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NEW ANTHOLOGY "FULL MOON ON K STREET" POEM ABOUT WASHINGTON DC BY POETS OF WASHINGTON DC

Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC
Kim Roberts, editor

Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes.  All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. Edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, this anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political.

Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet,Elizabeth Alexander.

Full Moon on K Street is available at Busboys & Poets, Politics and Prose in Washington DC and elsewhere!

Reviews:

The Washington Post called it "the first anthology of modern poetry to be wholly for, about and by current and former Washington residents—[that] teems with poets who've distilled the region's lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years."

The Current Newspaper's family of neighborhood papers (The Northwest Current, Georgetown Current, and Dupont Current) noted, "If you love D.C., even if you haven't read a poem since high school, you'll find that the book is full of intriguing perspectives on familiar places and events...And for newcomers--or those who want to send the book to folks back home--the introduction to each poem explains the local references."

The Hill Rag acclaimed, "What better place for a poetry journal than the nation's capital?"

Q&A with editor Kim Roberts by Plan B Press publisher stevenallenmay.

Plan B Press: What prompted you to start Beltway Poetry Quarterly online magazine?

Kim Roberts:  It was the idea of my friend Kathy Keler. Kathy is a painter and graphic designer, and she started a website called "washingtonart" to showcase other area visual artists. She thought it would be a great idea to pair this with some poems, and--after convincing me, since I initially took some convincing--Kathy taught me some basics of html, and designed the logo and overall look of the journal. I can't believe that it will be ten years old this coming January! The journal has taught me so much, and introduced me to so many poets.

Plan B Press: The anthology, Full Moon on K Street has evolved from a celebration of Beltway Magazine to a more sweeping look at the city’s poetry over the past 50 years. How did that happen?

Kim Roberts:  The anthology is an overlapping of my several obsessions: poetry, of course, but also literary history, and the built environment. love cities--their architecture, their grid, the way large groups of people use the space--and I love DC especially. I've looked at a lot of other anthologies, and nothing like this exists--a portrait of the city from 1950 to the present, and the places within the city that have meant something special to these authors.

Plan B Press: What types of obstacles have you had to deal with in preparing the anthology? What has been most frustrating and most rewarding in the effort?

Kim Roberts:  Compiling an anthology is much harder than I imagined! There were lots of authors I knew I wanted to include, and I looked back over their work, and was surprised to see that many never wrote poems set in DC. That includes such authors as wide ranging as Larry Neal, Archibald MacLeish, Owen Dodson, and Anthony Hecht. There were other authors, such as Dierdra Baldwin, Gloria Oden, and Haki Madhubuti who did not respond to my request for poems. It would have been lovely to have included all of them. But there were lots of wonderful coups as well. I spoke to the next-of-kin of many authors who have passed away who were enthusiastic about the project. Some, like Ed Cox's family, were thrilled to be reminded that their loved ones are still read and loved by the larger literary community. I am so grateful to them (as well as the families of Hilary Tham, Ann Darr, Betty Parry, and others) for the warm responses they gave. I was also gratified by the poets who--like Myra Sklarew--decided to write poems specifically for this anthology. And I was pleased to be able to track down so many authors who once lived in DC and have since moved away, such as Michael Lally, Gray Jacobik, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Sharan Strange. There are also poets included who I think should be better known to readers. I was able to get permission to reprint a poem by Essex Hemphill, the pioneering African-American gay rights activist whose poetry is a revelation, but whose work was long kept out of circulation by family members wanting to preserve their privacy. There are poems by Percy Johnston, a leader of the Howard Poets of the 1970s, and Eugene McCarthy, best remembered as a Senator and five-time Presidential candidate. Their poems, different as they are, show great humor and an deep engagement with the world around them. Jose Emilio Pacheco, little known here, is widely considered Mexico's greatest living poet. He taught at the University of Maryland for one semester a year for many years, and his poem about Sligo Creek is a terrific addition to the book. And Gaston Neal, who published so little during his lifetime but was a mentor to so many, is included with a tribute poem to Sterling Brown.

