So, tonight at 9pm EST (or 8pm for you Iowans, 7pm for you Denverites, and 6pm for you Portland-heads), Heather Christle is going to give a live internet poetry reading on HTML Giant . You will find a link at the top of their site five minutes prior to the start of the reading. Unlike most readings, you'll be able to chat while the reading is taking place. How cool is this?! Ok, meet you there.

After the reading, you should buy her book . If you buy it at some point after Heather's reading, and before midnight, Octopus Books will send you complimentary copies of BOTH Julie Doxsee's Undersleep and Eric Baus' Tuned Droves. That's 4 dollars a book and no shipping! We must be out of our minds!

Thank you for everything.

I thought I should tell you this now, since the deal only lasts for the day: Wave Books is selling their anthology of political poems, State of the Union: 50 Political Poems , for $5 today in conjunction with Obama's State of the Union Address tonight (9 pm EST). I know you've been wanting to get more political. This is your chance. Read political poems. Support independent presses. Get edgy.

Let's get sad!

Tomorrow night, this will happen, whether you're there or not, but it would great if you were there.

Sarah Lariviere has a charming too-brief poetry segment on WHMP in Northampton, MA, at noon on Saturdays. On the most recent segment, Sarah discusses Misery's place in her and our lives and then reads a poem of mine from Scary, No Scary. I think misery makes a poem lovely, especially when it is confused with humor. It sounds like Sarah may agree.

When I was a kid, my grandpa Bill owned his own grocery store in Maitland, MO. Bonner's Corner Grocery. My mom and I would drive down from Omaha on the weekends and I would spend a lot of my time in that store, playing with the foot pedal of the cash register conveyor belt with my grandma, pretending to work the register, helping unload the lighter boxes off the semi-truck. It had 6 aisles I think.  It smelled like cereal dust. My grandma Beth worked the register in the front and my grandpa was the butcher in the back. I liked it when he made the hamburger. He would cut off pieces of bologna for me--the real kind of bologna. The kind that felt like a heavy pencil eraser.

Anyway, I was in Fred Meyer the other day (which is where I took these pictures) and I started thinking about my grandpa. His store had a personality. It struggled. It was sometimes out of things. He knew all the customers and sometime kept a tab for them so they could just pay at the end of the month. It was an extension of himself. It made me want to run a struggling little grocery store somewhere. Maybe a grocery store/poetry bookstore/publishing house with a great produce section. Maybe someday.

There's been an emergency re-scheduling of the readings in San Francisco that I mentioned earlier. What would have been this weekend, will now be the weekend of February 19. But Studio One's promotional interviews have been posted as scheduled. You can't postpone a good interview. I was lucky enough to have Farrah Field (that's her pictured above) ask me some good questions. You can check it out on Studio One's blog here . And if you haven't read Farrah's first book of poems, Rising , then you're a little behind the rest of us--you're not quite as hip as you think you are. It was one of my favorite books of poems from last year.

Team Sad will read some collaborative poems this coming week at two events down there in California, whcre the beer flows like wine. Oakland and San Francisco, beware. And then once more in Portland on Monday.

Thursday, Jan. 21. Calaveras and Studio One Reading. 
Doors at 7.
Reading at 7:30.
365 45th St.
Oakland

Saturday, January 23. Modern Times Bookstore.

Reading at 3pm

888 Valencia
SF

Monday, January 25. 3 Friends Caffeinated Art Reading Series. 
Show and Tell Gallery.
Three Friends Coffee House.
Reading at 7pm sharp.
SE 12th/Ash
PDX

If you're in Seattle and were planning on doing some poetry book shopping without being interrupted by a poetry reading at Open Books around 7:30 Friday night, you're going to be disappointed. I'm going to be there reading some poems along with Donna Stonecipher at that precise time and place.

It's official. Apparently, I am remarkable.

The first collaborative chapbook in a forthcoming trilogy written by myself and Emily Kendal Frey, Team Sad, is now available from Cinematheque Press. It will cost you $7. Get a few other Cinematheque chapbooks while you're in there. Consider it an investment in your sadness.