City of Asylum-- Jazz Poetry Concert Sept 12th

I’m usually frustrated by the collaboration between musical performers and poets. Often the music is relegated to a mere background role, a vamping behind the words. Much better is when the two sounds are on even terms, when they influence each other: it’s at that point when something new emerges. That “new thing” emerged a few times last Saturday at City of Asylum’s annual Jazz Poetry Concert, as it did for Amanda Fadgen, who did a sign-language reading of one of  Heather McHugh’s poems. Vijay Iyer and Oliver Lake played jazz behind Amanda as she signed Heather’s poem, and the fusion of their sound and her movement, and the natural fusion of ASL between motion and language, collaborated in a way arriving at a sort of heightened dance.

City of Aslyum had set up a big white tent next to the National Aviary for the event; a light rain drizzled outside. The evening started off with about an hour-long performance from the Vijay Iyer Trio and followed with several Jazz/Poetry collaborations. Not all of them worked; but the idea did come through for Terrance Haye’s performance, which I’d like to talk about.

Terrance understands a crucial fact about poetry: it cannot, by the casual audience member, be taken seriously. To this end follows Terrance’s masterful poetic voice- at all times when he reads he deals with a troubled sincerity, a slight leaning-back from the honesty many poets make use of, a position which matches the off-kilter images and premises of his work. When he read last Saturday, he introduced his poems as “weird poems”- a kind of warning, a humor to help the audience accept the strangeness of the liberty with language that they were about to hear. What makes Terrance great is the way that these images and premises explode into sincerity: see the aunt from Hayes’ “The Carpenter Ant” who knocks holes into her walls like a carpenter- strange, almost joking metaphor made into sincerity.

The jazz behind Terrance, however, functioned to give his voice from the start a credence that allowed him to shed that premise of humor almost immediately, almost completely. His voice acquired a quality of song; there was an understanding that something as complex and strange as jazz was unashamedly the focus of his work. For me that moment achieved a kind of breakout goal of poetry, to become not the poem anymore, but to instead become something hard to ignore- in the same way that jazz can stop being just discordant noise and tune everyone in into something greater.

Other memorable pieces of the evening: Aja Monet’s reading (last line: “When we were children, we were told to believe in the santuary of peace. They should have told us it was war”), some of Vijay Trio's Jazz, and the reading with some guy in a white jumpsuit standing on his head while slow-frame black-and-white videos of gymnasts played along with the jazz and some light projections. There was also a moment when the event coordinators asked us to hold up our programs, which each bore the name of a persecuted, possibly murdered, writer. At first I felt distanced, but as they photographed us holding up all of those names they played a quote from some writer, and I felt moved: “language has the ability to change the world, and it is for this reason alone that small minds seek to silence it”. Somewhat self-aggrandizing, I know, but it drove the point home. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Beat Poetry Festival Comes To Pittsburgh

How'd the Beat Festival go? George Wallace was good, and Russ Green was ok. Jim Deuchars hosted, he had some good stuff himself. It was two nights, first at East End Book Exchange, second at Brillobox. The second night they had an electronic artist ("allinaline") mixing music from a miniature synth to accompany the poets.

Nothing seemed too surprising. I feel like the legacy of the beats lives on in more or less every poet I see in Pittsburgh, from the New Yinzers to the more formal small press people. Everyone has influences from that "beat" tradition: straightforward narration, confessional attitude, heightened examination of the brutal everyday, a casual veering between singing and talking-- pretty universal stuff.

This all to say when the "beats" came out and showed us their stuff, it wasn't anything we hadn't seen before. Not that the material itself was supposed to be fresh; e.g. The Mad Muse read Shakespeare to start her sets off. In doing this she claimed a kind of diplomatic function: "at some point in my life I was trying to bring literature to the drunks." Well, all the poets I know drink, it's not surprising given the modernist/beat/man-of-the-world stereotype, which I think is unfortunate: using the self-image of a writer to encourage drinking seems short-sighted at least.

So the beat poet festival: nothing new, although we shouldn't have expected anything new. The beats _are_ alive today in Pittsburgh, go drink with Baldinger et. al. if you can find the rock they're under. George Wallace of course was excellent throughout and he brought some real N.Y. talent to Pgh for those past few nights.

