Category: General (Page 2 of 135)

There are several ways to purchase Something Wonderful.
from me at these events and/or signings
DM me with your address etc on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and Venmo me $15 at @SMALLJONES,
or from Redhawk Publications
or pick up a copy or order from your local bookstore including these North Carolina stores:

• Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill
• Purple Crow Books in Hillsborough
• Old Orchard Creek General Store in Lansing
• McIntyre’s Books in Pittsboro
• So & So Books in Raleigh
• The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines
• Bookmarks in Winston-Salem
• City Lights Books in Sylva

Last choice – it’s also on Amazon.

New! Thanks to Redhawk Publications, you can now order Something Wonderful in hardcover for only $20 from these sites:

• Bookshop.org (supporting local bookstores)
• Barnes and Noble (you can even pick up at the local B&N store)
• Amazon (get fast delivery but feel a little guilty until you start reading the book)

On Mastodon as @smalljones on @triangletoot.party

[…]
I ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence
I no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers
like the breathing of the cypress tree that night
like the human voice of the night sea on pebbles
like the memory of your voice saying happiness.
[…]

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
[…]

[…]
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
[…]

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
[…More at link]

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

At 7 pm EDT on September 1, 2020, I will be the featured poet reading with the Nexus Poets (largely in New Bern, NC). An open mic follows so follow me over on Zoom and bring a contribution of your own.

I will be reading these poems which have been released online in the past few months:

Ode to a Certain Feeling of Optimism from Red Fez
At Seventy from Red Fez
Beach at Corolla, NC from South Writ Large
My Roommate Jeoffry from Light Poetry Magazine
Cicadas from Grand Little Things
Slugs from Vox Poetica
Pigs Eyes from Unbroken
The Trouble with Macaques from Triggerfish Critical Review
Skinnydip in the Millpond from Speckled Trout Review
In Praise of Small Disturbances from 2River 25th Anniversary
Moving from House to House from Broadkill Review (nominated for Best of the Net)

Accepted for future publication:

Hudson Review.
Geode. 2022.

Triggerfish Critical Review.
smoke fire. July, 2022.

North Carolina Literary Review
At the Watermen’s Dock. Summer, 2022. Honorable Mention. James Applewhite Prize.

Indelible (Feminine Issue).
Betty’s Current Status. February 2022. (First seen in Broadkill Review)
A Place Less Foreign. February 2022.
The Queen’s First Door. February 2022.

8 Poems.
Verse in Which I Should Probably Be More Charitable Towards the Gift of a Book of Mediocre Verse. TBA. 2022.

2020 Ekphrastic Poetry Book from Craven Arts Council and Gallery.
After A Sudden Blow. Print only sometime in 2022.

Available for Reading Now:

Grand Little Things.
All new writing is about grief. February 1, 2022.

O.Henry Magazine.
Pinestraw Magazine.
Against Desirelessness. In O.Henry. January 2022.
Against Desirelessness. In PineStraw. January 2022.
(First publication in Snapdragon: a Journal of Arts and Healing, November 2019).

Silver Birch Press. How To Heal the Earth series
At the Big Sweep. January 16, 2022.

Wine Cellar Press.
Operating System. January 15, 2022.

Red Fez.
Guarding Watermelons. January 13, 2022.
At the Butchers’ Souk. January 13, 2022.

Sheila-Na-Gig.
Death Came For The Cardinal. Winter 2021.

As It Ought To Be Magazine
Magnificent Frigatebirds. November 19, 2021.

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
25th Anniversary Issue.
Of A Marriage. November, 2021.

Wine Cellar Press.
Triolet of Zoom Impatience October 15, 2021.

Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath
Joseph Bathanti & David Potorti, editors.
Press 53, publisher.
It Strikes a Contemporary. September 2021.

January Review
My Life as a Scorpion. August, 2021.
My Precious Death. August, 2021.

101 Words.
Tender Tentacle. August 7, 2021.

Wine Cellar Press.
Hot Now! An Ode to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. July, 2021.

O.Henry Magazine.
Pinestraw Magazine.
Walter Magazine.
On An Okra Flower. July, 2021.
—in O.Henry
—in PineStraw
—in Walter.
(First found in Red Fez).

Bare Back Magazine.
Encircling. July 2021. (NSFW)

The Lake
Spiders in the Bathtub. July 2021.

Prime Number Magazine, Issue 197.
Ireland as Seen From a Porch Swing in Hickory, NC. July 1, 2021

Cider Press Review.
Cardinal. Summer 2021.

Indelible (Food and Nurture Issue).
Bread. June 25, 2021.
To a Tuber. June 25, 2021.
Artichokes. June 25, 2021.

Adirondack Review
Traces of a Portrait of Che Guevara on a Wall in Oaxaca. Summer 2021.

