http://thisispoetry.tumblr.com/

THIS IS POETRY
The Literary Underground is pleased to announce a new project called "This is Poetry". The project will ultimately result in an eight-volume collection of poetry, each volume representing poets from a specific geographic region as well as several special collections. These perfect-bound books will be published under Citizens for Decent Literature Press, founded as part of The Literary Underground. Co-edited by Michele McDannold and Brian W. Fugett, we are currently working on the first two volumes: Women of the Small Press and the American Midwest.

Poems selected for this project will first be published online via tumblr blog - http://thisispoetry.tumblr.com/ - a bit of a social media experiment with poetry. Wouldn't it be great if poetry went viral? We think so.

Submissions are taken by invitation only and based on referral from poets participating in the project. This is how the project is taking on an organic life of its own. It's not just the eds hitting up their favorite poets. It's the eds hitting up their favorite poets, their favorite poets tossing in their favorite poets and so on etc into awesomeness.

Another important and exciting aspect of this project is that we are encouraging contributors to send in their best, most defining work including and emphasizing on previously published poems. It is our intent to highlight other small press publishers, noting the publication credit with a link to the online presence of the small press publisher with each poem published on the tumblr as well as a links page including the same, gathered for easier reference.

viva la Underground
SUPPORT THE SMALL PRESS!

http://theliteraryunderground.org

Call for Submissions: Ppigpenn

Send raw wild words & art to Catfish at Mcdar3(at)aol[dot]com

We want poems & flash & art. Imagine extreme hunger & you had only one fish hook & a tiny bullhead swallowed your bait & you had to jerk out all the guts & heart. These innards are what we want.

http://ppigpenn.blogspot.com

Got Poetry? A public service announcement!

Got Poetry?

Unwanted poetry is a public safety issue, leading to accidental poisoning, overdose and abuse.

Academic poetry can be just as deadly as street poetry when read without supervision.

The use of poetry ranks second only to marijuana as the most common cause of death amongst members of Generation X in America.

The majority of teenagers abusing poetry get their poems from family and friends. Studies show that readily accessible books in homes are at least 73 times more deadly than loaded firearms.

Unwanted poems thrown in the trash can be retrieved and abused or illegally sold. Unwanted poems that are flushed contaminate the water supply. Proper disposal of unwanted poetry saves lives and protects the environment.

Here are some tips for properly disposing of unwanted poetry and poets:
Tear poems out of books; Mix poems with something more appealing like used kitty litter or soiled diapers; Seal poets in a bag or disposable container, and throw them away.

--Tim Murray
Editor, Blotterature

For more information on poetry abuse, go to:

blotterature.com

theliteraryunderground.org

Infinity's Kitchen Event in Brooklyn

Experimental Literary Journal Hosts Evening of Readings to Celebrate the Release of its Sixth Issue

Infinity's Kitchen magazine will host a release party in Brooklyn, New York at The Old American Can Factory. The party will celebrate the magazine's sixth issue of experimental literature, on the evening of June 13, 2013.

Founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 2008, Infinity's Kitchen is a graphic literary journal of experimental literature and conceptual writing. The publication is designed to explore new and innovative forms of literature, via print, performance and technology. The sixth and latest issue contains poetry, short fiction, essays on literary process and visual poems from 14 international contributors.

Contributors to the new issue will read and/or discuss their work during the event. These contributors include: Billy Cancel, whose poems are collages of found phrases and ideas; Greg Gathman, an experimental filmmaker whose video combines cellphone footage and music to accompany interlaced lines from different poems; Gary Heidt, author of an essay exploring the idea of the Word Square; Erica ESH Henry, who combines the use of musical notational symbols with written poetry; and Katie Morales; a dancer and choreographer whose essay offers “erratic thoughts on an art form nobody cares about unless Natalie Portman is making out with a girl.”

EVENT DETAILS
Date: June 13, 2013. Time: Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show starts at 8:00 p.m. Location: The Old American Can Factory, Gowanus Canal Brooklyn, 232 Third Street corner Third Avenue in Gowanus, Brooklyn at the edge of the Gowanus Canal's Fifth Street Basin centered between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY 11215. (very detailed directions: http://www.xoprojects.com/contact.html#address ) Ticket Price: Free. RSVP by e-mail at info@infinityskitchen.com or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/events/516921671678934/ or on Google+ at https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cj7siaa3ul4gm21burcm7u9ssu8

Lindsey Thomas @ Tinyamp vs The Literary Underground - Denver. January 12, 2013

Ryan Snellman & John Swain @ Pre-reading Reading, Denver, CO. January 11, 2013

Click here to listen to RYAN SNELLMAN at the Pre-reading Reading, Denver, CO. January 11, 2013

Click here to listen to JOHN SWAIN at the Pre-reading Reading, Denver, CO. January 11, 2013

Black Kite Poetry #7: The Midwest Underground Poetry Summit

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Midwest Underground Poetry Summit to be held in Toledo, Ohio

Toledo, Ohio, USA. Wednesday, January 23, 2013--The Midwest Underground Poetry Summit will be held at Black Kite Coffee & Pies in Toledo, Ohio as part of the Black Kite Poetry Series hosted by Michael Grover and Tara Armstrong. Featured readers are Brian Fugett and Michele McDannold.

