I can’t tell you if I made the right decision, or where I’ll be in a year. Here is what I do know: there’s no such thing as a wise risk. There are only the chances you must take on yourself. No matter the timing. No matter the economy.

How afraid we are of losing time! As if we can’t afford to write poems that won’t endure. As if the road can’t include both blackboard-jockeying and troweling cement. As if a few years spent on workshops, post-workshop pubbing, and rubbing elbows with professors you pray might blurb you—and I, too, went into debt for my MFA—wouldn’t have been spent in some other way equal parts tectonic and navel-gazing. Backpacking in Europe. The fixer-upper house. A rock band. An MBA.

If you’re in New York, this is a can’t miss!

The breakdown for this year’s festival is:

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E. 6th St.)
Boog City Classic Albums Live will kick off the festival with local musical acts performing, for its 10th anniversary, The Magnetic Fields’ classic 69 Love Songs. Among those partaking:

Ben Krieger
Dream Bitches
Gracefully
The Trouble Dolls
Andrew Philip Tipton
Genan Zilkha

and more

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10, 6:00 P.M.
ACA Galleries (529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr., bet. 10th/11th aves.)
This is the first date of season seven of our d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press series, where each month we have a different non-NYC small press host its authors and a musical act.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E.6th St.)
We’ll have poets, smaller musical acts, full bands, and theater performances.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
Poets and musical acts performing nonstop during our 6th annual small, small press fair, which will also have readings from poets representing the exhibiting presses. The day will also feature two poets in conversation with each other.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
We’ll close the festival with more poets and musical acts performing, sandwiched around a discussion.

The poets who will give readings on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Ammiel Alcalay
Sandra Beasley
Mike County
Jim Dunn
Eric Gelsinger
Hailey Higdon
Paolo Javier
Paul Foster Johnson
Basil King
Martha King
Brendan Lorber
Dan Machlin
Justin Marks
Tracey McTague
Ryan Murphy
Elinor Nauen
Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Nick Piombino
Joanna Sondheim
Ryan Walker
Dana Ward
Lewis Warsh
Karen Weiser
Dan Wilcox
Angela Veronica Wong

and more

On Saturday, Anselm Berrigan and Buck Downs will be reading and in conversation with one another.

On Sunday there will be a discussion on politics, poetics, and community curated and moderated by longtime Boog contributor Greg Fuchs

The musical acts who will perform solo sets on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Dorit
Gracefully
Serena Jost
Phoebe Kreutz
Alan Semerdjian
The Lo and the Lonesome

and more

Please email editor@boogcity.com for additional information.

In the wrong hands, the narrative/lyric divide is one of the great straw men of lit-crit. The great poems have both. Even in The Iliad, Homer was careful to build in descriptive passages that worked as mini-lyrics and proved his value, amidst all that marshalled history, in the role of delivering poet.

First up is Sandra Beasley, whose poems appeared on Linebreak on June 10 and Aug. 19.

Here’s Sandra:

I don’t know if it’s truly where magic happens, but that’s how the Linebreak editors phrased it when they asked for a snapshot of my writing space. What does happen at my desk: drafting, cussing, sneezing, gesticulating, wikipedia-ing as an aid to drafting, wikipedia-ing as a distraction from drafting, reading lines aloud, tapping out ten syllable-lines out with my left hand, and drinking of scotch.

A rundown of some visible elements:

• A new-ish macbook (which replaced my beloved ibook). This laptop will sometimes move up with me to the balcony, or to a rocking chair in our bedroom.
• A hulk of a printer that bears a sticker proclaiming SCREW GUILT. I have gone through five printers since high school, and this sticker has been transferred to each and every one of them. I don’t particularly know why, but now it’s tradition.
• Two framed prints that are actually each half of the same image, a menagerie of animals depicted in styles ranging from the cartoonish to Audubon-exact. I clipped these from an issue of CABINET magazine, and find them a useful place to rest my eyes when I’m feeling stuck. Every time I look, there is an animal I hadn’t noticed before. This may have a role in the high frequency of giraffes, horses, turtles, capybaras, and platypi that appear in my recent poems.
• An exceptionally comfy chair that I bought at a second-hand store here in DC and then carried, balanced on top of my head, the eight blocks back to my old apartment building.

I really do keep my desk this clean. Don’t get me wrong, there are stacks of to-do paperwork elsewhere, but having a blank surface is key to giving myself permission to write. If I were trying to draft a sestina while also eyeing my incomplete 2008 tax return, the sestina would never happen. If the walls seem a little bare, I am trying to pace myself. We’ve only lived here since March, so I’m waiting until I have just the right things to hang up.

When we moved in, I worried that the lack of a window would keep this from working as my studio. But I get plenty of natural light (there’s a skylight above that staircase in the upper left of the photo). It never feels claustrophobic, and it is also the first space I see when I walk in the door–so naturally, the first place I sit. Much more organic than creeping off to an attic.

The books to the left of my desk are only a fraction of my poetry collection. I have far too many books, and since I can’t bear to get rid of anything signed to me, it is safe to say I will always have far too many books. They’re grouped according to the color of their spines. It is an indulgence, but as easily as I can remember the author’s last name, I’m able to picture how the book looks in my hands. You’d be surprised how quickly I find what I need. And when I can’t locate a title right away, the search causes me to stumble across three books I’d kind of forgotten about, but want to re-read. Who says any system having to do with poetry has to be efficient?

What I love best about this space is that it is, truly, a room of my own. It doesn’t double as a sewing room, or a guest bedroom; the boy has his own desk, on another floor entirely. It is a room for writing, and that is a rare and lucky thing.