William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago.  His poetry has been published in small magazines in several countries and is also available in, among other places, the e-zines Aught, poethia, canwehaveourballback?, Milk Magazine, and Shampoo.  His chapbook Lingo was published by subontic press; his chapbook Temporal Nomads was published by xPress(ed), and his e-book, Ladders in July, is forthcoming with BlazeVox. In addition, he is the editor of moria, an e-zine for experimental poetry and poetic theory.

Petra Backonja's work has appeared in Big Bridge, Moria, eratio, and the Vispo Exhibit at at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami.

John M. Bennett's books, publications, and other work can be found at his website.

Daniel Borzutzky teaches in the English Department at Wright College in Chicago. His book, Arbitrary Tales, was published by Triple Press in 2005. His poems can be found online at BlazeVox, La Petite Zine, Milk Magazine, MiPoesias, Octopus Magazine, Shampoo, Tin Lustre Mobile, and in print in recent issues of Chicago Review, Antennae, Fence, American Letters and Commentary, Spoon River, LIT, Pom², and Denver Quarterly. His translations of Chilean poet Jaime Luis Huenun appear in Circumference; they will be also be used as part of the Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion program and will be hung on the buses in Los Angeles.

Julia Cohen just completed a one year Ford Fellowship in Wesleyan University's Writing Program and currently lives in Brooklyn. She is an editorial assistant at Palgrave, a fiction reader for Small Spiral Notebook, and also works for Nightboat Books. Her recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hanging Loose, GutCult, Moist Towelette, How2, The Tiny, and Pindeldyboz. Feel free to email her at jacohen at wesleyan dot edu.

Steve Dalachinsky and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen: Notes for ”Sad Cakes”

Kervinen: ”I send Steve computer-generated texts, 'templates', which are based on stochastic procedures, and use my own poems as sources. They have been done with one goal in mind: to try maximize a 'desire' to fill the holes in texts, any holes Steve may find there ('physical' holes, i.e., missing letters, or 'mental' holes, i.e., missing words in 'narrative'/linear structure).”

Dalachinsky: "'Quasi-linear’ is simply the use of fragmentation within complete thought, i.e., linear thinking or poesie, which of course is learned behavior, since we weren't born as linear thinkers/creatures--more like drunks walking the breathline. So if you examine what I've added to Jukka's erasures, you'll notice some long line linearities distorted to form quasi-linearities. An example of this distortion would be ”to be or not to not be not,” let's say, or even dispelling with all the ’the's’ and ’a's,’ etc., in one's work. Key words here: exist & exit. When John M. Bennett & I, or Jim Leftwich & I, do these back & forth e-mail poems it's pretty much always about adding (addition), whereas when Jukka & I do them it's almost always about subtract/add/subtract."

John Mercuri Dooley's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Mprsnd, BlazeVOX, Shampoo, untitled: a magazine of prose poetry, Journal of Modern Writing, Spectaculum, Gestalten, Coconino and elsewhere, and has been distributed as mail art by Marymark Press. Sound work and visual poetry has been presented at Brickbottom Gallery and visual poetry at Oni Gallery in Boston. He is in the process of co-edited a tribute to Jackson Mac Low in the second issue of Chax Press' journal, Eoagh. Contributors will include Charles Bernstein, Anne Tardos and Steve McCaffery. He is also the co-curator of Demolicious, a monthly poetry/multimedia series in Cambridge. Poets who have or will read for Demolicious include Jackson Mac Low, Anne Tardos, Kathleen Fraser, Anselm Berrigan and Jena Osman.

Notes:

"The [LDV] poems were composed using words written at an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci sketches at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2003. Many of the words were taken from curatorial notes.

I wrote very quickly, crossing out words I decided almost immediately that I did not want to use, and putting parentheses around words I decided I might use. After walking through the exhibition, I read through my notebook crossing out and adding parentheses. These marks are reflected in the final piece, resulting in a particular manner of presenting a confrontation with/in language -- allowing for an increased awareness of letters, individual words, words relationships to each other and personal meanings derived from non-sense; and a questioning on the part of the reader of the structure of language and making of meaning. These are ongoing interests.

I thought this would be one long poem, but considered as such it was a unsatisfactory muddle. So I broke up the text using a method of division I don't remember. I chose a line measure of 4 inches, but these results also were not satisfying so I changed the measure to 5 inches. Spaces in midline occurred because at 4 inches, words that ran over from the first line had been tabbed on the second line. When I increased the line measure I left these tabs, resulting in the spaces.

(I often determine line breaks by choosing a line measure in inches rather than deciding where each line should end. One reason I do this is because I am interested in composing works in ways that involves something outside the self, and I am interested in the way words, when combined with each other in unplanned ways make their own meanings. Also, I simply enjoy playing with language -- exploring the possibilities for creative work that present themselves when, for example, formal rules are applied to a body of words, then working with the results to compose something that calls attention to language itself and to our experience with/in it.)"

