From the cross-promotional department! Show your Secret Kitty pride—spread the Ahadada love! In the grand tradition of those other marketing geniuses, Catherine Daly presents her latest line of Secret Kitty wear to coincide with the release of her book, Secret Kitty.

Secret Kitty wearables! Check ‘em out and get ‘em while they’re hot!

Have you downloaded Secret Kitty by Catherine Daly yet? Check it out!

Books I’m designing:

Jerome Rothenberg’s China Notes and the Treasure of Dunhuang.
(Ecopoetics. Beautiful cover inspired by the caves at Dunhuang via Jerome Rothenberg. Selections from which first appeared as a tel/let book by John Martone). Check out some prior works in Ecopoetics. Will post some working files of the cover shortly.

Yoko Danno’s translation of The Kojiki.
(A fresh retelling of the Kojiki from an amazing Japanese writer. Some amazing original illustrations).
Will post some working files later this week. Check out an excerpt from Kansai Time Out, April 2004:

The most daunting project Danno has attempted is a translation, or “retelling,� of the Kojiki, a chronicle which details the creation of heaven and earth, and the Japan archipelago, and traces the imperial line back to Ninigi no Mikoto, grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami and great-grandfather to the first emperor, Jimmu. Though the book is thought to have been based on a series of oral narratives first committed to paper in 712, the oldest surviving copy of the text only dates back to 1371.

Danno says, “The most difficult thing about making the Kojiki ‘readable’ is the translation of the names of the deities. For example, Amaterasu is rendered as ‘Heavenly-Shining-Great-August-Deity’ in Basil Hall Chamberlain’s translation [first presented orally in 1882] and ‘Ama-terasu-opo-mi-kami’ in Donald Philippi’s [published in 1968].� Her version of the text has continued to evolve over the years, after starting out as a one-act play. The complete translation, though, has yet to be published.

Also via a link on the Small Press Exchange comes Edward Picot’s “From zine to screen“. It’s a discussion of the digital revolution’s impact on the UK’s small literary magazines in the UK, including Aesthetica, Birmingham Words, Incwriters and Route. It’s from his very worthwhile project, The Hyperliterature Exchange:

“What makes the digital revolution different from earlier technological advances is that it offers not just a handful of new possibilities - like the new font-faces and graphics which came in with electric typewriters and photocopying - but a bewildering array of them…”

And last, but not least, via Lou Rowan of Golden Handcuffs:

To celebrate Golden Handcuffs‘ 7th issue, there will be readings June 22, 2006 at Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg, and June 29, 2006;at Cafe Dodo, at Peck Slip and South Street in New York City (this one a party too, with band and drinks, food).

For more information, contact info, and directions to the readings ar Spoonbill, click here.

For more information, contact info, and directions to the readings at Cafe Dodo, click here.

Stay tuned for more of the great projects we’re working on! Check out our freshest project, Catherine Daly’s Secret Kitty. Download it here.

Peace y’all!

Just arrived and hot off Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s xPress(ed), Eileen Tabios’ The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol.1, filled with the wide range of forms that we’ve come to expect from this dazzling writer. Still thumbing through, but I’m already finding gems. For more info on how to obtain this beautifully designed, 176 page perfect bound volume, contact xPressed at info[at]xpressed.org.

via Dan: Hey Jess and Ahadadians—Eileen’s started a blog up to promote The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol.1, you can find it here. What’s more, all 2006 sales of this book will be donated to help ease the suffering in Darfur. Details in May 9 post here.

If you haven’t check out Ahadada’s offering of classic Tabios, click here. Greetz—Dan

Dedicated to Marton Koppany from his friend, Jesse Glass

A man named Marton was walking down the street
A man named Marton was walking down the street,
Down the street walked Marton.

He was not bitter about the road he walked
He was not bitter about the road he walked,
Neither was he bitter in the talk he talked.

He blessed the earth and he blessed the sky
He blessed the earth and he blessed the sky
And as he blessed he had a twinkle in his eye

For he knew the road that he walked upon
Was the self-same road that he talked upon,
The road that he walked was the self-same one.

So here comes Marton and there he goes
Here comes Marton and there he goes,
Where he will stop only Marton knows.

Hello Ahadadians!

As part of my pledge to clean up my to-do list, I’m happy to announce an addition to the Swedenborg Project, a beautiful collage from Anne-Helene Davin.

What’s the The Swedenborg Project you ask?

