Poets, Musicians, Artists, and People for Change join this worldwide event in New Orleans
Pre-Order at Trembling Pillow Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-9790702-59
CD also available: ($15.00) featuring verse and music by John Sinclair and His Blues Scholars (Kosmic Cow Productions)
John Sinclair pays poetic tribute to jazz musician John Coltrane in a collection of Sinclair's poems along with jazz album reviews and concert reviews from the 60s as well as edited and refined earlier works spanning decades of Sinclair meditating and reflecting on the influence of Coltrane and his music. As stated in the afterword by poet Dennis Formento, this collection reveals Sinclair to be in the lineage of the great Beat poets who were moved by the culture and the influence of Jazz in the 60s.
It can truly be said that John Sinclair has walked the talk. He was THERE, in the middle of the Rev, not standing and nodding on the side, but there in the forefront. Part scholar, part encourager, part organizer, part Activist, part poet, part chronicler— John Sinclair looms tall and vibrant and strong in the centuries he straddles, demanding that we KNOW, that we DO RIGHT, and that we PRESERVE OUR CULTURE, and somehow, at the same time, CONFRONT the depredations of poverty, racism, lack-love, cruelty and the "creeping meatball." All hail, John Sinclair, and his book of praise for John Coltrane! - Ed Sanders
John Sinclair’s writing about “The Music” has always been well informed and inspiring, from his early Detroit-hip days. So it’s important to gather this writing to show where he and we have been, and the great period of American Classical Music we lived through and particularly the marvelous revelation that John Coltrane provided everybody who could hear. –Amiri Baraka
Poet, activist, major jazz head, John Sinclair’s SONG OF PRAISE is a wild outward/ inward ride through time like any of Trane’s great solos. It’s a surge of time travel from the ‘60s breakthroughs & breakdowns as reflected in the revolutionary free jazz awakening as well as in the political uprisings of that time that changed the world.
–David Meltzer
Trembling Pillow Press Books are available through SPD Books and Amazon. CDs are available through Amazon and digital downloads are available through CDBaby and iTunes.
{Part two of a look at five chapbooks I bought this summer from Dancing Girl Press: Dancing Girl Press, edited by Kristy Bowen was founded in 2004 and publishes several handmade chapbooks a year by female poets in limited editions of 100 or so.}
The Calculus of Owls by Sarah J. Gardner (2009) with a cover by Elisabeth Pellathy is the second chapbook DGP has published by this author. How to Study Birds was released in 2006. I remember reading it two summers ago, but my impression from this chapbook was much stronger. The cover is probably, in my opinion, one of the best covers in my DGP collection. Here, Sarah Gardner presents 22 poems in three sections. These poems are largely narrative, clear in their descriptions and structurally coherent on the page. Gardner's gift lies in her word choice, stunning pairings and striking collisions occur as she dredges the word pool to populate her poems with phrases like: "rutted hinges of leaves" or "purse-heads of grasses." Visually, she piles up images to inhabit nebulous emotions as in the poem "An Explication of Loneliness" where we are told "Because a train is long sentence with a single verb." This litany reveals to us in layers and from different angles the facets of loneliness ending with the conclusion that, "none knows as the heart knows/ the difference between nectar and venom" Birds haunt this text, the wise owl, the symbolic feather that wraps the speaker and even the crow who has lost its voice; often the subject is tempered by the natural world as the speaker grasps to wrestle with complex emotions by returning to contemplate nature's quiet response: "What/ is most needed you have often seen: a field/ a single tree at center, a question/ that even leafless does not shrink from answer"
Dancing Girl Press, edited by Kristy Bowen, has been publishing chapbooks since 2004 in handmade editions of about 100; each chapbook features a female poet. Every summer, you can stock up on some of these well-made chaps during their summer sale.
Horseless Press has released two new chapbooks Deseret by Kirsten Jorgensen and SEWN by Nathan Hauke, and they are beautifully done. They both have cover art by Michael Sikkema, which involves these strange juxtapositions and collisions. The chaps themselves are made on thick paper with a nice font, stapled and bound with a thick cover. Jorgensen's poems are grounded in some cases with these ethereal shapes hovering just at the edges of the words. The effect mimics the subject of these poems, mostly inspired by the landscape (Utah), but one of the images also reminded me of hurricane shapes out in the Gulf. I guess in some ways rock and water collide and speak in similar tones. The text too recalls that dismal McCarthy post-apocalyptic story, but I couldn't even watch the movie version while I greedily devoured Jorgensen's text: "I'd dig a tunnel/ through my bones to yours/ wide kind palms pressing into the floor" 
Trembling Pillow Press is set to release the newest collection from John Sinclair, hailed by his contemporaries as the "hardest working poet in show business." His new collection SONG OF PRAISE: Homage to John Coltrane is a collection of poems as well as reviews of albums and concerts all written in response to the force that was John Coltrane and his musicians opening up the field of jazz in a way that mirrored the opening up and expansion of cultural norms and views throughout the sixties. Sinclair was there in the audience and he captured all of those moments in this work in order to continue doing what he does best, which is to be the container for the histories and the stories behind the music. 
