We're a group of confused homies tumbled thru years of asphalt-fluid evolution, growing thru ourselves into new cycles with our projects. There's been one constant thru our miles & stumbles; working to embrace our writers + push accessible Passionate Living > Making a Living.
Everything's donation-based, from our chapbook series to Books & Shovels, our traveling bookstore. We have a lotta fresh noise rolling out 2017’s slashed up red carpet collaged to suit our changing schemes & projects. New homes. New shelves. New horizons. New lit. One cross-country collaboration.
Oh! & much love to Beach Sloth for awarding us a 2016 Beachie for “Best Punk Rock Poets.” Calling yourself punk kills punk, right? What’s more punk than that? Self-love?
Everything's donation-based, from our chapbook series to Books & Shovels, our traveling bookstore. We have a lotta fresh noise rolling out 2017’s slashed up red carpet collaged to suit our changing schemes & projects. New homes. New shelves. New horizons. New lit. One cross-country collaboration.
Oh! & much love to Beach Sloth for awarding us a 2016 Beachie for “Best Punk Rock Poets.” Calling yourself punk kills punk, right? What’s more punk than that? Self-love?
ORIGINS
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N!’s been around for a minute—since 2011, Jeremiah’s Junior year of high school w/ the narcissistic publication of a long-buried collection titled “Nostrovia!”
Our momentum clocked in w/ a framepack. Jeremiah stuck his thumb out in 2013 & took the press with him. Libraries & cafes served wifi, & he bopped from open mic to open mic, busking on street corners, kicking with different poetry + art communities across the country distributing our titles. |
Miami, FL
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This tied into our early ramshackle tendencies. The road doesn’t give a damn for deadlines. The immediate moment ripped clocks from wrists. This rolled thru w/ the launch of Books & Shovels at the 2014 NYC Poetry Festival, touring thru to a Kansas intersection car accident, totaling the vehicle. This was followed by a new ride found cheap, settling in Denver (where Jeremiah’s partner & him fulfilled an emotionally abusive relationship) while trying to settle into murky mountain sweat to make some cash to get west, leading to a predictable lack of shows & a retreat east.
N! didn’t settle into much structure till our Chapbook Contest kicked off in 2015 w/ Christopher Morgan joining up as co-manager. The space we occupy w/ our artists + writers drastically widened as our systems balanced out.
Fuck Art, Let’s Dance transitioned into a bi-annual publication, incorporating poetry + prose + art + [ anything digitally publishable ]. Our book quality drastically increased--now stocked on independent shelves across the continent. Show + panel solicitations increased.
I guess the ramble can be summed up with—narcissism leading to boredom leading to community leading to fulfillment.
Fuck Art, Let’s Dance transitioned into a bi-annual publication, incorporating poetry + prose + art + [ anything digitally publishable ]. Our book quality drastically increased--now stocked on independent shelves across the continent. Show + panel solicitations increased.
I guess the ramble can be summed up with—narcissism leading to boredom leading to community leading to fulfillment.
ODOMETER
We've bounced back & forth from city to city, living situation to living situation, too many times, with too many strange details, to list out here. We're going to do a lil summary starting after the launch of Books & Shovels :
We kicked out of the 2014 NYC Poetry Festival thru the Midwest to "This Is Poetry" w/ Red Fez + Punk Hostage Press + The Literary Underground in Springfield, IL. The luxurious theater was an ironic backdrop for the drunk poets & bass that was slapping the wood walls creaking w/ age. We dipped outta Springfield to St. Louis & Kansas City, Lawrence, Denver, where sweat-soaked boxer mornings clung to skin & money tripped our ambition w/ giggling circumstance. We retreated back to New Hampshire, our childhoods, & worked our way South to Florida, to Tucson, Arizona, where we bumbled into watering roots growing unexpectedly fast.
Right now, over two years later, I'm re-drafting this in a graffiti-licked cafe down in my desert home.
2015 was a liquored mess of mileage toppling over itself. West Coast tour chasing West Coast tour. Hitchhiking to rubber tramping to Greyhound. Beast Crawl Oakland to the New York City Poetry Festival. New Hampshire woodland wages to Lit Crawl San Francisco, down thru under the greased sky of Los Angeles, where even those pale pale sky stars know to hide. To Tucson, to New Orleans, to Arkansas handcuffs, to Kansas City, to Salt Lake, & flip a coin, back down down down to our sun-baked washes & cactus fields.
