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September 27, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008 @ 7:00 p.m.
July 3, 2008
November 21st @ 7 p.m. – Stain Bar – Williamsburg, Brooklyn
** Carnahan, Cassimassima, Grinnell, Lederer, Oberman, and Rohrer **
Special Musical Guest @ Intermission: Addenda
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Brooklyn resident Kerry Carnahan has co-authored and edited a number of publications, including the New York City High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines, Cool and Green Roofs, and Sustainable Urban Sites (forthcoming), and is working towards her MFA in poetry from CUNY-Hunter College.
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Christophe Cassimassima is co-editor of AMBIT : Journal of Poetry and Poetics and founder of Furniture_press in Baltimore. He hosts a monthly reading series in Baltimore at One West Cafe of the same name. Cassimassima’s chapbook Mov/ment[s] was released last October, and his book, The Proteus, appeared in early 2008. His work has also or will appear in Word For/Word, Generator, Eratio, X-Pressed, and Can We Have Our Ball Back?
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E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006) and Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks Leukadia (Trafficker Press, forthcoming 2008), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks, 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2004), and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 2000). She lives in Brooklyn and edits Litmus Press and its annual journal of poetry and translation, Aufgabe.
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Katy Lederer
Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, forthcoming 2008 ) as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003 and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year 2003.
Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and Isn’t It Romantic? (Verse Press), among other compilations.
Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine. Her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo (2001; 2004; 2005), MacDowell (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005-2006), and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Program.
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Matthew Rohrer is the author of five books, most recently RISE UP, published by Wave Books. He teaches at NYU in the creative writing program, and lives in Brooklyn.
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Miller Oberman was the 2005 recipient of Poetry Magazine’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship
and has recently had poems in Bloom Magazine, the Minnesota Review,
and Lilith. Miller lives in Brooklyn with Zero Oberman.
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SPECIAL INTERMISSION GUEST
While Addenda is just beginning, there’s a history. Dan Sofaer and Christopher Anderson first met when Christopher was the singer in the Washington, D.C. band Nine Men Are Suicides. After being musical director for the recording of the one song the band knew how to play (Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground), Dan went on to be a founding member of the Silence After and Christopher rejoined him in ’88 for the short-lived Hurricane Daisy, whose killer demo had Fugazi’s Don Zientara for its producer. After years in the wilderness, Dan reemerged as bassist in the San Francisco trio Giant Haystacks, and Christopher posted some Prince covers on MySpace. A chance note from Japan has reunited them, and they’re ready to bring the spirit to the letter.
You can find their music at myspace.com/addenda
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stain
766 grand street
brooklyn, ny 11211
(L train to Grand Street,
1 block west)
718/387-7840
open daily @ 5 p.m.
~~~~
Hosted by Amy King and Ana Bozicevic
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WOM-PO and Walt Whitman
May 3, 2008
In a scene dubbed “a bit too precious” by one reviewer, an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” makes an appearance in the excellent film, L.I.E., above.
And separately, I have been graciously granted, by Annie Finch, the Women’s Poetry Listserv moderator title that she has worn many years now:
The WOM-PO (Discussion of Women’s Poetry) List was started in December 1997 by Annie Finch with an invitation to a small group of poets, critics, and lovers of women’s poetry. These people in turn invited other people to join, and the list has grown gradually by spreading through these networks. In April 2008, Amy King succeeded Annie as List Moderator for WOM-PO. Discussion on the list covers women poets of all periods, aesthetics, and ethnicities. It has been characterized by its high caliber, relatively low volume, and openness to a diversity of aesthetic perspectives.
Thanks, Annie! And friendly interlopers, please feel free to join us!
~~~
The Coconut Overfloweth …
April 30, 2008
GO LOCAL: National Poetry Month x 10!
April 13, 2008
WHY: Eating, growing, and celebrating locally to find the world in a grain of Brooklyn and eternity in an hour or two!
WHEN: Friday, April 25th @ 7 p.m. – Sharp!
WHERE: Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
WHO: ~~ BANIAS ~~ BERRIGAN ~~ BOZICEVIC ~~ BRYANT ~~ DICKOW ~~ HOY ~~ KOCOT ~~ SMITH ~~ STARKWEATHER ~~ WILLIAMSON
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ARI BANIAS grew up in California, Texas, and Illinois. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches undergraduate creative writing and literature at Hunter College. His poems are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Literary Imagination, and FIELD, and have recently appeared in Mid-American Review (as a feature), Arts & Letters, and RealPoetik.