Dancing Girl Press is having a chapbook sale: Get 5 books for 25.00.
Home/ Birth (1913 Press) by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker took me by surprise. The information was mostly familiar to me. The way they lay out and respond to each other flows nicely and makes it easy to digest all the facts and stories. But then the book just sweeps you off your feet, and you realize you're not just reading a fanstastic project taken up by two great writers but you're holding in your hands that 1/100th of life that poetry attempts to capture. It's such a brave, honest endeavor that these two women allow the reader to follow them through, and it changed me reading this text. You can't just go back to being who you were in the world before you read this.
March 24 at the Gold Mine Saloon, 7:30 PM (www.17poets.com)
Then I read Wandering Ghost, one of the best biographies of Lafcadio Hearn ever written. I'll quote Dave Brinks in his essay from Art Voices: Vivant Dans La Ville Fatale (Summer 09) "It's a wildly engrossing tome about a half-blind, Greek-Irish, eccentric vagabond journeying across 19th century Earth from bohemian New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean, and then later to Japan." Brinks goes on in the essay to excerpt selections from Cott's book to illustrate Hearn's time in New Orleans and how this influenced his Hearn's writing and thinking.
Beyond the Looking Glass is one of my favorites as I adore fairy tales. It's a compendium of novels, stories and poems from the Victorian Era with delightful images and pictures to accompany the stories.
Dave is currently reading Thirteen, looking into his upcoming poetry book on complex mathematical theories that I hear about on a daily basis but really don't understand.
I've been reading the complete Dylan interviews edited by Cott for my own work on a long poem about Wuthering Heights in conversation with Dylan lyrics; a topic which confounds Dave as much as his hexagrams confuse me. Coincidentally, Dylan refers to his music as mathematical. 
Jonathan Cott is probably best know for his Rolling Stone interviews with Dylan and John Lennon. But he is also a poet; his book of poems City of Earthly Love (Stonehill Publishing, 1975) is filled with beautiful lyrics such as "He Dreams What is Going on Inside His Head." This poem opens with the line: "Angel Hair sleeps with a boy in my head," which Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh named their magazine and press after; The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001) has Cott's poem in the opening.
Here's a poem from the collection:
Studying Water
I write you in small print
Waking up in little moments
Round like d's or sleeping fingers
Slipping through the intervals
As deck chairs turn in themselves
A wind blowing through
As a sun fan lifts
Birds float to dawn shadows
Rolling in dark grass to your hand
There's an interesting article at Slate about Cott's experience with ECT and his memory loss. It's a subject he explores in his book On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering.
Dave and I are checking into a hotel later for some more childless adventures, and this means that we have to pack our books.
Here's my list:
Exilee/ Temps Morts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Justifying the Margins by Pierre Joris
Cast A Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (reread)
Here's Dave's List:
Chita by Lafcadio Hearn
Osiris with a trombone across the seam of substance by Julian Similian
Transgender and Grinder by J. Semilian
Thirteen by Cott
Dear Sandy, Hello by Berrigan
Harry Partch, a biography by Bob Gilmore
Keep in mind we are going to be there a whole 24 hours, so we have to be prepared.
Here's a fun New Orleans inspired keychain from Green Kangaroo, an Abita Beer Top with a Mardi Gras baby. Two items that would usually end up in the garbage put to good use at http://www.greenkangaroo.com/.
This Saints colored fleur de lis pin is from Kristina Renee Jewelry (NOLAjewelry.net). I'll be wearing that on Sunday!
Here's a fun craft idea: a rocket ship clock made from an old 45 record, Disney album from Snow White. This is really fun. I think it'll decorate the playroom. Made by Art by Mags (artbymags.com)
This is a beautiful and well made hand bag from Bayou Salvage, comes in its own stamped case to protect it and zips down the side with a wrist strap. Bayou Salvage (bayousalvage.com) says they make rustic and romantic designs from down south, Handmade with care in the city that care forgot. 
Some fun rainbow earring and oversized ring from Shop Miss Malaprop (shopmissmalaprop.com) Unique handmade and eco friendly gifts. The earrings remind me of my Rainbow Brite obsession circa 1987.
I absolutely adore this ceramic wall hanging. The picture doesn't really capture the detail. This is from Lucky NOLA by artist Reagan Robinson (http://www.lukcynola.com/)
Here's a link to the New Orleans Craft Mafia Blog where you can see some of the artists above highlighted and get an even better selection of their work. You can access all the artists' etsy stores from this site.
http://www.neworleanscraftmafia.com/blog/
Miss Malaprop has a terrific blog here if your interested in crafting and reusing: http://www.missmalaprop.com/
