The Freq

Fishes,

The Freq of the Week will feature Matt Longabucco, Carley Moore, Aaron Tieger, and Nick Moudry (yes! it IS a really incredible lineup!) so I will see all of you at the Face tomorrow at 2:30. 165 W. 4th St. Saturday, November 18th.

Much Love,
Shafer

Our Friend Karen

Our friend Karen Miller just published a very good short story here:

http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1733

NoPoWroMo

Union Jack

A jack is a flag, but flags
can't always say everything
you want to say, jack, jack
as in person or bro or bloke
over there where they
fly the Union Jack. A jack
is a small square flag
used at sea, and when
the Union is flown at sea,
it is a jack, jack, and therefore
it is referred to as Union Jack.
At home, the Union Jack
has fallen into common usage:
jacks refer to jacks as jacks,
even though on land a jack is a flag
not a jack, jack. A jack is always a flag,
jack, but a flag is not always a jack.
What I am trying to say, jack,
is that jacks say exactly what
each jack means to say,
and there are many jacks
under every jack.

from www.howtodrawtheUnionJack.com:

The larger pieces each have area (335-75√5)/2; the smaller each 445/4-30√5; giving a total blue area of 1115-270√5 ≈ 511.261646 square units, which is slightly more than 1.44% larger than the cross of St George. The red of St Patrick is in four pieces, two larger and two smaller, these respectively each having area 20√5 and 20√5-5; for a total of 80√5-10 ≈ 168.8854382 square units. Thus the flag is red : white : blue in the proportions 494+80√5 : 191+190√5 : 1115-270√5 ≈ 37.38% : 34.21% : 28.4%.

The Freq

Fishes,

Scott Glassman, Adam Davis, Tom Haushalter, and all the way from St. Paul Paul Dickinson will be at the Frequency tomorrow at noon. Full details here:

http://frequencyseries.blogspot.com/

xo,
Shafer

For Mike Sammons

Waiter! More Shrimp!

Tonight let's drink
until we can't see
and tomorrow I will lay
on the floor on my back
while angry moments
phase into our morning
from outside my window
where they're upset by the Man.

And you, like a
cat can curl
up on my chest.

We will be married for a few hours,
for a few fine forevers.

She Finds Sweatshirts

My Houston Texans sweatshirt (that which Tom and Joanie refer to as "Shafer's Leather") has been returned!

Jess Larrabee dove into the Sputnik lost and found, and she reunited me with That Which Is Most Holy.

Jess Larrabee drives this finely-tuned machine. I will keep you updated about shows in Brooklyn and around the world.

You can hear Jess jam here

http://shekeepsbees.com/sounds.html

and here

www.myspace.com/shekeepsbees

Those of us who survived what is now referred to as "The Night of One Thousand Jaegermeisters" (a.k.a. last night) are deeply devoted to Jess.

Zoo Project

Fish Surgery

Fish surgeon:
this sturgeon
needs a bypass

STAT!

The nurse glug glugs
and gives up
on sterilizing anything

in this mess of weedy
fishtank -- why
did she become a nurse
anyway. Days like these
she'd rather be
someone's lunch.

But then beep...beep...
and the sturgeon's
back again. The surgeon's
fins snap, snap as he removes
his plastic gloves, and he says
"that's why we're in this business.
Saving fishes' lives."

October is National Poetry Month!

Keeping It Together

While researching words
for our friends' wedding
I discovered something interesting:

the Irish, while being
romantic about a lot of things
are not so about love;
and like a talking dog

the best years of our lives
are creating themselves.

We are an envoy
written to tell itself:
the next word is this;
the next word is this.

Zoo Project

Tuna and Hurricane

Two hurricanes
are turning
every New Yorker
into a tuna.

Time will tell
if tunas
can hang.
If they are hard.

I'll tell my fellow tunas:
our time is NOW!
Time to swim, time to
shed our raincoats.

My Two Favorite Poets

Shanna Compton and Jen Knox are on tour together supporting their books Down Spooky and Gringo Like Me respectively.

I am worried about them out there on the road without me in the back seat, drinking Silver Bullets and amusing myself.

Please take a close look at this schedule, and if you know anyone in these locations please tell them not to miss any of these parties. They will regret it, but in the good way.

