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Archive for the ‘Live Readings’ Category

Abigail Deutsch

literary gatherings: a schmoozer’s guide

Aliens!

The literati are like aliens. Some are cute. Some are hostile. All talk funny, and all require diplomatic outreach. (Daniel Nester recently described this phenomenon in his riotous, depressing takedown of the New York poetry scene, “Goodbye to All Them.”)

I here present the strategies I have observed and developed at literary gatherings, in hopes that you, reader, will not someday find yourself lying on a couch in a grungily chic neighborhood of San Francisco at 4 a.m., claiming, along with a bald, 13-year-old Norwegian you’ve just met, to be a Macarthur Fellow.

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11.03.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part II

(note: this is part II of a 1996 letter from the late Doug Oliver on his book Poetry and Narrative in Performance)

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

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10.31.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part I

I remembered recently the existence of a letter my stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver, wrote me thirteen years ago to explain, on my request, the series of experiments he conducted in his study of prosody and voicing, Poetry and Narrative in Performance. The book was published in 1989, and I think the recordings that he describes in the letter and the subsequent analyses (very densely related in the book) must have taken place a few years earlier. I’m very interested in the matters discussed in the letter, and as it will have been ten years this coming April since he died, Doug is very much on my mind. But the work he did is the point, and the focus of my attention, so I’d like to share this letter. The length of the letter necessitates it being divided into at least two posts. Doug is writing from Paris; I am 24 and living in San Francisco. To a very tiny extent the language and tone of the letter is pitched specifically to me, but I think it is by and large available to any interested reader:

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10.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Filipino American Poetas en San Francisco

Hello all. So I’ve neglected to mention that I co-curate (with poet and editor Edwin Lozada) and host a monthly reading series in San Francisco, for a lovely non-profit organization called the Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. (I am not too thrilled with the “Inc.” part of the name, but the organization itself is very good). For those of you not in the know, the Filipino American artist community in the SF Bay Area majorly overlaps with our activist community. Many of our organizations are homegrown, and have formed completely outside of academic and institutional settings. Poetry for us happens in community centers’ storytelling circles, and the best publicity is word of mouth.

These community centers are multi-disciplinary and multi-purpose spaces. Musical and theater performances, art exhibits, and literary readings take place in the same spaces as meetings to organize political demonstrations for Filipino WWII Veterans’ benefits, and for the tenant rights of this gentrified city’s low income Asian elderly. A couple of our activist and artist hot spots are South of Market (SoMa) and the new I-Hotel rebuilt in our former Manilatown, wedged between the Financial District, Chinatown, and North Beach.

And always, as with most Filipino gatherings, there’s food, and lots of enthusiastic picture taking. The vibe in the place becomes nothing like monotone automaton reading from behind a podium, eyes glaze over literary event; it’s more like a Philippine palengke, or bustling marketplace.

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09.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Eileen Myles

Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

I toured with Jim Carroll in 1990. It was sort of an honor.

He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.

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09.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Eileen Myles

Intimate in Pace

I’m trying to cure myself of the blogging late in the month syndrome PARTICULARLY because this month is my last month of blogging. To get to the quick of it I think well why am I not blogging now. Well because I have a new book and I’m

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09.12.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Joel Brouwer

One of my songs spins backward, while the other plays forward

cat_scratchin

OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I’ll take it down. Would be a shame, tho.

Adrian Matejka’s second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year’s National Poetry Series, and I’ve finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2001. He had a radio show on the local independent station WDBX (then 700 watts; since upgraded to 3000), and he asked me to come on the show and read some poems. I’d done this sort of thing before, on a poetry show on Madison, Wisconsin’s indy station, the venerable WORT. But Adrian’s show was a little different.

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08.04.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Catherine Halley

The Printers’ Ball: July 31, 2009

printersball2009

Get ready for the fifth annual Printers’ Ball, the completely free, open-to-the-public print festival taking place this coming weekend.

What is The Printers’ Ball, you ask?

Officially, The Printers’ Ball is “one of the largest celebrations of print culture in the country,” which in my fantasy includes people wandering around wearing ink-stained paper dresses and tuxedos. Apparently that’s not far from the truth. The organizers—folks at Poetry magazine, Columbia College Chicago and the Center for Book & Paper Arts–tell me there will be an origami ball gown made of recycled magazines, poet-trees, paper statuary and lots of activities that “take print back to its roots”. In short, it’s a paper-lover’s paradise.

Come on down and get your hands dirty making paper and rubber stamps, or stay clean and watch book binding, letterpress, silkscreen and offset printing demonstrations. Lazy bones are invited to sit around and drink microbrew beer at readings sponsored by the participating publications.

Find out more about it and watch some sneak peak preview video at The Chicago Poetry Calendar.

Check back next week for a report and pictures from the field.

Details:

The Printers’ Ball (not to be confused with the Printer’s Row Lit Fest)
Friday July 31
5:00 to 11:00 pm
Columbia College of Chicago – Center for Book & Paper Arts
Ludington Building
1104 South Wabash Avenue
Chicago

07.28.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Katie Hartsock

A Glass Glass Factory

fourthresize2

Hi again, Harriet! By the way, I’m the media assistant here at the Poetry Foundation. I’ll be posting until the end of the summer, when I’ll leave to begin a PhD program in Comp Lit at Northwestern, where I’ll work on classical and contemporary poetry.

When I began taking poetry workshops in college and forming an inkling of what contemporary poetry was up to, one of the books that most excited me was Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: not only because I loved its surreal lyric landscapes, but I was dazzled by its use of zeugma, a “yoking” (the Greek translation) of two words modified or governed by one word, although that governing word only makes logical sense with one of the two at a time. Picture a cart with oxen hitched up and pulling on both sides, and compare with how the lines break here, from the beginning of “Paint Your Steps Blue”:

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07.01.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Stephen Burt

the litmag whirl

It is a lucky thing, but also a bit of a melancholy thing, to write about contemporary poetry as I do, as often as I do: having written about living poets– sometimes at length, and sometimes for the sort of periodicals that have dozens of footnotes, and sometimes for the sort of periodicals that actually pay you– since 1994, I now get a lot of poetry books in the mail, from a lot of presses– from perhaps half the US presses (air mail is another matter!) whose books I would try to read anyway. In good weeks I’m simply grateful for the in-flow: surely I could not have bought all those books myself, and one in any given stack is going to have something memorable, exceptional, perhaps by a first-book writer whose name I’ve never heard, or a second-book writer whose volume I would never have seen (this year for some reason they’re most often prose-poem writers: Brian Johnson, Carol Guess, Alison Benis White, among others). But in bad weeks I’m almost overwhelmed: how can I give every one of these books a fair chance? How can I take each one of these books quite as seriously as I would had it been given me by a friend, had I sought it and bought it in an independent store? Of course I can’t— but I can try; and yet the effort, on alternate afternoons, can bring me something close to new-book burnout.

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06.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Archive for the ‘Live Readings’ Category

Abigail Deutsch

literary gatherings: a schmoozer’s guide

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part II

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry and Narrative in Performance, part I

Barbara Jane Reyes

Filipino American Poetas en San Francisco

Eileen Myles

Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

Eileen Myles

Intimate in Pace

Joel Brouwer

One of my songs spins backward, while the other plays forward

Catherine Halley

The Printers’ Ball: July 31, 2009

Katie Hartsock

A Glass Glass Factory

Stephen Burt

the litmag whirl

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