Thursday, February 16, 2017

"The Big Game Is Every Night" Now Available!

Pleased to share that my poetry chapbook THE BIG GAME IS EVERY NIGHT has just been released by Locofo Chaps as a *FREE* e-book (& as a physical chapbook too)! 
Locofo Chaps is a brand new politically-oriented poetry wing of Moria Books, edited by the courageous William Allegrezza. Bill’s goal is to publish 100 poetry chaps in the next 100 days (as a poetic resistance to some new racist-xenophobic-sexist-childish-unconstitutional "president"), and then send all the books to the White House as a poetic act of civil disobedience. Pretty cool! Bill’s currently accepting chapbook manuscripts for the series – so if you’re working your revolutions via verse, here’s a great way to share your practice.
The poems in TBGIEN (title is a song title by Jason Molina) are lyrik political, I guess. I steal, warble, leave things in public spaces, and dolefully eulogize the dance. A few poems have been previously approved of by some fearless editors who I’d also like to thank: Mitch Manning/Audrey Mardavich (No Infinite), Adam Tedesco and Anna Karenina (Reality Beach), Danielle Vogel (for curating RISD’s Earth Archive), and Ed Go/Napoleon Id (Other Rooms Press’ Open Resistance). So thanks to everyone who is doing something fearless through words, voices, marches, and other instruments of peace. Much love to all your fearless ways, dearests. ONWARD.
Chapbook is here: http://www.moriapoetry.com/petersonechap.pdf
Locofo Series is here: http://www.moriapoetry.com/locofo.html

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

NO INFINITE: NO INFINITE #4: Election Issue 2016


NO INFINITE #4: Election Issue 2016

Assembled in haste and in protest of the 2016 US presidential charade.

READ and Share 

Featuring new poems by:

Anne Boyer, CA Conrad, Jon Papas, Miriam Gabriel / Maryam Imam, Keith Jones, Michael Peters. Boyd Nielson, Daniel Remein, Translations from the Kurdish by Kawa Nemir, Cemal Süreya translated from the Turkish by Öykü Tekten, Dan Wuenschel, Molly McGuire, Maria Zervos, Andrew K Peterson, Charlotte Seley, Tamas Panitz, & drawings and visual poems by Feliz Lucia Molina and Paul Ebenkamp.

Cover Art: "Voiceover" by Paul Ebenkamp

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Two Interviews

UPDATE - new interview just published at Mass Poetry website!

"10 Questions! with Andrew K. Peterson"
http://www.masspoetry.org/10questionsandrewkpeterson

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Bienvenue! Two new interviews just published about Anonymous Bouquet!

Image result for Andrew K. Peterson poetry Anonymous BouquetImage result for Andrew K. Peterson poetry Anonymous Bouquet







"12 or 20 (second series) question with Andrew K. Peterson" at rob mclennan's blog:
http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2015/12/12-or-20-second-series-questions-with_7.html


"Getting to know Andrew K. Peterson and His New Book Anonymous Bouquet at Mass Poetry:
http://www.masspoetry.org/newbookpeterson

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Self(ie) Things

Image result for Andrew K Peterson vimeo video Mr Hip

From Mr. Hip Presents:

At the September installment of Mr. Hip Presents: Youth Reads, Poet Andrew K. Peterson and the young poets in the video came up with an interesting idea. 
Each of us wrote our own line of poem on plastic Boloco forks. We threw them up in the air and took cover. Picking up the forks, we read each fork aloud in order of she youngest to the oldest (or beauties before the beasts). 
Anyway, check out what we came up with. It's dope poetry.
https://vimeo.com/105646055

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At Both Both blog:

Poet/friend John Sakkis said he read some deer left the yard moving day and had some, er, nice (?) things to say about me. Anyway. Thanks John! Love ya.

http://bothbothseries.blogspot.com/2014_12_01_archive.html

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

A Little Bit of Everything, Continued: My Favorite (Mostly Small Press) Poetry Books of 2014

OK, I'm going to try to work on writing some things about these soon...

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

A Little Bit of Everything, Continued: My Favorite (Mostly Small Press) Poetry Books of 2014


Joseph Cooper, Arias Let Into (Spuyten Duyvil)

Disclosure: this book is dedicated to me, Joe being, after all, among my closest friends and poetry comrades.

Twenty-four favorite sentences from my interview with Joseph Cooper that appears as an afterward to Arias Let Into:  

