Happy Birthday Walking English!

This weekend celebrates the 8th year of Walking English…. the site’s been a huge part of the Idiom’s content and voice…the poets from the site give great readings and help out at literary festivals and the distribution of The Idiom…last night a group of us went out and celebrated with whiskey and wine and talked about the future endeavors of The Idiom

Here are some of my favorite pieces from the site:

Weather Report 

by Chris McIntyre   (Mac….The creator of the site)

Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land
in February of 1938,
hitchhiking through Pennsylvania
on his way to New York. He felt
the mountain range wind laughing.
Over lean miles, he lay on his back,
feeling for the rumble on coming traffic
to disturb the unstirring wilderness.
There was no road but his road,
as I-80 dreamt him along.

If you look for America there, you’ll see it
passing you in scenes, standing like billboards on the highway,
moving pictures of the great, empty
Sunday supper.
The oak doorway straining in the
weather. The toll road charming your
last few dollars. The chyrons pronouncing that
the corners have been turned. It’s like the
bookmark melting into the page. The field
slowly becoming forest.

My father brought pieces of America with him
when he left. There was the dirt on his boots.
He held onto the sky in his pockets.
He could throw it on the wall, and it would
slowly drip into a mess on the floor.
This was not something he would worry about.

Remember, these roads are still holding
a space for you. Remember that Woody Guthrie
stood
in the middle of Pennsylvania
in February
and he saw beauty.

untitled by Stephen McNamara  (F/brownstone)

physicists have shown
gravity to be the only
force that acts across
long distances

when tight rope walkers learn
they are three feet above the earth
slowly developing
a controlled sway
of their feet

there are no crowds
or safety nets
at that distance

haiku  by Erin Baird   (Marionerin)

a night of regrets
followed by the awkward sun
rising to greet fools

Fame by Keith Baird   (Cat’s Cradle)

I used to look like

Jack Black with a beard.

Now I look like

John Belushi without a beard

And Jason “George” Alexander,

Oliver “3 Musketeers” Platt,

And one time Charlie Sheen.

I have never once

Looked like

Keith Baird.

In Words  by Joe McCall   (Joe)

I remember the world as poetry.
it doesn’t happen that way.

It’s not until I sit down,
and scrape my pen against the page,
that I think of the way you smiled
the night I first met you, or

The way your lip gloss would
shimmer and shine,
the light reflecting
off my kitchen chandelier

or the feeling I get, looking back
at all the rainy nights spent together,
all the mattresses on the dining room floor,
all the curses that we screamed at each other
and the darkness of your cellar door.

You were always sweeter in words,
You were prettier in words, and
I loved you more in words
then I ever did in real life.

I call it Voiceterbating  by Amy Dwyer  (Apotheosis)

I’ll hum and click and sing for hours
keeping my fingers busy
dice or jewelry
loose change and trinkets

humming clicking
playing with the sounds, holding them

mouth
throat
chest
nose

nonsensical syllables
chopped up and delivered
into rhythms
that go on for minutes
that wind along like lifetimes
and get shot through
with bursts of birdsong,
crystallized howlings
and whooping exclamations of joy or regret

I couldn’t tell you what I’m thinking
starring blankly at busy fingers
dice or jewelry
loose change and trinkets
voiceterbating

The Sea gull  by Josh FInk  (Grayson Barlett)

I’m swinging around this world
I’m fucking John Glenn
The worst thing you can do to me is let me touch the ground
Toss me a pretzel
with a pressed and hidden Alka Seltzer
and watch my belly blow

First Time: An Anthology About Lost Virginity

A new anthology is out with a poem from idiom editor, Mark Brunetti. The anthology is First Time and its a collection of stories essays and poems about people losing their virginity…

The anthology is edited by writer Bud Smith so there’s no limits to what people have written about…I ordered mine today and can’t wait to get it. Here’s the back cover and lost of contributors:

A story by Bud Smith and more….

Our blog for the next week or so is gonna be mainly about Bud Smith not just because he treats the idiom and PHP a lil sweeter than other publishers but because we are putting out his next novel “Tollbooth” September 6th at revolutionary lounge in Toms River!

He has so much more going on too…here’s his latest blog post with his story “Smashing Everything”

And also coming very, very soon an anthology edited and created by him called “First Time” a collection of poems essays and stories about people losing their virginisis….

The August issue of the idiom is out and about too! Copies at rev lounge and plenty of events and things where you can pick up some…hell send us an email at theidiommag@yahoo.com and we can mail ya a copy too! The online version will be up in a week and these blog posts will return to talking about the poems in there….

Bud Smith interview

Here is a past interview with author Bud Smith

His new book Tollbooth is out now and here’s the blog post announcing it!

A book release party is taking place in New York on August 26 and in toms river New Jersey on September 6th! Details on the idioms Facebook page

Tollbooth books are in!

Tollbooth books are in and we gearing up for the book release party!