 

 

 

You can catch readings from Full Moon on K Street by poets who appear in this wonderful anthology here:

March 22
Poet's Corner radio show, featuring a reading from the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC with editor Kim Roberts and contributors Teri Ellen Cross, Hayes Davis, David Moore. Interviewed by Abdul Ali.
Monday, 7:00 pm
WPFW 89.3 FM

March 23
Poetry at Noon: Reading from the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC with editor Kim Roberts and contributors Jonetta Rose Barras, Merrill Leffler, Ramola D, and Venus Thrash.
Tuesday, 12:00 pm
Free. Library of Congress, Jefferson Building, Whittall Pavilion, First St. SE, DC. (202) 707-5394.

A NEW BEGINNING.....

COMING SOON......

 

Prufrock

Just a reminder:

The YorkArts Gallery
10 North Beaver Street
York, PA
(717) 848-3200
[email protected]

PRESENTS:

The Prufrock Project Mini Exhibit

from:

November 16 to November 28, 2009

with an opening reception on November 21, 2009 @ 6:00 pm to celebrate:

over forty artists and writers from your neighborhood across the globe contributing to York’s Prufrock Project—each creating art based on stanzas from T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This image-packed poem is transcribed in art to create a meditation on its various elements.

Visit http://www.emster.com/prufrock/ for more information.

And here's a video of Michael Gough reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Please proceed to http://www.emster.com/prufrock/ and read the following

"Maggie Foote and I were having some beers at Maggie’s in Westminster, MD. We were talking about a similar project we’d done years ago, where 13 writers made art in response to each of the stanzas of Wallace Steven’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. She said, “We should do it again. We should do it for Prufrock.”

I is the wonderful, fierce poet  Barbara DeCesare. It is the exhibit, the telos of Ms. DeCesare’s Prufrock Project, which, those lucky enough to visit:

The YorkArts Gallery
10 North Beaver Street
York
PA
(717) 848-3200
[email protected]

can behold as:

The Prufrock Project Mini Exhibit

from:

November 16 to November 28, 2009

with an opening reception on November 21, 2009 @ 6:00 pm to celebrate:

over forty artists and writers from your neighborhood across the globe contributing to York’s Prufrock Project—each creating art based on stanzas from T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This image-packed poem is transcribed in art to create a meditation on its various elements.

Visit http://www.emster.com/prufrock/ for more information.

AND featuring the art of two of Vrzhu Press/Beothuk Books’ beloved authors: Kim Roberts (The Kimnama) and Dan Vera (The Space Between Our Danger and Delight).

NEWS ON THE MARCH!!!

NEWS

For those of you who live in the immediate area of Washington, D.C. (motto: Visit Washington! It’s a *Capitol* offense!), Kay Ryan will be kicking off her second term as Poet Laureate with a reading at the Library of Congress on October 21, 2009.

I encourage you to attend this reading if you have a chance, whether you are a writer or not, and, if you are a writer, whether you find Ryan’s poems congenial or not.

As it happens, the online journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, has just put up an issue on the U. S. Poets Laureate, aka The Consultant in Poetry aka Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, that last being the current official title, courtesy of, no doubt, The Department of Redundancy Department.

The issue is guest-edited by Vrzhu Press’ own unindicted co-conspirator, Dan Vera. Nice Work, Dan. And a tip o' th' hat to editor-in-chief Kim Roberts, a noted Vrzhu Press author.

MORE NEWS

Upcoming (imminent!) Vrzhu author Carol Guess, who we are just crazy about, is a featured writer over at the Genpop Books, where you can read four of her wonderful prose poems, a form of which she is a master.

Also don’t forget Carol’s book, Timberbox Lawn, is available from Rose Metal Press, one of the hottest new presses around (along with, e.g., Big Game Books, and No Tell Books).

TRANSLATION

Here, from that aforementioned issue of BPQ, is nice tidbit on translation from Grace Cavalieri and Joseph Brodsky:

Cavalieri: How much are we missing? We see and hear English translations of your poems and some are called brilliant in any language.

Brodsky: You can’t say you are missing much. You can’t say you are missing the prosody of another language. You can’t miss the acoustics of another language. The original is rooted in the euphony of the Russian language. That of course you can’t have and you’re not missing it. You can’t miss something that you don’t know.