First leg: Atlanta, Athens, Davidson, Nashville, DC

DECATUR, GA: Sunday, October 2nd at 8:00 PM
With Jennifer L. Knox
Java Monkey
205 Ponce de Leon Ave. #5
Decatur, GA 30030
404-378-5002
FREE

ATLANTA, GA: Monday, October 3rd at 7:30 PM
A triplet with Danielle Pafunda & Jennifer L. Knox!
Emory University
Joseph W. Jones Room
Woodruff Library
540 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, GA 303022
FREE

ATHENS, GA: Tuesday, October 4th at 7:00 PM
A triplet with Danielle Pafunda & Jennifer L. Knox!
VOX Reading Series
Little Kings Club
223 Hancock Avenue
Athens, GA
FREE

DAVIDSON, NC: Wednesday, October 5th at 1:30 PM
With Jennifer L. Knox
Davidson College
Class visit
Davidson, NC 28035

DAVIDSON, NC: Thursday, October 6th at 7:30 PM
With Jennifer L. Knox
Davidson College
C. Shaw Smith Room
Alvarez College Union
Davidson, NC 28035
FREE
More info: 704-894-2202
(Also a workshop and some other stuff. Details to come!)

NASHVILLE, TN: Saturday, October 8th
With Jennifer L. Knox
Southern Festival of Books
We will just be wandering around the festival this day.

NASHVILLE, TN: Sunday, October 9th at 3:30 PM
With Jennifer L. Knox
Southern Festival of Books
Tennessee Performing Arts Center
Poetry & Drama Stage
505 Deaderick Street
Nashville, TN 37243
FREE

NASHVILLE, TN: Monday, October 10 at 5:15 PM
With Jennifer L. Knox
Watkins College of Art & Design
Brownlee O. Currey Gallery
2298 Metrocenter Blvd.
Nashville, TN 37228
FREE
More info/directions: 615.383.4848

WASHINGTON, DC: Tuesday, October 11 at 7:00 PM
With Jennifer L. Knox
Chapters Bookstore
445 11th St., N.W.
Washington, DC 20004
202-737-5553
FREE

Back in NYC briefly

NEW YORK, NY: Saturday, October 15 at 3:00 PM
with Danielle Pafunda & Steve Roberts
The Ear Inn
326 Spring Street
(west of Greenwich Street)
New York City
FREE
(This will be the first local event with books available.
Stay tuned for PARTY details for afterward. More soon!)

NEW YORK, NY: Monday, October 17 at 6:30 PM
with David Lehman & Philip Cioffari
Cornelia Street Cafe
New York Quarterly Series
29 Cornelia Street
New York, NY
$6 admission also buys a drink
212-989-9319

Second leg: Ann Arbor, Muncie, Milwaukee, Chicago
(Details to come for all below...)

ANN ARBOR, MI: Wednesday, October 19
With Jennifer L. Knox
Shaman Drum Bookstore

MUNCIE, IN: Thursday, October 20
With Jennifer L. Knox
Ball State University
MT Cup

MILWAUKEE, WI: Saturday, October 22
With Jennifer L. Knox
Broad Vocabulary & later that night at Cafe Lulu

CHICAGO, IL: Sunday, October 23
With Jennifer L. Knox
Green Mill

CHICAGO, IL: Monday, October 24
With Jennifer L. Knox
Columbia College
Class visit

Third leg: Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Ashland

SANTA CRUZ, CA: Saturday, November 5
With Jennifer L. Knox
New Cadence series

BERKELEY, CA: Sunday, November 6
With Jennifer L. Knox
Pegasus Books

ASHLAND, OR: Monday-Tuesday, November 7-8
With Jennifer L. Knox
Emergent Forms Series
Southern Oregon University

Saturday, November 12 at Frequency With Corinne Lee & Jennifer L. Knox
The Frequency Series
Hosted by Shafer Hall & Samuel Amadon
The Four-Faced Liar
165 West 4th Street
New York, NY
2:30 p.m.

Wednesday, November 16 at the Bowery Poetry Club With others TBD
Hosted by Christine Hamm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (btw. Houston & Bleecker)
8:00 PM

Sunday, December 4 at the Atomic Reading Series With CAConrad, author of Deviant Propulsion
Atomic Reading Series
Curated and hosted by Cheryl B.
The First Sunday of Every Month @ 7.pm.
Lucky 13 Saloon
273 13th St. (5th Ave.)
Park Slope, Brooklyn

AWP 2006 in Austin, Texas Associated Writing Programs Conference Panel
DIY Publishing: Chapbooks, Zines, Webzines, Blogs, Collectives & Etc.
March DATE AND TIME TBD
LOCATION TBD
Registration info

Ladies and Germs,

Please join us for another Freqy Tarpaulin Sky reading tomorrow at 2PM at 165 W. 4th. Lineup below.

