Don Peteroy at The Cincinnati Review asked if I would trade poems for a new album by Public Enemy. You can read our exchange here.
In honor of this imaginary Public Enemy album, one of my all-time favorite cuts, “Don’t Believe the Hype”:
My friend and poet extraordinaire, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, tagged me in the Pen American Center’s Poetry Relay. You can find the audio and text of five poems from the Jack Johnson project here.
I found this image and some others of Jack Johnson here. The source images are much higher quality than this.
Shout out to Allison Hedge Coke and the editors of Platte Valley Review for running some of the poems from my new project. You can find the poems here.
“In Walked Bud” was inspired by the Thelonious Monk song of the same name from his live album, Misterioso:
Many thanks to Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein for including my work on the Poet Laureate website. You can find text and audio of poems from The Big Smoke here.
My friend and cultural scholar, Howard Ramsby, just posted a series of links to some of the Jack Johnson poems on SIUE’s Black Studies Blog. Thanks for your continued support, Howard!
Here’s part of the reading I gave at O, Miami’s Anthology of Rap Celebration. Shouts out to Kool Moe Dee, Monie Love, Adrian Castro, and Adam Bradley. It was humbling experience sharing a stage with such incredible artists.
Many thanks to the editors of The American Poetry Review for publishing two of the poems from the Jack Johnson project in the July/August issue of the journal. They’ve posted “Fidelity,” one of the poems in Etta Duryea’s voice, online as well. You can read it here.
Jack Johnson & Etta Duryea
While I was crafting the poems in Etta’s voice, I listened to Arcade Fire’s Funeral . Something about the album made sense in the context of her dialogue. This song was on repeat when I was working on “Fidelity”:
Thanks to the Lannan Foundation and the Marfa Book Company, I had the pleasure of talking poems and music with Tim Johnson on 93.5 Marfa Public Radio. You can find our conversation from June 3, 2011 here.
I’m late to my own party on this one. This spring, I’m guest blogging for Ploughshares. There’ll be a new blog post up every Friday from January 21, 2011 to April 15, 2011. You can find the posts, past, present, and future here.
The wonderful folks at Wayne State University just posted some videos of the reading and conversation I had with Melba Boyd and M.L. Liebler on November 9, 2010. It was great listening to the 2 of them drop science. I keep saying it, but I’ll say it again: I love Detroit.
