🙏 & also, 🍺

Hey St. Paul:

I'll be reading some poems tonight at the University Club series, 7:30, alongside Anthony Ceballos & Paul Cisewski...

Stop by!

Cast-Iron Airplane Michael Bazzett I have an airplane made of cast iron. It has no engine. It does have rubber wheels that allow me to wheel it into open fields on sunlit days and climb into the cockpit. Or maybe the day isn't sunlit. Maybe a light snow is falling and the frozen grass is slowly being covered, and the only sound is the crunch of my footfalls and the creaking wheels, my breath coming in little white huffs. I slip into the pilot's seat and sit gazing at the dark pines that line the edge of the field. Then the plane begins to rumble, trundling across the field before it climbs into the air, heavily but steadily, and silent as the snow itself. If you're going to fly a cast-iron airplane with no engine you might as well do it while it's snowing. The risk abates once you crawl above the clouds. The view is the only real reason to own such a machine. And to be honest, I don't own it. I just kind of borrow it sometimes. And now the whole contraption has disappeared and I'm just up here, zooming along in a tiny seat, shirt-tail whipping madly, no plane whatsoever, just me feeling the wet breath of cloud on my cheek, staring down at a world that looks as if it were a meticulous model train lay-out in the basement of some guy. Maybe a guy with too much time on his hands. Or maybe that's unfair. Maybe he has just the right amount. Maybe he believes in the world enough that he wants to remake it, small and dear and delicate in his basement, where he goes and sits sometimes, and opens a beer, just one, and his eyes rove over his little world, hungrily taking in every detail, with a feeling more quiet than love.

Here's the little story itself... Thanks again, to Wigleaf!

new new: "Cast-Iron Airplane," by Michael Bazzett: wigleaf.com

Great news of a new book forthcoming from contributor Scott Garson

Essay on the Prose Poem by Charles Simic - Plume I’m grateful to Peter Johnson for bringing Charles Simic’s brilliant, unpublished “Essay on the Prose Poem” to my attention. Although Simic wrote this essay ten years ago, twenty one years after he wo...

Ha! Thanks, Davi...

& most excellent detective work. This piece was born when I ran across the following quote by Edson, in an essay on prose poems by Simic:

“. . . a cast-iron airplane that can actually fly, mainly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or not”

—Russell Edson

Top to bottom: Burgi Zenhaeusern: White Door Wislawa Szymborska: MAP Harryette Mullen: Regaining Unconsciousness Terrance Hayes: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin Jane Zwart: Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best Donna Vorreyer: Unrivered Michael Bazzett: Cloudwatcher Bernadette Mayer: The Golden Book of Words Harry Mathews: Collected Poems 1946-2016 Ron Padgett: Very Collected Poems

Some recent acquisitions.

also, 🍺

🙏💜

I wrote a little story & would be very honored if you should take a moment to read it. If you don't like it, I'll buy you a beer next time we meet. Much gratitude to Wigleaf, @wigleaf.bsky.social, one of my favorite places to read short fiction online, for giving it a home.

Sunday Poem + Prompt | Benjamin Niespodziany | Substack sharing a poem with an accompanying writing prompt every Sunday. Click to read Sunday Poem + Prompt, by Benjamin Niespodziany, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

even if you don't care about the accompanying writing prompt, I share one unreleased poem here every Sunday morning

Recent writers include: Johannes Göransson, Claire Hopple, Tom Snarsky, Vi Khi Nao, Jay Besemer, Zan de Parry, Joanna Ruocco, Todd Dillard, Michael Bazzett

neonpajamas.substack.com

"God", Michael Bazzett for Ada Limon Look, it's not that I believe in him. Nor he in me. We have moved beyond all that. Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock stray prayers lose from where they got stuck on their way out, so many years ago. It's almost like finding old piñata candy says God, picking one from the floorboards. He unwrap it, takes a quick taste. Winces. Nods like he's just remembered something for the thousandth, thousandth time. What is it? I ask. It's kind of like chewing tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.

Some Things I Don’t Want to Do Include walking on a tightrope over a waterfall, waking in the morning some days, or, living at all occasionally. The snapping turtle under ground in winter slows down its heart rate to nothing almost, a sound like snow falling in a pond when the Desire to Be grows so faint it is the setting down of a teacup by a mouse in the pantry, a lady mouse between chores, her laundry spread between chairs in the small kitchen of her life. The black snake blinks and she hears it coming her way through the walls. In the cancer ward my friend waited for his energies to return, his words like eglantine and diaphanous to have a purpose other than to speak of little pink funeral roses or the see-through gown of ghosts the dead wear so crisp and then he died asking for his mother twelve times as if from a list of his twelve favorite people. I don’t want to not be here if my children ever need me like this. Oh, let the fear of life thaw away enough I can dig out from the mud like the turtle in spring starved and clawing, the sun wild in my blood. Let the fear of death come apart in my hands like bread for the table enough for us all.

