My new chapbooks of poems, mostly written in Philadelphia but also New York and Los Angeles, has just been published by Mathew Timmons’ Insert Press as part of its beautiful Parrot series of chapbooks, which offers as a whole an invaluable cross section of Southern California poetry and conceptual writing. Info below:

The PARROT series was originally issued by Blanc Press (Los Angeles) from 2005-2010. Insert Press is reissuing facsimile editions of each title from the PARROT series and releasing a Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection at the end of the run.

PARROT will print the work of Harold Abramowitz’s A House on a Hill (A House on a Hill, Part One), Amanda Ackerman’s I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck, Will Alexander’s On the Substance of Disorder, Stan Apps’ Politicized Pretty Picture, Amina Cain’s Tramps Everywhere, Teresa Carmody’s I Can Feel, Allison Carter’s All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions, Michelle Detorie’s Fur Birds, Kate Durbin’s Kept Women, K. Lorraine Graham’s My Little Neoliberal Pony, Jen Hofer’s The Missing Link, Maximus Kim’s Break Bloom Burn, Janice Lee’s Fried Chicken Dinner, Bruna Mori and George Porcari’s May I take Your Order?, Joseph Mosconi’s But On Geometric, Vanessa Place’s Forcible Oral Copulation, Amarnath Ravva’s Airline Music, Stephanie Rioux’s My Beautiful Beds, Ara Shirinyan’s Erotic in Czech Republic, Michael Smoler’s Pieces of Water, Brian Kim Stefans’ Viva Miscegenation, Mathew Timmons’ Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation, and Allyssa Wolf’s Loquela.

Individual issues of PARROT sell for $6.00. Subscribe to PARROT and receive all the individual titles from the PARROT series for $81.00 or pre-order the Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection, signed and numbered 1-50 for $100.00.

Subscribe to PARROT for $81.00 and receive individual titles from the PARROT series as they are released.

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Or Pre-Order the Limited Edition hand-bound set of the PARROT collection, signed and numbered 1-50 for $100.00.

May the Google maps truck
Paralyze your soul
And make you return
Those gaudy new clothes.

May the men from AOL
Drop little reminders
That your personal economy
Is a trunk full of blunders.

May the dweebs from Microsoft
Inject a little humility
Into your poetic profligacy’s
Attempt at a monopoly.

And may the curs at Apple
Reboot the telephone
And channel into your brainstem
The virtues of being alone.

I aspire to
Your approval.
The eyes I
Once strove for

So dead,
His musics
Blanketing the city–
He was bored

With me.
Or couldn’t see
My modest
Variations

Above the din of
Applause
Were the counterpoint of
His cagey genius.

To you, then,
Who has a
Spark, and mellow vowel
Proving much,

And entrance
Into the hollows,
Scalpel
With which to touch,

Give me praise–
Who have no
Eyes to rise to,
But lack self-sufficiency.

1.

A page, of course,
Without trying, of
Course, confirms one
Again against nullity

Which isn’t sexy
Like death, or trendy
Like depression or
A substance abuse prob-

Lem–empty brackets
Don’t have the pull
Being time, and time
Is dull, “deathly” so,

And nullity is pure
Time, without attention.
No birth (death), no
Ecstasy (madness)

No booze, smokes, or
Heroin, all of which
Stoke narrative–this tick
Is merely I, passing by.

2.

No curious weather
And the air thick,
Not the beginning of a story,
Not Buenos Aires,

Mere auto-capitalization
In place of the voice,
No waves of sense
From speech
Of dogs or children,

Just silence,
Awareness
In the occasional click
Of the thermostat,

No drama, no
Comedy, no
Dramedy,
But more correction
From the pills
And the computer,

Not even radiation
From the slab
On which this poem
Fails to be written,

No entropy
Because there’s no form,
No catastrophe
Because there’s no weather
In Los Angeles,

No sin, no virtue,
As has been suggested.

3.

The true poems
Meld with
The undone ones
That are humiliating.

Such is
The economy.

The undone ones
Are earthy, or
Variably,
Ephemeral

Unlike the true ones
Which are both.

