Canard

Our father called jaguars black leopards. “Platitudes are not always flat,” he kept saying. Middle age had not brought a wisdom that was practicable.

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Though we separately married, we cannot stop staying in hotels together. We are used to the view.

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Xeriscaping: Two Small Decorative Poems

lapis philosophorum

milky latex a sore temptation
he threatens to find the appropriate weather

albedo

such spurge as ornaments the driveway
looks like purslane to me

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Eric Burke works as a computer programmer in Columbus, Ohio. Recent work can be found in elimae, Pank, qarrtsiluni, A cappella Zoo, and decomP. Work is forthcoming in Word Riot. You can read his blog at http://anomalocrinus.blogspot.com/

My first favorite song was “Carnival of Sorts” from R.E.M’s Chronic Town EP. Undoubtedly, I liked it because of the line, “Boxcars are pulling out of town,” as I was knee deep in my love-of-trains phase. My iPod flipped to this song today in my constant shuffling for something new to listen to. In the search for a fresh book, My Lie has piqued my interest. There is also an “autobiography” of/by Mark Twain hitting the shelves. Nick Antosca gives us an essay on reading Lolita when he was 12. On the business side of things, what is the effect of corporate donations in our academic libraries? As the transition continues, here’s a look at the evolution of e-book development and commerce. I’m sure you all can understand the need for editing, but the process has hit the courts in Singapore. Time to pull on out of town.

When I picked up Franklin Schneider’s first book, before I read the first page, one thing in particular stood out to me. It wasn’t the graphic of the little man on the ubiquitous men’s room sign bursting into flames and hurtling toward a trash can full of similar little men (though the image is quite charming). It wasn’t the fact that I’ve been unemployed for a while, and this book is about learning to love it. In fact, it was the petulant quote on the back cover, by Charles Signorile of ConstitutionallyRight.com: “I am sure that everyone who is not a Marxist can agree, Franklin Schneider is the type of person this country can do without.” Suddenly, though I don’t consider myself a Marxist in any practical way, I couldn’t wait to read his book.

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If you’re in Boston this November, do be sure to check out Ben and Annie’s reading at the Liberty Hotel…

ANNIE FREUD’s poetry collections include The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007) and The Mirabelles (Picador, 2010). She was Guest Editor of Magna Poetry 47 and teaches poetry composition workshops for the Poetry School in London. The Best Man That Ever Was received the Glen Dimplex New Writer’s Award and The Mirabelles has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (2011). She is the daughter of the Artist Lucien Freud and the Great Grand daughter of Sigmund Freud. Freud is renowned for her live performances.

BEN MAZER’s recent poetry collections are Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press, 2010), January 2008 ( Dark Sky Books, 2010) and, as editor: Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved (Graywolf Press, 2006) winner of The Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation. He is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics

Today we talk with Joe Milazzo about purple nurples, the sensory experiences of a blood orange, how reading online is more personal, yet less intimate than reading a physical book, and how true community functions in a world of cliques.

Tell us about the first piece you remember writing?

I was in the second grade, on some the-sun-set-at-5 o’clock Monday evening, so either very late or very early in the year. That’s Incredible featured a package on a 7 year-old that had written a book, advertising this individual as America’s youngest novelist or something to that effect. This was my first encounter with that mixture of envy, admiration and contempt with which many authors, aspiring as well as established, are well-acquainted. As in, the minute I saw what this kid, younger than I, had accomplished, I convinced myself that: 1) I had had the idea to be America’s youngest novelist long before this kid; 2) I could not only write a novel, but one far superior to whatever this kid had produced; 3) I should be on television, not this kid. And convinced the same way that, when I let someone else drive my car, once I return to the driver’s seat I’m positive they’ve moved the seat and re-angled the mirrors, despite the fact that I know they’ve been very careful not to. I watched all the way through the end of the feature (I think Fran Tarkenton handled the final punctuation; some subtle cultural coding in the producer’s choice there) and then immediately shuffled into the dining room where my father set up his office in the evening, assembled the largest stack of notebook paper I could fit between a two-handed grip, debated whether or not to entrust my ambitions to pencil or pen, chose the pencil (I must have had some inkling of what revision entails) and returned to the living room floor, vaguely determined to do this thing. As the project were equivalent to making the most awesome TIE Fighter you could out of the Legos on-hand.

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