Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

Thanks to everyone who has donated and/or shared info about my zine fundraiser for Immigrant Families Together so far. I just made a donation at the IFT GoFundMe site for $110, bringing the total to $165. Maybe the zine will cross the $200 mark over the next few days. I hope so! Here's the link if you want to donate and receive a copy of Well, It's a Job for your own zine-reading pleasure. (Recommended donation amount is $2 to $10.) I've been busy making more copies. I've also been thinking about finding an event where I can table with the zines, so please let me know if you have any ideas. I could just set up with a TV tray somewhere around town at a community event (I have a pretty cool vintage TV tray, in fact). When I think about what's happening to people--and especially kids--at the hands of our government, I feel small. And I feel very, very angry. I was heartened when I learned about Immigrant Families Together because it is a group of individuals...

I made a new zine! The zine is called Well, It's a Job , and it's a collection of a few of the poems I've written over the last couple years using text from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I wrote these poems by literally cutting up a paperback copy of the book and pasting down bits and pieces from the book with a glue stick. The zine itself is, in classic Teeny Tiny Press format, made from a single sheet of paper folded into eight pages. The actual cut-and-pasted images of the poems were too big to feature in the zine, so I've typed up the poems (though I did cut down one of the poems even more to make it fit onto the last page of the zine). I'm making cardstock covers for the first run of copies of the zine, too, so hurry to order if you want the unique cover. The best part is that I'm selling this zine by donation, with proceeds to benefit Immigrant Families Together , an organization of volunteers who are working to help immigrants who have been d...

I wrote a series of poems a few years back when the Chehalis River in Washington state flooded and blocked Interstate 5 for days. In reading and watching news stories about the flooding in Colorado, I've thought a lot about the people there and the damage to the landscape and roadways. We drove to Boulder last year when I went to Colorado with Trish to visit her family, and it's amazing to see how Boulder Creek has become such a raging body of water. Tonight as I was thinking of this current flooding, I remembered the poems I wrote about the Chehalis. Here's one that borrows found text from a map of road closures. Closures and Restrictions Trees down. Sinkhole. Broken levee. Debris in road. Rising water. Mudslide. Several lanes washed out. Watch for mud and overflow from ditches. One lane. Local traffic only. Deep water marked with cones. Rough but passable. Bridge intact. Highway clear. Heavy traffic. Open to all cars. Open to trucks with perishable loads.

I've been meaning to post to this blog, but I've been very tired. Turns out that the iron stores in my body are very low. By 5pm or so, I'm pretty much done for the day lately. Well, I'm taking iron supplements and trying to eat more iron-rich foods, and hopefully I'll have rebuilt my iron supply soon; I'm being conservatively optimistic in my hopes because I've read that this can take several months! On that note, here's a poem I drafted recently about taking vitamins. Unseen Needs of the Whole Family To grow taller, to resist sickness, to miss less school, to have stronger bones and more endurance, to feel tip-top, to have good appetite and digestion, to prolong your useful years, to meet the stress and strain of life, to help build good red blood, to prevent deposits of fat in the liver, to prevent fragility of the capillaries, to promote sound nerves, to have lots of energy, to feel less depressed and lonely, to meet the dietary needs of t...

A couple weeks ago, in putting together a little zine on writing poems which use found/borrowed text, I happened upon some fun writing exercises. Here's one on writing "found or headline poems" by William Stafford and Stephen Dunning. Here's a list of 93 poetic experiments to try , compiled by Charles Bernstein. And here's a "word mover" tool from ReadWriteThink which uses Flash to let you move found words around to create your own poems; it lets you save/export the poems you create, too. I need to take some photos of my zine--it's called Found It! --and list it on my Etsy shop . Well, I need to do about a zillion other things, too, starting with catching up on the grading (I'm teaching one English 100 class and two English 101 classes this quarter) that I promised myself I'd catch up on this morning...

I've been thinking it would be cool to write a little sequence of poems using text from Barbara Pym's novels if for no other reason than to encourage people to read her work. Usually I don't write found poems from other published creative works--I use postcards or advertisements or other work that wasn't crafted to stick around. But I just like her work so much that I'm enjoying sharing little pieces of it in poem form. Anyway! Here's a second little poem inspired by Jane and Prudence , this one from chapter 17. After a Small Dinner Party Nothing seems real, Prudence thought. Tea under the walnut tree tomorrow and then what? "Have you got something nice to read?" Jane asked. "Yes, thank you. A novel." "And you have a book of poems if your novelist should fail to charm or soothe." I am drained of all emotion, Prudence thought. "I think I'm quite ready for bed."

When I read Barbara Pym's novels, I feel sad that she isn't alive to write more of them and that I'll one day run out of new-to-me Barbara Pym novels to read. There's something about her writing that captures the feelings and thoughts of someone who feels just a little outside of the mainstream, someone who can't help but notice the odd bits and pieces of life. (The above image is from the Barbara Pym Society home page.) Right now I'm reading her novel about two friends, Jane and Prudence , and enjoying it very much. Here's a tiny found poem I put together from just a handful of sentences from the first page of chapter one of that book. Reminiscences In excited little bursts-- "Ah, these delphiniums," sighed Jane. "And to think that we didn't appreciate wine," said Prudence. They walked on without speaking, their silence a brief tribute to their lost youth.

My blog came up in some web searches people did for "Powerball poems" after I posted my little found poem about Powerball the other day. If only all my poems were about such heavily searched-for topics. I received another fun bit of comment-spam the other day, so here's another poem built from spam. 11.30.12 You can still look great without designer clothing. You should never pay much attention to brand names unless you're a millionaire. So anyway, to bring this full-circle: if you win Powerball, pay all the attention to brand-name fashion that you want!

Here's another tiny found poem, this one inspired by a quote from "Debbie Baker... 60-year-old retired construction worker" published in the Boston Globe . 11.27.12 I do it for fun. One ticket. Two dollars. Quick pick. If it's meant to be, it will be. Jackpot! Five hundred million dollars.

11.26.12 Ancient attire or modern garments? Hermes handbags are one thing you'll desire if you'd like to be more self-confident. The spam filter for blog comments catches a lot of garbled, mostly uninteresting stuff about various prescription medications, but now and then, something more unique comes through. I turned one long comment into the little poem above. Though I'd hoped to write at least a tiny poem every day in November, I haven't done that! But I've definitely done some poetry-writing this month, which isn't the case every month.

Today Liza Minnelli was in the trending news on Google. I clicked on a story from the Washington Post and found some text for a tiny poem. 11.14.12 Liza Minnelli will be a special guest star as herself: singular sensation who has dazzled show business for decades.

I was reminded the other day of the documentary, King Corn , which in turn got me thinking about some poems I've been working on, inspired by found text from a 1970s-era children's nonfiction book I found at the thrift store. I have a handful of poems in this series so far and hope to write more. The poems take up different topics about how different foods and consumer products are made. Here's one about the many uses of corn. Corn is pretty wonderful when you think about it, controversies about corn syrup and ethanol and cattle feed aside... Some of the Wonders of Corn Corn belongs to the family of grasses. We make its stalk into paper. We make its cob into ink and cloth. We use corn oil in food and soap. Corn starch helps seal our stamps and envelopes. We drink alcohol made from corn and when we heat tiny kernels, they blow up. Corn is truly amazing when it pops. P.S. If you haven't seen King Corn and are at all interested in how food is grown in the U.S. and...