Cavalieri: We can get a good lyrical poem anyway that is matchless.

Brodsky: That’s what it is if it works in English. You have to be a judge of solely how it is in English.

Cavalieri: We shouldn’t feel we’re getting only ninety percent of something which is absolute.

Brodsky: You get a poem in English, good or bad. You can’t fantasize about what it’d be like in the original.

That seems like one of the more reasonable remarks about the fraught issue of translating poetry.

Also I suggest giving serious consideration to Brodsky's advice to write your Nobel Prize acceptance speech NOW, "just in case."

Here's an article by one of our roving VRB reporters.  From the South Jersey Desk a report on the state of ultramodern poetry:

A Vrzhu Research Bureau Report - Techno-Lyrical Backlash

(filed 30 Mar 08)

Mount Holly, New Jersey - Here in Burlington County the techno-lyrical poetry season has just come to a close. Orphic Fusion, that exuberant annual showcase that brings cutting-edge poets to the county seat of Mount Holly to muse on the state of contemporary poetonomy and show off their latest tricks, ended a month ago. Lingua Avantguardia,  its less well-known Medford Lakes counterpart, wrapped up on March 14. The program for each was pretty much what I've come to expect. In Mount Holly, Ian Delancy cooked up a fine sestina using irrational numbers as end words, and scribbled lines in white ink across white paper and called it "In Memory of My Ironic Winter." In Medford Lakes, Martin Robinson talked about something called "synergistic de-elaboration."

And so, I’m asking: Is everybody tired of this stuff by now, or what?

Nearly two years ago, Adrian Ferrino started a revolution with his journal Rien et/o Nada? that thoroughly transformed modern poetry here, not only propelling Burlington county poets to the pinnacle of southern New Jersey literary acclaim (displacing Gloucester county in the process), but spreading a manifesto of high-impact, scientifically informed Sur-Objectivism around the 7 counties of south Jersey. Villanelles "spherified" with hydrocolloids until they looked like the gelatinous eyes of giant squid, haiku frozen with liquid nitrogen until they form ingot-shaped "stanzas," Petrarchan  sonnets on shredded magnetic tape and spun into a beehive “hairdos,” and everything from binary pantoums to sprung rhythm acrostics exploded into free floating phonemes—it's all part of a poetry style that places a premium on material innovation. At its best, this version of "molecular poetonomy" stokes the emotions and shocks the senses. 

But, from the beginning, some critics have scorned a mode of writing that relies, in their opinion, too heavily on technology (as if typewriters, computers, and even pens, aren’t machines) and often chooses “foam” over substance. In a recent e-mail, Harold Stefanos, an expert on innovative poetry in the southeastern part of the Garden State, wrote, "I am getting a little weary of Burlington-driven techno-composition. Many of these 'experiments' would be better off if they didn't show up anywhere but at AWP conferences, preferably at about 2 AM. Really, they should have a stall at Pennsauken Mart, if it were still around." His words sum up recent critical attacks: It’s all getting your eye poked out until someone starts having fun. I'd like some real poems now, may I please?

So, is it over? It is true that Adrian and his fellow poets are no longer as avant-garde as they once were. In food, you know your haute cuisine is no longer haute when you see it on the Applebee’s menu. In poetry, there are different indignities, from indifference to (shudder!) acceptance.

The rest of the poetry universe has officially caught up to the Burlington revolutionaries: Ian’s journal has been replaced by a blog, and is no longer the source of the new new new thing. But poetry movements often survive in the valley of their PR long after the American Poetry Review has lost interest. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E craze passed years ago, but interest in the structures and codes of language, the application of process, and the recognition that language is political have become staples of our poetry praxis; new formalism is tragically  unhip, but I still find quatorzains and end rhymes in poetry journals. And though often used as a derogatory term, the confessional poets of the 50’s and 60’s altered the landscape of American poetry and broadened the horizon for poems to traffick in intimate and unflattering information, poems about illness, sexuality and depression.

All these  movements eventually show some signs of stagnation—clichéd tropes,  academic analysis, overexposure, and critics standing by to gleefully rejoice in the demise in whatever movement is in their sights.