Live Nude Poems.
Mellow Gorillas. May 24, 2021.

Grand Little Things
Homage to George Herbert, Invitation of a Damselfly in March, Same Jay Seen Twice. May 20, 2021.

Red Fez.
Red Clay Way. May, 2021.
How Firm a Foundation. May, 2021.

Speckled Trout Review.
Swifts. May, 2021.

Asses of Parnassus
Sndbrg April 20, 2021 and Frst April 28, 2021. (two short poems made shorter as haiku).

Silver Birch Press. Still Waiting Series.
Still Waters. April 20, 2021.

Anti Heroin Chic.
This Old Dog. April 2, 2021.

Spoonfeed.
The Executioner s Love Potion. March 28, 2021.

Ekphrastic Review.
After A Sudden Blow. March 11, 2021.

Silver Birch Press. How To Series.
How I Avoid Assassination and You Can Too. March 10, 2021.

101 Words.
I Do This and That. March 9, 2021.

The South Shore Review.
When The Shadow Took the Day Off. March 7, 2021.

O.Henry Magazine.
Pinestraw Magazine.
Pairing Mantids. March, 2021. (First appeared in Panoply)

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
The Disappointment of the Comet Kohoutek. March, 2021.

Literary Yard.
”Emancipation of the Mermaid Tattoo,” “Larger Concerns,” “An Aran Sweater,” “Radio, Bosnia,” and “Against Bird Poems.” February 27, 2021.

Grand Little Things
Two Triolets. “The Saint of the Trees” and “Erasure.” February 5, 2021.

Verse Virtual.
Wine, Age. February, 2021.

Red Fez.
The Impossibility of America. January 14, 2021.
Poem in Which I Forget Myself. January 14, 2021.

Panoply, A Literary Zine.
Pairing Mantids. January 2, 2021.

American Journal of Poetry.
I Too Dislike Them. January, 2021.

Broadkill Review.
Betty s Current Status. January 1, 2021.

As It Ought To Be Magazine
Something Wonderful. December 23, 2020.

The Rusty Truck
Visions of Andrew December 11, 2020.

Thoughts on the Power of Goodness, co-edited by Timothy F. Crowley and Jaki Shelton Green.
Rising with the Moon on Advent Eve. December, 2020.
Print only. Order here

Deuce Coupe Poetry
The Good Butcher and Lunar Exploration December 9, 2020.

Redheaded Stepchild.
Firing Pottery on the Night Before Winter Solstice. Fall 2020.

little death lit.
All the Way Up. Issue 5. Fall 2020.

The Phare.
Can Crows Kiss? November/December 2020.

Grand Little Things
Eastbourne in May. October 28, 2020.

Madness Muse Press
Who Would Not Celebrate the Changes. October 11, 2020.
In one hand, mine. October 11, 2020.

Prime 53 Poem Challenge
One Red Maple. October 1, 2020.

River Heron Review.
Return to Kurdistan. Special Issue. Poems, For Now. September 15, 2020.

Ekphrastic Review.
Unnamed Early 20th Century Burial in St Matthews Episcopal Church Cemetery, Hillsborough, NC (2020). September 8, 2020.

2River View.
25th Anniversary Issue.
In Praise of Small Disturbances. September 1, 2020.
In an Unripe Season September 1, 2020.

Frank Gallery
Essay on Ekphrastic Poetry. August 17, 2020.

Red Fez.
To a Certain Feeling of Optimism. August, 2020.
To Very Small Devices. August, 2020.

Ekphrastic Review.
Lewis Morley’s photograph of Christine Keeler sitting the wrong way round on a copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair (UK) 1963. July 22, 2020.

Grand Little Things
Cicadas. July 21, 2020
Prayer to a Deer in Summer. July 21, 2020

Unbroken Journal.
The Church of Misdirected Saints. July 2020.
Pig’s Eye. July 2020.

Redheaded Stepchild Magazine.
Pulled Up My Socks. Spring 2020.

Vox Poetica Magazine.
Slugs. Spring 2020.

South Writ Large.
Bee Fall. Spring 2020.
Beach at Corolla, NC. Spring 2020.

Third Wednesday Magazine.
The Happiness of Fear. Summer 2020.
An Honest Talk To The Shadow. summer 2020.

Triggerfish Critical Review.
Visiting Lhakdor. July 2020.
The Trouble With Macaques. July 2020.
The Hidden Buddhists of Baikal. July 2020.

Turtle Island Quarterly
Early Fall Full Moon. January 2020.

Broadkill Review
Seventy Three. March/April 2020.
Moving From House to House. March/April 2020

This week saw three of my poems published:

• Slugs in Vox Poetica
  

  They are so unlovely and unloved

• Beach at Corolla, NC and Bee Fall in South Writ Large
  

  Inside the beached whale was a library

  Can goodbyes last past parting
  or are they, like bees visits
  to clover, intense moments
  of working passion, nectar
  searching, the sweet flight begun
  soon after? Home to the hive.