Brian Fugett (Dayton, Ohio) is a member of the slacker, fast food generation that has been branded with an ‘X’ by that Canadian-born, literary terrorist known as Douglas Coupland. Meanwhile, he sits in his pad all day consuming more oxygen than he’s worth. He’s been doing it for over 40 years now and has become quite efficient at it. Eating and voiding are the only things he really knows how to do. Between meals and trips to the shitter, he covertly milks ‘West Nile Virus’ from the tits of pregnant mosquitoes and uses it to butter the toast of local politicians. He is the editor/publisher of Zygote in my Coffee.

Michele McDannold (Jacksonville, Illinois) is corn fed and redneck bred. She has an extensive collection of flannel and rubber chicken heads. A devoted member of the Cult of the Honey Badger, she is also the co-editor/publisher of Citizens For Decent Literature, a project of The Literary Underground.

The event will begin at 7:00pm EST and includes an open mic and book release from Citizens For Decent Literature Press. Michael Grover will read from his new book “Some People Go Crazy” and copies will be available for purchase.

Black Kite Coffee & Pies is located at 2499 Collingwood Blvd., Toledo, Ohio 43620. Please visit theliteraryunderground.org/events for more information or contact Michael Grover.

Jason Hardung @ Tinyamp vs The Literary Underground. January 12, 2013

Frankie Metro @ Tinyamp vs The Literary Underground. January 12, 2013

Dustin Holland @ Tinyamp vs The Literary Underground. January 12, 2013

New book by James Babbs available now from Interior Noise Press

new full-length collection from poet James Babbs
Disturbing The Light



Now available from www.interiornoisepress.com

You can save 25% using Discount Code: 4V5RKNMB at the INP E-Store

Click here to order now.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Disturbing the Light

sitting here in
the living room watching
the way the sunlight falls
across the floor making
these rectangles of light and
I remember how you
always avoided them
whenever you got up to
go to the bathroom or
the kitchen stepping
carefully over them or
walking around them but
never just going through them and
one day I asked you
why you did this and
you laughed, softly
said you didn’t want to
disturb the light and
now you’re gone and
I want to run around the room
scream at the top of my lungs and
step into the middle of
all those rectangles so
the light shines on me and
no longer touches the floor

New Chapbook from poet James Babbs

The Weight of Invisible Things by James Babbs

The Weight of Invisible Things is now available for preorder from Finishing Line Press. Your preorder helps to determine the pressrun of the book so if you are interested please place your order now and pay only $12 plus $1.99 per copy shipping. The Weight of Invisible Things will ship in early March 2013.

“James Babbs delivers a vibrant collection of poems that explores loss, loneliness, and unrequited love with all of the rawness and acuity of an X-ray of the soul.” – Brian Fugett (editor/Zygote in my Coffee)

To order online click on the link below

The Weight of Invisible Things

Coming Up On Project U Radio- April And May

     Project U Radio is a radio program hosted by Lynn Alexander and Paul Corman-Roberts that streams live over the internet, with live callers and archives you can download. Brought to you by The Literary Underground, Project U Radio generally airs on Thursday nights, at 11:30 p.m. EST, 8:30 PST. Listen, set reminders, download an archive, and more at the show page: here.  All welcome. Uncensored, unscripted, unhinged. Santorgasmic Family Values programming that will make your Aunt Helen smile. We're already deranged, but we need your illness too. Project U is about asking the tough questions (then straying off topic), hard hitting small press journalism (ok, maybe passive facebook surfing journalism) and a commitment to poetry as demonstrated by random performances and open mic nights. We're gonna make you take a shower and proclaim your poetic tendencies from the top of a box store. Kick it.

Did you know that you can donate to The Literary Underground? Look to the right and FEED THE KITTY. It helps when we can pay the bills.

Listen now to our April 26 show! Listen or download from the archives here! LIVE AT THE TELEGRAPH, OAKLAND-with special guests Missy Church, Hollie Hardy- some of the organizers of BEAST CRAWL. Find out about BEAST Crawl, planned for July. Lynn Alexander and Paul Corman-Roberts. To find out about BEAST Crawl, 2012, check the website here. 