EDMUND BERRIGAN is the author of Glad Stone Children (Farfalla Press, 2008) and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of a forthcoming Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California).
ANA BOZICEVIC moved to NYC from Croatia in 1997. She’s the author of chapbooks Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). Look for her recent work in Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, absent, The New York Quarterly, Bat City Review, MiPOesias, Octopus Magazine and The Portable Boog Reader 2: An Anthology of NYC Poetry. Ana coedits RealPoetik.
TISA BRYANT is the author of Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000), which collages concerns of breast cancer, Barbados genealogy research, a Passover seder and a film by Yvonne Rainer, and her first book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from Eurocentric film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
ALEXANDER DICKOW grew up in Moscow, Idaho, traveled to France, got married to a French woman, studies French literature at Rutgers, and writes poems. His work has appeared in both Yankee and Hexagonal journals including MiPO, RealPoetik, Sitaudis, Il Particolare, Hapax, can we have our ball back? and others. A full-length bilingual collection, _Caramboles_, will be published by the Parisian press Argol Editions in October 2008. Alex currently lives in bucolic central New Jersey.
DAN HOY lives in Brooklyn and is an editor for SOFT TARGETS. His poetry chapbook, Outtakes, was published by Lame House Press in 2007.
NOELLE KOCOT is the author of 3 books of poems, 4 and The Raving Fortune, out from Four Way Books in 2001 and 2004, respectively, and Poem for the End of Time, out from Wave Books in 2006, of which the NY Times Book Review deemed the long title poem, “extraordinary.” She has won awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Fund For Poetry, The Academy of American Poets and The American Poetry Review, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, where she was born and raised, and teaches for a living. Her fourth book, Sunny Wednesday, will be published by Wave Books in spring, 2009.
JESSICA SMITH is the editor of Outside Voices Press, which publishes Foursquare magazine. She wrote a book called Organic Furniture Cellar. She maintains a blog that incites both hate mail and proposals. She recently moved to Brooklyn and is looking for a job.
SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is a small African village patrolled by dream-fed lions. They sway in the grasses when you move. His handwriting, which has been featured in several medical journals, strong-armed him into a life of asemic writing. He is the author of The Book of Sky, a wordless text published by anyone.
DUSTIN WILLIAMSON is the author of Heavy Panda (Goodbye Better), Gorilla Dust (Open24Hours Press), and Exhausted Grunts (Cannibal Books). He publishes Rust Buckle Books and is the current curator of the Zinc Talk Reading Series.
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766 Grand Street Brooklyn , NY 11211
(L train to Grand Street Stop, walk 1 block west)
718/387-7840
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“The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.” — Sydney Smith
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Happy Birthday, Amelia Earhart!
March 23, 2008
Indirectly related, I include two poems from Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart — And if you like these, you can find two more archived on my blog by clicking here:
Save Me Joe Louis
When I was small no one stopped the fights.
A man could beat you till you died,
the crowd leaning in, you on your knees,
maybe somewhere someone says, No,
but it’s like spoons dropping in kitchens:
enough to make someone look up,
not enough to get them moving.
The ref’s just glad it isn’t him
trying to stand, shading his face
like he’s coming out of the movies
into winter sun, shock of the world
made real again — brutal, to be sure,
but America is like that,
unrelenting, you get what you ask for
in the ring or on the kitchen floor.
Someone always wants you to give up,
shake hands, wipe the blood away and talk
of lighter things. And you do
because you’ve been fighting long enough
to know there’s no one here to save you.
——————-
A Word From the Fat Lady
It isn’t how we look up close
so much as in dreams.
Our giant is not so tall,
our lizard boy merely flaunts
crusty skin- not his fault
they keep him in a crate
and bathe him maybe once a week.
When folks scream or clutch their hair
and poke at us and glare and speak
of how we slithered up from Hell,
it is themselves they see:
the preacher with the farmer’s girls
(his bulging eyes, their chicken legs)
or the mother lurching towards the sink,
a baby quivering in her gnarled
hands. Horror is the company
you keep when shades are drawn.
Evil does not reside in cages.
