Elaborate poetry video--filmmaking good, poem not so.

Giving credit to David and Daniel Holechek for classy, professional filmmaking.  Otherwise, staying silent.

Mindy Nettifee shares her GLITTER IN THE BLOOD with other poets.

Somehow, in spite of a distinguished career as a page-and-stage dynamo, former LBC/OC powerhouse Mindy Nettifee is still referred to as a "rising" poet--such are the ways of modern poetry communities.

For those who may be interested, Mindy has a writing-poetry-better-tips book (from Write Bloody) called GLITTER IN THE BLOOD.

Here's the purchase link: http://www.amazon.com/Glitter-Blood-Manifesto-Better-Writing/dp/1938912012/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354777282&sr=1-2&keywords=mindy+nettifee

Here's the blurb from Amazon.com:

You do not want to write good poems. You want to write great poems. You want to write poems that challenge, inspire and awe. You want to write poems that forever alter your audience, that forever alter yourself. Those poems take guts. Glitter in the Blood: A Poet's Manifesto to Better, Braver Writing will put you in constant contact with your guts. Pushcart prize nominated and highly accomplished performance poet Mindy Nettifee is not going to lead you step-by-step up a how-to staircase. With this collection of essays, prompts and exercises, Mindy is giving you the wrench you need to open up the blood and let it flow into your writing.

 

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The art of full disclosure when writing poetry book reviews.

First, I'll start with a full disclosure of my own: I once had a book published by Lummox Press and was included in an anthology of its Little Red Books series.

G. Murray Thomas, who reviews books for Poetix.net (alongside Eric Morago), knows the proprietor of Lummox and has toured with him in recent months. 

But Murray routinely reviews poetry volumes published by Lummox and even more routinely fails to offer any kind of full disclosure.  This modus operandi has also occurred with books from Write Bloody.  There, the ethical conundrum gets a bit stickier because Derrick Brown's Long Beach-based small press recently offered up the NEWS CLIPS AND EGO TRIPS anthology, based on the NEXT....poetry magazine edited by....G. Murray Thomas.

Once again, I'm aware that a certain segment of the SoCal poetry community views itself as small enough where friends write reviews of each other's books and few people don't care to see this as any kind of an issue.

And I'll give Murray the benefit of the doubt and guess he does his best to be objective when writing reviews of Lummox and Write Bloody offerings.

But, if the poetry community in SoCal wants to trumpet its idealness more convincingly, then it should avoid too many occurrences of even the appearance of conflict of interest.

UPDATE 6/5/12: Heard from Murray privately (sent him comminique via Facebook); essentially, his response is that "most people" know he knows people from local presses and that he's not interested in full disclosure.  Case closed.

Explaining SoCal poetry to outsiders Part 3: Why new book NEWS CLIPS AND EGO TRIPS will be a Big Event to many.

Recent Twitter posts of mine--


Got my copy of NEWS CLIPS AND EGO TRIPS via Amazon today. Won't review it [as promised in a previous blog post here], but will say that it's a victory lap for G. Murray Thomas.



G. Murray, still-titan of Long Beach/OC Poetry, edited NEXT magazine, which NEWS CLIPS AND EGO TRIPS is a compilation of.



NEXT was a chronicle of slam/performance and page poetry both in SoCal and elsewhere. Lasted a few years until 1998.



Essentially, NEWS CLIPS AND EGO TRIPS is Murray and Write Bloody's Derrick Brown's manifesto that the magazine was Important and....

...that its brief life was not in vain.

Victor Infante tells you to be careful what you say.

http://www.telegram.com/article/20120316/POPCULTURENOTEBOOK/120319641/1011/features

I'm aware I'm eating a sort-of-rhetorical Lay's Potato Chip again by writing this post, but sometimes Mr. Infante can be a good columnist/blogger when talking about the wider world beyond the velvet-rope poetry/slam universe he inhabits.

The above column does manage to somehow work in a plug for sometimes-poetry colleague Amber Tamblyn, plus it contains this priceless passage:
"And you know what? I get it. There is something really cathartic about shouting someone down online. There really is."

Derrick Brown performs "Victory Explosions"

As the great philosopher Boz Scaggs once sang, "What can I say?"
 