Estela Eaton has been published in Pacific Review, Chicago Literary Review, GutCult and the Sunshine/Noir Anthology of San Diegan lit (City Works Press). She's written four libretti, three of which have been performed in New York, Boston and Chicago. She has her MFA from San Diego State University and received the Elsie F. Filipi Memorial Prize in Poetry from the University of Chicago. She lives in Jersey City with her brother and two cats.

Steve Finbow lives in London. His fiction, essays, short plays, and poetry appear, or are forthcoming, in 3am Magazine, The Beat, Big Bridge, Dicey Brown, The Edward Society, Eyeshot, The Guardian, InkPot, Locus Novus, McSweeney’s, Pindeldyboz, Tattoo Highway, Thieves Jargon, Tin Lustre, Über, Word Riot, Xtant, Yankee Pot Roast, and Zacatecas. He writes the bi-weekly cultural column Pond Scum for Me Three and is an Associate Fiction Editor of the Absinthe Literary Review. He is also a writer with Quarantine Theatre Company, and is supposedly working on a novel.

Sandy Florian's other “Cantos” appear, or are forthcoming, in Gargoyle, 42 Opus, Copper Nickel, Upstairs at Duroc, Segue, Versal, and Encyclopedia. She lives in Denver where she is pursuing a PhD.

Adam Golaski's poetry has appeared in a number of journals including LVNG, American Letters & Commentary and eye-rhyme. He is the horror fiction editor of New Genre.

Anne Gorrick's work has been published in many journals including: American Letters and Commentary, Dislocate, the Seneca Review, Good Foot, GutCult, Fence, Fish Drum, For Immediate Release, Sulfur, Situation, and Hunger Magazine. In 2002 she completed a collaborative artists' book, "Swans, the Ice," She Said, through the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. This edition of 90 books was funded by grants from WSW and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Images of this book can be seen at the websites for the Women's Studio Workshop and R&F Handmade Paints.

Notes:

“My work inhabits a space embodying both place and machine, and is informed by living near New York's Hudson River my whole life. I also am captivated by all kinds of mechanical gardens -- trains and their tracks, cars, tools, senseless metals. I am currently working on a series of poems that are experiments with translation engines, creating sense into nonsense back into sense again. I am hostage to the accident, the fragment, the unexpected. The experience of putting language through a mechanical process makes words more into things and then somehow more malleable, more surprising.”

Nicholas Grider is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in Shampoo, canwehaveourballback?, and elsewhere.

Alan Halsey: “Penmon with its priory and St. Seiriol's cell is situated on the eastern tip of the isle of Anglesey. I probably have no justification for associating it with a line from the Welsh Triads: 'Merddin, the bard of Emrys, and his nine attendant bards ... went to sea in a house of glass, and the place where they went is unknown.' The Triptych is derived out of photos of the walls of St. Seiriol's cell, a palimpsest of several centuries 'graffiti.' His most recent book is Marginalien, a collection of poems, prose and graphics, 1988-2004, including a CD-Rom of the text-graphic Memory Screen, published by Five Seasons Press."

Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr. is a graduate research assistant in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he also edits Natural Bridge. The poems here are from his manuscript-in-progress, The Soul I Imagined , his first book-length collection. Other poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Margie and elsewhere.

Dustin Hellberg lives in california for at least the next week until the tax man tries to catch him and he skedaddles unto the next adventure.

Tom Hibbard has written many reviews of contemporary writers and artists, some of which currently can be viewed online at Big Bridge, Sidereality, Poetic Inhalation, Milk, Jacket and elsewhere. A selection of his reviews was recently featured at Crag Hill's blog, Scorecard. He has also done some translating mostly from French Surrealism. Along with the current collection of poetry, Nonexistence, chapters from another recent collection, Gessom, can be tracked down online. Some earlier poetry collections are Delancey Street, Human Powers, Nocturnes, Songs of Divine Love, Enchanted Streets and Assembly.

Erika Howsare is an MFA student in poetry at Brown University. Her poetry and nonfiction has been published, or is forthcoming, in Chain, FIELD, the New Orleans Review, Fourteen Hills, horse less review, Encyclopedia and the Indiana Review. horse less press published her chapbook, Elect June Grooms , in 2004, and she subsequently became an editor at the press. A grant from Brown enabled her to follow the Lewis and Clark route in summer 2004, which resulted in a poetic travelogue, Bicentury (New Rows and Locks). Currently she's working on a piece based on walking across Rhode Island.

David Laskowski is currently a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he lives with his wife, two dogs, and two cats.

Jon Leon's poems have recently appeared in canwehaveourballback?, Shampoo, and Aught, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Wherever We Put Our Hats, a fresh and innovative journal from Atlanta, GA.

Notes:

“[Diphasic Rumors] began with an ambitious expedition a la Jacques Cousteau. Has ended with rogue bandits torching and identity disintegration. In Diphasic Rumors the People have deliberately been deleted. Of the 100 poems in Diphasic Rumors each has 10 lines, numbering begins with 10, ends with 110. These are L'après Voyage. Perhaps the lines will get shorter or the readability diminish until there is no discerning the face, the individual.”

