Sunday, April 25 | Booksigning | Book Sale | Free Books

Sunday, April 25th, 4 - 6pm
Book Signing with ARTHUR WINFIELD KNIGHT
- Small Press Book Sale- Free Poems-For-All miniature books- - -
The Book Collector
1008 24th Street, between J & K Streets.
Sacramento/
Richard @poems-for-all.com
916.442.9295
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Please join us between 4 and 6pm for a BOOKSIGNING with Arthur W. Knight. Poet, writer and editor of UNSPEAKABLE VISIONS, a literary journal of Beat Generation writing, Arthur celebrates the release of his latest book. Arthur will be hanging out at the bookstore on Sunday afternoon to sign books and chat with anyone who comes for a visit. Join us in a relaxed environment with light refreshments to talk with the author.
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SMALL PRESS SALE: All small press poetry publications from presses like Rattlesnake Press and Swan Scythe will be on sale between 4 -6pm for 20% off.
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FREE POEMS-FOR-ALL: In honor of Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day (coming up on April 29th) dozens of free little books are yours for the taking! Come grab a pocket full...
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ARTHUR WINFIELD KNIGHT  has published more than 2,000 poems and short stories and, with his wife Kit, has edited eight volumes dealing with the Beat Generation, including "Kerouac and the Beats" (Paragon House, 1988). His most recent of his novel is Misfits Country" (Tres Picos Press, 2008) Other novels include: "Blue Skies Falling," (Forge, 2001) based on Sam Peckinpah; "Johnnie D.," (Forge, 2000); "The Darkness Starts Up Where You Stand" (Depth Charge Books, 1996), and; "The Secret Life of Jesse James"  (BurnhillWolf  Books, 1996). He has also completed a novel about Billy the Kid.
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Arthur Winfield Knight is a well-known chronicler of the Beat Generation. In addition to his correspondence with and photography of the poets and writers of the Beat Generation, Arthur co-edited The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual series of books in a total volume of eight. THE BEAT BOOK (Arthur Winfield and Glee Knight, editors) was published in 1974 as Vol. 4 of  The Unspeakable Visions series. An essential beat book, with a wealth of photos and contributions by key figures of the beat movement, including Kerouac, Ginsberg,  Burroughs, Carolyn and Neal Cassady, Phil Whalen, Carl Solomon, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, John C. Holmes, Paul Bowles, Bob Kaufman, Micheal McClure, Jack Micheline, Larry Rivers, Gary Snyder, Dianne Di Prima, Paul Metcalf, Herbert Huncke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. THE BEAT DIARY (Arthur Winfield and Kit Knight, editors) was published in 1977 as  Volume 5 of  The Unspeakable Visions series. It featured contributions from Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, and Di Prima, among others.
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Arthur has photographed many famous writers, including Henry Miller and Aldus Huxley, and has over 200 book  jackets to his credit.

A conversation with Diane di Prima (San Francisco)

San Francisco Poet Laureate Diane di Prima
In conversation with writer Alan Kaufman
Tuesday April 20, 6:00 pm
Co-sponsored by Poetry Flash

A revolutionary activist of the 1960's and an important writer of the Beat movement, Diane di Prima co-founded the New York Poets Theatre, and edited the literary newsletter, The Floating Bear. She is the author of 43 books of poetry and prose, including Pieces of a Song, TimeBomb, Towers Down, and The Ones I Used to Laugh With. A long-time resident of San Francisco, she teaches private classes and workshops. In 2006 she received the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and community service. In 2009, she was named the Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

Alan Kaufman (Moderator) is author of the books Matches and Jew Boy and editor of several anthologies, including The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. His writing has been anthologized in W.W. Norton's Nothing Makes You Free: Writings From Descendents of Holocaust Survivors.  He has written for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle and Salon.com. He has taught at the Academy of Art University and writing salons in San Francisco. He currently has a blog on the Huffington Post

LOCATION: Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco
TRANSPORTATION: Montgomery BART/MUNI station
Reservations & Information: 415.393.0100
Reservations by email:  rsvp@milibrary.org

Judy Halebsky reads on Friday, April 2

Friday (4/2), 7:30pm: Judy Halebsky will read at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento. Judy trained in Performance Studies at UC Davis and is a member of Sacramento Poetry Center's Tuesday night workshop. Since 2007 she has been in Tokyo studying Japanese literature on a MEXT fellowship. Her book, Sky=Empty, was chosen by Marvin Bell as the winner of the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize.