But the poems themselves never really go away. The techniques are still there, in every de-stabilized persona that daubs a fragmented lyric, in every line made colorful by hard surrealism. We may laugh at the excesses of poetry manifestos, but we read them all the time.

The same is true of Burlingtonistas. It’s not the emblematic forms they use (or, as they say, “foams”) but their vigorous, often insouciant, search for the new. In an art where individual products take a hundred years or more to prove their staying power, every movement of the last 50 years is still very young indeed.

In the meantime, Ian is has been working on using nanosyllables to achieve more precise line measurement and, in collaboration with his father’s waste disposal business, Adrian is developing a poetry medium made from compressed inorganics. Adrian says: "Hey, there are guys who say, 'it’s over, let's put it behind us,' but that's just marketing BS. I can tell you from my own experience that there is more research going on, more energy, than ever before. At least on the weekends."

And there it is.  Poetry keeps changing even as it remains the same.  Some techniques will perhaps, mercifully, not withstand the test of time. And Ian has the third degree burns to prove it.  But others, whether it’s the ghazal or the new sentence, will seep into the poetry vernacular, enhancing the range of possibilities poets have at their disposal. It’s all part of the crazy candy-colored carousel that is Poetry.

Poem Infestation - a Vrzhu Reprint

We here in the research arm of Vrzhu Press are working [tirelessly] to improve the lot of poets, and consumers of poetry alike.

However.  Bethatasitmay. We also recognize that sometimes poetic efforts, effluvia and extravasations are not wanted or desired.

As such, one of the R&D efforts here in the warrens and catacombs of the VRB is to assist those for whom poetry is not an occasion, but a nuisance.  Here is a short summary of our initial research and a peek at one of our many products in continuous development.

Poem Infestation

Poems are among the most difficult household pests to control. Except for submission periods when they may migrate from place to place,  poems spend their entire life inside buildings. Usually they are found in libraries, bathrooms and bedrooms. They can be carried into homes in shopping bags, backpacks, furniture and pet foods.

Poems are one of the most disagreeable literary genres that may invade homes. While it is not true that an unkept home will cause a poem infestation, there is indeed a strong correlation between sanitation and poems once an infestation gets started.  The presence of poems often causes serious mental anguish for some homeowners. Poems often associate themselves with teenagers and are known to be involved in the spread of negative emotions which cause mild depression, self-absorption, herbal tea drinking, and more serious melodramatic behavior. Some people appear to be allergic to poems.

The exact origin of our domestic poems is disputed, but many are European, South American and Eastern in origin and now are widely distributed throughout the country. In most areas, homeowners are commonly bothered by five different categories of poems: confessional, experimental, accessible, surreal (which has a subcategory, deepimage), and nature poems, which are more at home outdoors but can also get into the house.

Species

The American poem may grow from one to several hundred pages. It can be identified by its normal markings: ragged, sloppy right margins and, frequently, a body segmented into “stanzas.”  There is not much reliable information about any one poem’s lifespan, which nonetheless seems to be highly variable: from a few minutes to many years or stretching cycles of years.

Oriental poems, or haiku, are uniform and small in appearance, no more than seventeen syllables long when full-grown and are easily recognized by their short lines, though mutations are possible. The haiku seems to be equally at home inside human habitation and outdoors, where they can be found near ponds or blossoms or other similar areas.

The European poem is larger, usually darker, but vary greatly in appearance and pronunciation. The European poem is quite active and can easily migrate throughout communities thus becoming a major pest, however, it seems to only truly thrive in the presence of American poems, a symbiotic relationship our poentomologists have termed “translation.”  Even so, a troublesome infestation can develop rapidly after the chance introduction of just a few individual poems. It is an unsettled question whether the South American poem, whose habits and behavior are almost identical to the European, is a subspecies, or is an entirely different species.

Another poem sometimes found invading the home is the Woodsy poem. This species lives outdoors and is not as fast nor as wary as its house-dwelling relatives. They may wander into buildings in wooded areas, or may be brought into the house under false pretenses. The males of this species (garysnyderus) are long-lived and have a rough appearance. The females (maryoliveria) are much more reclusive but probably more widespread.