I was able to record some blurry-quality videos of the Brillobox event. The audio should be ok:

Mad Muse reading a section from Shakespeare's "As You Like it".

George Wallace reading "Jazz is My Religion":

From the videos you can see the kind of performance value these people brought to the stage. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Worst Case Ontario*

So: Worst Case Ontario is a group of poets from Canada, primarily Toronto, who will be touring around the northeastern seaboard for the last ten days of August. We in Pittsburgh were fortunate enough to see them over at Dan McCloskey's house, The Cyberpunk Apocalypse, last night.

WCO is composed of four or five poets, Jessica Bebenek, JC Bouchard, dalton derkson, JM Francheteau, and Julie Mannell. They all read for about five minutes each in the back room of the Apocalypse. If you had to ascribe an overall genre to their work you could say: "bourgeoisie/hip psychologically realistic lyric poetry"; but I'm not making much of an effort here. There was a range of work, almost all of it was good, it was worth checking out.

What was important: a group of young poets, all at least competent, successfully touring. They were Kickstarted, some $4000, which I heard is going mostly to gas, not alcohol. This is what is known as "proof of concept": if you have a few poet friends you can apparently tour, like a punk rock group, and distribute your chapbooks around the country, although you'll probably lose cash on it. WCO has, indeed, even received some media attention, probably because of the novelty of their trip.

We went to a bar after they read and, full disclosure, I got some hugs. I appreciated the chance to reach out to some young and (perhaps characteristically for canada) friendly poets; the most notable thing I learned of was the canadian system for art grants, wherein it's possible to get funded by the state if you jump through some hoops. I have to reapply for my passport, but I'm strongly considering a trip to visit Toronto/Montreal, where I hear the girls are pretty.
--poetryburgh@gmail.com

their website: http://worstcaseontario-tour.tumblr.com/

*origination of w.c.o: rickyism for "worst case scenario"; ricky is a character on the nova-scotia based show "trailer park boys". pertinent to this is the fact that only one out of the five tour members has a valid driver's licence (dalton).

UPDATE: I ADDED SOME NOTABLE MOMENTS:

JM reading a WWE poem, about a wrestler who cut himself with a razor, who flicked the cuts to produce blood. He then compares the cuts to african watering holes, complete with tse tse flies.

Julie Mannell read a short story about bad sex education, and how it lead to a vore-like imagined scenario wherein a man physically would climb up into her body, which was far more touching than gross.

JC's poetry, short potent and strangely natural imagery, him "fucking the wind", growing antlers, etc.

dalton had an excellent poem in the chapbook (which he did not read :`( ) investigating the psychology of men who are opposed to feminism, ending on an excellent image reversing the word "bitch":

the dogs have found the opposable
thumbs sunk in the deep end of the gene pool:
figured out how to work
the latches in the backyards.

Jessica had good stuff also. Ok BYEE

The Pink & Shiny Party @ Modernformations

I think Sarah B. Boyle flashed me the horns after she read… we were talking about how she used gumballs as a poetic image for her aborted fetus, and how she uh, provided real gumballs at her event. I think she gave me a little “devil’s horns” hand symbol when I brought up the connection. It was at this point that I thought of the word “hardcore”. I thought this whole event was actually very “hardcore”.

Much like some kind of perverted candy, the soft, pink, & shiny exterior of Sarah B. Boyle’s poetry contains a rock-hard, tooth-cracking center.

An example line:

"The curette scrapes the uterus clean.
It is a parfait spoon with a scalpel edge."

The center of Boyle’s new chapbook, What’s Pink & Shiny / What's Dark & Hard, is an abortion, which isn’t new subject matter for poetry, but it managed that night to become new. I think it was the reading: Sarah spoke with a lilting, almost innocent manner which gave an artificially to her performance which, for me, translated into tactics. That seeming incongruence between center and exterior gave Boyle's work power: the disastrous became everyday, the grotesque was cute, and even if it was tongue-in-cheek it was unflinching: the experience was exactly as serious, exactly as humorous, as it deserved to be.

