The E-Verse Radio newsletter goes out to 1,500 readers and authors. It is mailed once weekly (less frequently in the summer months). It usually appears on Monday. To subscribe, please enter your email address below, and I’ll be happy to sign you up. I hope you enjoy it.
The average speed of Heinz ketchup leaving the bottle is 25 miles per year.
Readers write in with more on albums named after states:
“Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens. Sure he’s a young guy, but this album is fantastic.”
Another:
“Come on man, at least something in the last 15 or 20 years! What about ‘Come on Feel the Illinoise!’ by Sufjan Stevens? It’s so good to have E-Verse again! Where else was I going to embarrass myself by pretending to know stuff?”
An Alaskan E-Verser (not the only one!) writes in on last week’s Town of the Week, Chicken Alaska:
“And if you keep driving through Chicken and over the pass, closed in winter, you come to Eagle, Alaska. If you are still hungry you can fly to King Salmon or Beaver . . . And we have a few others. For instance, you can drive through Cold Foot, AK on your way to Dead horse . . . And let’s not forget little Eek, AK!“
On the “fact of the week” about the pound sign:
It should have read: The pound sign # is called “an octothorpe” rather than “anoctothorpe”. Minor typo, and all apologies follow.
A reader sends in some fun author photos:
http://ilx.wh3rd..net/thread.php?msgid=5605023
Read three more of my sonnets in the new issue of Unpleasant Event Schedule:
http://unpleasanteventschedule.com/
This week’s town you really have to visit:
Chocolate Bayou, Texas
Check out the new issue of the cool online magazine Drunken Boat:
“Does anyone have any amusing or inspiring anecdotes relating to stress and anxiety, particularly with reference to revision and examinations? I would be particularly interested in any stories about famous figures who suffered from great stress/anxiety and overcame it or turned it to their advantage.” E-Verse collective noun of the week: A wisp of snipe E-Verse Radio ain’t getting in the ring with Tolstoy, either. It is a regular weekly column of literary, publishing, and arts information and opinion that has gone out since 1999. It is brought to you by ERNEST HILBERT and currently enjoys over 1,300 readers. If you wish to submit lists or other comments, please use the same capitalization, punctuation, and grammar you would for anything else intended for publication. Please send top five lists, bad movie titles, limericks, facts, comments, and new readers along whenever you like; simply click reply and I’ll get back to you. The Webmaster and general guru for E-Verse Radio is Jason Christopher Hartley, author of the best-selling Iraq War memoir Just Another Soldier. Do you know anyone who might like E-Verse Radio? They may subscribe to E-Verse by sending an email to listsrv@list.everseradio.com with SUBSCRIBE EVERSE in the body. You may unsubscribe from E-Verse by sending an email to listsrv@list.everseradio.com with “UNSUBSCRIBE EVERSE” in the body.
A reader writes in with a request:
Visit www.everseradio.com to read and contribute any time!
Host Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. His poetry has appeared in The New Republic, American Poet, The New Criterion, American Literary Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, LIT, McSweeney’s, American Scholar, Verse, Volt, and Fence.
His collection Sixty Sonnets will be issued by Red Hen Press in autumn 2008. He writes for a variety of publications, including The New York Sun, Scribner’s American Writers series, and the Academy of American Poets. He is an editor at the recently-launched Contemporary Poetry Review Press, based at West Chester University’s Poetry House. The press publishes the annual Donald Justice Poetry Award-winning book as well as anthologies and essay collections. Hilbert is currently assembling a book on the life and career of Anthony Hecht.
Hilbert received his doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University, where he earlier completed a Master’s Degree and founded the Oxford Quarterly. While there, he studied with James Fenton and Jon Stallworthy. He was the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type for several years and later edited the magazine nowCulture. He works as a rare book dealer and lives in Philadelphia with his wife, a classical archaeologist.
He created E-Verse Radio in the summer of 1999 as a regular means of harassment for friends, enemies, and fellow readers. It currently enjoys over 1,500 very smart but quite unruly members. Members include Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, truck drivers, MIT professors, and stunt men. You may send electronic mail to E-Verse Radio at everse @ everseradio.com.
Producer and sidekick Paul Fleming prepares high quality radio and TV broadcasts for your delectation. He is also the host of the enormously popular show Best Damn Tech Show, Period.
Webmaster and general guru Jason Christopher Hartley is author of the best-selling Iraq War memoir Just Another Soldier, published by HarperCollins. He has been featured on NPR, the News Hour, and many other news shows.
Designer Jennifer Mercer is already famous for her surprisingly fun designs in a variety of media. The woman behind the E-Verse Radio logo, the popular guitar picks, pens, stickers, and temporary tattoos, Jennifer continues to design E-Verse Radio merchandise, to include t-shirts, glow-in-the-dark stickers, shot glasses, ashtrays, and the long-awaited Ernest and Paul bobble-heads. You can view more of her work at www.jmercerdesign.com
Jessica is the E-Verse Contessa. She is the best-read fashionista in the greater metropolitan area, and, as the Dark Lady, hosts the E-Verse network series “Shakespeare Says,” a regular A-Z compendium of words coined by the immortal bard.
