Summer, y’all.

What does a poet do when it isn’t 20 below zero with a windchill of negative 47 outside and there isn’t a waist-high stack of Writing & Rhetoric papers to be graded or a manuscript to be meticulously and properly ordered?

Well I don’t know about you, but I BBQ. Mostly. In fact, I’ve just joined a hotdog & outdoor movie screening club that’s more exclusive than even the tightest of poetry circles.

Don’t worry. You probably haven’t heard of us.

But other than wielding a pair of tongs over a basketball-sized grill, summer’s been full of watching the World Cup, submitting the three manuscripts that I completed during my two years at Columbia, and setting up a pop-up performance for The Swell at this year’s Printers Ball.

I watched the 2006 World Cup in France, secretly pulling for Italy. At least until the unforgettable coup de tete dealt to Materazzi by Zinedine Zidane. In 2010, I was in Italy, half supporting Italy, half France, and whatever’s left after two halves was rooting for the USA. And now this year, trying to trace my allegiances is like explaining the dramatis personae of Game of Thrones. But if nothing else, I’m just happy that it means that I get to drink beer at 11am on a weekday. (Whereas this is perfectly natural and acceptable in Italy and France, the idea is pretty verboten in the States. That is, unless it’s the World Cup.) And beers for breakfast are even better when followed by a Peruvian feast before biking back to the bar to catch the afternoon match.

As most poets know, June and July are huge months for submissions. So the last couple weeks were spent tweaking my manuscripts to fit the appropriate guidelines for the various presses I was sending to. Among them were Rescue Press, 1913, Black Lawrence Press, Black Ocean, Publishing Genius, and Omnidawn.

I’ve written several posts mentioning The Swell and what it is we’re up to, and so it was a big honor to participate at this year’s Printers Ball at Spudnik Press. This year’s theme was “Chatter,” which Spudnik describes as “a term that printmakers know as the ink debris surrounding an image. It’s also a sentiment rich in meaning to the layperson, signaling the verbal barrage and fragments that oscillate through social media and blogs, online magazines and texts.”

Several notable Reading Series in the city were asked to participate by giving pop-up readings throughout the day. Instead of inviting two of our contributors to read, we chose to invite them to submit to us a short video of themselves reading poem, performing, or talking about their art and practice. I edited all the videos together that we used to project onto the wall of a nook space, repurposing of the space to be used for art.

Here are three of the videos from the loop, which includes poets Jill Magi and Chelsea Martin, as well as a collaborative improvisational movement piece I did last semester with Julynn Wilderson:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/99749203[/vimeo]

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/99750356[/vimeo]

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/99757112[/vimeo]

Printers Ball actually played a major role in my decision to attend Columbia’s MFA Poetry program. When I was living in Milwaukee in 2011 and beginning the MFA application process, Kyle Schlesinger, who was then the Visiting Artist for the Center for Book and Paper Arts, came to Milwaukee to give a poetry reading. I told him about the bizarro dream I had, and he encouraged me to visit Chicago the following month for Printers Ball. That year, Printers Ball was held at Columbia in the 1104 S. Wabash building. The experience was incredible: print demos, poetry readings, open studios, and all the small presses you could imagine. The collaborative initiative between lit and print reminded me of what became so important to me during my time as visiting artist in Cortona, Italy. After that, I was hooked, and there was no turning back. I knew that Chicago, in general, and Columbia College, in particular, was where I needed to be.

So even if Chicago hasn’t exactly fine tuned its weather operations, if there’s anything it does do right, it’s hotdogs and LitPrint culture. And that’s enough for me.