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Weekend Tips
March 23, 2008
First, check out Linh Dinh’s “Pick Up Lines” video-poem above for obvious reasons. I’m a fan of the man and his poetry too. I was torn between posting this and another called, “The Mind’s G-Spot“. Dinh’s got his finger on the pulse. At least one of them …
p.s. I love the “…lather you with my swerved voice” and ” …behind the basement of your sternum/the spasm at the lower end of your esophagus/Come, let us lie down on the timothy …” mixed with those background announcements, as in the bargain of environments contrasting/complementing~
In other news, I’ll try to be at one or both of these events this weekend — meet me there?
~~~
A Glorious Celebratory Festival Of Brief Readings From Some Recently Published & Highly Awesome Chapbooks To be Followed By Revelry
Friday, 6:00 pm @ St. Mark’s Poetry Project
A group reading curated by Matthew Zapruder (author of American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), celebrating poetry from recently released award-winning and self-published chapbooks, featuring Dottie Lasky, Valzhyna Mort, Dan Chelotti, Kate Hall, Cindy King, Betsy Wheeler, Travis Nichols, Monica Fambrough, Lori Shine, Kathy Ossip, Cole Heinowitz and Stephanie Ruth Anderson. Note the early start time of this Friday night event! Bios: Dorothea Lasky is the author of three chapbooks: The Hatmaker’s Wife (Braincase Press, 2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series (along with poet, Michael Carr) and is pursuing her doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first full-length book, Awe, is due out from Wave Books in the fall of this year. Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her chapbook Favorites for Accordion was hand-made in spring 2006 in a couple of days for obscure reasons. Her first full-length collection of poems is coming out from Copper Canyon Press. Dan Chelotti’s chapbook, The Eights, was the winner of the 2006 PSA National Chapbook Fellowship. His poems can be found in Boston Review, Kulture Vulture, Tarpaulin Sky and other journals. He lives in Amherst, MA. Kate Hall lives in Montreal, where she co-edits Delirium Press chapbooks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and jubilat. Cynthia Arrieu-King is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati and an echocardiographer. Her chapbook The Small Anything City won the Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Contest for 2006. Betsy Wheeler’s poems have appeared in Forklift Ohio, The Hat, No Tell Motel, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pindeldyboz, Octopus, GutCult, Can We Have Our Ball Back and elsewhere. She is the author, with Dean Gorman, of Absolutely You. Co-editor of Pilot, and Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, she lives and writes in a little cottage in Lewisburg, PA. Lori Shine is the author of Coming Down in White (Pilot Books). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Canary, Conduit, Crowd, New AmericanWriting, and in Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. She works as Managing Editor of Wave Books and lives in western Massachusetts. Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Search Engine, which won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, Fence, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches poetry workshops at The New School, where she serves as Editor at Large for LIT. Cole Heinowitz is a poet and scholar. Her most recent chapbook is The Rubicon (A Rest Press, 2007). She teaches literature at Bard College. Her previous chapbook, Stunning in Muscle Hospital, came out in 2002 from Detour Press. She is currently at work on a book about the relationship between British Romantic poets and Latin American revolutionaries. Stephanie Anderson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Lit, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo. Her chapbook, In the Particular Particular, won the 2006 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest. She lives and works in New York City. Travis Nichols grew up in Ames, Iowa. A graduate of the University of Georgia and the University of Massachusetts, he now lives in Seattle where he works as a freelance writer. He has published four chapbooks: The Empirical Field (811 Books), I am Trying to Be A Good Horse (Katalanche Press), Iowa (Braincase Press), and See Me Improving (Po Bus Press), all of which can be purchased from him super cheap. With Katie Geha, he curated the visual art exhibition Poets on Painters, which recently opened at the Ulrich Gallery in Wichita, Kansas. Monica Fambrough was born in Mableton, Georgia and was schooled at the University of Georgia and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, Baffling Combustions, Filter, and Glitterpony. Black Beauty, published by Katalanche Press, is her first chapbook. She lives in Seattle.
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LANGUAGE POETRY & THE BODY: A PANEL
Panelists include: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Maria Damon, and Leslie Scalapino,
Moderated by Tim Peterson and erica kaufman
Saturday, May 12, 2007 — 3:45PM (sharp!)
Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
“He believed if the woman on the right moved over to the left he could place her into the frame where a meadow lay beyond her. But it did not work out that way.”
~Barbara Guest
“They ask her
what she’d think
if what she
thought was rock”
~Nathaniel Mackey
***
www.belladonnaseries.blogspot.com
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More music, via Stephanie King, not quite related to me. I love this song. Video soothes too. O, my heavy heavy, Fake Plastic Trees. I heart sentiment.