The undone ones
Have windows
Showing
Onto the frank scene.

A reader
Breaks one of them.

Hence, one prefers
Poems undone,
Tumbling
Like drunk loves

Earthy, or ephemeral
In our arms.

The true poems
Are arrogant
With balance,
And don’t need us.

They need perfect arms
In shuttered rooms.

Everyone looks perfect
for what they truly believe.
And if it’s 1970,
the talkies are in color.
And if it’s the Clippers this season,
it’s Nicholson on the bench.
Quite a landscape
I am never loath to be in.

This might not be your cup of tea
But it’s mine,
Titticut Follies meets Pasolini
Shot in Los Angeles, just

Two decades past the war, so
Bunker Hill is there
Warped by Victoriana, the
Beaches still kissed by industry,

Obvious as a camera.

The true garden lies in the valley
Of dust, below the false garden.
The new garden provides shade in which
The doe-like intensity of first loves
Can happen, and a fecundity
Float lazily into the sky above the false garden,
Advertising the palace of the true one.
We generally reject such allies
As would have us promote peak incursions
From the hillocks, into the smog
That is our womb, that is our carpet bomb.
Pregnant with blushes, retreats, and braying lips
This valley can seem like a barnyard
Rife with seasoned mirroring.

In the otolaryngologist Christian Head’s waiting room
an old guy leans over into his
breath.

We can stand it
One minute
At a time,

Ha ha and by seconds
Stand it

But by hours
Begin to question
The stamina

And talk
Endlessly about it.

*

This
Was a fine
Mess,
You ruined it

One
Photograph at a
Time,
Of Tijuana.

*

I watch art
Idly
As that appears
In the instructions

And watch sports
Actively
When the
Screen is large

As
Passively
I succumb
To this poem.

*

Public burning
At 35

Of the entire oeuvre
Describes a crime.

You are invited to a Beyond Baroque reading on July 30th at 7:30 pm with Factory School Books poets including:
Diane Ward, Deborah Meadows, Kathyrn Pringle, Sarah Menefee, Allison Cobb, Brian Kim Stefans, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Catherine Daly.

The doors open for a reception and to the book store at 6 pm.

Beyond Baroque is located:
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her sixth collection of poetry is from Factory School, Depleted Burden Down. Other recent titles include How, the means (Mindmade, 2010) and Goodbye Tissues (Shearsman Press, 2009).

Diane Ward was born in Washington, DC and currently lives in Santa Monica, California. She attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC and is studying Geography and Urban Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She has published eleven books of poetry including, most recently, a collaboration with Tina Darragh and Jane Sprague at #8 in the Belladonna Elders series,2009, No List (no list) from Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles, 2008, Flim-Yoked Scrim, Factory School, 2006, and When You Awake, New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Several of her poems have been set to music by the Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, including “Fade on Family” which was performed in 2005 as part of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound series at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. “InHouse,” a constructed poem, is forthcoming as part of Kindergarde, the First Avant Garde Anthology for Children.

Catherine Daly‘s book Chanteuse / Cantatrice was published in the Heretical Texts series in 2007. It is a book about collaboration and complicity during World War II and now; it can be read from the bottom of the page to the top and normally.

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) and Green-Wood (Factory School). She was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as were the first atomic bombs, and she now lives in Portland, Oregon.

Sarah Menefee is a San Francisco poet whose latest books are Human Star [Factory School] and In Your Fish Helmet [Transmission Press].

kathryn l. pringle has written RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY (Factory School), The Stills (Duration Press), and Temper and Felicity are lovers. (TAXT). she lives in Oakland, Ca.

Brian Kim Stefans lives in Los Angeles, California, and teaches digital media and literature at UCLA. His latest books are What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (2006) and Kluge: A Meditation, and other works (2007). In manuscript is a short collected titled Viva Miscegenation. His digital text works and other art projects can be seen at www.arras.net.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up 3 miles from the CIA. Her two books of poems include That Gorgeous Feeling (2007) and Underground National (2010). Juliette also edits Corollary Press (www.corollarypress.org), a chapbook series devoted to new work by writers of color.