Boyle also read a “Golden Shovel” poem, in the style of Terrance Hayes, wherein the last word of every line is anagrammatically taken from a sentence. Boyle’s chosen sentence was an off-the-cuff public sexist remark by a Republican partisan: “I can look out in the crowd, I kinda have Fox X-ray vision, and I can see that some of you women, you don't even know it yet, but you're pregnant.” In the resulting poem, Boyle explored the rapacious reasoning behind this statement with sensual and lyrical language which had the guts to move beyond caricature. The result was very funny, sounded , and exposed a kind of crazy heart to the politician's logic, an animal romance: cutting to the bone.

Margaret Bashaar also read some excellent poems and Adam Gibson, Boyle’s brother, played a few songs on his guitar. Brandt Dykstra was painting on a pink canvas on the back of the stage for the entirety of the event. Along with the gumballs a pink creamcheese-and-chocolate-chips cake was served, and was delicious. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Girls Get Lit @ Bayardstown Social Club: Impressive & Good

Bayardstown Social Club: down Penn Avenue, in the Strip District; late twenty/thirtysomething folx; lots of beards. Campfire smoke, cigarette smoke, sounds of passing trains, weird howling industrial alarm in the distance, plentiful beverage and snacks. I had no cash but I got some dogs and even a beer. We were protected from the smattering of rain by a plastic canopy.

The place was packed, had to edge past people at their respective picnic tables. Host Stephanie Brea was gracious and alternated fiction readers and poets in a successful attempt to keep everyone engaged. There was a large wooden stage with a quality public address system. Reading were: Taylor Grieshober, Angele Ellis, Christine Stroud, Deena November and Jessica Simms.

Well folks this was a great event. 5/7 on the Peter Scale*. I had never heard Deena November before despite my trying; she had even started a reading series at my local cafe, The Staghorn, but I could never make it (I work Saturdays!). Well the good news is Deena is a pretty good poet, probably Up There in my little personal Pittsburgh Poet Hierarchy. She read from her semi-infamous chapbook Dickwad, which codified relationships to men using things such as nicknames for their dicks, along with poems about her motherhood experience. All the poems were absorbing and rich with the stained details of life, played the field between scatological humor and deep and painful truth, just great.

Scatology was a kind of running theme of the night; female authors using grotesque images to pull the audience in. Taylor Grieshober had a story exploring the more bodily consequences of a breakup: the line that got me was when the main character (who, the author kept reminding the audience, was not Taylor) was fucking her boyfriend for the last time, and the boyfriend stopped and said "that he couldn't do this anymore" and then "thrust one last time, like an exclamation point" (paraphrased). Jessica Simms of The Haven, the group that organized the event, I believe, had a great scene in her story where she described the corpse of a 5-year old who had been mauled by a wolf.

Christine Stroud presented some fine poems and Stephanie read her own work, which was for the most part the same as what she read at the closing of Hem's Summer Reading Series, which I liked. Good event all around, great success, I hope there are more readings at the Bayardstown Social Club. After it was over people lit a giant stump on fire and pounded nails in it with a hammer.
--poetryburgh@gmail.com



*(formerly the Liam scale or "Liam Ratio"; but I don't feel comfortable using Liam's name. Refers to the common fraction of one good poem/body of work out of every seven. In this case the fraction was closer to 5/7)

Biddle's Escape: Uppagus

Ha, ha.
Having some trouble here, folks.
Getting kind of disillusioned. Well,
depressed. Frankly.
I mean I've got some good ideas, about poetry. Same as it ever was. But still!
Things are not going so well... I suppose
it's up to me to change. Change it.
If you wanna externalize it, you can. It's
the same outside as in the inside.
I'm pretty close to putting out a chapbook.
Just give me a few days.
I just need to purchase some paper
and ink. And lay it out,
I guess in a pilfered edition of
Adobe InDesign.
It's pretty easy.
Well I know how to use it.
I trained myself.
Well,,,,