Revolutionary Lounge in Toms River
September 7th 7:00
Tollbooth $8 per book!
Performance by Nathanial Dickinson, Mark Brunetti, Chris Rockwell, Love Hustle, and Bud Smith

The Idiom Podcast #8 with Chris McIntyre Part 2

We have a new podcast up
which is actually a continuation from an old podcast A few months
back we interviewed Chris McIntyre And now
here is our continuation with Idiom Podcast #8
  Also check out The Idiom
Website for updated information on our events and book
release Party for Tollbooth

Mark Brunetti’s museum of trees….

Alright, so this weekend ill really be posting up the new new issue onto the idiom website….until then we’ll feature this last poem from the May issue by one of the editors Mark Brunetti….usually we tell you what we like in a poem but I don’t want to get to self indulgent so comment below and say what you like about this piece (or don’t like)

The Museum of Trees

Your car drives through the entrance, a large gate with large wooden doors.
After your car rolls its windows down, the excess amounts of oxygen
make all the passengers feel really good about themselves and the world around them.
The trees have branches that gradually lower themselves onto the cars as they go further into the museum.
Pretty soon, the drivers can hardly drive, and it feels as if your car is going through a car wash, the giant branches dragging
over the windshield and dropping back off the trunk.
Everyone feels fine in the car, no one is panicking.
Soon enough you all have become a part of the museum,
a part of the trees. Your screams can’t be heard through all the
wood,
and if you happen to escape the car, you would walk for so long
that it wouldn’t even matter.

Tollbooth is coming!

September 7th at Revolutionary Lounge in Toms River
7:00 PHP releases its first novel by Bud Smith…

Jimmy Saare collects tolls on the highway, but
he’s had a mental snap and is becoming uncontrollably fixated with
the 19 year old Gena who leans seductively on the copy machine at
Officetown. Despite his wife Sarah’s impending pregnancy, Jimmy
pursues his desire for Gena, unexpectedly becoming more entangled
with the strange manipulations of an anarchistic teenager, Kid with
Clownhead, who wants to start his own destructive cult when he
grows up. Tollbooth is a dark literary adventure chronicling one
man’s escape from drudgery into the wilds beyond the New Jersey
Parkway where beauty and horror blur.

Voice and Imagery

Matthew J. Hall’s poems in the current issue are an example of
what we here at the Idiom appreciate and enjoy in a writer’s voice and the described images in a poem.

I think what makes me
like the voice in his first poem, even my
daydreams are damned comes in the first introductory
line. The whole poem is about a couples downfall on a night
out and eventually in the poem we see the pronouns “we” “you” and
“I” but he holds up on bringing the people into the piece and goes
right into the action.

“took a piece of pink chalk
and sketched us on a paving slab”

It throws the
reader right into the scene and kinda distances us from either of
the people in the relationship and when the breakup comes its
impossible to really pick any side.

His next poem in the issue,
commuting through the town, the city, the village
becomes a list poem but what makes a good list poem
is by presenting it in a way without the reader knowing its a list. Hall goes from chocolate to crack heads to nuns and suicides on
train lines that the poem becomes a story about this place and
everything in it….

A jersey reading series and a sonnet

Hank Kalet is a prominent participant in the local Jersey
poetry scene…he hosts a reading series in the South Brunswick
Library with a beautiful window paned sunroom as the readers
backdrop….here’s details and the 2013-14 line-up

The South Brunswick Arts Commission, in
partnership with the South Brunswick Public Library, will offer
Poetry Readings one Sunday afternoon each month in Program Room 2
(Octagon) at 2:00 p.m. The readings are given by some of New
Jersey’s best known poets and there is an open reading by audience
members following the scheduled poets. The program is offered for
free, but a donation of canned goods for the local food pantry is
encouraged. The schedule for 2013-2014 is as follows: 9/15: Evie
Shockley and Cathy Park Hong 10/20: David Messineo and Davidson
Garrett 11/17: Vasiliki Katsarou and Lynn Levin 12/15: Charles
Johnson and Laine Sutton 1/19: Wendy Rosenberg and Charles Bonhus
2/16: R.G. Evans and Kevin Carey 3/16: Sharon Olson and Martha
Silano 4/13: Therese Halschild and Barbara Daniels 5/4: Lisa Russ
Spaar and Cate Marvin

Hank is also a great poet
and had some pieces in the current
issue In his Sonnet of the Everyday
Hank presents some kind of love. The “he” the narrator addresses is
hardly identified but his lifestyle is somewhat admired. I love the
ambiguity I find in the last statement and much like a sonnet kind
of sums up the whole as either the narrators or the mans luck is to
good to keep within… SONNET OF THE EVERYDAY
He navigates the ’78 Caddy he bought with the money he won on a
good trip to Monmouth Park turns left onto the highway as his
passenger sips from a cardboard coffee cup – He nailed the trifecta
then a longshot in the last race walked out with two grand in his
pocket had a steak dinner and bought the car You should come to the
track with me he says, unlit cigarette dangling my luck’s been too
damn good to keep to myself