The Best American Poetry

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews interviews Phil Brady

Ed note:  With this post, we introduce "Meet the Press" for which poet Nin Andrews will interview editors of small presses.  Today Nin interviews Phil Brady (photo), editor of Etruscan Books.  -- sdh

NA:  I’d love you to start by just giving a description of Etruscan Books.

PB: I know it sounds trite, but it's difficult to describe the 40 books we've published or contracted to publish since our beginning in 2001 because I love every one of them. I remember where we first met; first grope, first kiss; when I first swooned. It's all so sappy.  I hide my blush behind the mission statement: "to nurture a dialogue among genres." That works about as well as a cold shower.

But though I'm the last person to describe my love objects, I'll give it a shot:

They are engaged but not entangled in the world. They tell stories without plod. They offer lightning glimpses of a midnight landscape. They shake and stir. They yield more with each reading. They whisper to one another behind my back. I strive to learn from them and to learn them by heart. 

NA:  How did the press get its name?

 PB: We did a lot of market research. Which means we called three or four buddies. Our first choice was Siena Press, in honor of Siena Oristaglio, our founding funder's daughter. But folks thought that we were linked to Siena College. Then we tried Tuscan Sun Press, to commemorate a trip to Tuscany that the Oristaglio's and I had taken many years ago. But that was about the time Frances Mayes published Under the Tuscan Sun.

 Then our co-founder Bob Mooney pointed out that the Etruscans had settled Tuscany, and that in many ways the Etruscans' relation to the Roman Empire--underground, mysterious, somehow necessary even though powerless—reflected the role of the small press world in imperial America. Bob's good with stuff like that.

So for us, the question isn't where our name comes from, but whether we can live up to it.

NA: How is Etruscan different from other small literary presses?

PB: Not so different, we hope. We aspire to follow the example of presses we admire: BOA, Graywolf, Copper Canyon, Sarabande, Coffee House, New Directions, CavanKerry, Milkweed, and many others which have produced great books for the last thirty years or more. The small press world is burgeoning right now, filling needs—both aesthetic and economic—that aren't met by corporate publishers.

You know, Nin, I’ve been hanging out with a physicist—I won’t mention any names but his initials are Jim Andrews—and I gather from him that with strings and black holes and quasars and dark matter, cosmic scale is truly weird. Small press scale is wacky too: Immense effort is lavished on products of tiny consequence. The genius of the writing and the labor of bringing books into print are awe-inspiring, and yet most small press titles sell fewer copies than a teen has facebook friends. Now, this could frustrate, I suppose. But it makes me giddy as a charmed quark. I’m helping to produce something absolutely wonderful, something that very few people know about. We all sense that there’s something not quite right about the commercial equation between quality and popularity; but in the small press world, where merit is the only value, the infinitesimal can seem vast, in a weird way.

How is Etruscan different? Well, at ten years old we're a relatively new press, but because Mooney and I are...how shall I put this?--junior geezers?...we have a long history. We didn't begin as swashbucklers trying to publish impetuous younglings. We wanted to provide a platform for writing across traditional genres, writing with heart and seasoning.   We wanted to feature work which emerged out of a sense that genre isn’t bound by a set of conventions but is instead a manifestation of a human impulse. There is an impulse to sing, an impulse to regale, an impulse to explain. Yes, genre solidifies into tradition. But the best work—the most new and most ancient—still thrums with that primal impulse. "Form in dread of power," as Emerson puts it. We were looking for work that carried the tradition but emerged from the source. So, we began by scanning our bookshelves, contacting some writers who for us had set that kind of example: Bruce Bond, H.L.Hix, and William Heyen. From them, came our next generation: Carol Moldaw, Jennifer Atkinson, Diane Thiel.   

John Findura, Guest Blogger September 19-25

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Useful Shrapnel (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nicel, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Welcome, John.

-- sdh

The Best American Poetry Launch Reading - First Photos

All photos copyright 2010 Lawrence Schwartzwald:

"This poem knocks bad guys on their bottom! "  Peter Davis reads Four "Addresses."