Have to redesign some of my goals.
Restructure some of my goals for poetry.
Thinking about that kinda thing. Met
Jenson Leonard again last night,
over at the Uppagus Reading at
Biddle's Escape. There were
three or four readers, not counting
the open mic, mostly featuring
poetry I feel all blasé about, standouts were:
Rina Ferrarelli who as an older Italian woman I thought was a convincing reader. Convincing, meaning, "authentic", she had poems about Italian ingredients and a skill with composition and a dignity which I think ended up dealing with issues of race and immigration. Jenson's work, being the millennial contribution, was an associational pop-culture referencing verse I ascribed in conversation with him to the Beats, probably because Jenson mentioned the Beats, along with Lil B. He read in a low measured monotone. We talked about poetry, really I approached Jenson as a kind of person who'd be willing to talk to me about "young poetry"; I keep seeing him at events and this is the first time I've known he was a poet. Anyway interesting point was that Jenson said that "Liam Swanson says that about one out of every seven poems, or bodies of work, is what he would consider 'good'" and I've been thinking about that.

It's my dream to be somewhere where there's lot of poetry which "[I] would consider good." Maybe throw that out. I mean, at this point, I've figured out that place is Academia, which is not super hard to move to, for myself. Jenson talked about this too, if briefly; "Academia champions poetry and preserves it but keeps it to itself" (paraphrased). But, you know, even if there's this ivory tower, there has to be a crop of MFA's poets around somewhere, reading, I guess, they could even be poets who have studied independently enough to be MFA-quality, sure. There probably is.

"There probably is" like there's not those MFA people in Pittsburgh. For the record we do have Terrance Hayes, this guy Paul Cunningham, and a bunch of the older folx around who've been reading at Hemingway's who probably have degrees too. There's also many readers who are good and talented without the academic qualifications... the new Yinzer crowd, although I guess I'm not one to say how degree'd everyone is anyway. The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, headed up by Jennifer Jackson Berry, just started up, with the intention of being "quality print journal to highlight and celebrate the best of Pittsburgh poetry and it's many groups". I've got a longstanding "feud" with JJB, my fault, because of what I wrote about her on this blog, so I may have shot myself in the foot here, as she pointed out to me, at the time.

Journey of coming to accept and love something vs. create something new subtheme/only theme to this blog. Is there poetry anywhere that's acceptable (outside of academia, and maybe Pressure Press Presents)?. What I'm looking for is read poetry, poetry that's spoken out loud, that's cool, and that's frequent. Hopefully better than the 1/7 Liam ratio. Stonecutter Journal (and to a lesser extent, Apogee) has a better trash:treasure ratio, I've found, in my exploits... But I've got no cash so I can't buy more Stonecutters. Click the button below to donate. --poetryburgh

TERRANCE HAYES, J. BALDINGER, and many more of the 30-something new yinzer-ish poets in THE LAST HEMINGWAY'S OF THE SUMMER

Gegick, Baldinger, Silsbe, Korn, Matcho, & me, and one or two other people, drinking in the back room of Hemingway's... after everyone left, the waitress had come in, sprayed some Comet on the tables... we plugged in the dome hockey game and went at it... eventually people started talking about the syphilis outbreak in McKeesport, or some place like that... Conversations about the area of Pittsburgh outside of the "V", places you'd go to if you had a car... Later in bed, I'm too drunk to sleep, too hot to sleep... innumerable nightmares, can't stop composing everything I think into lines... immersed in lyricism....

T. Hayes spoke to a group of probably 200 people in the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. Terrance has a lot of charm and panache, and his poems are good too. Most notable perhaps was the lullabye he initially declined to sing, despite the crowd's urging; the simple song recounted the tale of a young boy killing a blackbird with a rock, and how the song of the blackbird lived on in the boy, who whistled it to himself as he went home (this last part of the song, describing the boy whistling, was the part Terrance sang). It was a startling metaphor for racial politics executed in a manner more mundane than I've ever seen from Hayes, who usually has long poems which employ a range of devices to weave often complex messages often about race; to see him do something as simple as a lullabye prefigured a sea change, to my mind.

