Timothy Green's Blog

Last week I read poetry with a comedian at a hair salon slash art gallery.  An unusual setup, but that's not necessarily a bad thing — poetry readings are generally boring as hell.  They come in two forms — the poet plus open mic, and the fancypants poetry pair all by their lonesome.  I don't know which is worse; the former is a more acute pain, the latter more a dull ache.  Both are mostly psychological torture, bound to a chair and suffering a tedium bearable only in small doses.  Maybe...

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The trolls are ruining this place, and I'm sick of cleaning piss out of a carpet that I don't even care about.  There's no reason to waste time thinking about comments on this blog, unless it's to participate in a discussion relevant to the post above them.  I've spent way too much time this summer trying to decide how to respond to what amounts to ignorant, masturbatory graffiti.  I feel like a kindergarten teacher.  Well, I'm taking away the scissors.

Comments on this blog are now all...

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Since I changed the formatting of Rattle.com last week, I'm not sure where to post books received, other than the static books received page.  So I thought maybe I'd just post them here and mention them on Rattle's Twitter.  If you'd like to review any of these books, we'll send them to you, just email Megan at:

All reviews published online.  Payment is  a copy of Rattle.  Sending a review is no guarantee it will be published, but you get to keep the books no matter what.  Here's what we've...

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Thursday, September 3rd, 9 p.m.

The Hive/The Apiary (map)

1402 Micheltorena

Los Angeles, CA 90026

Tomorrow night/tonight I'll be taking a much-needed break from reading contest entries and packing — we just moved to a new apartment, if I haven't mentioned it, and for some reason we decided to do it on the hottest, smokiest, busiest week of the year.

The cool thing about this reading is, I think it's actually going to be a cool reading.  The truth is, I haven't really paid much attention to it, wit

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This poem is awful, so don't bother reading it as if you'll be able to take something from it — but it marks a key epiphany in my growth as a writer.  In 1999, we were all worried about Y2K and I was a freshman in college, still a biochemistry major, still thinking of myself as a fiction writer, if any kind of writer at all.  Spring semester, I took an intro to poetry class with James Longenbach, hoping it would spice up my prose.

As of April 8th, the day my records say I wrote this poem, the sum

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There are two reasons I'm announcing the Rattle Poetry Prize numbers a full week later than I did last year.  First, our editorial priorities had to be adjusted to fit with Alan's travel schedule, as he's going to be gone for much of September.  But the bigger issue was the volume of submissions we received.  You might be surprised by how long it takes just to log them all in.  Here are the totals:

812 hardcopy entries

781 email entries

1,593 total entries

As you can see from last year's post, thi

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I have reams of writing (from back in the day when I wrote regularly), that aren't published and never will be, but that are still meaningful to me.  In some cases they probably could be published if I sent them out, but I don't care enough to bother, or just don't want to.  In other cases, the poems aren't any good, but retain a sentimental value.  Others are simply meta-poems — poems about poetry — which I'm always mildly embarrassed to find myself accidentally writing.

Anyway, since these poem

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Still no time for an essay-like post, and we're going on a much needed mini-break to Laguna Beach this weekend, so here's something to hold you over — a list of literary magazines that fans of Rattle could also be fans of, at least in my estimation.

Perhaps surprisingly, I'm not all that current with literary magazines; when I first starting working here, the stack of exchange copies was enticing, and I dove in headlong.  But in the time since I've come to enjoy collections of poetry more than in

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I haven't had any time to update recently, but I've got a few topics loaded in the chamber and ready to shoot — just need time to write them up, and time doesn't come cheap this time of year.  I'll have an official count on Rattle Poetry Prize submissions by the end of the week, but we've already broken last year's record ("even in this economy") and still have a two-foot stack of hardcopy submissions to log.  In the middle of this, we've decided to move to a new apartment, sacrificing some spac

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Two Hollywood people I like, Steven Soderbergh and Brad Pitt, had teamed up to film a baseball movie I'd actually pay to see (well, rent at least) — but it was axed at the last minute by the studio.  And I really mean last-minute — the film crew was on its way, and they'd already built a replica of the Oakland Coliseum in Phoenix.  There's a great article about A's GM Billy Beane and  "Moneyball" the movie over on ESPN.com.  It's  shame, I would have loved to see Pitt as Beane, and Soderbergh's

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