1.      I wanted to write a story without beginning or ending, something without resolution, perhaps even without conflict, a kind of anti-narrative, one that simply aroused questions and curiosity.
2.      The title Arias Let Into is an anagram of Aristotelian, and the subheadings are anagrams of various key points used in defining the plotline structure: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
3.      I think I’ve always been attracted to the sentence and the sentence fragment because during my adolescence I battled so relentlessly to actually speak one fluently.
4.      When I was 11 I was diagnosed with a ‘speech block’, a type of speech impediment focused on the blocked airways, the tightening of the speech mechanism in a way that no sound could be emitted.
5.      Formal constraint makes me feel safe somehow.
6.      My father forbade me from seeing him, and from the traumatic thought of our friendship ending, I pulled out a spiral notebook from my math class and began writing poetry.
7.      Whenever I write, I do so with the intention of reading it aloud.
8.      As a reference to my body, it is perhaps a commentary on how I have never quite managed to live entirely in the present, which has always been an ongoing desire and struggle.
9.      I worked nights and since I was single and otherwise unmotivated I spent the daylight hours writing.
10.  Through Jim Morrison I discovered Rimbaud, Nietzsche, the Beat Movement.
11.  Additionally, “unfolding crisis” surfaces from a constant internal quarrel to be, on the one hand, an experimentalist, and on the other, a more confessional narrator.
12.  It was simply that Creeley was grand and Bukowski was shit.
13.  The name goon papa, by the way, came from a stoned mispronunciation of nag champa incense, if that gives you a sense of the atmosphere.
14.  The “you” that surfaces acts as reader, lover, friend, Other.
15.  I’ve done it both ways.
16.  After we left Boulder we continued collaborating via the telephone writing blind sonnets, taking turns not knowing what the other wrote before we issued our next lines.
17.  [Arias] is contained in a subversive plot structure, each chapter containing 14 poems, 14 lines each as a further dissidence of the sonnet form.
18.  For Arias I began with a select few and then exchanged them as I felt the first voices growing faint.
19.  It was so quiet and secluded, especially at night.
20.  I once saw my father perform in a show that took place entirely backstage.
21.  You watch a person play after play, season after season, always themselves, always as the program states: So and So playing So and So.
22.  Or are they?
23.  I like to think that “I” is my collaboration with these various authors allowing that pronoun to act as more of a curator or tourist guide through experimentation.
24.  The final word is always mine.

Monday, December 8, 2014

A Little Bit of Everything, Continued: My Favorite (Mostly Small Press) Poetry Books of 2014



Zachary Schomburg, The Book of Joshua (Black Ocean Press)

Getting Carried Away, or Eighteen Things about The Book of Joshua

1.       Zachary Schomburg’s weirdly dark debut The Man Suit put Black Ocean Press on the map with an engaging, sincere, childlike devotion to the imagination and dreams’ (and nightmares’) vivid realities. Schomburg has continued developing raw, tender journeys through, then past, sense and innocence, which for me recall the carefully constructed coming-of-age storybook films of Wes Anderson.

2.       The Book of Joshua is Zachary Schomburg’s fourth publication with Black Ocean. The ongoing relationship between poet and publisher is a match made in a book lover’s haven. With each new title, Schomburg’s and publisher Janaka Stucky’s aesthetic continue to inter-twingle (ok, not a word) in uniquely beautiful “third book mind” ways.

3.       Physically, this is a gorgeous object to hold. Joshua’s limited first edition is clothbound with a textured scarlet cover, white inlaid lettering and blue stain trim. Its slender shape recalls some mysterious childhood storybook found in the corner of a dusty library, left tottering on the edge of a just-low-enough-to-reach bookcase, which makes a reader wonder, did this book even exist before I discovered it? It welcomes you into an intimate, cosmic mystery, makes you feel it’s been created by and just for you.

4.       The narrator – Joshua? Not Joshua? Joshua-but-not-Joshua speaking to a maybe-imaginary friend, ghost, or departed sibling? – tips in and out of control of interior/exterior surroundings, like childhood, or like how a childhood dream careens between idyllic fantasy and terrifying nightmare. Buried within these lines, I felt a struggling rewind back into adolescent metamorphoses – the development of the self through senses, self-consciousness, memory, acknowledgment of the other, guilt, shame, grief, and release through imagination and dreams.

5.       Joshua is divided into three sections: EARTH – MARS – BLOOD. The first two sections are paragraph-length prose poems, progressing sequentially between the years 1977 and 2044.

6.       At the Cambridge book-launch release earlier this year, Zachary revealed that he was born in 1977. Inevitably, 2044 being the year he thinks he is going to die. So the book is structured, terrestrially, like a life.
7.       Knowing this was an enjoyable and inevitable guide for my own entrance into the book’s narrative, tracing my own memories of childhood into adulthood…

8.       Around the time a child might take their first step, Joshua writes “When I moved my arms and when I walked forward or backward or sideways, I knocked many birds to the frozen ground and then stepped on them and crushed their hollow bones.”
9.       Around the time a child might form their first sentence, Joshua writes “I slept like a million broken accordions.”

10.   Around the time a child might begin school, Joshua writes “I was scared to finally see you. To see you for the first time was to see myself for the first time.”

11.   Around the time a young person might experience death for the first time, there is an empty page beneath the year, “1989.”

12.   Around the time an adolescent might develop their first crush, Joshua writes “And then growing from its middle came my own unforgivableness, an impossibly beautiful strawberry patch to feed me forever.”

13.   Around the time a teenager might earn the right to vote, Joshua writes “Every night, I slept on the peeling linoleum in front of the refrigerator. I thought something major would happen. I thought hunger was curable.”

14.   Around the time a young adult might graduate from college or get their first ‘real’ job, Joshua writes “When I touched my own skin it felt like someone else’s father’s.”

15.   Around the time a young adult might quit their first job out of disillusionment, Joshua writes “I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but maybe that is always the best thing, to just ask if anyone is there and maybe then to tell them you’re not scared.”

16.   Around the time the average American adult gets married, Joshua writes “I didn’t feel like living in a thing not shaped like me anymore.”

17.   Around the time the average American adult gets divorced, Joshua writes “There was no bed in the spaceship. I wrapped myself in a blanket and slept sitting up. In space, there is no day and no real direction.”

18.    As everything breaks apart, it’s BLOOD that puts us back together.