Integrated Poem Management

It is easier (and less costly) to prevent poems from entering a structure than it is to get rid of them.  They can be discouraged from invading buildings by sealing cracks and crevices in foundations and outside walls. Careful inspection of all anthologies and omnibus selections is essential, as poems have been known to hide within large tracts of prose.

Carefully inspect all incoming books, magazines, and junk mail for the presence of poems or references to them.

Control

Unfortunately no method for controlling poems has proven universally successful. We here in the Vrzhu Research Bureau are working on a safe, convenient method of eliminating poem infestations when they occur.

Vrzhu claims no expertise in reviewing or criticism—we lack the necessary competence and nerve to accomplish anything in this area, and we are awed by a critic’s ability to discern, distinguish and apply hermeneutical apparatus in the destructing of creative works.

Bethathowsoever, once in a great while, a work (other than ones we have published, which are brilliant and unsurpassed) crosses our mahogany desktop here in the Research Bureau that we find so radical and original and groundbreaking that we are compelled to comment, if only to bring it to the attention of our vasty multitude of readers (104 hits in the last seven days alone!).

A work recently set before us can, I believe, accept the mantle of epic without so much as a blush, and meets our criteria for comment, being unique from several perspectives:

1. That it is a breakthrough work in a little known or appreciated genre.

2. That it combines visual artistry with post-lyrical writing such that both are so closely bound that neither could exist without the other—only together do they constitute meaning. This is so unprecedented a feat that comparisons with other, faux-similar, works—the collaborations of Susan Bee and Charles Berenstain, or the environments and compilations of Arakawa and Gins—are feeble at best.

3. That the work itself represents the next step beyond collaboration. The book was created by a collective—no individual or group of individuals takes credit as the author(s). It harks back in this sense to the medieval guilds whose productions were both anonymous and exquisite (note: There are some possible clues folded into the text itself that may identify members of the collective, at least visually. However, these are so integral to the work as to be opaque to any possible definite identification or biographo-interpretation).

If anything, the apparent methodology reminds us of nothing so much as some of the cinematic collectives of the 20th century: Chris Marker and Société pour la Lancement des Oeuvres (SLON), the films of Vertov and company, or the various technician/artists who produced Citizen Kane under an elaborately fictional persona they created known as Orson Mercutio Welles. However the work before us even more fundamentally erases the distinction between the individual and the group, the group and its productions. One could designate the whole enterprise (the book with its visual/written axes, and the “creators” of the book) as “Static Cinema,” to semi-coin a term.

[Editorial correction: It has been brought to our attention that we misspelled one of the individuals in this post. The corrected phrase should read “..the collaborations of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein.” Mr. Bernstein is in no way related to the avant garde experimentalists Stan and Jan Berenstain. Vrzhu regrets the error.]

Enough preamble. It would be impossible to do justice to the whole work, its gestalt, without many hours, nay, months, of deliberation, research and analysis. Instead here is a tentative commentary about some of the sections in this sui generis miesterstuck.

There are threaded and woven themes and leitmotivs throughout the work. These predominate one section and show up sporadically (though not, it seems, randomly) in other movements within the work. The book as a whole opens with a long, finely wrought and subtle section on themes of containment and enclosure. Other themes tentatively identified are closure, imperatives, the seal, and there are indirect references to articulation, the concept of “safeness.”

But the opening section established a rigorously controlled poetic, wherein small and continual variations accumulate. The written to visual ratio fluctuates through the work but here in the beginning, text most strongly asserts it hegemony. The written portion seems to based on an Olsonian “open field” of projected verse, but mutated into a matricial truth-function that constrains the page and the expressible materiality within the page’s “horizon.” This “grid” contains the text even as it releases it to the reader/viewer as participant, and becomes a subspecies of its genetic ur-lyric: intrajected verse. Could the matrices that enclose and free the text be here at the inception because of the etymology of matrix as “brood animal, womb (‘All that openeth the matrix is mine’ - Exodus xxxiv.19)?”