Yours,
Shafer

8 OCTOBER
Jenny Boully, Jan Clausen, Sasha Watson, & TBA

Jenny Boully is the author of The Body (Slope Editions). Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present, and The Next American Essay. She has recently finished a new manuscript, The Book of Beginnings and Endings. She is a Ph.D. student in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Jan Clausen's writing has spanned numerous genres. In the 1980’s, she focused heavily on fiction, publishing a story collection and two novels with the Crossing Press (U.S.) and The Women’s Press Ltd. (U.K.). Her memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity was issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1999. Since then she has become a “born again poet,” publishing widely in periodicals and receiving a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 2003. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Calyx, Feminist Studies, Fence, For a Living: The Poetry of Work, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, Hanging Loose, Ikon, The Kenyon Review, Luna, Margie, North American Review, Ploughshares, XConnect and The Village Voice. Her essays, book reviews, and literary journalism may be found in Ms., The Nation, Poets and Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others.

Sasha Watson is a writer, translator, and teacher based in New York. Her poetry, translations, and reviews have appeared in Bird Dog, Common Knowledge, Triquarterly, Bookslut, Nerve, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. She is currently working on a Ph.D. in French literature at NYU.

Freq of the Week

Hey Folks,

It's October and it's chilly and there's football on TV.

This week's Freq features a couple of veterans and a couple of new faces. Their info is below. See you Saturday October 1st at 2PM. 165 W. 4th St & 6th Ave.

Yrs,
Shafer


1 OCTOBER
Amy King, Dan Machlin, Paul McCormick, Jonah Winter

Amy King is the author of the poetry collection, Antidotes for an Alibi (Blazvox Books), a Lambda Book Award finalist, and the chapbook, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award 2002). Her poems appear in such publications as The Brooklyn Rail, Milk Magazine, The Mississippi Review, No Tell Motel, Riding the Meridian, and Shampoo Poetry. She teaches English at Nassau Community College and spends much of her time between Brooklyn and Baltimore. Please visit www.amyking.org for more.

Dan Machlin is the author of 6X7 poems (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), This Side Facing You (Heart Hammer), and In Rem (@ Press). His work has recently appeared in Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Cy Press, Antennae, Crayon and The Portable Boog Reader. He has also collaborated on a full length Audio-CD with cellist/singer Serena Jost (Immanent Audio)
and contributed companion text to several visual art exhibitions in New York City and Germany. He is the founder and editor of Futurepoem books and a current curator at The Segue reading series at The Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.

Paul McCormick's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Verse, Fence, Conduit, Barrow Street, Word for/Word and DIAGRAM.

Jonah Winter writes books. His first book of poems, Maine, won the Slope Editions Book Prize. His second book of poems, Amnesia, won the Field Prize and was published by Oberlin College Press in Spring 2004. His hobbies include: 1) staring blankly.

Zoo Project?

Momadillo

A paleolithic leftover
is the hard shell
of my momadillo.

Who knows how old
mothers are? Armadillos
are old mothers;
their single-sex litters
are of seven.

Soft as the stuffed
armadillo I bought
for your mother
at the Houston airport.

Every one so soft
on the inside. You
exposed yourself;
you died.

Hours from now
the fossil record
has hardened
these dreams
into facts.

Since you likely cannot read the above information, here's the mighty Jen's description of the event:

"Greetings Fluffy Woodland Creatures,

Just a reminder that you already have plans this Saturday, September 24, at 9 p.m. Big plans.

You're gonna come to Greenpoint for a party celebrating the release of A Gringo Like Me on Soft Skull press, with lots of money in your pocket, dressed to the 9’s, in something very tight, and equally squeaky.

You're going to sidle up and order a drink, like you don't care who pours it. And you'll drink it, like you don't care what it is. Because you won't.

And the last you'll remember before you wake up in New Lots with your pants around your ankles, hickeys spelling out “HONEYBOY” on your ass was singing "Sweet Caroline'” like it was 1999. Because it was. *

9 p.m. A star-studded reading featuring a “Chicken Bucket” showdown with a trophy for Best Recitation.

10 p.m. A performance by The Ladies Tableaux Society of North Brooklyn. (The ladies who brought you “Fury of the Femizons”)

10:30 KARAOKE! No lie!

WHERE: The Capri Social Club (Irene’s)
156 Calyer Street btw Lorimer and Manhattan Ave.
in beeyootiful Greenpoint, Brooklyn G to Greenpoint Ave.
(718) 383-8833

Forward this onto folks who don’t spook easy, and bring a buttload of people. They’ll all fit!"

*

WOW! Hopefully I will have pictures for you come monday.

