's got a book coming from switchback. ch-ch-check it. she's also quite nice, tho has yet to figure out how to flint her matchbooks. that's not a euphamism. we read at the new england institute of art in boston. she a series of animals, I a bunch'v babies. we were joined by other poets, including david blair, shana deets (who read from a cool novel about a woman named nathan), and steven lee beeber (who bought a copy of my book)----

moonlit this is issue number three

did I mention moonlit 3?

2 copies arrived via post haste & I’ve been reading 1.

some notes:

hello Chuck Stebleton, I like your poems. from “Red Walls”: “Another spoon / bender in the lobby. // The net of next / events is thrown / wide to each.” yeah, man. &, from “Talking Book”: “Persimmons shook often // once we stopped / to knock our weapons. // Still the peripheral // let’s an ideogram be.” I’ll keep an eye out for y’r work.

of th’Flim folk: Amanda Ackerman’s “Autumn Poem Written in Spring” lists what “we would like to see changed, altered, improved, ended, stopped, enacted, protested, organized, continued, or brought to justice, if we had our say, and others like us as well. If we had our say. If we did make decisions that are recourses to actions.”; we've friendship from Harold Abamowitz’ “Measure #1,” “such stuff, such violent and dedicated stuff, such stuff, that friends are made of” & from “Measure #2," “in front of a train / the train is your / friend // in a fiery furnace”; close-ups “from Lip Service,” by Matthew Timmons, “impress upon the audience / the best lips are now.” & how; & Kate Schapira leads us into her city, “…made magic by apricot…” her city in “from The Bounty: You’re a Stranger”: “New lights and darknesses cross the same faces….” as an editor, it is reassuring to see again how excellent the poets I’ve published all are.

Jessica Bozek’s poems, typed on the inside of matchbooks must be seen; a reshuffling of words plays across the flaps; from “4: a”: “where I am / wax // walls extend // up from //the roof / inside // my arsenal / raindrops”; then, from “4: b”: “I prefer / the roof // a gun to / most walls // wax seams // rain anodyne wolf.” patterns emerge & criss-cross--these poems avoid the problem, for example, of Jenny Holzer’s visually striking but texturally dull text art--both components are interesting, vital.

on Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney’s collaborations: here they’ve corresponded with a series of letters to each other--mostly “Elisa to Kathy”--a clever conceit for collaborators. “Elisa” seems to be querying Kathy for advice to escape a relationship: “Any tips for getting a ring off my finger / &/or becoming a better singer in public / you sometimes careerist?” & “With this dead, damp leaf / I thee wed. Kindling / my love, but killing my joy / your stable of words / falls upon me like a / cartoon anvil.” w/in the context of collaborative poems, this desire for escape is particularly perverse: “Terrified / my success will soon dwarf yours & / then explode & die.” clever & perverse? fine.

moonlit 3’s good looking: take a look

A Sing Economy Symposium

For the duration of 2008, Flim Forum poets are singing the economy. See: the contents of our November board meetings...


Sing it to the ceiling
from How We Saved the City by Kate Schapira
I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut by Eric Gelsinger
from The New New Deal by Mathew Timmons
On the Mohegan Sun Bus with Robert of Kinshasa by John Cotter
May by Lori Anderson Moseman
I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut by Eric Gelsinger
from Your Imagined Reader by Jennifer Karmin
Poem by Kate Schapira
Tuesday by Barrett Gordon
The Burgaloos by Kaethe Schwehn
from The A Down by Tawrin Baker
I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut by Eric Gelsinger
Take Aim by Barrett Gordon


...and look for new Econo-poems in this forum throughout the month of December, as we continue infrawriting the reconstruction.

The Inland Sea

The Inland Sea
by Brandon Shimoda

Tarpaulin Sky Press
6" x 8", perfectbound, black endsheets, 40 pages.
$10

Normally

2

goal,
water bars

old wet
trigger vacant

binge into white
rice red leaf
not to plug
the hole or
un-pend queue

however randomly
the weather
to finish at 3
when i come
out & things
weigh
down
but to their strength &
place floats old
sticks w/ water thoughts






3

the unplayed horn
of the goat u-turns
back slowly to pick
the lock

alley's larval moan
mobs the mulberry-
died & -shaded walk

noise-hop, kodak city
crag w/ plunger-bridge
& air-chain truss







4

tumble satellite
extra-fine
detritus
company bound
↑, a(root)float

the pressure too
however imaginably
sky- ____-high
nut-wound round
the bolt tight
___high
& snap-button dry
on water magic
falling normally




excerpted from a poem by Barrett Gordon
art: Take Aim by Barrett Gordon

see A Sing Economy

The Alps

by Brandon Shimoda




ISBN 978-0-9790888-2-7
144 pages, 7x9
$14 (+ $2 shipping & handling)

or:

Send a check for $16 to:

Flim Forum Press
PO Box 549
Slingerlands, NY 12159

Query: klane at flimforum dot com

Browse: flimforum.com




More on The Alps

I have come to strengthen the currency radically cut

Observing soup kitchens should teach you the power of ambition.






Handshakes strengthen memory.






A good teacher will instruct you to cultivate your image as much as your learning.






There is no stick hard enough to drive me away from a man whom I can better in a deal.






Watch a cashier, a laborer, a cleaning woman, and you will conclude that man is the stupidest of animals. But watch a dealmaker, a fund manager, or a diplomat, and you will beg if creation can display a finer thing.






Poverty is a halter. Any man with a grip will yank it.




Why India, friend? Can you not buy their rich cigars and pretty sandals in America?






Ask some old money for a hundred dollars, and they give you a thousand. They do not give as they are asked, nor act as if they earned it.






