Still shaking from jet lag, but once that stops we’ll get down to business. Dan has some great pictures, but he’s off on a trek to the Artic circle before he can post them. Jess

I asked her if she was famous, and she said yes. That was all it took for the ahadada press crew to go into operation! Soon as you could say “Jack Johnson!” Marie Ponsot, a wonderful poet I’d read years ago in H. Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, was sitting among the ahadadaites talking about the traditions of poetry and not so much about the scrimmage of the appetite known as po-biz. We love Marie Ponsot and we award her the Ahadada Award of Honor, Flying Eaglets Against a Back-ground of Pheasant Feather Throat-Ring Green! Thank you, Mari, for spending an hour with us. The American Muse thanks you for all the good moments you’ve given to her service, too!

Poetry Mule says: honi soit qui mal y pense .

Poetry Mule had to dish out history lessons to many hundreds of G.Q. and Prada folks who were still bits of star-dust when he was trampling the patch into patchouli. Yep (hard to believe that the universe existed before you did) but small press has been forever. My little slice of geological time encompasses the late 60’s and ends up at the present moment. We’ve published in all kinds of manners and ways but maintained the momentum. And yes–real poems can be found in stapled, xeroxed, or even spirit-mastered and hecto-graphed, pages in magazines named Spunk, Spite, Poet-Meat, and Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts, and I haven’t even gotten to the magazines that include the word “Review” in them yet!

Poetry Mule broadcasts his barabaric yawp above the roof tops of Chicago, city of the shoulder blades.

Lost ten pounds and was so jet-lagged that I got the shakes. We taught scores of G.Q. geniuses that they weren’t slumming when they stopped at our small press. In fact, we shocked them into a higher mode of understanding. From what I could fathom, though, the AWP was something of a nesting ground for goddesses and cuttlefish. I can live with that. I wished I had a video camera when two lock-step, graying goddesses from some writing program looked into our eyes and said “Noooooo!” I had to thank them for their No, recalling the catalogue of wonders of another time: the ladies of the Century Magazine, and even Harriet Monroe’s The New Poetry of 1927, co-edited by Alice Corbin Henderson. There was, for instance, Constance Lindsay Skinner, or Moireen Fox (Mrs. A Cheavasa), or Florence Kiper Frank, or Grace Fallow Norton (with a slew of publications from Houghton Mifflin! oh ho!), or Leonora Speyer (E.P. Dutton for her!) or Eunice Tietjens (Mrs. Cloyd Head)–Knopf thought she was pretty hot in 1919. I would suggest that these goddesses (and their accompanying gods) slow down on the way to the eternal prom night that seems to await them, and contemplate Century Magazine or pick up a copy of that Monroe Anthology. For every Marianne Moore there was a least four Leonora Speyers. Get a grip.