Front row L to R: David Lehman, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn Greacen, Gerald Stern, David Shapiro. Second row L to R:  Elaine Equi, Lynn Emanuel, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sandra Beasley, Sharon Olds, Gregory Pardlo, Eileen Myles, Terence Winch.  Third row, L to R:  Jim Richardson, Kimiko Hahn, Dara Wier, Jeffrey McDaniel, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Mark Bibbins, Matthew Yeager.

  The Best American Poetry Series Editor David Lehman

Poets gather in the green room before the reading.  L to R:,  Stacey Harwood, Amy Glynn Greacen, Lynn Emanuel, Kimiko Hahn, Gerald Stern, David Lehman, Matthew Yeager.

"Who the Hell is Li-Young Lee?" - John Findura

So the first thing my wife Lauren asked me when I told her I’d be blogging on this site was “You’re not going to write about the time I fell asleep on that guy’s shoulder, are you?” And I told her that no, of course I wasn’t. But then I decided it was a pretty funny story, so now I’m going to write about the time she fell asleep on that guys shoulder.

"So What's The Question?" - John Findura

Growing up I was never what one might call a “decision maker.” The whole process of deciding between two things was often more than I could bear. Weighing the merits of one thing against another was not just painstaking, but left me riddled with doubt as to whether I made the right choice. Fortunately, for myself and for those who I have to make decisions for, I no longer seem to have this problem. I owe it all to four simple letters: WWJD. Yes, that does indeed stand for “What Would Janice Do.”

Sneak Peek: The Best American Poetry 2010

From Guest Editor Amy Gerstler's introduction:

A word about taste.  When I began this yearlong process of, to quote the late great David Foster Wallace, "deciderization," I was determined to do my best to represent the entire range of American poetry at the present time.  There would be poems of every school, persuasion, and methodology included!  I would read from sea to shining sea to find them!  Looking back through the anthology as it stands now, I am once again whacked in the head by what I realized not very far into the process:  that I could no more escape my own proclivities, preferences, and tastes when editing this book than I can when writing my own poems. 

In a way, working on the anthology turned out to be more akin to writing a poem than I would ever have guessed.  Themes, modes, and ideas I've long been obsessed with:  women's bodies and lives, sex, dogs, the devil, the dead, lists, drugs (psychotropic and otherwise), disease, epistolary literature, prayers, coming of age, dregs, graveyards, ghosts, religion, insanity, love, animals, drunkenness, mordant wit and other pet topics long resident in the pest house of my head make multiple appearances here.  Sometimes during the process of assembling the anthology I got very lost and overwhelmed, as I often do when writing, it felt almost as though the book began to exert a burgeoning will of its own, with its own hungers, tidal pulls, quirks, and requirements, just as it sometimes feels when a poem I am wrestling with is taking shape . . .

from The Best American Poetry 2010.  Buy a copy and read the full intro plus David Lehman's forward and 75 wonderful poems chosen by Amy Gerstler.

And join Amy tonight, at the Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading.  Details here.

Bloof Books Tour: "Our poets come from lands far, far away..." (Shanna Compton)

"...so please fill this giant bucket with money." --Maureen Thorson, co-host of In Your Ear (pictured below)

In the resonant black-box theater space of DC Arts in Washington, Peter Davis & I read poems (duh) with M. (a.k.a. Magus Magnus), who's promoting his new book from Narrow House, Verb Sap.

Let me be honest here: It's hard to report retrospectively. The readings have started to blur together a bit in my memory. It's Day 10 and we've each read at least that many times, heard each other that many times, heard a dozen other poets as well. All with the buzz of the road in our ears and dulled by too many late nights/early mornings. Not to mention fraying bundles of nerves. This DC performance was 3 days ago and already evaporating. But I can say with absoluteness that M.'s reading was energetic and enjoyable, his book is strikingly designed, and I'm looking forward to spending some time with it once this crazy trip is over. Pete and I had fun with our readings too, and each read a poem by Jennifer L. Knox since she couldn't get back down for this one. Books were miraculously sold and swapped. DC's many friendly faces included Mel Nichols, Cole Swensen, Reb Livingston, Cathy Eisenhower, Leslie Bumstead, and other friends, poets, and former students, along with series hosts Maureen Thorson and Buck Downs. (Buck's also got a new book called Ain't Got All Night, coming very soon!)

