Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Tight 4


Tight 4 is now available for purchase at the Northshire Bookstore.

Jeffery Beam
April Bernard
Edmund Berrigan
Jackie Clark
Peter Davis
Corrine Fitzpatrick
Matthew Henriksen
Susan Ingersoll
Jennifer L. Knox
Mark Lamoureux
Dora Malech
Tom Meyer
Mary Millsap
Paul Muldoon
Constance Onorato
Matt Reeck
Aaron Tieger
Eric Unger
Karen Weiser
Mac Wellman
Dustin Williamson
Terence Winch
Sara Wintz

Friday, October 17, 2008

Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Mad Song is Here!


Greetings Everyone,

I’m very excited to announce the publication of my first book of poetry, The Mad Song, a prose meditation, bluesy elegy, sensual lament, comic colloquy, poetic memoir, and cri de cour for liberty that seeks not necessarily to reveal the invisible republic but to remind you that it’s there.

Douglas Crase, former MacArthur Fellow, Witter Bynner Prize-winner, and author of The Revisionist, AMERIFIL.TXT, and Both: A Portrait in Two Parts, has written an illuminating foreword to this book-length poem that he says “lope[s] with the erotic generosity that proceeds from all the best unions of high and low culture.”

The Mad Song is published on the Espresso Book Machine developed by Jason Epstein by the Shires Press, the imprint of the Northshire Bookstore, a family-owned, independent bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont since 1976. The Espresso Book Machine at the Northshire Bookstore is one of only five in the world, including machines housed at the New Orleans Public Library and the Library at Alexandria.

The Mad Song is available exclusively from the Northshire Bookstore. There are a number of ways you can purchase your copy:

• Go online to www.northshire.com, search for The Mad Song by Michael Schiavo, and place your order; or you can simply click here. The Mad Song retails for $13 plus shipping, standard or media mail rate. The latter will take a little longer to get to you but you’ll save a couple of bucks. You can also download a free preview featuring Douglas Crase’s foreword and the first chapter of The Mad Song, originally published by Guernica in January 2008.

• Call the Northshire Bookstore toll free at 1-800-437-3700 and talk to a helpful and friendly Northshire Bookseller. The Northshire Bookstore has one of the most knowledgeable staffs of any bookstore in the world. It will only take a few minutes to place your order and The Mad Song will ship right away.

• Visit the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont. Southern Vermont offers some of the most stunning scenery in the United States, any time of the year. The Northshire Bookstore offers three floors of books and a helpful staff ready to answer your questions and offer suggestions for books to read on any topic under the sun.

I hope you enjoy the free preview and that you’ll join me in supporting not only independent artists and bookstores, but the spirit of independence that our country was founded upon.

Your servant,
Michael Schiavo

Friday, May 16, 2008

Tight 3

Tight 3 is now available for purchase at the Northshire Bookstore

Featuring work from

Nora Almeida
Aaron Belz
David Berman
Sommer Browning
Michael Carr
Shanna Compton
Buck Downs
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Gabriel Gudding
Matt Hart
Mike Hauser
Katy Henriksen
Mark Horosky
David Huddle
Lisa Jarnot
Robert Kelly
Evan Kennedy
John Koethe
Maurice Manning
Chris Martin
Joseph Massey
James Meetze
Andrew Mister
Ryan Murphy
Jess Mynes
Daniel Nester
Cate Peebles
Arlo Quint
Morgan Lucas Schuldt
Sandra Simonds
Ed Skoog
Kathleen Winter
Charles Wright

Get Your Mind Right

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Goose! Up! Poetry!

present

Goose Up!
Poetry!
at East Coast Aliens

Saturday, May 17th, 3-8pm
Doors 2:30 pm, $6

Ana Božičević
John Coletti
Kate Greenstreet
Sarah Gridley
Katy Henriksen
Shannon Jonas
Jennifer Kronovet
Mark Lamoureux
Timothy Liu
Chris Martin
Jess Mynes
Cate Peebles
Christopher Rizzo
Matthew Rohrer
Frank Sherlock
Joanna Sondheim
Shanxing Wang
Rebecca Wolff

& music from
The Hadacol

Hosted by Cannibal, Saltgrass, Harp & Altar, & Tight
Representing Tight are
John Coletti, Katy Henriksen, Chris Martin,
Jess Mynes, and Cate Peebles

East Coast Aliens
216 Franklin St
btwn. Green & Huron
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
G to Greenpoint Ave (exit at India St)
B61/B43/B42

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Jonathan Williams


Jonathan Williams, the founder of the Jargon Society, the small publishing house in the western mountains of North Carolina that for more than 50 years has introduced the works of unknown, little-known and soon-to-be-better-known writers, photographers and artists, died on March 16 in Highlands, N.C. He was 79 and lived and worked in Scaly Mountain, N.C.