Spent about an hour tooling around in the Carnegie Library before I walked over to Hem's... I had gotten there too late to sit with any of my friends, so I had to balance myself in a chair with the back knocked out, next to some lady who started having a loud cell phone conversation halfway through the reading and had to be escorted out by the decorous Joan Bauer. This was the last Hemingway Summer Reading Series of the summer, so there was occasion for occasion... Jimmy Cvetic kept reminding all the open mic-ers that they could take as much time as they want. And he spent time honoring Joan, who played an integral part of the reading series and I think practically every poetry group I've been a part of this year... she was honored with a special award from the Pittsburgh Poetry Society.

Jimmy himself had a good piece he read after all the readers, a poem in response to the shooting of one of his students from the "police academy for kids" that he runs... a poem decrying everything from guns to gay marriage, mostly just saying "no more [x], no more [y]", ending with him describing a meteor coming down and destroying the earth. Had that level of cynicism that for Jimmy is nothing less than true passion, a police cynicism that looks like cynicism but is in truth honesty. I took a moment to have everyone congratulate and thank Jimmy for running the series, which has been going for "40 years" as I said, although I'm not 100% sure that's the exact correct number of years.

The readers? Baldinger, Korn, Silsbe, et. al., those "30-something" (my estimation) PGH poets who Jimmy introduced as "masters of jackoffery". Their shit's the good shit, I like to think, all that New Yinzer-era labor poetry which is often about Pittsburgh and drinking and personal pain and waitresses. Standout was probably John Korn, who full disclosure is an friend of mine (you might have seen me write a review of one his books) who had a bunch of his semi-surreal/comic poetry about such things as talking to a waitress about astronauts who had claimed to see UFOs and then digging out your eyeball, putting the eyeball in a glass of water, and asking the waitress to drink the water with the eye in it so you can see inside her. Jimmy even went so far as to bring John back up for the final reading, Jimmy saying "I recognize good poetry"; so congratulations to John for that. Other standout was Stephenie Brea who had some seriously audacious poems about an abortion and a female coal miner who had to tolerate the sexual abuse of her coworkers. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

FOR THE RECORD YOU CAN GET ESSENTIALLY EVERY HEMINGWAY'S READING EVER ON THEIR SITE, EVERY READING HAS BEEN RECORDED, INCLUDING ALL THE POEMS I HAVE EVER TALKED ABOUT http://hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com/ SEE JIMMY CVETIC'S "CHICKEN DINNER": http://www.kostany.com/hemingwayspoetryseries/2015-07-28/Jimmy%20Cvetic%20Reads%20Winner%20Winner%20Chicken%20Dinner.mp3

POETRYBURGH IN NEW YORK

Well it's true you may have heard the rumors but your good old pal Poetryburgh spent the last couple of days in the good old city of NYC. What was I doing? The New York City Poetry Festival, dear reader, held on Goverener's Island, in a big sandy field, just a ferry ride away from Manhattan. What happened there? There were 3-5 simultaneous stages of poetry, and it was possible to stand at a point in the field where you could hear all of them at the same time. The event occured 11-5 Saturday and Sunday, with 30 minute blocks of time for each registered group of readers: that's 6 x 2 x (3-5) /.5 = 72-120 differentt poetry groups, all under the same tent, so to speak (there was no tent, only: a beer tent).

How was about the poetry? Well, I wasn't impressed by most of it. That's to be expected I suppose: the majority of any group isn't going to be by nature higher quality than the norm. What's significant here is that my PGH norm for poetry isn't all that different from my newly aquired NY norm, i.e. my opinion of PGH poetry in general isn't worse than what I saw in New York. In fact, the quality of the average PGH poem may be a little higher (a bias on my part, perhaps?) The other thing is that there was enough poetry a the festival to create a competitive market. People were screaming, putting on masks, just trying their damndest to be noticed and have their work get out there. This means that more people were doing schlocky things like masks etc. but it also means there was a sustained desire on everyone's part to do their best; the audience could walk away from any stage at any time and go to a different one so there was a "battle of the bands" effect. The other advantage of a teeming ecosystem of poets was that your critic could pick and choose, take sides, play favorites, essentialy have a greater selection of poetry to work with than what is offered in PGH.