Afterwards we did the usual drink-and-dine at the place next door (the name of which I can never remember), where the discussion turned to serious matters like...

"Fork On Broken Twig" - John Findura

My father is the kind of guy who sees Bill Cosby do a stand-up routine and comes home absolutely positive that he could do that just as well. He is also the kind of guy that gets asked to leave the White House tour by the Secret Service because he tries to sneak a picture out the window by the Rose Garden. That was an exciting trip. “Hey John, what’d you do over summer vacation?” “Eh, nothing. Oh, wait, yeah, except for watching my dad get interrogated by the FBI over camera usage in the White House.”

 

This Just In: Publishers Weekly Reviews BAP 2010

Congratulations all!  You can hear some of these very poets tomorrow night at the New School launch reading (66 W 12th Street, NYC.  7:00 pm (doors open at 6:30)  Details here.

This year's annual roundup of poems published in literary magazines includes the usual big names (John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic) and a sampling of lesser known, newer writers (Sandra Beasley, G.C. Waldrep, Mark Wunderlich) as well as a few true newbies like Matthew Yeager, whose talky excerpted long poem asks some laugh-out-loud-funny questions: "Do you eat the crusts of pizza, or only/ when they're excellent or you're hungry?" James Richardson's aphorisms, fifty of which appear here, will quietly blow minds: "My best critic is me, too late," reads number 40. Lucia Perillo's "Inseminating the Elephant" describes exactly what the title suggests. James Tate takes a rambling walk in prose that amounts to a meditation on what depression really means. In her introduction, Gerstler extols poetry's capacity to serve joyful as well as "darker, maybe more complicated needs." As usual, this anthology has something for every kind of poetry reader, and serves as a helpful introduction for newcomers curious about the contemporary poetry landscape. (Sept.)

The Best American Poetry 2010
Edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman, Scribner, $35 (258p) ISBN 978-1-4391-8147-8; $16 trade paper ISBN 978-1-4391-8145-4

-- sdh

"Simple Twists of Fate" - John Findura

On 12 November, 1944 my grandfather, Alister MacMaster, was Wounded in Action during the Lorraine campaign near the small town of Nancy, France during a push by the 80^th Infantry Division of Patton’s 3^rd Army. My grandfather was born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913 and immigrated to the United States alone at age 13. During the Second World War he saw how many of the young men on his street in Paterson were either being drafted into the Armed Forces or joining of their own accord. Although he was past the draft age, and older than all of the other young men on his block, he joined the Army because he felt it was his duty and an obligation.

A German potato masher filled him with shrapnel and a 7.92mm round, probably from a Kar98k bolt-action rifle, passed through his right arm, severing nerves that would leave him with permanent numbness in his right hand. The shrapnel would still be working their way out of him well into his 70’s. The rest of his unit KIA, he was assumed dead and left by the Wehrmacht. Somehow he kept himself alive until the rest of the 3^rd Army was able to catch up with him. He then spent a year in a British hospital recovering from injuries both physical and psychological. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder didn’t exist as a real condition then, and his jumping at loud noises or the nightmares he had every night for the remainder of his life were things no one was prepared to deal with.

When he returned home to Paterson, he was one of the few men to make it back from the European theater. He would sit on his front porch, still in bandages, and smoke his Lucky Strikes. The young Italian girl, Emelia, who lived across the street felt sorry for him – a strong man who still needed help doing the simple things around the house. So she would go over with dinner, help him tie his shoes, sit and talk. They married not long after and soon gave birth to their only child, my mother.

On Thursday, November 8^th, 1962 my father headed over to Srob’s Dairy Farm on Outwater Lane, in Garfield, New Jersey. He was 14 and playing in a pick-up football game. Being the fastest kid in his school, he naturally was the running back. On one running play, my dad was tackled by a kid named Craig De Vore, a legal tackle, and everyone heard a loud crack. At first my dad assumed it was the nearby wooden fence. He thought that maybe someone ran into it. Of course it wasn’t the fence: it was his leg.

My father spent months in the hospital and had multiple operations putting in screws and cleaning up infections. His athletic career, for all intents and purposes was over. Instead he would spend his time learning to use his leg again.