The cause was pneumonia, said Thomas Meyer, Mr. Williams’s companion for more than 40 years.

Mr. Williams was himself a poet, essayist, photographer and graphic artist — talents he brought to the meticulously refined design of the approximately 100 books of avant-garde poetry and fiction, folk art and photography that Jargon has published since 1952.

“The face he presented to the world was of an irascible crank, a loose cannon, a gadfly,” Mr. Meyer said. “But as a publisher he was extraordinarily generous, always looking for the overlooked.”

Among the writers whose careers budded or bloomed through Mr. Williams’s attention were James Broughton, Basil Bunting, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Metcalf, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky. A book-length poem about the history of industrialization by the futurist Buckminster Fuller was published by Mr. Williams in 1962.

Hugh Kenner, a Canadian literary critic, once called Mr. Williams “the truffle hound of American poetry.”

In the early 1950s Mr. Williams turned down Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which became a Beat Generation classic. He had no regrets. ”If Jargon had published it,” he told The New York Times in 1976, “it would have sold 300 copies.”

Artists and photographers whose work has been highlighted in Jargon books include Harry Callahan, R. B. Kitaj, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Robert Rauschenberg. Mr. Rauschenberg, the acclaimed Pop artist, was barely known in 1952 when he painted swirling arrows to illustrate “The Dancer,” a poem by Joel Oppenheimer, published by Jargon.

Mr. Williams was an early champion of outsider art — works by those, mostly self-taught, who are outside the artistic establishment and away from art-world centers and might use materials like corrugated roofing, plywood or rug remnants.

“Although he lived in Manhattan and also San Francisco in the mid-50s, he felt there was this whole vibrant culture outside of cities,” Mr. Meyer said. Noted outsider artists shown in Jargon books include Thornton Dial and Howard Finster.

In his own writings and photographs, published by other small-press houses and in periodicals, Mr. Williams delved into his diversity of passions: long-distance hiking, Appalachian plant life, civil rights, vernacular variations, English parish churches, graveyards, Chinese porcelains, Japanese poetry, French haute cuisine, corn bread and barbecue.

His curmudgeonly affinity for the low-brow led, in 1986, to the publication by Jargon of Ernest Mickler’s “White Trash Cooking,” with recipes for delicacies like cooter pie, okra omelets and potato-chip sandwiches. New York publishers initially declined to buy the manuscript unless the author changed the title to something like “Poor Southern Cooking.” When Mr. Mickler refused, Mr. Williams gave him a $1,000 advance and ordered a modest 5,000-copy first printing. It was a best seller and was the only seriously profitable Jargon publication.

Jonathan Chamberlain Williams was born in Asheville, N.C., on March 8, 1929, the only child of Thomas and Georgette Chamberlain Williams. When he was a child, the family moved to Washington.

Mr. Williams dropped out of Princeton after his freshman year and began independently studying painting, etching, photography and book design. In 1951 he went to Black Mountain College, a hive of creativity outside Asheville, and came under the tutelage of the poet Charles Olson.

Mr. Olson urged students in his poetry class to go beyond the writing on the page. Mr. Williams took him at his word. He started what became Jargon on campus. In 1968, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, it became a nonprofit corporation.

At different times Mr. Williams offered different mottos for Jargon. In 1956 he told The Times it was, “Wanted, 500 readers.” Two decades later he said it was, “One poet’s way of doing something for other poets.”

Friday, March 7, 2008

Thursday, February 28, 2008

In April

combination of the hot tear | A noise beneath the noise | Together we unspool | curve of youth | October’s endless ribbon in a maiden’s hair I unravel | its noiselet | not your garden variety Platonic— | Then she is housed. | into a suit of worry, birdsong recircuited. | left in the lyric dust late in the night | WOW! This is new, surprising, strange, out-of-nowhere, and oddly sensual. | That’s what they call a nation. | as chief social pleasure | Brought me nearer to the tomb. | I can show myself to bed and make nice | this prick pushing a stroller | helen keller corduroy | So this—this is Pontiac LeMans | you will have a sponge lizard in your stomach | into the distant colonies | Like the radio dark. | ask to coronation par none | Pretty nice, but that was then, | I just put my name up on the board. | a punctuation to harbor time | one-eyed monster flame-ups | Her phlox already rotted. | o you are my cabana privily | millennial persuasion | may I sing it? | These moods came on in the early fall, | Dust rides in with rainy explanations. | in the sweep

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Tuesday, February 5, 2008


See, I do change it. But I can’t help it. It’s not that I’m a “genius”—but it’s just that I can’t help it. I play it one way so long, I just have to change my way. In order to give it to you. So you’ll like it.

Miles Davis

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Wednesday, January 9, 2008


“Gentlemen,” he said, “I don’t need your organization. I’ve shined your shoes; I’ve moved your mountains, and marked your cards. But Eden is burning: either get ready for elimination or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.”

Bob Dylan