I can now officially announce that Octopus Books' fourth full-length book of poems, Matvei Yankelevich's Boris by the Sea, is now available for purchase. Please buy it from SPD here, from Octopus directly, or demand that your small press friendly bookstore order a few for you. 

Matvei's Boris is a work of existential theater that destroys the distance between puppeteer and puppet, between ego and id, between what is real and what is absurd. Consisting of prose, poems, and plays, the book creates its own world and then confronts the loneliness of having to exist within one's own creation. Like Daniil Kharms, Yankelevich has written a a children's book for only the bravest of adults. 

For graduation /xmas present, my parents were thoughtful and generous to get me that Canon EOS Rebel T1i off of my Holiday Wish list. These are the first pictures it ever took. 

I am proud to have some poems in two poetry magazines that I want to tell you about. Poor Claudia, out of Portland, whose second issue is a collection of unbound broadside postcards in a handprinted wraparound jacket, and Microfilme, of the Amherst collective of small press poetry magazines, which is, well, printed on a microfilme reel. Preservation is the new consumption. Small presses are the new presses. 

Matvei Yankelevich's Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books 2009) will be ready to ship out from our giant warehouse (small kitchen) here at Octopus, and from SPD, in the next few days. I'll announce it more officially then. But to prepare you for your purchase, I wanted to direct you to Matvei's conversation with BOMB magazine about his first full-length book. 

If you're in Portland, you should go buy it in person at the Pub Fair at The Cleaners downtown from 11-6 on Sunday. Octopus Books (which will be represented by Emily Kendal Frey) and Poor Claudia (which will be represented by Joseph Mains) will share a table at the fair. Do you like small presses? Do you like free hot popcorn balls and hot apple cider? I thought you did. I know you. 

Here's all the info you'll ever want.

I'm going to start painting a Portland series. This one is called Portland #1.

Holiday Wish List #3

VW Camper

New pair of Scrub pants. Mine look like the Hulk got mad while wearing them. 

For his written response to experimental film week, one of my students, Nick, turned this in. Totally full credit. Can you recognize the films these images come from?

Timothy Henry has been reading "the diary of a delusional child prodigy." 

Verse daily has started to warm up to me lately. This morning I caught it looking at me, in that way, while I was trying to eat my pancake. I was just eating one pancake. 

(...and Mathias is on Poetry Daily today. Is that better?)

It was experimental film week in my film class tonight--the poetry of film (I wish I could get away with making this at least half the term). I screened the following movies: Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali 1929), Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren 1943), Cat in the Cradle, Wold Shadow, I...Dreaming (Stan Brakhage 1959, 1972, 1988), The Alphabet (David Lynch 1968),and Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Svankmajer 1982). We talked briefly about Chantal Ackerman, Shirley Clarke, James Mekas, Brothers Quay, John Cage, and my good friend Jake Gillespie. And we read some Pierre Reverdy poems. I want to stay up very late now and write poems until my brain falls off. 

A furrow in my brain,

a line etched in my hand: 

if habit has its way,

it will confound the two.

Save yourself and flee

the narrowed net. 

Cast a new law's circuit

over you and them. 

--RMR 

What I've been reading lately and loving: Rainer Maria Rilke's Uncollected, Catherine Wagner's My New Job, Jennifer Moxley's Clampdown, Lewis Warsh's Inseperable, Garrett Kalleberg's Malilenas, John Berryman's Dream Songs, Heather Green's No Omen, Brenda Hillman's Practical Water, Andre Breton's Earthlight, Kristin Naca's Bird Eating Bird, Mark Strand's New Selected, Dorothea Lasky's Awe, CD Wright's Rising, Falling, Hovering, Luciano Erba's The Greener Meadow. 

O Shirley

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

And so begins my night...

Holiday Wish List #2

I'm finding it difficult to be a good blogger when my camera is on the fritz. I have no pictures to show you. I've been seeing cool things, but you'll never see them. It's frustrating. So, that makes me think I should put a good digital camera on my christmas list. Maybe a nice little Canon Rebel (I might as well upgrade). 

While I'm at it, all these things from Holiday Wish List #2 from last year are still in play. And you should take note of that PressPressPress wish. If you've been telling people you're all about the small presses, prove it. Our new slogan: Prove it at PressPressPress. 

The 8th issue of Mantis is here, just in time to save us all. In it, I have some translations of Andrei Sen-Senkov's poems about Hitchcock films. So. 

Still swimming after all (2) these months. You can't even start to stop me. 

Note: I've dropped my camera too many times. It is now officially on the fritz. I thought you might enjoy these, the last fuzzy photos it ever snapped.

Holiday Wish List #1

I badly want these two books of poems from two of my favorite younger and living poets (but I'll probably buy them for myself when they come out, so don't worry about it). Graham Foust's A Mouth in California and Brandon Downing's Lake Antiquity. 

I've always been interested in the drafts of covers of poetry books. I've sometimes wondered what some books may have looked like if a different cover decision were made. Like the final versions of Scary, No Scary and The Man Suit, Denny Schmickle is responsible for these drafts (above) as well, though it is entirely possible I meddled way too much for these to feel quite right. 

In hopes of inspiring some of the rest of you with books to post your would-be covers, I thought I would post early drafts of SNS. Anybody else care to share? 

Heather Christle Week!

And so begins the holidays: This week HTMLGiant, the self-proclaimed “internet literature magazine blog of the future,” will be celebrating Heather Christle Week in
honor of her debut book The Difficult Farm. Every day this week, HTMLGiant will present poems and features relating to Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm.

In conjunction with HTMLGiant’s Heather Christle week, if you order a
copy of The Difficult Farm this week from Octopus Books you will be
automatically entered into a contest to win a free letterpressed
broadside of Christle's poem "Barnstormer," from Nor By Press.

Heather also has two upcoming readings on the East Coast. You should
consider attending them:

Friday, November 6
5 PM
Agriculture Reader Salon at NYU
with Joshua Cohen, Matthew Rohrer, and Diane Williams
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street
New York, NY
More information

Friday, November 13
8 PM
Amherst Books
with Christopher DeWeese
8 Main Street
Amherst, MA 01002

For just an 8 dollar bill, you can hire the United States government to create a chain of service that, in just 2-3 days, will bring the beautiful new issue of Caketrain into your mailbox. I have some poems about refrigerators in there. And today I'm on Verse Daily. So.