Dan Solomon

My name is Dan. I am here to punch you.

Here are some things that will happen to me in the next year:

In September and October and some of November I am touring the country as a performance poet. I do this a lot. I'll be going east first to hang out on some dirty beaches, then down south to grab some fireworks. After that I reckon I'll spend some time in Texas and get some barbeque before heading home in the middle of November to freeze nearly to death in Chicago for the second year in a row.

In December and January you won't have enough money to pay me to leave my apartment. By February I suspect I'll be going stir crazy and venture out west for a couple weeks, and then I'll hole up again for March. In April I'm getting married to this real pretty girl I tricked into agreeing to hang out with me for the rest of her life, and a couple months after that we're going to London so she can get another degree and so I can tell everybody that I meet that I'm Canadian.

My first full-length collection of poetry, sometimes you gotta fight the bear, will be released by Shotgun Honey Press on September 12. It features a cover illustration by frippy and a hundred and two pages of poems worth not-throwing-away that I wrote between 2003-2006. I am learning a lot about how book distribution works; I was gonna recommend that you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders and stick it to the man by ordering fifty copies under the guise of being a professor teaching a class on the book, or running a book club, or something, but it won't work at all and will result only in stacks of coverless books being returned to the distributor. You ca'nt get ahead by cheating, and you'd do well to remember that. If you want a copy you can order one from my website or even better, come to a show in your town and get one in person. I dunno how much they'll cost yet, but if you smile real nice and I'm in a good mood I may end up just giving a bunch of 'em away. I ain't here to sell you too many things.

What I am is what I do. Tonight I stay up too late and move my hands over a piece of metal and plastic and hope that the lines and curves that appear on a screen as a reaction to my movements somehow represent actual thoughts and feelings. Tomorrow I will be something else.

I have a website at www.dansolomon.com and you can look at it if you're so inclined. It's got poems and mp3s and tourdates and a book I wrote and some other stuff on it.