Also I will be going to the Sewanee Writers Conference. Not this year but in 2021 as this year the conference has been COVIDed into Master Classes.
I have not been to such a conference since being at Warren Wilson in the very early 1990 and before that at Breadloaf in the very early 1980s.

Looking forward.

In June 1855, a ship, the Benjamin Franklin, coming from the West Indes was placed under quarantine in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The captain broke quarantine. 3000 people–1/3 of the population of Norfolk and Portsmouth, Va.–died of yellow fever.

The first doctor treating patients to die was Dr Richard Silvester (he thought he might have immunity from previous exposure) in August. In September, his wife Lydia, his son Richard also a Doctor, and a younger son, William, were struck by the fever and died. Before winter, a daughter, Margaret, also died of the fever.

The elder Dr Silvester was my great-great-great-grandfather. The story of how the family was nearly wiped out by the captain breaking quarantine has been in my family since.

Yellow Fever was localized, carried by mosquitoes (that was not understood at the time. Vapors and the like were blamed), but ravaging. Today’s pandemic is at global scale, but the swiftness of the spread, the quarantine, and costs of particular lives echoes the so-called Great Pestilence in Virginia.

(note to myself: add links to this later)

Yesterday, my friend Eric (the Silent K) asked folks on Facebook:

Hey, word-smiths. Is there a word that describes the sensation of doing something normal in abnormal times?

In response, I coined not one but two related words – Abnotopia the sensation of doing something normal in abnormal times and Abnophoria Feeling elation in an abnormally weird or scary time. They’re now in Urban Dictionary. Vote ’em up!

Incidentally some open tabs in my browser:

1. The Myth of Voice by Sean Igoe in The Lark
2. “All You Have To Do Is Say The Words” Some notes regarding Robert Hass’s “Summer Snow” by Jonathan Farmer in Believer Magazine’s Logger
3. Windows, Emily Leithouser’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fenêtres in LIterady Matters
4. Narasimbha – the 4th avatar of Vishnu. The half-man/half-lion avatar is a one time use god. He incarnated, he killed a very bad deamon, and that’s it.

After being heavily tied to verse, I’ve taken a vacation into prose poems. This despite Robert Pinsky’s warning in his appreciation of Robert Hass’ A Story About the Body:

“A standard form for young poets these days, as the sonnet might have been for another generation, is the prose poem. It seems that most first books must contain one or two prose poems, if only to demonstrate the poet’s ability to manage the form, or awareness of fashion.”

In part this is also driven by my reading through “A Cast Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly,” an anthology with commentary that includes Robert Hill Long and Charles Fort, which includes a wide variety of prose poems.

I did one prose poem a while back for Triggerfish Critical Review, but now have 3 or 4 more.

Anyone else working in this genre? Have favorite ones? Say Hass’ Paschal Lamb or Carolyn Forche’s The Colonel?

Update: Since posting this I’ve had three new prose poems accepted by Triggerfish Critical Review for their 24th issue due out online in July 2020.

A manuscript of my poems was sent to the moon’s surface April 11, 2019 as part of Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library delivered by SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.

Just my manuscript?

First, let me be a bit more modest. We, Arch Mission, created a library designed to be landed on the moon via SpaceIL. The library contains over 30 million pages of text and images etched into 40 micron thick nickel foils. My manuscript is only about 60 pages of all of that.

All of Project Gutenberg, all of the English language Wikipedia, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (in all of the recognized languages), the PanLex datasets (from the Long Now Foundation, a linguistic key to 5000 languages, with 1.5 billion translations between them), and some “private collections” (the entire works of Peter Drucker, the poetry of Kathleen Spivak, and more) make up a few of the other pages in the library. Some contents are yet to be revealed for various reasons but see The Lunar Library Overview for details on content and on the physical construction of the disks and etching process.

How am I involved with Arch Mission?

I’m on the Advisory Board for the Arch Mission Foundation helping the founder Nova Spivak identify free and open content to represent our human endeavors in the library. I also give advice as to categories of material to include. I was delighted that Nova asked me for a manuscript that might become lunar.

Where is the Lunar Library?

That’s a good question. The Beresheet lander landed really hard. That is to say it crashed on the lunar surface somewhere near or in the Sea of Serenity. The Library could have been ejected or sailed off at impact or… well, we’re not sure. Nova and other team member have created a document that speculates on the fate of the library.

So it’s on the moon. Even likely in one piece. But it’s small and waiting to be discovered.

And there are tardigrades!

