Draft December 7th

Squirrels

We're sitting on the bole of a tall maple
looking for squirrels to bark. You call
(redacted)

Draft Dream Poem #3

Dream Poem #3



High on Tower Hill I walked down
what seemed to be a logging road
which petered out into a deer path.
(redacted)

In the Midst of NaPoWriMo

sit yourself back for some good reading. Keep the fire stoked. Here's one I bet a bunch of you would like, Trevino L. Brings Plenty's Real Indian Junk Jewelry. Adrian Louis brought the book to my attention, and I'm so glad. Brings Plenty is the real deal. Find out more at http://www.trevinobringsplenty.com/.

Trevino L. Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. He is singer/songwriter/guitarist for the musical ensemble Ballads of Larry Drake. He has read/performed his work at poetry festivals as far away as Amman, Jordan and close to his home base at Portland’s Wordstock Festival.

In college, Trevino worked with Primus St. John and Henry Carlile for this poetry work, studied with Tomas Svoboda for music composition, and Jerry Hahn for Jazz guitar. 

Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject.

Other titles by author: Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).

More on Bill Knott, from John Cotter

Why isn't Bill Knott better known? John Cotter has part of the answer, at least, at the Poetry Foundation.

Bill Knott is probably the closest thing the American poetry establishment has to a rebel. Over the course of his career he has published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, BOA Editions, and Random House, but his most recent books are all self-published. Among them, Collected Poems 1960–2013 is a coffee-table-sized edition; its contents were simultaneously (and briefly) made available in their entirety on Knott’s website before it was taken down, along with poems from a smaller but still considerable collection, New Poems from the Last Six Years. Because they are as cheaply produced as possible, and promoted only by Knott himself, the new books (containing no index or table of contents) stand as a kind of rebuke to the gorgeously produced, deckle-edged volumes from major publishers, and also to the often fetishistically beautiful volumes by smaller presses. They are brutal packages for an often exquisite art.