I'll just say this: if you're a poet in LA/Long Beach/Orange County and you aspire to acceptance from certain sects,
it doesn't hurt to love Derrick Brown without reservations.

The slippery slope of no-open-mike poetry readings if they become a trend in LA/LBC/OC.

Reprinting this tidbit from Sander Roscoe Wolff's interview with Derrick Brown re the Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour's resurrection (highlighting by me):
I asked him why he decided to abandon the open mic segment.

[DERRICK BROWN]"The audience didn't like it, but the poets did. As a writer and promoter, the audience is master [a comment that G. Murray Thomas--also a titan of LBC--has duplicated in the past]. But now we have a contact button on our site so any writer can request to join one of our 'found object' battles. The themes change monthly. Instead of one author for 20 minutes, each contestant competes to get a 7-10 minute feature slot that night, 50 bucks, and all the found objects. Only one can win. The audience decides."

In the late 90s and the first half of the 2000s, when there was an abundance of readings, it wasn't all that bad when certain poetry hosts did no-open-allowed showcases on occasion.

Nowadays, you can ingratiate yourself with certain SoCal literati by badmouthing the oh-so-uneven quality of open mikes at poetry readings.  And you may well increase popularity by doing this.

But I hate to see a resurgence of the bite-sized invited guest reader trend.  Larry Jaffe, during his 2002 venture into hosting a sedate literary poetry reading at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park, did this--though Larry didn't make people jump like dogs eager to be fed by asking them to compete in a "found object" battle.

Perhaps Derrick Brown thinks he's being semi-generous by giving poets/writers a "request to join" option and presenting them $50 if they meet his win-the-crowd-like-a-slam-gladiator standards.

I'm just worried that, in an environment of rising gas prices and diminishing venue attendance (not to forget fewer extant venues), that literati of both the page and stage may get the idea to kill open mikes in greater quantities--thinking that it's a sure way to woo more nonpoet audience members to "community" and showcase readings.

LBC's Derrick Brown brings Lightbulb Mouth reading back from the dead.

http://www.lbpost.com/life/sander

Noticing that Derrick Brown killed the open mic segment.

From the one time I attended at the previous location (Basement Lounge) in June 2010, the open mic (which inspired me to walk out early) was essentially cronies like Eitan Kadosh making in-jokes with other cronies.  The one exception was an elderly man who took open mic seriously and actually got up to engage in the (apparently not audience-pleasing enough for Derrick) arcane act of reading poetry.

Recent Mindy Nettifee online radio interview.

In the interest of offering a sort of "equal time"--here's an interview with Mindy Nettifee
on the BreakThru Radio show WRITER'S BLOCK:
Here's a clip of the show: http://snd.sc/j0vb9s


Here's a link to the entire program: http://bit.ly/ksYf7B

G. Murray Thomas reviews a poetry anthology from the publisher of his upcoming NEXT magazine anthology.

Since the poetry community in SoCal is small enough that a lot of people know a lot of other people, these grey areas sometimes occur: http://poetix.net/reviews.htm

It's In The Way That You Use It--The Derrick Brown situation and local poetry..

A few days ago, I wrote a blog entry about Derrick Brown mentioning a FORBES magazine article about him in his official bio (which was used in a Beyond Baroque flyer listing); the post was a bit dubious about the value of a FORBES mention due to its ownership by a more-big-capitalist-than-most-people-are-aware Bono. 

I sent the blog entry to his Write Bloody e-mail and got a short, profane text-message sort of response; this was highly likely since I wasn't thrilled with what I perceived to be an overly for-cool-kids-only ambience last summer at the portion of a Lightbulb Mouth reading I attended in Long Beach (and I wrote about it).

In a perfect world, perhaps Derrick could have written whole sentences and paragraphs about why he disliked my post (defending the FORBES piece, among other things).  He didn't.  Instead, he opted for the Frank Sinatra/Russell Crowe way of striking down an annoying pest with a very heavy hand.

Here's an irony about the whole thing: I think Write Bloody has great graphic design and well-presented product (at least Derrick got books into the Borders chain before their current financial difficulties) and am pleased that Derrick champions people like Mindy Nettifee and Buddy Wakefield.  I became interested in the Write Bloody imprint a few years ago when Derrick was in Tennessee and word went out amongst the poetry community that he was ill and needed money from book sales; I bought several books--anthologies and individual authors' volumes--at that time.