At least we think so. Nova (I wasn’t part of this bit) had the library coated with protected resin in which there are, as far as I know, water bears aka tardigrades, embedded. Tardigardes are the roughest creatures on earth and can survive in a state of limbo for a long time under adverse conditions. While their inclusion concerned some people, the very idea that some form of earth life might be part of the library effort is novel.

Starting in September, I’ve been doing consulting with IntraHealth International‘s Informatics group. I’ve been impressed by the ways that this small group of dedicated people have developed Open Source software infrastructure for increasing the capacity of frontline health workers to do their jobs under tough circumstances. No circumstances — Palestine and Afghanistan perhaps excepted but for different reasons — are tougher than in Liberia during and in the continuing aftermath of the Ebola epidemic.

IntraHealth folks collaborated broadly and quickly to develop a new open source project mHero to create a bidirectional linkage between frontline health workers and ministries of health to help get out information about Ebola and to get information back to the ministry.

Largely because of IntraHealth’s strategy of developing increased capacity in both ministries and workers, and because the software and culture takes advantage of open source principles for remix and resuse, the ministry workers in Liberia found ways that mHero could be used in the diverse areas of mental health and in Information, Communications and Technology evaluation.

I just wrote about this work in detail for Open Source dot Com in an article Open source app takes on Ebola and mental health in Liberia. Check it out.

winksplay

Adrienne LaFrance writes in the Atlantic in an article called “Raiders of the Lost Web” about vanishing websites and the recovery of one particularly important investigative reporting piece, “The Crossing.” Along the way, LaFrance discusses the state of web archiving through brief interviews with Jason Scott and Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive as well as Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation. The problems of preserving everything are still insurmountable. The problems of just preserving and serving valuable websites, those curated say or deemed to be of ongoing importance, is possible but not yet done well.

I’m glad to see the continued attention to this problem. With the help of support from IBM research grant entitled “Keeping the Historic Web Alive and Accessible: preserving and serving,” I’m involved in using virtualization to keep older versions of older software open and accessible.

In fact, I’ve kept open and accessible a version of Tim Berners-Lee’s earliest public webpage from 1991. You can read about the context of the page in an Atlantic article from 2013.

Despite the great efforts of Internet Archive and others, archivists attempts at preserving websites have largely been a collection of web page collected periodically by such successful software as Archive.org’s Heritrix. While page collectors provide a good service especially for sites that do not allow access to the database that drive them, they fail on several fronts.

First, a complex site can never be completely captured by a screen capture program or even a video. The number of potential pages and interactions cannot be duplicated in such a manner.

Second, user interactions with a complex site cannot be duplicated by a captured set of static pages. Understanding interactions is important to the use of archival material.

Third, the context of use and interactions is lost when the user experience is changed from one of interactivity and customization to one of simply retrieving selected static pages.

Even worse are archival activities that attempt to preserve by atomizing the objects from the pages removing images, audio, texts, etc and placing them in new decontextualized object databases completely unrelated to their original context.

We propose, using ibiblio as an example, to attack this preservation problem by using machine virtualization and virtual machine management tools. One suite of tools that particularly interest us are NCSU’s Virtual Computing Lab known as VCL. VCL is in use at over 200 institutions and has a strong support structure. Open source and licensed under the Apache project licenses, VCL is mostly used to provide temporary virtual machine for training computer scientists. We and our partners at NC State see a new use for VCL as a way to manage and present older servers Running older software in a secure yet living and interactive way.

I hope that we and those others of us working on digital preservation and in virtualization can provide a framework that benefits the creators, the archivist, and publics present and future.

Look for some initial results to be posted here soon.

On Thursday April 22, I’ll be leading a MicroLab session on Digital Development Principles with Merrick Schaefer, the Lead of the Mobile Data team at USAID, and INTRAHealth’s own Dykki Settle as part of the SwitchPoint conference in my favorite NC community, Saxapahaw.

Do concepts like designing with the user, understanding ecosystems, and using all things open (source, standards, data, innovation) around the world excite you? They excite the international development community too! Join us for a discussion about the Digital Development Principles (www.ict4dprinciples.org) – the product of a global groundswell to capture lessons learned and guide future donor investments in information and communication technology for development (ICT4D). Together we will explore how the Principles help create new opportunities and synergies, driving us beyond simple technology solutions to true transformative change.

A photo posted by switchpoint (@switchpoint) on Apr 11, 2015 at 5:29am PDT

The latest Imagining the Internet report is out from The PewResearch Internet Project and Elon University. This one focuses on the future of Privacy and Security.

In it, I say:

During the previous century of urbanization, we constantly complained of alienation and isolation. No one knew anyone quite as well as we did when we were in small towns. Now, like it or not, we are having to relearn the social behavior of small towns: how to cooperate, tolerate, or just ignore differences. Frankly, we were not so great at all of that when we were in small towns. Now, we get another chance to try to live like a Family of Mankind.

But read the report for more and varied insights.