Thursday, December 6th 7pm FREE
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 8th Ave, Suite 2020
A,C,E, to Penn Station

wine, cheese reception to follow

Brian Kim Stefans’ recent books of poetry are Kluge: A Meditation (Roof Books) and What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School). A book of interviews and criticism, Before Starting Over, was published by Salt Book in 2006. He teaches new media studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Wave Books), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, forthcoming), and several chapbooks. He is a contributing editor for PENNsound and publishes Minus House chapbooks. He lives in Denver.

Mobile Libris will be selling books.

“Hope I die before I get there!” — Pete Townshend.

 

I got caught up in a lulu.com fever a couple of years ago and started creating this book, which collects my collaborations with Sianne Ngai, Judith Goldman and Jeff Derksen among others, and contains a lot of poems that I never put in my books, occsionally because they just “didn’t fit,” but also because I either forgot about them or didn’t like them at the time, though like them now.

It’s been for sale at Lulu for a few months now but I’ve held off telling anyone about it, but I’ve read from the book at a few readings over the past month and people have been asking about it. So here it is. I’m pretty happy with it — have finally stopped tweakng the shit out of it — and I really like the cover, which features a painting by a Stockton student named Mike Bruno.

The back cover features Charlotte Rampling in a still from “Zardoz,” with the words “It’s Not Time” floating over her — that was the original title of the book, but it’s now just the title of the second section, of “early poems.”

Other features of the book: more translations from Rimbaud, as well as Apollinaire, Jules Laforgue, Emile Nelligan, Guido Gozzano and Virgil; another short play I wrote called “Being John Malkovich”; some more crazy computer-assisted gobbledy-gook; a series of sound translations of Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”; my one and only collaboration with my little sister, Cindy; leftover visual poems from my first book, Free Space Comix as well as the visual poems that have been on ubu.com for nearly a decade (with a few more that don’t appear there); two New York School sestinas and other brands of Ashberian ooze; more stuff in the style of “Les Assis” from my last book; etc.

Pasted below the blurb from the site is the acknowledgements page so you can see where this stuff comes from. Not all of the poems I’ve published appear in it — I tried to keep the quality high and threw away a ton of garbage, just for you. Some of the really old poems have actually only appeared recently in print because they give me that old Language tingling sensation in my toes.

“Booty, Egg On” includes poetry mostly from the nineties, as well as translations of Virgil, Rimbaud, Guido Gozzano, Apollinaire, Jules LaForgue and Emile Nelligan. Collaborators include Judith Goldman (the Haki Pok poems), Jeff Derksen (“Mao’s Gift to Nixon”), Stephen Rodefer, Sianne Ngai (“The Cosmopolitans”) and the poet’s sister Cindy Stefans. Poems have previously appeared in Chain, The Impercipient, dANDelion, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, Premonitions, Interlope and the Asian Pacific America Journal among other places. Previous books by Brian Kim Stefans include Kluge: A Meditation (Roof, 2007), What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2006) and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003). He runs www.arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, and his blog is Free Space Comix, at www.arras.net/fscIII. 

http://www.lulu.com/content/921396 

PREVIOUS APPEARANCES OF SOME OF THESE POEMS:
Arras: “The Golden Age of Swimwear,” “At the Entrance of the Arbor”
Asian Pacific American Journal: “Author Photo,” “Calypso”
Bard Papers: “Houseboat”
Callaloo: “Fact’s Bird,” “A Bronx Tambourine”
Chain: “Folk Music,” “Heritage”
dANDelion: “Mao’s Gift to Nixon”
Drunken Boat: “Countering the Luddite Itch with a Tin Switch,” “Dailies,” “Jim Jarmusch”
First Intensity: “The Storm,” “Free to be Yu and Mee,” “Poem 33”
580 Split: “Cheqw!,” “The Royal Life (As Told To…)”
Hodos: “A Dream of Winter,” “Poem, ‘As'”
The Impercipient: “Poem (Thank the gales…),” “Poem (Now…),” “Scattered Norm”
Interlope: “The Cosmopolitans”
Itsynccast “Angeles”
Jacket: “The Apple Generation,” “Pastoral Disposal”
Model Homes: “Before Odilon Redon,” “Postlude: the appropriation of peach,” “The Streets of Baghdad”
Mora: “Wednesday’s Children”
Object: “Thermosaging Wayne”
Ocho: “White Sestina,” “Complaint of Pierrot”
Poetic Inhalation: “Very Light and Sweet”
Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of Asian American Poetry: “Astoria”
Read me: “Frances Chung’s Booklist”
Trowel: “from The Aeneid”
Ubu: Visual Poems
We 19: “Mutter Tongue (To Hearing),” “Thugs”

“Mon Canard” appeared in Stephen Rodefer’s book of poems Mon Canard (the Figures, 2000). A later version of “Mao’s Gift to Nixon” appeared in Jeff Derksen’s book of poems Transnational Muscle Cars (Talonbooks, 2003). A shorter version of “Booty, Egg On” is available for free download on the website ubu.com.

Life just isn’t fun without new posters to design. Here’s one for a project I’m starting at Stockton.