More Literary Underground Radio Goodness: Frank Reardon now hosts Your Mother's Medicine Cabinet, on Monday evenings. Frank interviews small press writers with live call in. Draconian Vampire Tunnel airs in the ass of dawn on Tuesday nights. (Wednesday, East Coast) Frankie Metro will bring you a mixed bag of music, poetry, live callers, and more. Worth staying up for! And let's face it, you are up talking to Brian Fugett anyway.

Coming up on PROJECT U Thursdays. You KNOW you want to call in: 

(Archived) April 26: LIVE AT THE TELEGRAPH, OAKLAND WITH SPECIAL GUESTS MISSY CHURCH AND HOLLIE HARDY. Find out about BEAST Crawl, in July. Listen to Paul Corman-Roberts eat and ramble while Lynn Alexander eggs him on. Will he pass the phone around Oakland? FIND OUT!

May 3: (Go To Episode) The Literary Underground: Community, Collective, Chaos? What IS The Literary Underground? The time has come to share the vision of the Literary Underground community, with founder Michele McDannold, who will speak to her "manifesto". We would also like to hear your thoughts on this segment about this idea of community building, if it can work, or if it is doomed to collapse in a cloud of chaos and ego implosions. If you remain positive about the collective or community model, share your thoughts on what works. If you are cynical and sour, we want to hear about that, too.

And it goes without saying that in small press, some people play nicer than others. Some take a diplomatic stance on disagreements, and some feel that it is important to speak out and call things as they see it. But what happens when people try to work together toward common goals, and personalities clash or there are differences in direction, aesthetics, resources, priorities? Can conflict derail a good thing? Did you ever feel like community can both lift, and splatter? As much as a community can support, it can also create concerns about other people speaking for you. How do you avoid taking on other people's conflicts in a community? Is this particularly difficult with writers, or is this dynamic a problematic area for all cooperative groups of people?

Last, but not least, do you expect a community to have your back, right or wrong? What does loyalty look like? And how can you keep yourself from getting roasted in other people's fires?

May 10: Editorial Affirmative Action? Read the background on this topic in Lynn Alexander's column at Red Fez, "Criticism's A Bitch" on the subject of female submissions in the independent press and the solution (if any) to the problem of female under-representation. Is it a problem, and editors- can anything be done about it?  Open call in, all opinions welcome.

May 17: The Male Aesthetic. Call in, and give your opinions. Is there such a thing in small press, and are you partial to it? What kinds of presses and publications, web or print, do you associate with the term?

May 24: TOXIC ABATEMENT is coming to San Francisco's Viracocha in July. Find out more, and hear some poems from featured readers. Can we get Zarina and Sammy Dwarphobia to talk to us? Depends. Do we have the chops to ask?

May 31: Spectral Ganglia: Poetry and Sound Experiments. Open Mic. Live call in. Spontaneous Poetry, Overheard In Pittsburgh, Poetic Voyeurism. Milwaukee- Midwest Book Fair coming up on June 1, where Michele McDannold and Tim Murray will be out there representing Red Fez, Full Of Crow Press, and the Literary Underground. Hear from Michele. Unless she is sleeping. Hear from Tim Murray, unless he leaves his phone in the refrigerator again.

Spectral Ganglia: Poetry And Sound Experiments

The Literary Underground's Project U Radio first "open mic" call in show. Join Lindsey Thomas and Lynn Alexander for Spectral Ganglia: Poetry and Sound. What the hell is  "spectral ganglia"? Who cares, cause this is some badass radio, coming straight to you live on Friday evening, Feb. 3, at 11 p.m. EST, 8 p.m. PST.  Get involved and call in to  share whatever you've got going on. Uncensored, unclicked, uninhibited, naked radio featuring YOU. Be a part of this by calling in: (805) 856-2808. Find the show page HERE where you can log in, set reminders (get an email before our shows) and follow. You can also listen to on-demand archives of previous shows and download them to your ipod or whatever device. Hell, you can even download it to your phone. If you still have dial up or sleeping kids or live under a bridge but have a cell phone, you can opt to bypass the whole computer situation and listen through your phone. Just call in and you will hear it.

How does a radio "open mic" show work? Easy. You call in, you wait, we say your area code to let you know that you are live- and off you go. How about five minutes? Cool? OK. Let's do this. We don't care if you are a burning piece of hot hipster shit or a first timer, just trying out some stuff. The U loves you.

Project U Radio is a project of The Literary Underground, a community and resource for writers, publishers, and readers of the independent press.