The New Math of Poetry - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The New Math of Poetry - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
David Alpaugh writes about how the publication of poetry is "likely to double, quadruple, 'ten-tuple' in the decades ahead."

FEB 7 | Walt Whitman reading

Beatitude Magazine | 50th Anniversary

Issue Reading & Party | Tuesday, December 8th, 7pm |  City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Poems-For-All | Bone Folders

JUN 01 | Neruda translator interviewed

Monday, June 1st, 2009
Noon
Bibliocracy Radio
KPFK 90.7 FM
access webcast via the bibliocracy blogspot


Andrew Tonkovich of KPFK radio in Los Angeles has prepared a one-hour interview that features World’s End, William O’Daly's final book of translation of Pablo Neruda; a two-part essay O’Daly published in 2006 titled “A Winter’s Sun: Writing Against Torture”; and some of his own poetry.

With World’s End, work written by Pablo Neruda in 1968 and 1969, O’Daly has now published eight translations of the late and posthumous poetry of Neruda, as well as a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry for Still Another Day, the first of his Neruda series. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, with coauthor Han-ping Chin, set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Copper Canyon Press

Big Drink

Big Drink by Crawdad Nelson
2009, 24th street irregular press
5.5" X 8.5", 32 pages.
$5.00

24th street irregular press seems to spend an inordinately large amount of time making miniature books of poetry under its Poems-For-All imprint. But they've been know to put out the occasional larger-sized chapbook now and then.

Big Drink presents an impressive collection of poems by Sacramento poet Crawdad Nelson. "For raw power and freshness of language," writes author Bill Pieper, "nobody outdoes Crawdad Nelson in crafting poems that interweave the natural world with the human psyche and vice-versa. This guy has a gift."

In addition to the title poem, Big Drink, the chap puts together for the first time his popular poems I Get the Impression the World is Made of Roses (previously published in miniatures as part of the Poems-For-All Series) and Bigfoot is Continuous.

Copies are available at The Book Collector in Sacramento, CA or email me here if you're out of the area and would like me to mail you a copy

(Transit)ory Poetry

It's with my great pleasure that Bob Stanley, president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, has lately been presenting me with a lot of creative projects. They've allowed me to put my design skills to good use in support of the literary arts. One project involves putting poetry placards into Sacramento Regional Transit buses.

Poems on Transit isn't a new idea. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for example, calls their project Poetry in Motion. In London, Poems on the Underground has been putting poems on subway trains since 1986. (According to their website, Poems on the Underground has been the inspiration for similar programmes around the world: in Dublin, Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Sydney, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, St. Petersburg and most recently Shanghai.) And it's been done before in Sacramento. Several years ago, the Sacramento Poetry Center initiated a brief project to put poems on buses. Now, Bob Stanley wants to see SPC do it again.

While Bob works on sponsors, funding and RT approval, he's asked me to create a few mock-ups of what the poetry placards might look like. What you see pictured here are preliminary; a starting point towards creating the basic look, with each poem used getting its own unique design while the boilerplate information about the poetry center and sponsors along the bottom stays the same from placard to placard. Bob suggested Ezra Pound's In a Station of The Metro as a "test" poem something to build a first version around. I included a design that features Jack Spicer's First Catch the Rabbit to provide an alternative design. (We presently have permission to use neither in widespread use.)

Anyway, a taste of what I hope becomes a successful Sacramento Poetry Center literary-art-in-public-places project.

Pictured placards are 11" tall and 17" long. (RT permits placards as long as 28".) On the print version, and not clearly depicted here, the placards have a half inch white border. There's a glaring error in Mr. Spicer's poem. "if your going to build..." should, of course, read "if you're..."