The Swedenborg Project is an ongoing Mail Art call for artists to respond to Swedenborg’s 1714 plans for a crude monoplane. Contributions from: Mark K. Cain, Clemente Padin, John M. Bennett, Gianni Simone, Jesse Glass, Pete Spence, Ella Joosten, Roberto Scala, Rose Garden, Shmuel, and Bernd Reichert. And more!

Check out Anne-Helene’s work in detail in our new and improved gallery. Click here.

Also, be sure to check out Anne-Helene Davin in the “Am Fluss/ By the River” project. Click here.

In the coming days we’ll be adding further contributions from some great artists! Stay tuned.

Syphilis had many different names . . . Because of the outbreak in the French army, it was first called morbus gallicus, or the French disease. In that time it is noteworthy that the Italians also called it the “Spanish disease”, the French called it the la maladie anglaise - the English disease and “Italian” or “Neapolitan disease”, the Russians called it the “Polish disease”, and the Arabs called it the “Disease of the Christians”. (source: Wikipedia).

Well, according to The Chambers Dictionary, the name “syphilis” was originally the title of a poem written in Latin by Girolamo Fracastoro in 1530 whose hero, Syphilus, had the disease. Fracastoro was an Italian physician, poet, astronomer, and geologist—a contemporary of Galileo—who proposed a scientific germ theory of disease more than 300 years before its empirical formulation by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Indeed, he put forward the idea that diseases are like seeds that can be transferred from one person to another.

He wrote a poem entitled ‘Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus’ and devised a myth, giving the name syphilis to a fictional shepherd. The poem describes how Syphilus (‘pig lover’), a pastoral shepherd is stricken with syphilis, albeit somewhat harshly given the circumstances, for having ‘offended’ Apollo:

A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame)
Possest these Downs, and Syphilus his Name;
Some destin’d Head t’attone the Crimes of all,
On Syphilus the dreadful Lot did fall.
Through what adventures this unknown Disease
So lately did astonisht Europe seize,
Through Asian coasts and Libyan Cities ran,
And from what Seeds the Malady began,
Our Song shall tell: to Naples first it came
From France and justly took from France his
Name…

On sixteenth-century representations of syphilis in poetry, see Margaret Healy’s “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

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Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav would be pleased by my friend Marton Koppany’s latest adventure into the visually enigmatic, now up and available at the latest eratio postmodern poetry.

I’m in the process of cleaning up *everything* today—from half-finished projects to various tasks too long the victim of a very unwieldy earnings season. Man, was it busy.

Yes, even my overflowing inbox of messages, all awaiting some kind of action by me, is being addressed(even if I’m late getting back to everyone, no email falls victim to the delete button!).

As part of the cleanup, I am getting together a bunch of unfinished blog posts (reviews, etc), but the one I did want to set

Lately I’ve been thinking about blogging and blogging in the poetry world. Should the blog should be a very strategic activity which is designed to draw a specific audience and build the reputation of the press and its authors.

Or should it be about your passions and naturally stray from the specific field in which you practice? Eileen Tabios’ blog is probably the best exemplar of the latter. She’s got a great blog and a network of friends and colleagues that has grown up around it—as well as the authors she has found as a result.

What makes the most sense to me is the idea that blogs enable connections. Regardless of whether a blog is connected to a press or not, people recount the connections they’ve made with people they would not otherwise have met. Blogs help establish colleagues, expertise, and reputation: they help us connect to people. I kept thinking back to the model of community-as-neighborhood, where people interact out on the street and have a regular home from which they base their operations: the virtual front porch. This satisfies a deep need for many people.

So, now that spring has sprung, it’s time to refocus our energies, reconnect, and renew the energy that drives Ahadada forward.

Lots more from both Jesse and I in the near future!

Under the category of learning new things everyday: another bit of informantion from today’s (Sunday’s) Daily Yomiuri concerning patuas, or West Bengali painter-muralists. These people sing rhyming couplets as they exhibit paintings done by their families of current events and traditional stories, using paper or cloth and special vegetable dyes. The poets are illiterate in the strict sense of the word, but create oral literature just the same. This reminds me of the Japanese kamishibai–a form of recitation/exhibition usually reserved for teaching children about washing their hands, brushing their teeth and keeping away from strangers these days, but also used for the transmission old stories. In addition, experts speculate that the more cartoon-like Monte Alban, Pre-Columbian books were set up as backgrounds before which shamans sang and danced the stories told in the text.

Bahar Chitrakar, a 52 year old patua includes the story of 911 in his stock of performance materials.