Rise, Frequency, RISE!!!

Hey Fishes,

Join us for a rare Frequency Reading on Sunday, March 25th at 2 PM (sharp!) when we will be joined by Jill Alexander Essbaum, Jessica Piazza, and Meghan Punschke. These are three very talented and accomplished ladies, bios below. That'll be at the applauded Four-Faced Liar, 165 W. 4th St., New York, NY. Take the blue or orange trains to W. 4th or the red trains to Christopher.

Yours,
Shafer Hall


Jessica Piazza's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Agni, Indiana Review, Spork Magazine, The Formalist, and 150 Contemporary Sonnets (Evansville Press). She won the 2005 Keene Prize for Literature at the University of Texas, where she did her graduate work in poetry and founded/edited Bat City Review. She is co-founder of the Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City, and is newly involved in the Student Publishing Program, which brings creative writing curricula to public schools across the country. Jessica was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

Meghan Punschke has MFA in Poetry from The New School (2007) and is the current managing editor of an online literary journal, MiPOesias. She is the curator and host of Word of Mouth, a reading series on the Lower East Side dedicated to poets and fiction writers. Her first collection of poetry, "Stratification" is forthcoming. Her works can be found in MiPO and Free Focus. Visit www.megpunschke.com for more details.

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of the 1999 Bakeless Prize winner in poetry, Heaven, and the 2005 gathering of sonnets, Oh Forbidden. Her newest collection, Harlot, is forthcoming from No Tell Books. Her poetry has appeared in journals both religious and secular, both domestic and foreign, both well-known and rabidly obscure. Her literary influences and obsessions include the following: Simon Armitage, Nick Cave, St. Augustine, John Bunyan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Parker. Seriously.

FAT BLACK SLO DE DO creeps up on ya.

Viva FATBACK SPO-DE-O-DE!

VIVA!

Matt Henriksen has this to say about last weekend's AWP Convention:

Dear Shafer,

I woke up dead today,
on the wrong side of hell
in a jar of formaldehyde
and the intestines of Egyptian
whores. We knew the asylum
had fancier light than
the middle school cafeteria,
terrarium of luminous insects,
a katydid on a caryatid
of an Egyptian whore with
nice titties and no insides
downstairs, where her and
our sorrows dwelled.

Flesh Eating Poems!

To get the new issue of Cannibal, which features a poem by Shafer Hall, CLICK HERE!

and scroll down to where it says

Cannibal Issue Two
$12
Buy Now

and CLICK AGAIN!

click click click

From the Teddy Roosevelt Archives by way of Jeffrey Eaton

"I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot.

"Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiujitsu for a few years."

*

Major hoss.

Frank Sherlock Emergency Fund

Great poet and friend Frank Sherlock has been hospitalized with a severe case of meningitis. Find out how you can help him here.

Invisible Scary Things

Check out this cool thing Matt Rohrer did.

Here's how Matt describes it:

"Basically they ask poets to write a poem on a topic they've just been given, and they have only 15 minutes to do it. Their software records the keystrokes and so when you see it, you see the poem being written keystroke by keystroke."

It's lots of fun. And there's a button (I didn't find it until halfway through my viewing) you can use to speed up the show 4x.

Smooth, Criminal

Check out our famous friend Jason.

And did I tell you about what I can do with my fingers and Bad Company?

Thanks Steven Schroeder for this very nice thing.

Carrie and I have some important things to tell you.

Tartar Sauce

Richard Brautigan
made it punctuation:
Mayonnaise.

And the malaise
of an early palate
could only be crisped
by pickles;

we didn’t all
tell our parents
what we liked to eat;

some of us
made faces
out of our lingue-d
palatial ideas
of our ideals:

food
was our first
taste of life --
what life means
-- could be easily
defined: I like this,
I like this,

I don’t like
tartar sauce
as much as I once
liked it.

AND I can magically call forth Bad Company jams with my fingertips.

The chapbook Maureen and I wrote together made this list.

Another Triumph in Poetry Engineering...

...by the well-oiled John Cotter and Shafer Hall Poetry Making Machine. Be sure to note the authors' photo. And please note that my bio is written in 3rd person omniscient.

Two Poems by Mike Sammons as left on my voicemail on consecutive Sunday mornings.