Steve Scafidi in @therumpus.net

HE TELLS HER He tells her that the Earth is flat— He knows the facts, and that is that. In altercations fierce and long She tries her best to prove him wrong. But he has learned to argue well. He calls her arguments unsound And often asks her not to yell. She cannot win. He stands his ground. The planet goes on being round.

Wendy Cope

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

at the counter standing slant and late the light hovering the sink still on i take an orange find the edge with a thumb press the skin gives way as it does lifts clean i pull it back in strips set them aside for a moment it looks like clean separation like it were possible to remove the after but the oil breaks against my fingers the smell takes the room i keep trying until the fruit is bare still your smell is there on my hands in the air everywhere

Impossible Poem 1 inspired by @mikhailbazharov.bsky.social and @neonpajamas.bsky.social's #Poem + #Prompt 066.

Impossible task: removing the after of something that's already happened.

Link to the prompt and inspiration poem below.

#writing #PoetryCommunity #BlueSkyPoets #writingcommunity

Great poem!

@parnassusbooks.bsky.social in Nashville is a true gem. Owned by Anne Patchett, and peopled by marvelous booksellers, it's one of my favorite places in the state of TN (my old stomping grounds, Knox-Vegas, Andersonville, Sewanee...). So, this one-line review from Max means plenty... 💜🙏

@parnassusbooks.bsky.social in Nashville is a true gem. Owned by Anne Patchett, and peopled by marvelous booksellers, it's one of my favorite places in the state of TN (my old stomping grounds, Knox-Vegas, Andersonville, Sewanee...). So, this one-line review from Max means plenty... 💜🙏

a lot of chatter about James Tate, Russell Edson, and Charles Simic (all wonderful), but I think Jack Handey should be part of that grouping of masters of humor on a shortform poetic level

Agreed. & Mitch Hedberg, on the level of the line. & Steve Martin, on subverting received forms/structures.

🙏💜

Cloudwatcher by Michael Bazzett - Copper Canyon Press Cloudwatcher by Michael Bazzett

Congratulations to Michael Bazzett on the publication of his new book! His language is a form of magic, traversing many worlds.

www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/cloudw...

The Revisionist Everybody thinks at first that time has somehow been reversed.

I haven't read "Cloudwatcher" yet (it came out *today*) but Bazzett is an enjoyably versatile poet; writes literary stuff, does translations, writes speculative poetry. Here's a piece of his we ran a few years back in Strange Horizons: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

A small stage with a brick façade, a stool, and a mic stand like it's a comedy open mic. Lots of small tables that will soon be filled with listeners.

I attended an excellent book launch tonight for an excellent book—Cloudwatcher by @mikhailbazharov.bsky.social—at Sisyphus Brewing in Minneapolis (seen here just before the crowd poured in).

Poets aren’t always the best performers of their work—but Mr Bazzett was hilarious, profound, fluent.

Happy Official Publication Day to Michael Bazzett for his collection Cloudwatcher — first winner of The Stern Prize! Order your copy here: the-american-poetry-review.myshopify.com/products/clo...

😶‍🌫️

Friends! Today's the official pub day for Cloudwatcher...

& I just wanted to drop a line to express my gratitude to all of you for being fellow voyagers, whatever form that's taken: friend, reader, editor, mentor, compadre, admired kin, all of the above...

I'm literally beside myself w/ joy 🌩️

The famous first panel from the "This is Fine" dog comic strip, but I made it so the dog sitting happily amid a burning house is saying "So a cool thing happened," and instead of his coffee mug on the burning table, it's my book The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees.

Well this is indescribably cool and flattering!
plumepoetry.com/mitchell-nob...

Thanks, Ben. Very excited to have CLOUDWATCHER, (the book where this little poem resides), launch into the world this coming Tuesday...

neonpajamas.substack.com “The Man Kept Reaching” over the gunwale of the canoe and dragging his tin cups across the water then pouring it back into the stream and when we asked what exactly he was doing he said I'm trying to peel the moon- light off the water the skin of it seems so thin and silvery but no matter how many times I scrape it stays luminous as the sky itself

Michael Bazzett

@mikhailbazharov.bsky.social

a new poem (& free writing prompt) about the moon, from @mikhailbazharov.bsky.social, whose next collection is out THIS TUESDAY 🌗

neonpajamas.substack.com/p/066-poem-p...