Share a plate of oysters with old money, and they will savor each bite, talk discursively, even let fall napkins – anything to make sure you eat more than your share. Their type is easy, their generosity is stylized greed, their magnanimity degrades.






If you’re going to be a dog, you might as well be a bad dog. If you’re going to be a man, though, be a man.






excerpted from a set by Eric Gelsinger

see Oh One Arrow and Buy Later

The A Down

Determined his default logic's
Struggling within a sick metaphysic.

"What I mean is when I think maybe I identify with certain thoughts, maybe that's—and they might jump from this to that, and all the while I'm scratching my ass, shifting in my chair. Someone might come over and say 'hi' absentmindedly and my attention's on them, but it's still not me who's acting there, the center" I know that that's a tree "held barely edges in—the worn curtains revealing of an ecology of social surplus, as fruit color energetic surplus—holding"




Bureaucratic order forms.

I've made a few assumptions, but have yet to work out their conclusions. For instance, take "the first principle," that of non-contradiction. "For instance. Take" the first principle "that of non-contradiction," take the first "that" of the "non-contradiction" principle for "of for the" that instance principle, take first "non-contradiction."




Partly because I like to keep it fresh, and avoid adapting, and partly because my schedule is subject to interruptions and I need to workout when I can, however I can.

Since our hip flexors are generally stronger than our ab muscles, we rely on them by yanking ourselves up as our hip flexors tug on our spine. But she was also able to talk and laugh as we visited and I told her I was proud of her for that, and for so many things. The former you can get from watching. The circumstances that led to the victim going to the floor included noise, terror, seeing others shot, concern for his classmate, overwhelming confusion about what to do. But laying on the floor is a bad idea. But laying on the floor is a bad idea. CCC Here at World Stock Report we work on what we here from the street. Big news expected. This should invoke LARGE gains.



from The A Down by Tawrin Baker

in A Sing Economy

THE BURGALOOS

I will tell you a story about a black virgin glove.

Shy glove.
Shy glove.

Never a hand in the glove.
sunset + love = good kind of glove.

But we were robbers.
We were burgaloos.
That’s what we called ourselves, me and Tom.

Tom liked to press the belly of the Happy Chef.
I liked to place a blade of grass between my thumbs and blow.

I cut my mouth once, so hard did the grass reverberate against my lips.
That’s why they call it a blade, asshole, said Tom.

We let the glove lay tenderly on the dash while we robbed banks.
While we robbed army surplus stores.
While we robbed a house with orchids in the windows.

Next to the orchids was a harp and next to the harp
a framed poem called “The Load Star.” It began

I don’t know how. But the neck of the harp was womanly and soft
like a stilled northeasterly wind. Movement glinted in the fiber.

Tom wrapped his arms around the harp and lifted it to his chest.
I did not open the door for him.

Instead I examined the orchid, the deep purple color in the center
fraying and scattering as the color moved up the petals.

I thought of my mother and the cancer in her chest.
I thought of the log we split open in the woods and then
the leg of a man we shot and how it kept kicking.

With my mouth I made no sound.
I went back to the car and put on the glove.

Tom, I said, let’s drive away from here.

My hand was warm inside the glove.
Greatness reared her head in front of me.



poem by Kaethe Schwehn

see A Sing Economy

moonlit 3

quite a few flim poets--kate schapira, matthew timmons, harold abramowitz, amanda ackerman (all victims of a sing economy), & adam golaski--and a coupla friends 'o flim--kathleen rooney & elisa gabbert--appear in the newest issue of moonlit, edited by lisa janssen & clair mcmahon, which suggests to me a rather solid book. ch-ch-check it.

Matter of Days

1

just about
bone dry
w/ upward
dust mobile
can not
now as dampness had
slept-thru

things take the place
whistle dry
sit-in
chokes the
croon under
head
the volunteering guard
whimsy

all pacing day in
to & out the _____, what is it?
barrel
wagon
?
out—over
strapped to middle

in the park wherever

all distance caves
& more suspect
life’s just so

for win—total immeasurable gain

matter of days




excerpted from a poem by Barrett Gordon
art: Tuesday(2) by Barrett Gordon

see A Sing Economy

The opposite of credit is blame

My sweater, which I wash in the bathtub because

of the economy, is sour and stiff. I get a hanger.

I hang it from the fire escape. When I bring

it in it’s soft, smells good. I don’t

attribute this to the fire escape, its metal or rust.




I want a map of the moon.





Now appearing with failure, its source.

Everyone wants to know for blaming purposes

now that they can’t save. Something to do.





The moon’s disc fits over the sun’s disc

by accident, but wanting can be powerful.




My friend explains mortgage bundles carefully over

and over email, using analogies, but nothing

but wanting is exchanged, right up

to the minute of total obscurity.





Maps work by analogy. Trying

to navigate is only like.

The opposite of credit is blame.




poem by Kate Schapira

see A Sing Economy

The Words Go Round

alphabet | pocket | world

currency you got art to make words from one mouth to another a concentration of wealth receipts yada yada this economic poetry poverty makes the world go round do you got spare change in your pocket in your poem can you bankroll these syllables an enterprise of language a tax deductible alphabet a cut back cut up cut off page a long term plan a big mac big chief can’t remember what you bought but make it bigger



from Your Imagined Reader by Jennifer Karmin

see A Sing Economy

Fomalhaut b: fhqwhgads

Faced with economic meltdown, the universe blithely continues to expand. From one globe to another: panic! O Fomalhaut b, bask in Fomalhaut's glow whilst ye can. News from the universe: Fomalhaut b's moon will be called fhqwhgads.