A few years later my father received his draft notification and headed to the Federal Building in Newark. It was filled with people trying to do anything to get out of being accepted for duty. Young men were wearing dresses, putting cigarettes out on their arms, trying in vain to break some sort of bone that would give them at least of few more weeks to figure out how to get out of this. The kid in front of my father had chest x-rays. The guy behind him was wearing a neck brace. My father had a folded note from his doctor in his pocket.

Bloof Books Tour: On ten-hour drives, plus a reading report & interview (Peter Davis)

Saturday, at about 11:00pm, we arrive in Raleigh, after driving from Tallahassee. We dropped off kindred spirit Bruce Covey in Atlanta and off we fled, through the hills, through the stoplights and gas stations, through one O’Charley’s and one Ruby Tuesday’s, racing against the time, hoping to arrive as  soon as is possible. We discussed the viability of Worm Holes and the hope that the blue dot on Shanna’s GPS would jump ahead, skipping us along the highway, and making the shit go quicker. Ten-hour drives are long. They take at least ten hours. Those ten hours feel exactly like 666 minutes. But when we arrive we are happy, setting ourselves up with a Gin and Sprite and retiring to our rooms to just do nothing. But now I’m writing.  

But at The Warehouse (the venue in Tallahassee) the reading was excellent. Fellow Bloofer and Atlanta reading companion, Sandra Simonds, organized the  reading at a cool venue that was like a cool bar in Texas. In fact, Shanna said, “This is like a cool bar I used to go to in Texas.” It was large and there were wooden rafters and a long back porch that made you feel like you were waiting  for a train.    

 None of our photos really came out all that well. This is Scott Sweeney though, trust us.

Among the many kind people we met, was Scott Sweeney, [PDF from BlazeVox 2KX] who read with us and runs Grey Book Press. Scott was vivacious and kind and had a very well-dressed wife.    

His life in poetry goes a little like this:

"The State of New Jersey Has Licensed Me To Teach Your Children!" - John Findura

 
So after my first post yesterday I went grocery shopping. No one recognized me or asked for an autograph. I found this highly disconcerting. Instead of getting depressed, I wrote another blog entry for your perusal/enjoyment. Cheers!

Before landing my sweet Community College gig, I was a public school teacher in New Jersey for six years. For four of them, I taught in an urban middle school. I won’t name the city, but I was born there, along with Allen Ginsberg, and WCW may have written a 300-page poem about it, and the school may have been located next to The Great Falls. Anyway, I had the kids write a lot of poetry, mostly because it was easy for me to teach and I didn’t have to read 120 essays about why public school students shouldn’t have to wear uniforms (my students didn’t have to wear them, but the idea still pissed them off). Oh, and also because I think poetry is important.  On occasion I was surprised by what I got out of them.

The majority of them spoke English as a second language and a lot of them didn’t speak it at all at home. I had one girl, from Bangladesh, named Beauty (actually, almost half of my students were from Bangladesh). She spoke extremely limited English, and I’d often let her write her assignments in Bengali, then have an honor roll-type kid translate it into English as extra credit. I know enough Spanish that I could read assignments written in Spanish en español, but Bengali is well beyond me.

Beauty wrote a poem titled “My Village” that she presented to me in immaculate writing, forming a perfect square of script on the page. One of the other students translated it for me as Beauty sat next to him, nodding at the few English words she knew. It was an absolutely beautiful poem, no pun intended, about leading the cows over the small bridge that connected the two sides of their river and how the memory of this small act kept her connected to her home. Immediately drawing from my vast knowledge of Bengali poetry, I asked if she ever heard of Rabindranath Tagore. Her eyes lit up at possibly the only two Bengali words I knew and started excitedly speaking, waving her hands, the first time I had ever heard her say anything in any language.

“What did she say?” I asked my 12 year-old translator.

"Remorse" [by John Tranter]

(After Baudelaire)

When you sleep at last, my darling,
for the last time, beneath a slab of stone,
when the weight of that slab presses down
and crushes the breath from your breathless chest,
when your bedroom is a hollow box
six feet deep in the damp soil, when
you long for a flicker of light to illuminate
that horrid cave, thick with eternal dark,

your grave, like a sheriff in a black and white
Western, my confidante, for sheriffs are always
ready to listen to a poet, will sneer, and mock
in whisky-soaked tones: ‘What’s up, darling?
Couldn’t you guess why the dead weep? Remorse
for a wasted life. Now say good night.’

