Voices of Venus hosts the Rubies to launch Where There’s Fire. It’s going to be great. Don’t miss it. Doors at 7:30, reading at 8pm. $5 or pay what you can at the door.

Helena Nelson at Happenstance (a Scottish publisher going since 2005) has some interesting things to say from behind the desk receiving tottering piles of poetry submissions,

In my stack of envelopes, there will be at least six or seven, and perhaps up to ten, from poets I have communicated with before. I will have invited some of them to send more poems, and the consequent familiarity will make those texts feel friendlier. However, the associated guilt will be greater if I can’t make any publication promises.
[…] For poets desperately keen to find a publisher, it may be worth noting that poetry publishers, once established, have a constant mental list of people they’d like to work with and publications they’d like to do. These arrive by one route or another, some of them through personal recommendation, or because one has met them or heard them read. The ‘window’ operated by a few of us is, effectively, an added extra. Most publishers start to say ‘no unsolicited submissions’ simply as a way of making the workload manageable. But they do get submissions, of course. There are other ways. There are always other ways.

Thanks to Hoa Nguyen I found out about the CUNY Poetics: Lost and Found series of chapbooks, now in the third series, but you can still get ones from all.
It’s one of those cases where I wonder how others knew about this and I managed to be so late to the table.
I dove first into the reproduction of Lorine Niedecker’s handwritten 1964 chapbook which she sent to Cid Corman. It, included in this package of chapbooks, pays the price of admission alone. I admire her work above just about anyone. Her careful step, grace with fury is fascinating. Her energies balance and push in such an interesting way.
There’s something about handwriting. It’s something like seeing the face of someone you only know thru text.
Having it in hands is strange and wonderful. It’s as I have keen poem envy for what is already in my hands and mine.
The original chapbook in Corman’s papers was falling apart in its original binding. As the editor of this reproduction, John Harkey, rightly said there’s something about the small subset as it was in its original context, not rolled into a remix of larger unit of poems.
Books where each section is an unrelated chapbook is convenient for alphabetizing spines but have something of the quality of homogenized milk. To keep separate is more like warm Jersey milk. Her first poem starts:

Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossoming

To start in with food metaphor, savoring life. To consider How much to go full-tilt and dense or dilute, parse, chunk. It’s as if made for me.
There’s also a chapbook within the chapbook, a separately stapled afterword of her life and the making of the project.
Besides it there are over 400 more pages of rich neat stuff including Diane di Prima’s memories/memoir of meeting Charles Olsen in 1966. She remembers him lifting a sheet of plate glass and being struck by how the glass sunk into the flesh of his hand despite his size and strength, it was still just skin. She pondered on “his size that everyone spoke of — overwhelming when they first met him — but they spoke of it as if it could explain something.” (p. 11)
When cash flow flows again, going to have to look at getting Series II too.

LEARN TO WRITE HAIKU
 
A Five-Week Online Course
 
Haiku is one of the most misunderstood poetic forms. There is a lot more to haiku than counting syllables. In fact, counting syllables in English written haiku is a misnomer. One element of haiku is juxtaposing images in surprising new ways:
 

sparse shadow
of the plum tree
the pull of an old friend
          —Dru Philippou
 
The course will be taught by Dru Philippou, an award winning writer who has earned her MFA from Naropa University. The course begins January 21, 2013. Everyone is welcome regardless of writing experience. Contact: druphilippou@yahoo.com or (USA) 575 737 9113. Fee: $195 (USA dollars).
 

a poem from The Atlantic Anthology, Volume 2, edited by Fred Cogswell (Ragweed, 1985)

Decisions, Decisions
Since I can’t win your love with poetry I think I will take up football.
All one needs is 250 pounds of muscle, instantaeous reflexes, unhesitating
obedience, and an adamentine determination to die in agony,
hands mashed, thighbones splintered, spleen kicked out, neck broken.
For an audience of two hundred million beer drinkers who wouldn’t
turn himself into a projectile? Or a quarterback—
he gives the orders the orders and drops back to hurl touchdown passes.
In the off season I’ll be a TV comedian
and after that
an international authority on orgasm in the female.
When I retire from football I’ll own a fleet of 300,000-ton oil tankers
and a well stocked island
defended by e Organization of American States.
Meanwhile the Russians and Chinese
will have created a society in which poetry is more impoertant than football.
A billion people will buy recordings of W.H. Auden
and read Dante in the original. And in the whole of Eurasia
there won’t be enough ball players left to field a single team.
In fact the only three extant will be found penniless
in a deredict stadium in Tashkent
sitting like poets in a circle
and keeping the game alive by calling plays at one another.
By this time, however, the free world will have entered the millenium.
All desires will be satisfied before they occur.
Well, why wait when you can have it ten minutes ago?

It’s spoken word transcription of stand up comedy storytelling. But even tho the surprises aren’t because I already read it, its absurdity is fun no matter how many times I read it again. It is damning and hopeful. Even tho poetry is generally overstocked on poetry referencing beer, it is endearing.
In othere news Jim Smith in interview about writing and Nicanor Parra at Findinf a Voice.