Alexs Pate, David Mura, Maxine Kumin, Annie Finch
Stonecoast 2009, photo by Suzy Colt
Bowdoin college campus. Cool perfect Maine summer night. The warm wake of a great reading—a strong and vivid event, Maxine Kumin and David Mura, each introduced with heart and thought by a Stonecoast student, and each reaching a powerful and somehow a shared place. Everyone else finally gone from the hall after the signings and the hugs

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”:
Today I went to visit my mother, Margaret Rockwell Finch, who turned 88 a few weeks ago. As always lately, she showed me a new poem. Maggie was my first model of a

Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961
The exercise in silent poetry rages on. I drove in my truck up to The Hispanic Society on 155 St. on Sunday morning to do a walk through with a few of the future silent performers. I wonder if anyone’s read a great book called The Art of Memory by Frances Fitzgerald. Among other things (I’ve never finished it though I have assigned it to students…) it describes the practice of the study of rhetoric in the ancient world and how one would create a memory house to learn long speeches. To practice you would go to some public plaza at night that had lots of columns and lion statues to basically attach your memory tracks to these items and then when you delivered your speech you would move in your memory through the plaza you’d rehearsed in picking up cues from each staircase and statue you touched as you walked in the night.
There’s so much going on today. Kafka’s America, for instance. Jonathan’s panel at the Pen conference in New York. And something else. So much else. Lately I’ve been bumping up a little against Susan Sontag’s diary. I was wondering how a blog is different from a diary. Susan didn’t get paid to write hers, and she had to die first before we could read it.
It’s good to be a Bay Arean. (Wait. That doesn’t sound right.) It’s good to live in the Bay Area, partly because of all the great readings. I don’t think anyone covers a reading better than Oscar Bermeo. Oscar’s personal and intelligent reports are the best thing other than actually being at the reading. He’s always had the best flickr, and now he’s also capturing readings on video. The video(s), a playlist, above is of the most recent Achiote Press reading, organized in collaboration with the UCB Ethnic Studies library, which turns 40 this year. The featured poets are Naomi Quiñonez, Lee Herrick, and Hugo Garcia Manriquez. I highly recommend you check out Oscar’s videos, get your hands on the new Achiote Press chapbooks, and donate a/your book to the Ethnic Studies library.

Martin Wong, King of Pain, 1997–98
Dean Daderko is an imaginative and adventurous independent curator working in New York City. A few years back, he turned the living room of his ground-floor Brooklyn apartment into one of the more interesting alternative art spaces in the city.

Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA, edited by Jon Andersen, appeared earlier this year from Smokestack Books in Middlesbrough, UK. Mike Alewitz’s stunning mural from the Roosevelt School in New Brunswick, New Jersey (“Temporary Sanity”) graces the cover (and those not familiar with Alewitz’s work should check out Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz). Epigraphs from June Jordan and Paul Robeson open the book—so take your cures from there. (And in full disclosure, an excerpt of a verse-play from yours truly appears in the collection.)

Last week’s public performance component of Urban Word’s Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was a fairly formal affair. As I described in my previous Harriet entry, Theodore Harris presented work from his Our Flesh of Flames artist book, and Amiri Baraka read poems. The Bowery Poetry Club was packed, there were lots of older people in attendance, and the q&a was relatively brief.
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
Señor Smith to you. (1)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)
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