Seven people are confirmed dead as a consequence of the tropical storm Delta which struck the islands yesterday evening. One person on Fuerteventura & six refugees in a patera (smallish open boat not fit for the open sea) heading for Gran Canaria

all of
a sudden
there's this
really warm
WIND
bringing the
temperature up
by seven
degrees celsius
in
less than
ten minutes
& all
this sand
&
dust &
debris coming
from all
directions

Some more reading for you. Michelle Grangaud

For your reading pleasure, two poets from Argentina. Mercedes Roffé & Karina Maccio

Some random not so lazy thursday notes. First some recently discovered mags. H_ngm_n & Titanic Operas (which includes some poems by Mercedes Roffé in english translations by Janet Greenberg, but why not the original poems & why no bio?) are two more of all these strangely good online mags that seem to just grow out of the ground, how else to explain this proliferation? Grimm Magazine (thanks Jonathan for the link) & Tolling Elves are two print mags. Tolling Elves does smallish one-author issues, along the lines of STANZAS, the difference being that in TE the author (poets, really) is paired with an artist. The poets they've published so far make for really good company. Grimm is more the formally normal mag, printing several authors in each issue, so with them it's in their approach & also, which is apparently rare, that it is widely (whatever that might mean in the world of litmags) distributed both in Canada & the UK. Young Austin, Texas, poet Scott Pierce has a blog with links to, among other thing his two e-chapbooks (as pdf). They are well worth what little space they take up on your computer, as the blog is worth reading quite apart from the links. He also operates Effing Press, one of the really interesting chapbook presses. The e-book series that Moria started late this summer has been off to a flying start with books (also available in print editions) by Jordan Stempleman, Donna Kuhn, Eileen R. Tabios, William Allegrezza &, just a few days ago, Anny Ballardini. Halvard Johnson has two blogs I have returned to with some regularity recently, one is all words & no pictures, the other is all pictures & no words. He is another of those poets I was late to discover. Some really good poetry is easily accessible from his website. Finally a question. What happened to Dustin Williamson, cool poet & editor of Rust Buckle Books & mag? The Rust Buckle blog was taken down & he doesn't reply to emails. Also, a minor thing, I never saw the "after"-issue of Rust Buckle which was my first print publication in english (just two small poems, but anyway). The issue seemed to include some interesting things. Does anybody know what happened to him?

Some lazy sunday random notes. The publication of on stealing lips from Martian Press has been postponed until february/march. Along with Houston from Furniture Press (why the messy address?), as announced here, that means spring will bring my two first chapbooks. Also, I learned today that a poem of mine will, one of these mondays, be poem of the week at Deep Cleveland Junk Mail Oracle, a latter day follower, maybe, of d.a levy's The Buddhist Third Class Junk Mail Oracle.The Deep Cleveland site is well worth a check. I first heard (read) of d.a. levy in an essay by Gary Snyder & he has had a strange appeal to me ever since, although it wasn't until a couple of years ago I found more than a poem scattered here or there by him. Another delicious mag I came across recently is Aught. There's some strange & beautiful things happening there

Las Palmas is a bit tired this fine noon. She didn't sleep well last night. At around four in the morning she was woken up by, as I was told, a spectacular & beautiful thunderstorm. Did I step out onto the roof to watch it? No. Did I get up to close the window that has been wide open since I first looked at the room? No. I slept. At eight, when I put my feet down on the floor it wasn't with a thud or a thump but with a splash. This, Mr Eliot, regardless of how the world ends is how a morning sometimes begins

The owls are not what they seem. You have two weeks to suggest what they are

Ron Sillimans survey of what he calls a New Western aesthetic brought him to Bobby Byrd, living in El Paso. When reading the post the name at first seemed vaguely familiar & when I read the three poems included in the post the vaguely familiar became "oh, him". I had read some haunting poems by Bobby Byrd in a Santa Fe Poetry Broadside Like a Regular Storybook (december 2002) some more than a year ago & the poems had reverberated in my head, & possibly in some of my poems, ever since without a name to connect to the poems. This is, if you will, post-beat poetry at its very best. That may be quite a statement to make based on having read just eleven poems by someone, but so what. Someone really should solicit a collected poems from this man. Along with the complete collected poems of Philip Whalen, which I await with an uncharacteristic lack of patience, it would make a cornerstone in the shelves of anyone in the least interested in the wedding of a kind of zen sensibility & contemporary poetry

Last night Salif Keita played in Parque Santa Catalina, as part of a three-day free outdoors festival. In the course of a little more than an hour & a half he & his band (the members of which are no more than half his age) played eleven songs with scarcely enough pause between them to say muchas gracias. Everything I thought I'd write on the show boils down to this; the man & his band rock. That's it. If they get within reach of you, go see them

another thing
the dromedaries do
is keep count
of the one-way
streets & the years
of moroccan
occupation of
west sahara. well,
that's two things
& thirty years & the
majority of streets
in town. besides which
most people feel that
when the dromedaries out
number the humans (as
if they ever would) the
islands will explode
into senseless
violence, of course
caused exclusively by
ungrateful dromedaries
& never by their own
attitudes & actions
toward them

Anja Utler, translated by Tony Frazer & Alberto Blanco, translated by Joan Lindgren. Both from the april 2005 issue (63/64) of Shearsman Magazine.

A really fine blogger living in a smallish swedish town has started a blog in english. Hopefully he will post with some regularity. So far it's just a brief hot & wet dream

Just in case you want to drive one of the black cabs in London, first learn this

On fieralingue you can choose from five languages; italian, chinese, french, arabic & english. What got me there in the first place was a link somewhere to their poet's corner, which is really fine & dangerously close to becoming a goldmine. P.F.S. Post has recently updated with two poems by Amy King (try the first two lines of the second poem on for size, they fit at least these ears like a glove), a feature on - including some poems by - Chris McCabe, two poems by David Prater & one by John Tranter, as if it wasn't enough that he's editor of Jacket

A few things I've read online recently that struck me as worth linking to. The april 2006 issue of Jacket is starting to go up. So far it contains a few poems & a couple of interviews. One of them is Ryan Newtons interview with Tom Clark, one of my favourite living lyrical poets, taking three poems from Clark's forthcoming volume of new & selected poems as a starting point. Also, in other magazines, some new poems. First some by two poets familiar to me: Amy King & Christophe Casamassima. Also some by poets previously unknown to me: Sara Wintz, Rositza Pironska & Francisco Santos.