Get Freqy

with Tarpaulin Sky tomorrow at 2pm as they bring the below poets to 165 W. 4th St.

Dan Chelotti is currently pursuing his MFA at UMASS-Amherst. He has worked as an Assistant Managing Editor at Verse Press for the past three years. He lives in Easthampton, MA.

Mary A. Koncel is the author of You Can Tell the Horse Anything (Tupelo Press, 2004) and the chapbook Closer to Day (Quale Press, 1999). Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets.

Jeffrey Levine is the author of Sanctuaries (Red Hen Press) and Mortal, Everlasting, winner of the 2000 Transcontinental Poetry Award from Pavement Saw Press. His individual poems and groups of poems have won the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the first annual James Hearst Award from North American Review, the 2001 Kestrel Prize and most recently, the 2001 Mississippi Review Poetry Award. His work appears in Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Poetry International, Virginia Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Barrow Street, Yankee Magazine, and The Journal, among others. Jeffrey Levine is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press.

If you can't beat 'em...

I have always sort of thought of rats as little, moving soccer balls, but I've always had a touch of the sadist in me (even though I never let sadists touch me.) I'm certainly not scared of them (provided they don't have any open sores) and I don't hate them by any means. But some people do, and this website aims to change that. I'll support any cause with a website this entertaining: http://www.greatpointedarcher.com/

football and poetry

Hey y'all,

Saturday at the Liar features the poetry of Michael Schiavo, Jesse Ball, and Gibson Fay-LeBlanc. Check out our new Frequency site at http://frequencyseries.blogspot.com/.

Sunday at the Liar features a brand-new and exciting experiment: live halftime shows for NFL football games. Ben Murphy and special guests will be performing live halftime shows for the one o'clock and four o'clock games. It's important to note that NO FOOTBALL WILL BE INTERRUPTED! Ben will perform short sets between each half and then everyone will shut up and we will watch more football.

Come on out for these exciting and groundbreaking events.

Yours,
Shafer

Fall Frequency

Hey Folks,

We are kicking off the Fall Frequency tomorrow with the below reading presented in association with Tarpaulin Sky. Frequency readings will be on Saturday this season, and they will begin at 2 PM.

Yours,
Shafer


TARPAULIN SKY / FREQUENCY SERIES

2PM Saturdays @ The Four-Faced Liar
165 West 4th Street (between 6th & 7th Ave), NY, NY
www.thefour-facedliar.com

10 SEPTEMBER
Robyn Art, Jen Benka, Michael Gottlieb, Heidi Lynn Staples

Robyn Art was born in Boston. Her recent poems have appeared in Slope, The Hat, Conduit, Slipstream, The New Delta Review, Rhino, and canwehaveourballback.com. She's the author of the poetry manuscript, The Stunt Double In Winter, which was selected as a Finalist for the
2004 Kore Press First Book Award. Her chapbook, Degrees of Being There, was released by Boneworld Press in May 2003. A second chapbook, No Longer A Blonde, is forthcoming from Boneworld Press in 2005. Currently she lives in Brooklyn.

Jen Benka's collection of one poem for each of the 52 words in the Preamble to the US Constitution, A Box of Longing With Fifty Drawers, will be published by Soft Skull Press in 2005. Jen is the managing director of Poets & Writers and lives in New York City.

Michael Gottlieb is the author of more than a dozen titles, including Lost and Found (Segue, 2004). His other recent books include Gorgeous Plunge (also from Segue) Careering Obloquy (Other Publications/Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and More Than All (Tongue To Boot), a collaboration with Ted Greenwald.

Heidi Lynn Staples is the author of Guess Can Gallop, which was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. Heidi's manuscript, Dog Girl, runner-up for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, will be published by Ahsahta Press. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, HOW2, La Petite Zine, LIT, 3rd bed, Slope, Unpleasant Event Schedule and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at the University College, Syracuse University.

Google Ads Continued

Bigfoot Costume Rentals

As a child, he never worried
about his feet. Adjectives
like big, smelly, and hairy
were the stuff of...of stuff.
Just people talking about things.

But at adolescence Bigfoot
gained self-consciousness,
and now he rents a costume;
he dresses like a human
when he walks among us.

Shafer 'n Donna Zoo Project #7

Monkey Coffin

Maybe ivory makes
the walls of
your monkey coffin --
she seemed to love you.

But you can’t say
for sure; you are one
dead monkey, unseeing
eyes puffed to the size
of golf balls.

It’s OK, what makes
the walls of your
monkey coffin;
their off-white
is not for you;
that material
is for the monkeys
who survived.