But, as I've learned from the poetry community, if you say both nice and less-than-laudatory things about certain poets, they tend to only listen to the latter and then yell their heads off. 

In a way, I'm still amazed by the way some of our ostensibly-progressive poetry community leaders (which sometimes resort to a rigid form of groupthink) tend to react/overreact to contrary opinions (be it about a magazine article or even certain cliques which tend to feature the same poets over and over--something I was kicked in the shins for mentioning way back in 2003).

To close, certain poets (especially the entrepreneurs) need to be less translucent-skinned and start banishing the phrase YOU CAN'T SAY THAT! from their public and private vocabularies.

It will make for a healthier, more welcoming environment for all.

Derrick Brown: Cotton In The Air

Just to give you a visual and verbal example of someone I've been writing about.

Some fallout from the previous post re Derrick Brown and FORBES.

I'm not printing it here, but Victor Infante ex-of-OC and-current-New England-poetry dynamo, gave me a roasting for forwarding the link to my last post to his blog.

It didn't help that I expressed a contrarian opinion of Derrick Brown and referred to Victor (who has benefited professionally from his association with Derrick's Write Bloody mini-empire) as an "enabler."

The essence of the criricism was that I'm an awful person who criticizes successful people, brings failure upon myself--and suffers from mental difficulties as well.

Specifically responding to Victor's allegation that I criticize successful people (who, in his mindset, have done nothing to me):
I have no problem with people who are winners.  I do have problems with people who win ugly.

And it seems to me that Victor, Derrick and most of the people in their circle fit into the latter category.

What do poet/publisher Derrick Brown and U2's Bono have in common?

Just noticed this on a Beyond Baroque e-flyer, taken from a future reading that Derrick Brown of the LBC is taking part in (highlighting by me):
DERRICK BROWN, former paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne, gondolier, magician, and fired weatherman dedicated to bringing American poetry into rock and roll status. He is president of Write Bloody Publishing, the first indie press to be reviewed with favor by Forbes Magazine.


I'm not sure the above is that much of an honor.

It's not household knowledge, but do some digging (Rock critic Dave Marsh's ROCK N RAP CONFIDENTIAL newsletter/website at http://rockrap.com/ is an excellent place to start) and you'll find out how semi-idealist plutocrat Bono of U2 came to be an integral part of Forbes Magazine.

In any event, the old phrase about "rendering unto Caesar" comes to mind--to say the least.

UPDATE: I sent the above post to Derrick Brown and this is a portion of his response:
"you bitter friendless witless talentless turd"

Safe to say that Bono, even faced with criticism, would have handled this somewhat better.

UPDATE #2: Here's a link to the Forbes article, which mainly looks favorably on Brown's money-generation as a road-warrior performance poet: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0622/lifestyle-poetry-slams-derrick-brown-poetic-license.html

Yes, kids, you too can aspire to Write Bloody.

http://writebloody.com/?page_id=53
http://writebloody.com/?page_id=50
http://writebloody.com/?page_id=56

If you want to sit at the Algonquin Roundtable of Indie Poetry and meet the exacting standards of Derrick Brown (doesn't hurt to have slam-to-lit crossover aspirations and already be a National Name who hits the road each year), just click the links above!

A modest proposal re Long Beach's Lightbulb Mouth reading.

Awhile back, I wrote a poem called I'LL BE YOUR DEAD MAN FOR THE EVENING--inspired in part by not being able to make it past the open-mike section of the Lightbulb Mouth "poetry show" in Long Beach run by Derrick (Write Bloody publisher/entrepreneur) Brown and Mindy Nettiffee each Wednesday.

Here's a thought: As far as Lightbulb is concerned, perhaps the gesture of an open reading should be dropped--and they should concentrate on being a showcase-only venue for friends and nationally-known colleagues. And, if Mindy and Derrick desire a nonpoet-but-still-afficionado audience [as was explained to me backchannel by a supporter of the reading], perhaps they should try print ads in the LA and OC WEEKLY and expand their current base (although that requires money and some risk).