-- John Tranter

Editor's note: The poms after Baudelaire that we have posted by John Tranter were written at the Civitella Ranieri in Umbria.

Poem: "The Jewish Biker" -- by Mitch Sisskind

 

This poem is part of my "autobiography as SAT test" project. Read the poem, then answer the question that follows. The correct answer and explanation are below.






The Jewish Biker

Like a motherfucker he rose
At dawn winter mornings
And snowplowed driveways.

Spring nights when rain poured
He disinfected flooded basements
With Lysol like a motherfucker.

All week like a motherfucker
He worked in the parts department
At the Western Avenue Harley dealer.

He used to say, ‘You won’t
‘See me riding Japanese iron.
‘You won’t see me riding bitch.’

When his old lady had a miscarriage
He fished it out of the toilet. Why?
Maybe the doctor wanted to see it.

Yet he was Jewish! His name was
Zebelman! His mother volunteered
In the Weiss Hospital gift shop!

>> The character in this poem is loosely based on:
a. Mickey Kalison
b. Tony Drago
c. Julius Jaffe
d. Leon Wells
e. Charley Livingston

The correct answer is 'a,'  Mickey Kallison.

Tony Drago was the very sweet tempered son of Steve and Millie
Drago. His sister was Roseanne. For a time Tony Drago was employed
as a greeter in a funeral home.

Julius Jaffe was the attorney for the Harrison Wholesale Company.
His most memorable utterance was, 'But then you're dipping into principal.'

Leon Wells was an employee of the old Central Electric Company who argued
that the power of the Roman Empire came from the legionaries' consumption of
honey.

Charley Livingston, like my father, was an alumnus of the Jewish Orphans Home
in Cleveland. He lived by himself in the Rienzi Hotel on Diversey Avenue.

Regarding the poem's first stanza, Mickey Kallison invested in a snowplow for his
truck and picked up some extra cash clearing driveways in Skokie and Lincolnwood,
Illinois. Although I don't know that he also disinfected basements, there did come a
time when Bob Kallison (Mickey's father, and my uncle) wanted to disinfect his
own basment after a rain. When Bob was unable to buy disinfectant anywhere,
he declared, "There was no Lysol in Skokie!" with such fervor that the memory of it
has stayed with me forty years.

The incident in stanza four derives not from Mickey Kallison but from a
conversation with Tim Bissinger, 'the tough guy math teacher,' that took
place while we were waiting on a subway platform in 1971.

Finally, it was actually my stepmother Jay who volunteered at the Weiss Hospital
gift shop. Her maiden name was Zebelman ('onion person.')

 

This Monday @ KGB: The Wilde Boys

Monday Night Poetry at KGB Bar features the queer poetry salon, the Wilde Boys, with readings by Mark Bibbins, Paul Legault, Jason Schneiderman & Mark Wunderlich, presented by salon founder Alex Dimitrov.

Mark Bibbins is the author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings and Sky Lounge, which received a Lambda Literary Award. His poems have been published in the Paris Review, Poetry, Yale Review, and other journals. He has been the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and teaches at Columbia University and The New School.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of Voluntary Servitude and The Anchorage, which won a Lambda Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Writers at Work Fellowship. His poems have been published in the Paris Review, Boston Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is currently professor of Literature at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Striking Surface and Sublimation Point, which was a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and other journals and anthologies. He has been the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Paul Legault is the author of The Madeleine Poems. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the translation journal Telephone. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Field, and other journals. He works at the Academy of American Poets and lives in Brooklyn.

Alex Dimitrov is the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Yale Review, Boston Review, From the Fishouse, and Best New Poets 2009. He works at the Academy of American Poets and frequently writes for Poets & Writers magazine.

The Monday night Poetry reading series at KGB is hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone, and was founded by David Lehman and Star Black. 

Readings begin at 7:30 pm. Admission is FREE

For the complete season line-up, click here.