All punctuation, linebreaks and stanza breaks are my own. [In brackets are untelligible passages.]

*

I Fell Down

After a long -- very long night
of drinking bourbon and beer,
I came to my door and immediately
fell down at the first step.

These are the days I instantly remember:
God is a bird caught close between the legs;
winter winds round me like a [sick date]
coughing some madness in the nice air.
Trees dance the polka unrestrained
by my methods; some mother
sleeps sound in her bed.

Cigarettes last on my fingers
like gods…of strife.

Run your fingers down your thighs,
take them down your own legs
to your feet: you are a god of lust
and of all things lusty.

I love you like a shooting star
all above me; I lie on a trampoline
making my mistakes the way
we [warn some kids about lies]
and yet fails
on the white gates of Montrose.

*

Restaurant

Actually they don’t come in like wolves,
they come in more like enormous and pointless mannequins
on the lunchtime crowd of miscreants.

Cubicles disperse and weep;
taxis scream without screaming;
the boss stands like a moron waiting
for something that won’t come,
won’t become itself.

There is a man with his wife and his child,
a young boy with big lips and black skin,
and the mother keeps spying all over him
and thinks [he’s a genius or more]
and waits for her meal and ponders
some things I don’t even think about.

The dad’s face shows a jumble of ears
and doesn’t smile or move at all.

I see a doomed corpse in us all:
the father is doomed to at least fourteen years;
the mother is doomed to at least fourteen years;
the earth belches magnetic revelations in kind.

A bad haircut can ruin your life;
a parking ticket can send you to jail,
sitting wildly with the animals
who don’t shout and also don’t front.

Innocence abounds in the accused like a plague:
the dog barking is doomed to fate;
the birds fly like an idiot also.

Where does that end or begin:
yourself, your own child, a rogue,
an entire imbecile.

[Just to reassure] our kids, more
morons than we,
I open the bottle with a tool,
and sink my lips over the same glass mouth
till the draining, delving mind
sinks itself into the start which [is hard.]

The winds will find themselves virgin,
and the sky will mask itself like an owl.

I stand thinking “no, this is not my life,
this is not the life I wanted, this is just
not my life.”

Some are doomed to dust, others are doomed
to lust and to other things. Some are doomed
to happiness and comedy.

I will stay with the doomed of the doomed.

Christmas Poem

For a Christmas poem see here!

Storyhole

Get ready for Joan Vorderbruggen's STORYHOLE!

My New Boots

Here is a short movie our friend Colin made. It features John Cotter reading a couple of his poems and me reading a couple of haiku John and I wrote together. It also guest stars Marion Wrenn.

November As National Poetry Month

Prison Escape with References to Dances With Wolves

The assistant warden
is a HUGE Kevin Costner fan,
and the warden’s son
participates in the universal theater
of young men in concert
with Tonka trucks.

The warden wonders
where #801116 went,
and soon the news
of the jailbreak
has shot through
the little local population.

The warden’s wife, who thinks
she’s been done so much wrong,
looks out from her kitchen window
into the wide Indian woods,
and mutters to herself: “run
you little fucker, run,”


*


Who Wrecked this Train?

Back then, one of us
was a sleek, shiny train,
and another was a bright
blue smiling train,
unassailable as he tracked
his way around.

The sun reflected off
all of us trains;
it was bright back then,
when our lives were filled
with so much university
and beer.

Bright trains, never
tired trains, and trains
wearing big brown sunglasses,
we were all linked up
with big metal joints that clanged
when we rammed into one another.

No one could say when
certain trains wrecked,
and no one worried
about it much anyway --
we were trains; we were
made of steel.

Now we know:
no train wrecks itself;
there’s nothing a train
likes more than its track;
and as the train rolls
through the forest,
the trees ask
“oh, what have we done?”

But inside the clickety-est
“trouble trains” is always
a quiet, clear voice from
a bright-eyed conductor:
remain calm, remain
calm, remain calm.

ONPM ETC.

Carving Pumpkins of Our Forefathers (From A Bunker in Strep-Ridden Vermont)


The likenesses of our Founding Fathers on squash
(as you ahem-ahem your throat into submission)
create a capitalization issue: does an Abraham
Lincoln squash become an Abraham Lincoln
Squash (ahem-ahem ahem?)