I need to spend some time working on the links page. Any ideas for links, let me know.

New idea for La Fovea. If you can't get your invited person to invite another poet, you can begin another strand of your nerve. So we'll have dead nerves. Cool, yes?

Several of you have not sent me your own poems yet. Please send them ASAP. Space around the eyeball is limited.

Also, please remember to invite people and get your people to invite people. I'd like to have some nerves go on and on while others are very short (dead).

So far, Jay and I are the only ones who have successfully invited a new poet. But now I want to get another one to stay ahead of him.

emails between Frank Giampietro and Kathleen Yancey, Prof. of English, FSU

Kathleen,
I'm thinking it would be very cool to give t-shirts withe the
www.lafovea.org logo on it to people who are invited to post poems on
my website. To do this,I need I need about $700 to make 100 t-shirts.
Any ideas about grants available for literary websites or english
department funding for such a thing?

thanks,
Frank Giampietro




Frank,

*I don't, offhand.

You might talk to Ralph? Or to Mark Winegardner?

I wonder if it would be wise to think about what the end game is. In other
words, the web and the t-shirts might be the whole shebang, but it might
be that there is a larger kind of effort of which these are two (but not
all of the) parts.

Make sense?
k




Kathleen,
yes, you're right. I'm trying to address a problem that I see on the internet and in poetry as a whole, the fact that no one, even poets, actually read poetry by their peers, mostly because there is too much good poetry out there. But also because the machine simply says you must publish, not be read.

So what I'm trying to do, in part, is make a website that encourages poets to read each other's work. And talk about it. The nerves are a way to make associations, network as readers, make families of poets who actually "care" about each other--we could have nerve reunions.

It's an experiment even more than it is a "webzine" with Tshirts.

Thanks so much for keeping me on track.

yours,

Frank Giampietro

I like the whole "nerve" idea for the sort of network of poems that you're
initiating -- it reminds me of how Frank O'Hara likes to use the image of
nerves, often in connection with poetry. Like in a poem he wrote praising
his buddy Kenneth Koch:

"Kenneth you really are the backbone of a tremendous poetry nervous system
/ which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance / of
distraught experiences and hysterical desires so to keep things humming /
and have nothing go off the trackless tracks"

--Andrew Epstein, Professor of English, Florida State University

If you are a la fovea poet and would like to post on this site, email me and I'll add you to this list.