Bill Callahan

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival at Golden Gate Park:

Sunday October 7th, Porch Stage:

* 2:15 Bill Callahan

Rae Armantrout Reading Thursday

When I took Contemporary American Poetry in college, Rae Armantrout came to my class so we could ask her about her poetry. I think her son or stepson went to my school.

At the time I thought she was pretty amazing. Now I know she's pretty amazing. I also know that at the time, in early 2001, I was trying to figure out how to stop working on poems and leave them be. I know this through the embarassment-memory of having asked Rae Armantrout about it in class. I wish I could remember what she said. I do remember that she had the ability to know when one of her poems was finished. I somehow learned it too.

Rae Armantrout is reading Thursday night in the Holloway Series at U.C. Berkeley, Wheeler Hall, in the Maude Fife Room at SIX-THIRTY p.m. with graduate poet Charity Ketz with Q&A to follow.

There's a pretty interesting article by Errol Morris in the New York Times which discusses this photograph and a similar one (without cannonballs on the road) taken the same day by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War. The question sends him to The Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the photographs were taken. I recommend it.

I'm in the library at SFSU, and there's a lot going on. Amazing library books. See photos. And there's a new Typo in which I have a poem.

And two cool new Lame House chapbooks, Arlo Quint's Photogenic Memory and Matt Hart's Simply Rocket:

And I'm about to go to English language learner class. To those of you who sent poems, thanks! The Braille copies should be sent in the next couple of weeks. It's not to late to get yours. As to language,"old" is my new favorite adjective; "old abacus" is my new favorite phrase.

Dear Poets,

I would like to direct your attention to the sidebar. Please read. -->

I would love it if you'd email me a poem. Write a sentence or two about a poem,--any poem, yours or someone else's--and send it off to my class.

My class (basically high school) wants to read poetry. I read them a long poem from Coconut, and a few days later one of my students said, Will you read us that depressing poem again?

But we will also put your poem into Braille and study it part and whole.

And we'll send a Braille copy back to you (or to someone else if it's theirs & you want that).

Please repost this if you want.

Thanks!!!

Love,
Claire

Happy 30th Birthday Lauren!

Lily Brown and Zachary Schomburg reading at Pegasus. A photo diary.
Mp3s of the reading at andrewkenower.typepad.com coming soon.