This web site is a copyrighted product of E-Verse Radio. The information on this site is provided as a resource to those interested in literature, poetry, book and magazine publishing, and popular culture. E-Verse Radio disclaims any representation or warranty, expressed or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for a particular purpose of the information. Persons, particularly students, accessing this information assume full responsibility for the use of the information and understand and agree that E-Verse Radio is not responsible or liable for any claim, loss, or damage arising from the use of this information. Reference to specific products, processes, or services does not constitute or imply recommendation or endorsement by E-Verse Radio. E-Verse Radio also reserves the right to make changes at any time without notice. No portions of www.everseradio.com may be reproduced without the express written consent of E-Verse Radio or its proprietor, Ernest Hilbert. In addition, some of the material on this site, or linked to by this site, may be copyrighted by others. E-Verse Radio cannot grant permission to use or reproduce others’ copyrighted material.
E-Verse Radio, asking people since 1999:
“Would it kill you to read a *&#%$@& book?”
“The injustice of it all. ‘I’ve seen the Stones many times,’ complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. ‘I don’t feel they play as good as we do. You’ve got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing.’ He could be speaking for members of Guns N’ Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree. Paul McCartney now looks like an old lady, Bob Dylan resembles one of those unfortunates who line up at the Scott Mission, and Mick Jagger looks like his face has not so much aged as congealed, yet they remain irreplaceable icons. What would you rather tell your friends - that you had lunch with Mick Jagger or Joey Kramer? Will we never shake off this damned legacy of the 1960s?”
- Philip Marchand
I never did find you.
I later heard how you’d wandered the streets
for weeks, washing dishes before you got fired;
taking occasional meals at the Salvation Army
with the other diagnosed. How on one particular night
you won four hundred dollars at cards:
how some men followed you and beat you up,
leaving you unconscious in an alley
where you were wakened by police
and arrested for vagrancy, for being tired
of getting beaten up at home.
I’d dreamed you were dead,
and started to cry.
I couldn’t exactly phone Dad.
I bought a pint of bourbon
and asked for you all afternoon in a blizzard.
In Hell
Dante had words with the dead,
although
they had no bodies
and he could not touch them, nor they him.
A man behind the ticket counter
in the Greyhound terminal
pointed to one of the empty seats, where
someone who looked like me sometimes sat down
among the people waiting to depart.
I don’t know why I write this.
With it comes the irrepressible desire
to write nothing, to remember nothing;
there is even the desire
to walk out in some field and bury it
along with all my other so-called
poems, which help no one—
where each word will blur
into earth finally,
where the mind that voiced them
and the hand that took them down will.
So what. I left
the bus fare back
to Sacramento with this man,
and asked him
to give it to you.
1. If they order vanilla: boring
2. If they order triple chocolate brownie with extra chocolate sauce: will never be satisfied
3. If they order rum raisin: totally on the edge!
4. If they order okra ice cream: proceed with caution
5. If they spend 20 minutes licking their cone: take them home with you. Now.
http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/editorial1.htm
http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/editorial2.htm
http://www.cprw.com/Hilbert/editorial3.htm
The Webmaster and general guru for E-Verse Radio is Jason Christopher Hartley, author of the best-selling Iraq War memoir Just Another Soldier.
Do you know someone who might enjoy E-Verse? Please direct them to the site.
JACK: Ah, but they don’t want to cast a wider net. Michael Palmer, even more than Charles Bernstein, is what happened to the language movement when it became respectable. He publishes with New Directions. People who don’t “like” language poetry “like” his work. Though Michael worked for many years with the dancer Margaret Jenkins, his poetry (unlike the poetry of his friend Jerome Rothenberg) represents experimentalism as writing rather than as performance. He says of the page in “Pre-Petrarchan Sonnet,” “We are nowhere else.” Writers associated with Talisman (Leonard Schwartz, for example) admire him tremendously. I have a few remarks about Michael in my piece on Ishmael Reed in my book, Foley’s Books, p. 29 ff. Michael was friends with Robert Duncan and wrote the introduction to the new edition of Ground Work. The introduction doesn’t even mention Duncan’s insistence on Ground Work I’s mirroring his typescript–a fact that makes the book look very strange. Palmer certainly knew what Duncan had done; he evidently didn’t think it was important enough to mention. As for myself, I think it’s a fact of considerable significance: it’s a literal working out of Olson’s insistence on the typewriter as a “score” for poetry, and it points to the tension between writing and speech which is everywhere present in Duncan. For years, Michael Palmer was more or less associated with Leslie Scalapino: you would see them at readings together. Michael’s career took off in a way that Leslie’s never did, though she has her admirers. I think it’s significant that Palmer isn’t in the Pound tradition. Robert Hass’s remarks about Michael being the most important experimental writer of his generation “and perhaps of the last several generations” are a subtle way of discrediting both Duncan and Olson–not to mention far less well-known people like Ronald Johnson or Jackson MacLow (or Ivan Arguelles and Philip Lamantia, for that matter, or the whole of the language group). Hass is implicitly saying, “You don’t have to read them: read Palmer.” Palmer is certainly a good poet, but you can’t help feeling that he’s being used. And for $100,000 who would object to a little use?
Read my interview with poet, critic, and editor David Yezzi:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/32/yezzi_i.html?ref=home
While I was away from E-Verse, I managed to edit the entire summer issue of the Cortland Review:
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