The 2nd Annual Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics: Jalal Toufic

This event is going to be huge! Jalal is flying in from Istanbul to deliver the lecture, and I'm basically memorizing Leslie's fascinating essay on his work "Fiction and the Present Without Basis" (first delivered in a class I attended in Buffalo back in 2003 and later published in symploke, vol. 12, no. 1/2 (2004)) in order to write an introduction; I hope to post Leslie's essay in sections here leading up to the event, which takes place Sunday, June 10th at 5:00 pm (Timken Hall, 1111 8th Street, SF).

I'm also currently rereading most of Jalal's work in anticipation (today Undying Love or Love Dies between grading essays), totally in awe of his conceptual power! Perhaps you'd also like to spend the coming month reading Jalal's entire body of work in anticipation of this event?! If so, you might be interested to learn that almost everything he's written is now available in PDF form here. The new material (The Portrait of the Pubescent Girl: A Rite of Non-Passage (rhymes with Tiqqun, no?) and What is the Sum of Recurrently?) certainly promises to keep me busy until the 10th! Hope to see you there...

Reading at the Green Arcade this Friday!

I'm super excited to participate in a group reading with my AMAZING students from University of San Francisco this Friday, May 11th at 7:30 pm if you happen to be in the city looking for something fun to do. Our final project this term was to design and publish chapbooks of new work, and we'll launch these books for FREE at the Green Arcade (1680 Market Street, near Gough) in just a few short days!

My own contribution is 100 new lines from The Katechon (cover image above), letterpressed start to finish on the Heidelberg, and I'll hand this out FOR FREE to friends and colleagues who drop by. You can also pick up really stunning new chapbooks from the following whipsmart up-and-coming poets:

Jenny Chu
Lourdes Figueroa
Natina Kihara
Margaret Ann Mabry
Stephen Novotny
Claire Rawlins
Wes Solether

We'd love to have you join us! And once you see these chapbooks, you'll be really happy you did!

Now Available: Eleni Stecopoulos' Daphnephoria

I'm super excited to announce the release of a new Compline chapbook, Eleni Stecopoulos's Daphnephoria. Over the course of the year, I hope to print completely letterpress micro-run chapbooks as a way to highlight brand new work by some of my favorite poets while also raising money for more expensive full-length projects. My plan is to treat these books as press fundraisers: to make them using mostly recyclable material completely by hand, while selling them for a ludicrously cheap price to inspire interest and support from local poetry communities.

Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of the totally wonderful Palm Press long-player Armies of Compassion, and the world's foremost expert of the Poetics of Healing (according to me!). By purchasing this book, you'll get a glimpse at what Eleni's currently working on (like, right now!) while directly helping to support the next two Compline projects; the long-awaited edition of Leslie Scalapino and Kiki Smith's The Animal is in the World like Water in Water and David Brazil's first full-length collection, Economy. And to make it even more appealing, I've decided to try a two-price model: if you live in the Bay Area and you can get the book from me personally, it will only cost you $5 (I know!! Nuts, right?! This is the price of a coffee drink these days!). If you'd like the book shipped (even if you're local), it will cost you $8. This is not, of course, to punish friends and colleagues living out of state, but to try to keep the price down for folks I might see in person around town. It is also to inspire us to actually say hello to each other and share a moment of camaraderie in an otherwise completely inhospitable world!

I'd also like to make it easy to give these books as gifts to friends (and they're worth it, I'm telling you!), so buy one for a friend and I'll include a little personal note from you! This might be the perfect time to remind someone you're thinking about them by sending them a badass chapbook in the mail!

Also, it's a super short run, so get it while you can!

So, if you'd like to get the book from me in person (at a reading, or at my house, or at some clandestine location), and you'd like to spend $5 to get something rad while supporting the work I do with the press, click the button below:

If you'd like me to send the book to you, and you're willing to spend $8 of your hard-earned money to support often-not-super-commercially-viable poetries (!!), click the button below:

Spread the word, please, to friends and family! We appreciate the support!