Brian Lucas lives in Bangkok, Thailand. His work has been published in 26, Birddog, Beard of Bees, Sulfur, the Germ, and Ur-Vox. His book Light House, as well as a series of prints and book illustrations, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil.

J. Michael Martinez is an MFA candidate at George Mason University. He is currently in his third year of graduate school and is art editor and a poetry reader for Phoebe: a journal of literature and art.

Paul McCormick's recent work appears in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Verse, Fence, Conduit, Barrow Street, Diagram and others. He lives south of the main estate.

Process statement: "Process is largely the chipping away of unresolved conflicts in the unconscious. That being said, I dig clams."

Poetics statement: "While the unconscious may not know how to speak, it knows how to chime."

Ross Priddle lives in Medicine Hat, Alberta and is the editor of Imp press. Samples of his work can be seen at the Five Million Copies Project and the Mail Art Postcard Exhibition.

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino lives in New York City and is the editor of eratio.

Zachary Schomburg is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He has poems most recently in Fence, Canary, Spork, Parakeet, Cutbank, and No Tell Motel's Bedside Guide Anthology. He edits Octopus.

Brian Seabolt lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His book Otto was a finalist in the 2004 Starcherone Fiction Prize. An excerpt from Otto is available in Word For/Word #2.

Brandon Shimoda was born in Tarzana, California, and has since lived in Belgium and Bar Harbor. His poems have appeared or will appear soon in POOL, TYPO, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere, as well as in The Pines, an ongoing collaborative series with artist/writer Phil Cordelli. A contributing editor of CutBank and Octopus Magazine, he currently lives on the north side of Missoula, Montana.

Carol Stetser is a visual artist sweltering in the high desert of Arizona.

Notes:

“Lingua Musica is music for the eye. It is inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts, 15th and 16th century shaped musical scores, decorative graphic notations of the 19th century, the surrealism of Remedios Varo, and the musical calligrams of 20th century typographic artists.

Musical notation uses the letters of the alphabet. The history of language is embedded in our being; the sounds in us, the ancient forms of language are all part of our brain. The music of language is the key to comprehending what is really happening inside our minds.

Lewis Thomas write that the individual human brain is an immense living creature made of interacting, interconnected thoughts in constant motion. Listening to music enables us to thing about thinking. Music is the sound of thought.”

Daniel Sumrall's poems and reviews have appeared in Euphony, Snow Monke, sidereality, Rain Taxi, and the Hyde Park Review of Books.

Thomas Lowe Taylor (anabasis Press) lives in southwestern Washington State on the Long Beach Peninsula and copublishes Xtant Magazine with Jim Leftwich.  The Homages of Eagle (2004) 900 p., two vols, from anabasis.xtant Books, 1512 Mountainside Court, Charlottesville VA 22903, $100 plus s/h. He has work online in Word For/ Word, eratio, samsara, Xpressd, EXP, MPRSND, tin lustre mobile, 5 trope, Moria, Big Bridge, BlazeVox2k4, Great Works, QLRS, Neon Highway, and Softblow. Email: anabasis at pacifier dot com.

Tony Tost is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks World Jelly (Effing) and "Complex Sleep" (Desert City), as well as Invisible Bride (LSU 2004). He also edits the new webjournal Fascicle.  His poems and prose can be found in Hambone, Jacket, Talisman, The Hat, Verse and Effing Magazine.

Sam Truitt is the author of Vertical Elegies: The Section (Georgia, 2003), Vertical Elegies: Three Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), and Anamorphosis Eisenhower (Lost Roads, 1998). Further excerpts from Transverse may be viewed at ubu.com.

Gautam Verma has been living in Piacenza, Italy after completing graduate work at the University of Denver. “The Kremlin's Crumbling Velimir” is part of an ongoing work, Theatre, in which "utterances are freed from subject and actor in order to proclaim themselves with the material weight and character of language." Verma's work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Pom², Big Bridge, 26, Moria, BlazeVox, Drunken Boat, Diagram, Slant Review, and others. His chapbook In Ladakh is available from Shearsman ebooks, and Soundings is forthcoming from BlazeVox ebooks.

Irving Weiss: “Infrapics ultimately derive from the presentation of any image or text with an accompanying title. Historically, the infrapic goes back to the emblem poem of the 16th century whose text referred to the picture above it. More immediately, the infrapic is my version of the modern single-panel cartoon or news photograph with legend (now called caption), quote, explanation, or identification below. I keep to the basic form of the single panel but the content or relation of content to form may be inverted, subverted or involuted. In addition, I consider the infrapic to be a visual poem in the way a piece of light verse or parody in verse is a kind of poem.”

Greta Wrolstad passed away on August 9, 2005 from injuries suffered in a car accident. A poet and vital presence in the M.F.A. program at the University of Montana, she held a teaching assistantship in English and served as poetry co-editor of CutBank. This past summer Greta attended the 2005 Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia on a scholarship awarded through Fence Books. She was born on April 26, 1981, in Corvallis, Oregon.