4 Responses to “Weekend Tips”
The Year of the Pig
March 22, 2008
Along with being a Leo, I was born in the Year of the Pig. While those aren’t pigs above, here’s some info:
The Pig is a fun and enlightening personality blessed with patience and understanding. People born under the sign of the Pig enjoy life and all it has to offer, including family and friends. They are honest and thoughtful and expect the same of other people. Pigs can be perceived as oblivious or gullible because they do care about others so much that they will do just about anything for a friend in need.
“Its better to give than to receive” would probably be the Pig’s motto. Pigs are more comfortable giving of their own time or attention than they are to ask others for it. They do not find asking for help an easy task and would rather carry the burden themselves. Pigs will do anything they can to maintain a sense of peace amongst family or friends. This can lead to a tendency to be taken advantage of, but Pigs basically forgive and forget everything. They are compassionate souls who simply want to keep the peace.
THE METAL PIG 1911 AND 1971
Outspoken and confident, Metal Pigs give 110% for everything they do. They throw themselves into relationships with others completely, sometimes to a fault. These Pigs are headstrong and diligent in the workplace, honest and caring in a relationship and trustworthy with everyone he meets unless given reason not to be. Metal Pigs usually give people more credit than they deserve but when challenged can be a hard nut to crack.
HEALTH
Pigs enjoy being around other people and so being alone for long periods of time can cause illness in a Pig. They also like to party and have a tendency to over do it at times. Because they do not get much exercise they also have a tendency to gain weight. A Pig’s stomach and intestines are prime spots for sickness because he tends to overindulge with food, alcohol or nicotine. In order to maintain a clean bill of health, Pigs should watch their diets, make sure they get enough vitamins and minerals each day and somehow work an exercise routing into their daily lives.
AT HOME WITH THE PIG
Pigs have comfortable, friendly homes that just invite you in. As much as they love company you can believe their homes are going to reflect materialistic gains. Pigs like to show off assets and pay close attention to their decorations in their homes. They can certainly make something out of nothing; however, they don’t make cleaning or chores a top priority.
CAREER AND FINANCE
THE PIG AT WORK
Pigs generally do really well when they get to be creative. They usually do better at jobs where they can express themselves. They are enthusiastic about taking on new responsibility at work and jump in to give a hand to colleagues in need. Pigs are well-liked by co-workers because are so willing to help and they have an eye for detail that makes them quite invaluable to upper management.
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
Pigs are great friends to have on your side. They will nurture you, care for you and make sure you have everything you need. In times of trouble, Pigs are genuine friends who will give you the shirt off of their backs if you need it. They entertain their friends and host parties as often as they can. Any chance to gather n a social setting is enough for a Pig to have a party and most of the time, he doesn’t really need an excuse to host one. They are loyal and good-natured, always willing to lend a hand or an ear.
But enough about me. Not all of the above holds true for me, and I’m sure much of it holds true for many people who weren’t born in the Year of the Pig. This post was originally meant to be a celebratory one for Sandra Simonds and her capybara connections. Did you know, Sandra, that there is a Capybara Dance? Better yet, watch one of these very large rodents get pet and squeal in ecstasy:
You May Say So Myself
March 20, 2008
Ladies, there is no neutral position for us to assume.
* Gertrude Stein, Libretto for the opera The Mother Of Us All by Virgil Thomson (1947), from Last Operas and Plays (1949)
Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.
* Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”
The Dessert of the Year
January 1, 2006
Is an Italian tiramisu finished with a not-too-nutty Frangelico. Bene appetite~
the stain of poetry 
May 9th, 2007 at 5:34 am ei will be at the bruce andrews event, it seems like a winner
May 10th, 2007 at 1:04 am eNeat videos. Linh Dinh’s was eery, much of this
anthro-bubble of thought space.
May 11th, 2007 at 2:17 am e“The Mind’s G-spot” is even more of a hoot the 2nd watching.
Finger on the pulse, indeed. Fingers in the mind…L.D. eyes,
flying thorough the mind. Fly on the gray wrinkled wall.
Linh Dinh is truly a Psycho-Physicist of the electronic emosphere!
May 12th, 2007 at 5:14 pm eSee you there, Patrick!
And Jim, indeed, Dinh’s poem vids are something to spend time with, for the comedic and for the politic!