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360 ● KgbBar.com 

Russian Gossip

The game of telephone -- also known as "Chinese Whispers" and "Russian Gossip" (thank you, JA) -- has inspired a terrific project on the Huffington Post. Masterminded by Nicole Walker and Rebecca Campbell, the project requires participating poets to respond within twenty-four hours to the painting posted yesterday in response to the poem of the day before in a constantly renewing chain. The collaborative game is called 7 Rings. "The premise is 'An Artist's Game of Telephone' and the quick turn-around time is part of the fun," Walker says. The painting on the left by Elizabeth Tremante is part of her response to a poem by Paisley Rekdal ("After Frank"). -- DL

Sinatra's Advice

<<<
Joey Bishop looked at Sinatra to see if the leader was laughing.  He was so it was OK for everyone to join in.

Whitey Lockman stepped into the batter's box. Ball one. Campanella called time and went out to the mound to calm Newcombe down.

"My advice to you," Sinatra said, "is to live each day of your life as if it's your last. Because one day it will be."

Bishop led the laughter.

from The Gleason Chronicles
>>>

"It Curves!" - John Findura

Hello all! Thanks for checking in. My name is John and I’ll be your tour guide for the week. There are all sorts of things that we’ll explore together: UFOs, my father’s poetry about Amish cashiers in Ohio, the time I almost went searching for Bigfoot in Washington State, why the Honeymooners is the best television show of all time, and some reflections from my time spent as the “ball crawl” guy at Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza when I was 18. Oh, and poetry.

For my first post, though, I wanted to talk about something important, something that doesn’t really get the attention it deserves. No, it’s not a post about the themes of supplication and resignation in the work of James and Franz Wright, but if you’d really like, I can post that as well or you can go searching for my Master’s thesis at The New School. What I’m talking about is perhaps the most beautiful, most perfect object in existence: the Wiffle Ball.

John Findura, Guest Blogger September 19-25 and Best American Poetry Launch Reading

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Useful Shrapnel (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nicel, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

In other news . . .

September 23, 2010, 7:00 PM. The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading at the New School (66 W 12th Street, NYC)  Guest Editor Amy Gerstler joins Series Editor David Lehman to introduce this stellar  line-up of poets: Sandra Beasley, Mark Bibbins, Peter Davis, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Lynn Emanuel, Elaine Equi, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn Greacen, David Lehman, Kimiko Hahn, Jeffrey McDaniel, Eileen Myles, Sharon Olds, Gregory Pardlo, James Richardson, David Shapiro, Gerald Stern, Dara Wier, Terence Winch and Matthew Yeager.   Doors open at 6:30 PM.  Free.  Details here.

Bloof books live blogs its road trip.  Details here.

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Paige Taggart

from To People Who Sometimes Read

A female blue whale calf gains nine pounds an hour. Holy fuck! What a mammal. If only all females could see past their own insecurities, the fire would light a higher maternal flame. The deep sea is ridiculously blue. I’ve been caught in a wave twice and was pulled from its drowning. How high the feeling of being full of water can be, knocking the wind from your lungs, giving you no option but to swallow. That’s how to be in love, to swallow all your pride and let your body sink into its capsizing existence. The blue whale’s heart is the size of a small car.

* * * 

Paige Taggart is the author of Won't be a Girl (Scantily Clad Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2010. Paige wrote, "To People Who Sometimes Read is a series in which I attempt to make language my bitch. I had exhausted my previous mode of writing, coinciding with a need to change my life. It was time to admit my “soulshame,” to allow myself to be vulnerable and more declarative, a befitting circumnavigation with my lifestyle transition. I was influenced immensely by two poet’s correspondence of email-poems that were both extremely personal and had mastered a certain building format that I wanted to build-off of myself. At one point I didn’t even believe in editing. I had said it’s like trying to train a mule to talk. But I now realize that part of my dream is to begin without perfection, in fact, the more chaotic, the more likely I am to hone-in. Oftentimes, I felt like I was trapped in a cave that only allows exit when the sea is at low tide, and frequently the sea was at high-tide but with my one-good-eye I was able to scratch lesions into the walls. I found a dog that wasn’t mine but fed it anyway for four days, then I responded to the posters that had been duct-taped to tree trunks. The number put me on the phone with a sheriff. He was out for blood but when I told him my story, he let me go. I think I care about writing poetry more than anyone else in the world."