Calling all bums: free drinks!

Press Release

The WordTemple Poetry Series will celebrate the beginning of its second year on Friday, January 12, 2007 by featuring Michael McClure¹ and Michael Rothenberg². Refreshments will be provided as part of the celebration so come early, and please spread the word!

Michael McClure and Michael Rothenberg
Friday, January 12, 2007 - 7 p.m.
Copperfield's Books, 2316 Montgomery Dr., Santa Rosa

Tipsy O'Hara

¹ Michael McClure is famous for his dynamic poetry performances. Author of Rain Mirror, Touching the Edge: Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha, and Huge Dreams, McClure has given hundreds of readings from the legendary Six Gallery in San Francisco (with Allen Ginsberg) to the Library of Congress. Recently, McClure joined with composer Terry Riley to create a CD titled I Like Your Eyes Liberty, a stunning exploration of music and voice. A musician and playwright, as well as a poet—McClure's songs include "Mercedes Benz" popularized by Janis Joplin.

² Michael Rothenberg's books include The Paris Journals, Monk Daddy and Unhurried Vision. He is editor and publisher of Big Bridge (www.bigbridge.org), the editor of Overtime, Selected Poems by Philip Whalen, As Ever, Selected Poems by Joanne Kyger, and David's Copy, Selected Poems by David Meltzer. Rothenberg's readings are stunning for their wide range of experience and emotion. David Meltzer calls Unhurried Vision a "deeply stirred & stirring affirmation of poetry's centrality in realizing mundane & profound instances in the everyday extraordinary."

Brokeback newsdesk

Short story competition update

Dear literary people, the north wind is rustling the trees with a sound reminiscent of paper chains. Time to round-up untold stories for the winter and send them to: entries. So what are you waiting for? And furthermore...

Willesden Herald and Pretend Genius Press today shook on a deal to publish an anthology called 'New Short Stories' featuring short-listed stories from the competition, next spring. Inclusion is optional. If you don't want it we'll just die (laughing).

Ortwright Gerder

Updated announcement

Guardian Books news story

Special Reports | Zadie Smith wins Orange prize

blinkers

"Zadie Smith has held off competition from perhaps the strongest Orange shortlist in the prize's history to take this year's award with her third novel, On Beauty." (Guardian)

This class filly saw off a strong field to take the Orange by a length.

Tipsy O'Hara

slam fiction

pretend genius and writethis.com present slam fiction. june 1.

fish drink like us review

ablution

a mustard bastard production (friends of pretend genius)

mustard bastard hosting poetry night every thursday night at the muse in danville, va. featuring kim goransson and jimbo brown. there are too many thursdays. you can't miss them all. get on.

pretend genius author j. tyler blue and poet charles simic in washington d.c.

Joanne Kyger reading & celebration*

Small Press Traffic / Friday, May 26, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.

Every year the board of directors of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center votes a Lifetime Achievement Award to a living writer of distinction. Past honorees have included Barbara Guest, Jackson Mac Low, and Carl Rakosi. The latest recipient of SPT's Lifetime Achievement Award is Joanne Kyger.

Joanne Kyger made an auspicious debut as the golden girl of the Spicer-Duncan circle of the late 1950s in San Francisco. Within a month of her arrival everyone wanted a piece of Kyger, and she became associated with many of the fluid, mercurial poetry scenes around the "New American Poetry." Like her best writing, she was everywhere at once, deep inside the Beat movement, all over Japan and India, up and down the San Francisco Renaissance, steeped in Charles Olson's polis-based soul curriculum, our ambassador to the New York scenes of Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman, the mainstay of Bolinas, and a seer in the Buddhist poetics of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder. Those are only the locations; deeper underneath, the substance of her many lives created, over forty-five years, a new poetic freedom. Based on frank and sensual observation, an innovating line, a sometimes acerbic wit, and a devotion to the 'golden root' of compassion, Kyger's poetry continues to win her the admiration of numerous generations.

Joining us for Kyger's reading will be her friend, the poet Michael Rothenberg, who edited As Ever, Kyger's selected poems, for Penguin Books in 2002. Rothenberg, author of Unhurried Vision, has recently relocated to the Russian River area and will be on hand to introduce her. We will also show Kyger's 1968 video, "Descartes."

* Two previously unpublished poems by Joanne Kyger are featured in the new anthology "Last Night's Dream Corrected". (Link). An epic new journal poem "Éire" and others by Michael Rothenberg are also included, as well as new poetry by Bill Berkson, Ira Cohen, Mikey Delgado and others.

Late edition - read all about it

Erratum, erratum, erratum, errati, errato, errato
Errata, errata, errata, erratorum, erratis, erratis

The second editions of the anthologies have just been released, now with even less errors than before. bLink

get riled upheaval tore ii

sean brijbasi and j. tyler blue to disappear at the small press bookfair in washington d.c. (bethesda md) on 4/29/06. bring your own cups. they'll have everything else.

get riled upheaval tore

sean brijbasi to appear and read at day of the book festival in kensington on apr. 23.

look at those little budlings

Get healed revival tour (UK)

Westwords Festival

pG author, the Rev. Steve Moran has had audience members throwing away their emotional crutches at these meetings, and falling into hysterics with his inspirational readings from Fish Drink Like Us* chapter 10, verse 16, the parable of Carmencita.

Also featuring testimony by writers of The Monkey's Typewriter (now with extra deluxe Raymond Williams award sticker).

• Weds 8th March: Gayton Library, 8pm. Gayton Road, Harrow
• Weds 15th March: Pitshanger Library, 7pm. 143 Pitshanger Lane, Ealing
• Thurs 23rd March: Willesden Green Library, 8pm. 95 High Road, Willesden
• Thurs 30th March: Heston Library, 7.30pm. New Heston Road, TW5
• Weds 5th April: Shepherds Bush Library, 7pm. 7 Uxbridge Road, W12 8LJ
• Mon 10th April: Marylebone Library, 6pm. 109 Marylebone Road, NW1 5PS
• Thurs 20th April: Kensington Library, 7pm. Philimore Walk, Kensington

Subjects of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, you have four more chances to be healed when this outstanding literary revival meeting comes to your neighbourhood.

Buddy Graham

*Pretend Genius Press, April 2006, isbn 097785261X

Breaking Nudycheeks!!!

Guardian Books "Original fiction: Part-time tiler Mikey Delgado is one of the winners of this year's Willesden Herald short story competition, judged by Zadie Smith. Read his story in full." (Link)

Mikey Delgado's winning story "Secure" to be published in the Pretend Genius Press anthology "Fish Drink Like Us"

Mondo pretendgenio

New story by Sean Brijbasi in 3am magazine: chalker

A new story by Stephen Moran for Big Bridge (2006): tither

A new story by J. Tyler Blue in Juked: And Finally an Autumnal Depression Left Us Delirious

Stephen Moran interview in Author Trek: yonder

Fish may safely drink

cLink

The publishing event of the century is imminent. Zombies are being despatched to the capitals of the world to seize control of bookshops and government buildings. Do not adjust your sets. We will control the vertical, we will control the horizontal. Resistance is futile. You will read "Fish Drink Like Us", the most shagnificent volume of fiction since the Bible.

And when you are satiated beyond pleasure nearly to death, you will still crave more. And ye (yes ye) shall have more, even to the zenith of ecstasy with such a superfluity of indescribably exquisite poetry that it defies this spatchcock system of wordles entirely, and demands a tome of its own, and it shall have a tome of its own, an thology of poetriloquism. Hear ye, hear ye! Hear ye?