2015 was a liquored mess of mileage toppling over itself. West Coast tour chasing West Coast tour. Hitchhiking to rubber tramping to Greyhound. Beast Crawl Oakland to the New York City Poetry Festival. New Hampshire woodland wages to Lit Crawl San Francisco, down thru under the greased sky of Los Angeles, where even those pale pale sky stars know to hide. To Tucson, to New Orleans, to Arkansas handcuffs, to Kansas City, to Salt Lake, & flip a coin, back down down down to our sun-baked washes & cactus fields.
2015 laid out ingredients for 2016's feast. Our kitchen fat w/ spices & ovens, we set off into cycling lessons from 2015 into our plans, aiming for more shows, more publications, more lit. The process--a struggle that doesn't its palms read here--was blundering & fulfilling in its lack of cooperation. We sweat thru the bruises of the South Coast to Boog City's "d.a. levy-palooza" in Brooklyn, to Erie, Cleveland, Detroit, to St. Louis & down back to rent & bills staggering us up like its tolerance was thru our roof. From Tucson to the NYC Poetry Festival, back to that good ol Kansas City, to This Lil Lit Fest Denver, to Tucson, to Albuquerque, Austin, New Orleans, Miami, & back back back to San Francisco Lit Crawl.
2018? We're coming.
Pay It Forward
In Denver, CO, on our first cross-country journey with Books & Shovels, we'd been busking for a couple hours, and were not doing too well. We'd set up on 16th Street, a downtown strip mall overly saturated with other traveling kids. We'd made 50 cents. A new friend we'd met was playing guitar while we intermittently performed poetry & sang Sublime. Due to vending laws & licenses, we were unable to set up Books & Shovels, especially in this heavily policed location.
Across the street from our lil gathering was a young couple, a youthful looking man in a vest & a pregnant woman with blonde dreads. Both were most likely our age, mid-twenties at most, & were spanging outside of a pizza restaurant. We threw them the 50 cents we'd been tokened, which had come from a poet of the 50s, a Catholic preacher in love with story telling.
Some time passed. The aged poet had returned from his wandering to our group, and asked if he could tell us a tale. While he was weaving his story, and old fable of sorts, the couple we'd given the 50 cents to approached us with 1/2 a pizza. They'd had their fill, and were paying it forward.
It starts in the community, the seed, and grows upwards, sprouting branches across borders, countries, through walls and concrete.
Pay it forward. Always pay it forward.
We are responsible for fighting for our soil's fertility.
Across the street from our lil gathering was a young couple, a youthful looking man in a vest & a pregnant woman with blonde dreads. Both were most likely our age, mid-twenties at most, & were spanging outside of a pizza restaurant. We threw them the 50 cents we'd been tokened, which had come from a poet of the 50s, a Catholic preacher in love with story telling.
Some time passed. The aged poet had returned from his wandering to our group, and asked if he could tell us a tale. While he was weaving his story, and old fable of sorts, the couple we'd given the 50 cents to approached us with 1/2 a pizza. They'd had their fill, and were paying it forward.
It starts in the community, the seed, and grows upwards, sprouting branches across borders, countries, through walls and concrete.
Pay it forward. Always pay it forward.
We are responsible for fighting for our soil's fertility.
We have done this through street ciphers. Through hip hop circles. Through event hosting, from open mics to campfire gatherings. We talk with people. From lounging around cafes to four day Greyhound rides, we work to inspire others to inspire themselves, to encourage folks to seek routes to create platforms for their passions, to discourage monetary drive as a primary. This inspires us to keep moving.
Everything in our collective & individual human experience funnels down to communication. We live for intimate moments of expression, those naked conversations of insecurity & strength, vulnerability & empathy. Our message is to pay it forward, to create more & consume less, to rip away the facade of feigned decadence & giddy neon to expose the human in all of us.
We're working out the kinks, and doing what we can, on an individual one-on-one basis, using this website as a central hub for our activities & projects. Sometimes we fuck up. Sometimes we miss something. We try to be open to criticism. Please contact us if you see something you think we missed, would like included, or have general suggestions / commentary.
Everything in our collective & individual human experience funnels down to communication. We live for intimate moments of expression, those naked conversations of insecurity & strength, vulnerability & empathy. Our message is to pay it forward, to create more & consume less, to rip away the facade of feigned decadence & giddy neon to expose the human in all of us.
We're working out the kinks, and doing what we can, on an individual one-on-one basis, using this website as a central hub for our activities & projects. Sometimes we fuck up. Sometimes we miss something. We try to be open to criticism. Please contact us if you see something you think we missed, would like included, or have general suggestions / commentary.
& while we promote poetry, we do not push it as an 'end all be all'. We use poetry as a vehicle to promote finding a reason to be excited to wake up in the morning, to find what you love and chase and directly interact with artists, particularly young aspiring artists, in whatever city/town we are passing thru.
--thank you, cheers!
Dig our chapbook contest:
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