This transitions into a epithelium on the instrumentality of aporia, here signified under the rubric “that which seals.” Note the “impulse” sealer—which undoubtedly functions as both Lacanian superego (the psychical agency constructed around residual fantasies of the Oedipal father’s access to the sovereign jouissance of the mother's body denied to the child) and instinct-jailing civilization (where the subject {text} must bear up vis-à-vis the condition of being a castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on 'the inverted ladder of the signifier', within the phallic order of its society’s big Other) which, ironically, requires “less pressure to activate.”










After the monochromatic permutations of the long opening section (akin to perhaps an overture?) the next sections build to an exhuberant climax (“Je suis un petit mort.”) that is part Jenny Holzer, part Kafka, part heterotopic JoJo the dog-faced boy.















Another section which struck us was one that alludes to the unique human “being-at-hand” here shown as articulation, but, significantly, covert articulation concretized by the glovedness of our interpenentration with the thing-world.


















One final preliminary prolegomena: imbedded in and as part of the visual text are “people.” Could these function as both markers and as hints to the multidentities of the author(s)? Perhap only in a combinatorial construct where Art is also Artist, the self-created creator who becomes her own creature (created) collapsing that which knows (sapiens) into that which guards (canis).












Vzhu salutes the Uline collective for this tantalizing and depthless work of art.

Hope for a Cure Vocal-based Morphometry Reveals Excess Poetic Matter Concentration in Patients with Graphic Poetical Dysplasia

Many patients with graphic poetical dysplasia (GPD) continue to write poems after treatment. The usual explanation for the poor outcome is the presence of residual poetical fluids missed by the pre-suction imaging investigation and therefore not leeched during treatment. We apply a vocal-based morphometry (VBM) analysis to the metaphoric resonance imaging (MRI) scans from patients with GPD and aurally detected GPD to investigate whether (a) VBM is able to detect ego-matter concentration (EMC) abnormalities in patients with GPD, and (b) whether the extent of EMC abnormalities in these patients can be renormalized using aural and critical self-feedback procedures.

Abnormal areas detected by VBM can possibly correspond to mild malformations of poetical development. GPD is a developmental malformation of the right margin cortex that is now recognized as one of the leading causes of drug-resistant poetomania. Noninvasive methods show the presence of lyric cortical thickening, alterations in the pentametric and ABAB patterning, blurring between metaphor- and simile -matter transition, and elongation of the subcortical ego image tapering towards often interminable recitational ventricles.

Carefully designed protocols can detect subtle reality lesions that will not be identified by routine evaluation. Although the diagnosis of GPD has improved, the reasons that many patients do not become poetry-free after poetic fluid reduction are still largely unknown. One possible explanation it that reality lesions in these patients are just the "tip of the iceberg" of a more pervasive dysplastic egomorphing.

Vocal-based morphometry (VBM) is a technique that uses automatic reclassification of poetry “output” with an aurally normalized feedback to reify the dormant critical response function of the patients.

Vocal-based morphometry Although we received an overwhelming numbers of samples (“review copies”) for use in normative structuring, we decided to use our own template to overcome (a) differences in form and school, (b) inhomogeneities in open field scansion, and (c) differences in the demographics of our population (slamist, flarfetics, snarkitudinism, emo, beatic, fugue-state quietude, post-avantilepsy). Poetic images and the template were convolved with an isotropic gluckian kernel (IGK) of 8 mm and were used for optimizing the nonlineation normalization of raw padding-stripped images. Finally, the images were convolved with an IGK of 10 mm to minimize ginsbergal interindividual exapansibility. This smoothing renders poetic-matter concentration normally distributed, enabling us to apply standard attention-span parametric mapping techniques.

We also were concerned that the differences in GPD between patients could be an effect of the younger age of some patients, even though all patients fell within two degrees of the mean age of attainment (MFA, and BA). To address this issue, we randomly selected three normal writers (essayist, short storyist, journalist), and the images from each one of these were compared with the mean imagism of the patients by using the standard analysis of covariance with age as nuisance factor.

RESULTS

VBM was able to detect a distinct poetic overproduction in each patient. 91% of the patients showed excess of publication and lack of empathy for reading attendees. In 82% of the patients this matched the area of significant EMC excess. In 64% of the patients, EMC excess extended beyond the area of poetic production faculties into post-reading behavior and casual anti-empathic ego-centering.

