Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I'm heading out to see if WHS is available in Sydney.
  

    
Answer: no, it is not yet available in Sydney.
  

    
You can order it directly from City Lights and they'll send it to you!

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100592520
  

    
I'm amazed that City Lights is still such a literary force.  I was
just at a rading there and learned that they are starting a new poetry
publication project along with their other several going concerns. 

Does anybody have a theory as to why so many other literary
institutions have folded and City Lights seems to be so vital?  
  

    
tourists
  

    
Maybe they've kept in touch with their customers through personal
interaction? And were doing that ages earlier than other bookstores? 
  

    
The combination of bookstore and publishing house along with a
legendary backlist of titles (I'd wager that the annual sales of HOWL
alone dwarf the combined sales of 99% of poetry publishers... and I say
this as the Publisher of BOA Editions) have kept CL vital. They've
also transitioned into nonfiction and political books which (as we all
know) have more robust sales than poetry. That said, I was very happy
to hear them reaffirm their commitment to their roots with the new City
Lights Spotlight poetry series. And of course indie publishing and
bookstores can only run with a staff dedicated to their mission - and I
can say firsthand they've got a great team in the CL publishing
office. Viva City Lights.     
  

    
Also a great location, they keep their costs down, and I think they
own their building.  And even CL's nonfiction titles don't reduce to
"information."  Which means that the publicity they get (and produce)
isn't a close substitute for reading the book. 

Take Peter's book.  As was noted earlier in the thread, Don Lattin's
review claims that Peter "writes like a poet and researches like a
scholar."  The first part, especially, means that the reading
experience is valuable.   
  

    
I really like that quote!
  

    
Favorite quote from a book review. Ever.  
  

    
Peter, looks like we're coming down the home stretch--though, as you
know, we can continue the conversation as pleasure dictates.  If
there's anything we didn't cover, please unlock your word hoard. And
I'd love to hear about any projects you're planning or working on now. 
  

    
Well, I'm around here - usually over at the Beat discussion group - so
anyone can hit me there whenever. I'll keep posting info related to
WHS here when appropriate too.

As far as future projects, I've got two books in the pipeline now...
one poetry and one new nonfiction book.

The poetry book is called The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees. It's
coming out in April, but just got a killer advanced review in
Publishers Weekly yesterday. I'll post the review below because it
gives a good taste of the book.

My next nonfiction book will be published by Da Capo Press in fall
2013. It's called JAMerica. In short, it's an oral history of the jam
band/festival/improvisational music scene. So for the next couple of
years, I'll be running around the country interviewing musicians, fans,
journalists, etc. and compiling that into an oral history narrative.
I'm also working with a documentary filmmaker named Denver Miller to
turn JAMerica into a documentary along the way. We already started with
the Well's own David Gans and he gave us a great "shove in the right
direction."

If anyone has thoughts/suggestions/contacts for the JAMerica book,
please let me know here or shoot me a note at phconners@hotmail.com
It's a very new project - in fact, I was just offered the book contract
while this interview was going on! - so any input is appreciated.

Here's the poetry review:

 The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees
Peter Conners, White Pine (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paper (96p) ISBN
978-1-935210-20-7

Fractured fairy tales, intellectual animals ("spider monkeys of tiny
rebellion"), Kafka-derived anti-parables, and bracingly fast run-on
sentences--somewhere between a mystical incantation and a nervous
breakdown--come thick and fast in Conners's powerful new book of prose
poems. In one tale of archetypes behaving badly, "Father delivers the
woman's enemy to her doorstep while Mother makes a list of betrayals
while Sister's mind is populated by the ghosts of wallflowers."
Elsewhere, Conners offers a sweet love story, a set of rants, a handful
of paragraphs that evoke archeology as well as political change and
"repeating patterns sunk into the concave surface of the rock of the
Mesoamerican Poets of the Zapotec of the Maya in Veracruz in my
backyard." Conners (most recently author of The White Hand Society, a
study of the friendship between Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg)
presents no view of the cosmos nor a consistent outlook in these robust
sentences--more like a set of lenses or takes on a dangerous,
passion-soaked world, a world that will surely stick in the mind. Prose
poems, very short fiction, hard-to-classify compact meditations are
enjoying some time in the sun now, and Conners's new pages approach the
best in the lot. (Apr.) 
  

    
Wow, those projects both sound very cool.  Thanks for the visit and
for the tips on what's to come!
  

    
Sure thing, Gail!

I also want to credit Steve Silberman with thinking up the title
JAMerica. We were talking about the project at his apartment (while he
was interviewing me for David Gans' show) and I told him I was
struggling with the right title. For me, a title helps frame a project
early in the process. I started free associating different elements of
the project and Steve spontaneously came out with, "Jamerica." 

Perfecto. Thanks again, Steve!