Kansas City Royals Do It Again!

The Royals have clinched the ALC. There will be baseball in Blue October!

It's time to work on my Dan Quisenberry Project!

My Springboards of 2004

As Kathleen Ossip reported to use Sylvia Plath's ARIEL for a project, I am questioning if I should not use entire books from 2004 to create poems--then widdle down?

Robinson Middle Sham

On June 8, 2015, Dennis Etzel, Jr. and other poets took a psychogeographic drift (see Kaia Sand, Allison Cobb, Jena Osman) around Robinson Middle School. This hybrid collection of poem and history--against our [continued] racist, sexist, homophobic, and Patriarchal culture--serves as an act of voice and empowerment.

An Actual Kansas Press

An Actual Kansas Press is a Kansas-based press designed to provide both free copies to works via pdf online, as well as inexpensive physical books for bibliophiles. The Press borrows from Ronald Johnson (a native Kansan): "an actual / Kansas--the central, earthy, prosaic core of us, needing only to be seen anew."

It comes out of the need for more exposure to experimental poetry, hybridity, document poetics, blurred genre, and whatever new [diverse] voices for poetry--for the people--are there.

Also, the need for voices to be read in a timely manner. As in, as soon as possible. As in, someone has something to get out into the world one week, someone else can read it the next week, and both poet and reader can hold it as a book in the week after.

Finally, it comes out of a Kansas place, to defy what others would see Kansas as only by reading the headlines. This is An Actual Kansas.

Unique Fantasy

Who has heard of this? Out of Japan?

Who would you recommend reading?

Ballot Ballet

Kansas voting as a dance.

philology of topeka

A new project, coming soon.

Also, look for Road-House Beowulf.

from Nikki Wallschlaeger

The Bay Area poets seem to live in a nostalgic fantasy of resurrecting the area of when it used to be a political area of value. Or at least when they thought it had value, when the Black Panthers were active. A group that certainly did important work but also had serious internal structural problems like "sexual abuse of women, financial malfeasance, and brutal factionalism (Dyson, 49). For instance, the Oakland Branch dismissed the East coast Black Panther party that Afeni Shakur (Tupac Shakur's mother) was a member of in the case of the New York Panther 21-named for the 21 houses raided where Black Panther Party members lived and 5 members were arrested, Afeni was one of them in which she was also pregnant with Tupac in jail. (Dyson, Michael C. Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur: Basic Civitas Books, 2001).

Is this a concern of Bay Area poets- knowing fully the history of the Black Panther Party or are they just preoccupied about the romanticism they project about black militant life in order to make themselves look more radical?

Must black people consistently be "on the front lines" in order to gain a white radical's respect? Aren't we already politicized whether we like it or not simply by being embodied? The police are killing us regardless of whether we are militant in our politics, liberal in our politics, or apathetic and hopeless in our politics. It doesn't matter to them-what they see is a black body, what they see is a "nigger."

At the end of the day, I'm still a "nigger" in this country. You are telling me, white radicals, "communists" (lol) to go sit on the front lines with that weight in order to earn your respect? That along with the one of the gravest most painful of historical genocidal generational traumas, I'm supposed to prove to you that my life matters? That if I'm not risking getting my head blown off by cops to satisfy your radical fantasies the work that I do is basically meaningless?

My life is literature. My life matters. My black life matters. Black poetry matters. Black literature matters.

‪#‎blacklivesmatter‬

*This post is marked for the public.