Chicago!

Here's info on my upcoming Chicago readings:

http://uptownliteratti.blogspot.com/2009/06/lit-talk-author-carol-guess.html

West Wind Review

I've got two poems in West Wind Review.

Here's a link to their webpage:

http://www.westwindreview.blogspot.com/

Here's a nifty nutshell description:

We seek writing (verse, prose, other) that does some or all of the following:
* goes beyond familiar models of lyric expressivism and "realist" narrative
* draws on the inherent rubberiness of language
* causes inanimate objects to hover eerily in midair
* replaces capitalism with a futuro-archaic barter system predicated on terrifying but flexible Deleuzean definitions of value

Review of Tinderbox Lawn in Galatea Resurrects

Here's the latest review of Tinderbox Lawn
in Galatea Resurrects #12, by theorist Kathryn Stevenson:

http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/2009/05/tinderbox-lawn-by-carol-guess.html

Four readings in Chicago June 25-28

I'm reading in Chicago during Pride weekend
at four different events:

Thursday June 25th The Fixx reading series 7pm

Friday June 26th Women & Children First
with Hanna Andrews 7:30pm
http://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp?s=storeevents&eventId=422274

Saturday June 27th Dancing Girl Press Studio Salon
with Kathleen Rooney and Brandi Homan 2pm
http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/studio.html

Sunday June 28th Orange Alert

For more details email me or visit Rose Metal Press:
http://www.rosemetalpress.com/

Hope to see you there!

Three On A Match

Here's a link to one of my prose poems,

just published in Hill Poems, an anthology edited
by Steve Barker, and published by Jacob Brooke Press.

I love the description of the book project:

Capitol Hill Poetry Collection about Capitol Hill's
degradation into a yuppie hell and the conversion
of apartments to condos and the effect on the community.

http://www.citizenrain.com/

Uneasy Heavens Await Those Fleeing

Uneasy Heavens Await Those Fleeing
Host Jennifer Borges Foster
Thursday April 2
7 pm

Canoe Social Club
409 7th Ave South
Seattle, WA

** Elizabeth and I will be participating in this
multimedia art event, alongside writers,
visual artists, and musicians, all inspired
by Jennifer Borges Foster's new manuscript.

Queer Theory courses under attack in Georgia

Queer Theory courses and professors are under attack
in Georgia. The attackers are inarticulate, as usual,
but also sloppy: their rhetoric deliberately conflates
teaching sexuality with enacting it. In courses on
American History, do we teach students how to
fire weapons, invade Native settlements, and wage
civil war? Nope. In classes on Religion, do we expect
students to pray to every God under discussion?
Nope. Why is it that the STUDY of sexuality immediately
translates, for Conservatives, into PRACTICE?
Is STUDY so very hard to understand?

What's at stake here is a lack of imagination.
As a fiction writer, as a poet, I'm invested in cultivating
a vivid and unique imagination. My imagination is
necessary for my art. As an intellectual, I also tap into
my imagination in order to grasp realities beyond
my experience -- both fictional and factual. I've never
traveled to Iraq, but learning about Iraq, and the culture
and conflicts there, is part of my education as a citizen.
Studying Iraq doesn't mean I've been there or experienced
the culture. I have to imagine a world beyond
the page, beyond the photograph. This is where having
a brain comes in handy. This is also why learning
is pleasurable -- more fun than not learning,
more fun than shutting everything out.

Fascinating to notice that there is no division,
among Conservative Outraged Citizens, between
theory and practice. This is a failure of their
own educations and educational institutions.
I'm not interested in a world without imagination.
I'm not interested in a university run by
the C.O.C..

Mostly this just makes me sad. It also
makes me think of Wallace Stevens' great poem,
"A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts." The pleasure
this poem gives me! "To be, in the grass,
in the peacefullest time, / Without that
monument of cat"

How lovely to slip inside the rabbit's being,
just for a moment; how lovely to imagine,
to escape. How awful the life of the C.O.C.,
stuck inside their very literal worlds,
without imagination, without the spiritual
transcendence that comes from art and passion.
How dry and dull their worlds must be,
without poetry, pleasure, or invention.
Days of pinning down, precisely, the alphabet
to its dusty page.


http://rawstory.com/news/2008/GOP_lawmakers_Fire_college_teachers_for_0218.html