Lindsey Boldt's conversational road poem written on I-5 to LA...

Pubes are a present
pubes are a privilage
suspicion is your game (your honesty's to blame)
Viper Room
I'll have a French Racetrack
horse tranqs & red wine
Remember guys, 2 rootbeers each, that's it
East Bay extends to Livermore
Benicia, Vallejo, that's North Bay
stoked, super stoked
get some headshots
book a commercial, work on getting a SAG card
the jukebox affect--playing music you know
Where the fuck are we?
I can't imagine living there
Can you imagine living there?
I can't imagine living there
but these fucking hills are beautiful
This is the Altamont pass
Power pop (Cheaptrick)
Are you equating [redacted] people from Oakland
w/ Uruk-Hai?
That's what that girl said right before we [redacted]
write that shit down
pub cheese--it's pretty fuckin' sweet
yer gonna love it
Rotten Robbie

Cowsies!
Cowsies!
Giant clouds!
Sky....
Yosemite! Yosemite! Yosemite!
Nat'l Park!

I got a jug a dat
"No water, no jobs"
La Pinocha--pussy sweet bread
work that clit

Heart full of love for you
brothers
kissing cousins
my ambiguous and multiple thought--all at once
all at once
low flying clouds
rocking the hills
like twilight zone
turn to smog
the atmosphere--flattens
we're winding through
workable line
it deals w/ you
I can see the sauce
I want the sauce
all down my mouth/chin
like a guzzler
the shock of persimmon in everyday life
winding up w/ a mouthful
when you thought you were just eating fruit

Heck yeah, the lights
neighboring neighborhoods
Is Glendale a neighborhood or a city in L.A.?
Ok, we don't have to listen to The Doors
the whole time but it has to stay L.A.
Guns n' Roses, Beck
OK
Totally
Is Bon Jove L.A.?
No, that's New Jersey

another celebrity/ poet doppelganger thingy...

Mariel Hemingway



and

K. Lorraine Graham

i can't stand Mary-Louise Parker...

don't know how anybody can sit through an episode of Weeds...



and now she's ruining Season 3 of The West Wing...

SPD November 2009 Bestsellers

some photos from our LA/PRB reading...

the very huggable Stan Apps has written a great reading report on me and Lindsey's PRB debut...check it out here...

off to Echo Park, LA. it better look like this...

Happy Birthday Beck
November 18, 1982 – November 19, 2007

Kevin KILLIAN reviews Rude Girl...

Lately I've been noticing a lot of new poetry being written here in the Bay Area that seems like Gary Snyder or Kenneth Rexroth could have written it fifty years ago. Actually I like some of this retro-eco-writing, but when it comes to a new twist, John Sakkis is my go to guy. The tidal basin of the Bay Area has left its mark on every aspect of the region, and everywhere you look you see some lovely vestige of nature, and Rude Girl is filled with the names of landmarks, towns, neighborhoods (Fulton Street, Oakland, the "Panhandle standing on one leg"): I imagine a computer might graph out the spots named in the book and produced a complicated cats cradle of string on pins that would show you Sakkis' trajectory with more accuracy than I can. If you have been waiting to see if Rude Girl is worth buying, I'm here to tell you to lift your finger, press the button and order now. It is a beautiful book full of hope and promise.

Though I will say that Sakkis neglects not the dark side of life either. (You can imagine, since his last book was called Gary Gygax!) I don't go much by blurbs but I do like Brandon Brown's suggestion that Rude Girl reflects today's financial crisis with its evocation of "broken economies." One could write a paper on the way Sakkis' verse slips and slides across pages nimbly avoiding ruin, like the protagonist of a disaster film: "the East Bay/ is running out as we climb in/ I jump up to the floor," etc. First book of poetry composed in Parkour?

It's divided into three sections, but they are fairly fluid and elements of each appears in the others. In the beginning piece, Sakkis gives us the "two kinds of hills: the first slow and/ shuffling, the second fast and frenetic." In part two, "Rude Girl" itself, the two kinds of hills are seen again, as if by another viewer--maybe the child grown older? Or the adult recalling the visions of childhood?---the hills, now "baited with maggots," are "red or yellow fish/ out of the green ground." You can see that Sakkis's syntax is slithery, far from straightforward, and there may be some extra difficulty because of this factor, but the book as a whole hangs together better than most such project. "These operations," he decides, "belong together." A play runs through Rude Girl like a river, a cantata of voices from real life and its outer rings. The final section is "The Breakable Ones," when it was published originally I thought of it as a track by Prince (like "The Beautiful Ones (They'll Hurt You Every Time") but now I think in terms of advice I got when I was a teenage wanna-be poet, from the august Paul Blackburn, on the subject of metric in poetry. "There are only two sorts of rules about prosody, and some are set in stone, but the fun ones are the breakable ones."

upcoming events...this Saturday...

Just a reminder to head on over to Oakland this Saturday for two of our local darlings.

John Sakkis and Norma Cole on Translation

Saturday November 14th, 2009

Nahl Hall, Oakland Campus of CCA

5212 Broadway at College

Small Press Traffic is at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season presents multi-disciplinary conversations that investigate vital areas of contemporary poetics and politics. Poets Norma Cole and John Sakkis continue the season with a reading focused on “Translation.”

John Sakkis’s first book, Rude Girl, is just out from BlazeVox Books. With Angelos Sakkis he translates the work of Athenian multimedia artist/poet Demothenes Agrafiotis, their translation of Agrafiotis’s Chinese Notebook is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse as well as Maribor forthcoming from The Post-Apollo Press.

Norma Cole’s books include Collective Memory, Do the Monkey, and Spinoza in Her Youth and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, among others. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert’s Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France.