juan carlos mestre is not only a beautiful person & a fine poet, in cuaderno de roma he shows some of his visual work. my eyes like

at first i thought of doing this as a comment to a post on adam fieled's blog, but found even the short version would be too long for that. hence

i love the print chapbook for all the reasons adam states. i have been preaching to swedish poets & my local constant readers about how almost all the interesting new poetry, at least in north america, is published in chapbooks

the e-book or e-chap has some advantages & some disadvantages to its print counterpart. the, to me, most obvious disadvantage is that it lacks the tactile delights of a printed book, which in the case of the chap is often beautifully & lovingly designed & produced. the most obvious advantages are ecological (using less natural resources) & the potentially unlimited readership. as for the risk adam sees with poets sending their second rate work to e-chap presses, that strikes me as a strange practice. but if poets do that they will have to live with the fact that their second rate work will be available indefinitely to anyone who wants to read it. & i for one don't submit anything that isn't exactly the poem(s) or manuscript i want it to be at the time. posterity will show what's good & what's not

the two e-books i have forthcoming in the near future, more about them when they're released, are fairly different from each other. one is a poem, or 150-some poems/fragments, mostly culled from a couple of older, only partly functional, unpublished manuscripts, with some new ones added. that one was submitted for e-book publication because it felt too long for a print chap & too short for a long book, which to me makes it the perfect length for the e-book format. the reason i chose chalk editions is that i think they have published some fine things. the other one is a selection of prose poems sporadically written over three years or so. i was thinking of who to submit it to & if it should be print or online. then felino of differentia press asked if i had something i wanted to submit & as i was completely happy with the prose poem manuscript that was the one i sumitted. ye readers will have to judge if either of them is second rate

david rovics reports from copenhagen in counterpunch

time now to speak of a tiny poetry press in malmö called poesía con c. it's the only cartonera press i know of outside latin america. they publish some really fine stuff for those of us who can read spanish (& in some cases swedish translations of the poems)

blue
blue man
blue man with
blue man with his
blue man with his beer
blue man with his beer inside
blue man with his beer inside the
blue man with his beer inside the sun
man with his beer inside the sun
with his beer inside the sun
his beer inside the sun
beer inside the sun
inside the sun
the sun
sun


the photo is by petra pacifico, the poem is by me. both were part of our berlin exhibition (the poem in swedish) which just ended. i have plans to, probably sometime in the spring, publish the photos & english poems (not quite translations) as an e-book

in other news weekend press, operated by amy king & ana bozicevic will start production of my & adam fieled's split chap don't be quiet, start a riot this weekend. & pfs post is back. hooray