Among the patients who showed areas of increased EMC, the cluster size of the EMC excess in the region corresponding to ability ranged from 40 to 1,046 units of professional recognition.

DiSCUSSION

Clearly VBM is a crucial and effective tool in detecting GPD. However, the feedback part of the system showed varying degrees of effectiveness. How much of this is due to the restructuring of the poetic matter content, and how much to the impermeability of the poetic ego cannot be determined without a further refinement of our present techniques.

Until then such egomorphic poetry excesses are liable to be pervasive in the poetry world. But with vigilant diagnosis and aggressive treatment this scourge may one day be no more of a threat than small pox or overacting.

A Classic Vrzhu Reprint

Finally, feel safe thanks to Vrzhu Reliable Poetry Protection!

NEWS ITEM

Poetry is naturally acidic, because carbon dioxide emitted by the poet combines with water molecules to form carbonic acid. Acidic poesis occurs when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere react during a poetry reading to form sulfuric acid (H2SO4) and nitric acid (HNO), which falls on the audience as invisible dust. Most poetry readings are known to have a pH of 5.0 or lower.

In past decades, to reduce poetry pollution in areas near universities, English departments built poetic sneeze guards and venting ducts to disperse the poetic particulate high up into the air, away from listeners. However, new EPA regulations have now made this method infeasible.

During the 1980s, the American Poetry Society conducted a major ten-year scientific study of acidic poetry and poetry precipitates. This study, the National Acidic Poetry Assessment Program or NAPAP, found that the effects of acidic poetry were greater than feared. The study found that acidic poetry had affected about 10 percent of Eastern poetry readers and audiences and that it had contributed to the decline in reading poetry by reducing tolerance to anastrophe, rhyme and synecdoche. The study also found that acidic poesis contributed to corrosion in prose writing in affected areas and that poetic particles had contributed to reduced readability and intelligibility in the Northeast and parts of the West. The panel found that the readers and listeners most severely affected were those who lacked a natural buffering capacity.

The particulate matter associated with acid poesis has been shown to have adverse health effects, especially among those who are susceptible to mental disorders, or are highly suggestible. There is also some concern that acidic poesis could contribute to leaching of common sense and humility from the literate populace.

HOW YOU CAN BE PROTECTED

With Poetry Ponchos from Vrzhu Industries!

Our ponchos are safe to use at all poetry readings, both indoors and out:

• readings by nationally known poets,
• open mics,
• local readings,
• “slams,”
• book festivals,
• AWP conferences,
• workshops,
• any event with the words "Geraldine R. Dodge" in it, and
• evenings of performance poetry.

The seams are welded ultrasonically -- no stitching is used in our ponchos – providing maximum protection from poetic seepage.  Elastic hems provide our patent pending “extra snug fit.” There are also reinforced side grommets to be used for added protection and support. Our ponchos naturally resist rot and mildew. A storage bag is included for safe keeping when not in use.

AND INTRODUCING . . .

New to the line and totally new to the market is a one of a kind Emergency Poetry Poncho from Vrzhu Industries and it is nothing short of revolutionary. Living up to it's name, the Vrzhu Emergency Poetry Poncho, the "Prose-Maker," is the ONLY WATERPROOF AND BREATHABLE poetry poncho on the market today. It is a three micro-layer poncho and is unequaled for 100% poetry protection. There are two layers of Polylyricpropylene with a layer of micro-porous film sandwiched between them. This allows for superior poetry protection with the ability for moisture to evaporate through the poncho. It is also highly effective against UV (ultra-verse) rays, prose poems, sound poetry, oulipo, banter, fawning, preening and logrolling. There are built-in, reinforced, scratch-proof tie down grommets that when in use with a cable lock will ensure your poncho will stay put, regardless. The Vrzhu Emergency Poetry Poncho comes with a convenient storage bag, and. . . AN UNBELIEVABLE FIVE YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY!

Try it and you'll say: Thank you Vrzhu Industries, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Vrzhu Research Bureau, part of the family of Vrzhu Comglomerates and Vrzhu Press, a name you can