January 20, 2012, Segment 5, Project U Radio

Segment 5: January 20, 2012.  ”Editorial Discretion”. Editors, would you publish work with content that you think is personally objectionable (i.e. racism) if you thought it was an otherwise good piece? How do you feel about a blanket policy about certain kinds of content, such as “We don’t publish anything that includes sexist elements”. Do you make distinctions as far as language, character, etc. and have you had this issue come up when selecting work for a zine, website, journal, or project? Do you find the line of subjective interpretation to be difficult? Have you rejected work that you thought was well written because it contained something that you thought to be offensive or thought might offend readers? Beyond offensive, but perhaps hurtful or harmful?

If you want to start at the beginning, check out the archives *here* for our Censorship show, December 2, 2011, where we discussed movements like The Citizens For Decent Literature whose aim was to suppress literature that organizers felt was "objectionable". Inspired by this and being a fan of free speech, Literary Underground's Michele McDannold started a printed publication by the same name and soon after, a website to showcase poetry online. Brief editor of the website content, Michael Goscinski, was invited on to talk about censorship and a lengthy conversation ensued.

My distinction on the difference between censorship and editorial discretion is simple- one involves the systemic suppression of free speech through an authority either by their own undertaking or under pressure by a group that has lobbied for suppression. The other involves the discretion of a content producer and their right to have standards with respect to content. If I have a magazine, I have the right to decide that I don't want any content that involves clowns. (to use my example from the show) We are looking at my right as an owner and producer to discretion, which I believe to be important. But censorship would involve the government telling producers that they cannot publish content that involves clowns. This distinction takes away editorial discretion with a blanket rule across the board, presumably (they say) for societal or other benefit. This is an external, imposed control meant to assert one group's moral or religious view onto another group by limiting clown content. ...... 

Call for Submissions - Citizens for Decent Literature

Citizens for Decent Literature is a print zine in the early-Calliope Nerve-style (published by Nobius Black), distributed to contributors, an APA of the same name and your mother's underwear drawer. submit poetry, flash fiction or whatever lit drug you're snorting this week. Keep it short, make it good. also looking for b&w photos and sketches.

http://theliteraryunderground.submishmash.com/submit

Primal Urge Magazine Call for Submissions

THE DEAL - Primal Urge Magazine call for poetry submissions: Here’s the deal, the publisher gives six to eight pages for poems. We run two featured poets on two to three pages each. Whatever pages are left over we run in “One Offs” – one or two poems each from several poets. The rules: Don’t send any spiritual stuff. If you talk to God you don’t need to talk to us. Don’t send epic poems. Shorter is better. Alice’s Restaurant has already topped the charts once. That’s enough. The best thing to do is look at an old issue of the Urge: http://www.primal-urge-magazine.com/. We lean toward “Meat,” “Street,” “After Hours” and the occasional political poem. Don’t tell us about dead-burnt-bodies or regurgitate the daily news. We want your secrets – surprise us. Bring something fresh to the page. We want to smell the perfume, taste the lipstick and know why hearts beat – and sometimes bleed. Okay, send three to five poems to our poetry editor, Bill Gainer at: wsgainer@comcast.net. Put “Primal Urge Submissions” in the subject line. If you don’t hear from us before the next issue, there’s a good chance you won't.

Thunderclap Press releases new chapbook

Thunderclap Press has just released a new chapbook of poetry by Kat Dixon called Birding.

Kat Dixon’s, Birding, is a wonderfully fluent, beautiful book of 12 poems each titled by a type of bird.

Order from Thunderclap Press at http://thunderclappress.com/2011/07/20/birding-by-kat-dixon-now-on-sale/
$8.00 for the print version or $5.00 for the ebook.

Call for Submissions - MiCrow Flash

Update On MiCrow Flash, From Editor Michael J. Solender

Microw is the tiny sibling of Full of Crow and looks for Flash Fiction/ Poetry works in the under 1000 word range. The theme for the Summer edition is Search. Think: seeking, pursuit, looking, investigation, hunting, rummaging and exploration. Special consideration will be provided to those works that endeavor to leave their reader as if they’d been on an adventure. I am also looking for original artwork and illustrations along the same theme.

Submit your work in the body of an email only to mjsolender at fullofcrow dot com with Microw – Summer submission, title and your name in the subject line. A very brief bio may be included along with a link of your choosing. Submissions will be open until 05/15/11.

Submission guidelines that will endear you to the editor:

Use TNR or Arial Font, size 10, single spaced. Do not indent paragraphs and do not center title or anything else – left justify. Please submit in the body on an email – no attachments.

***

I NEED ILLUSTRATIONS & Photos!! – I’m looking for cool pen & ink, charcoal and crisp clear high definition photos. Whatever you’ve got lay it on me!