So the big question: am I going to move to New York? Well, I've been less excited about the idea, after visiting, than I usually have been. It's not the city itself: everyone was nice, the subways are great, etc. I think it's that my big idea of New York as a "poetry mecca" has been deflated a bit... Not to say that I necessarily saw everthing the city had to offer on my trip, just that: I wasn't so inspired, you know? It's always good to get context for your dreams not just because you can begin to make them real but also because you are able to release some of the ambition's disorienting pull, idealize a little less. Not to say that I've given up on my dreams... I talked to a lot of the festival people, as I am talking to everyone, about my goals and ideas for poetry... Some of them told me that in lieu of moving I should just start something up in Pittsburgh.  The idea of a Poetryburgh review or /house or /reading series has been kicking around my head for a while... if I was a little more ambitious, maybe I could get something like that started....


POETRYBURGH'S PICKS FROM NYC:
Noelle Benau / Betty Red[?] .. soundcloud.com/derytteb
Tommy Pico .. heyteebs.tumblr.com
Jay Deshpande .. [Book forthcoming From Yes Yes Press]
Danniel Schoonebeek .. dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com
Apogee Journal
Stonecutter Journal
[not such a long list, huh?? My fault or the city's? I have to admit I find one way more likely] --poetryburgh@gmail.com

STEVE ROGGENBUCK & CO. @ BIG IDEA

Steve Roggenbuck, of "national fame" as I keep telling my friends, read at the Big Idea Book Store last night along with four other readers- Paul Cunningham, Savonna Johnson, Liam Swanson, and Becca Cobetto. Becca, Liam, Savonna, Paul: all competent poets, although for me the standout was Liam who kept lying about the number of poems he had left, but had several great poems, including one where he describes feeling like a horse and kicking himself naked in a room in a way that did not feel at all chintzy or innocent. Common theme was either insects or ghosts: Paul sans hockey mask did his pitcher plant poems again, and Savonna and Liam both mentioned bees, Liam at length. Liam also talked about ghosts, and so did Becca; all of her poems were about Spirits and Hell and The Devil etc.

Steve Roggenbuck read at least for half an hour if not forty-five minutes; the majority of his time was not spent reading, however. Steve talked, and with his air of celebrity, we all hung on; he talked about the moon, veganism, "life hacks" etc. At one point I told him to stop talking and read a poem and everyone laughed and looked me and Steve said "you don't know what a poem is!"

The environment was comparable to a childhood sleepover where, drowned with languor, you enter a space beyond what is normal with your friends; it was intimate and anything anyone said became funny. Steve took polls on the crowd over how many bananas people had eaten in one day, and whether or not we personally connected to the cookout scenes from "The Fast and the Furious"; the statement we were to rate our reliability to was "i feel nostalgic for the barbeque scenes in the fast and furious movies as if they were from my own life." This line is a title to one of Steve's poem's- the poem itself more of a story than a poem, is Steve's take, even though it's lineated: the story/poem follows the life of "duncan" who "is a fucker" and says things like "no, i hate your dad... he spray-painted my camper with 'WHO IS RON PAUL' during the 2008 election.. and i still don't forgive him!!" (sic.) Steve's book "Calculating How Big Of A Tip To Give Is The Easiest Thing Ever, Shout Out To My Family & Friends" is all like this, filled to the brim with internet language and memes and new sarcasm. In Steve's arms, in his persona when he reads it, it comes alive in this gripping popular way- Steve, for instance, says "hehe" a lot in his poems stories and in person pronounces it as one word, the same way, every time, for all of his different characters saying it, connoting a kind of mischievous disregard for literary/language conventions as well as whatever the phrase is applied to.

I gotta ask, was occasionally during the reading seriously embroiled in the question of whether or not Steve is being intentional. In the same mold as John Mortara last week, I wondered: how hard has he worked to achieve this cute and silly brand of internet self-awareness? It seems natural... I keep using the phrases "childhood" or "popular" or "sleepover" because the wheelhouse of Steve Roggenbuck is the same humor that was popular in public school and has kind of infiltrated young contemporary poetry through the (now dead) Alt-Lit scene... It's impossible to call it "mature" because no one can be "mature" when they're giggling over a poop joke. Somewhat fair to call it "crude" because the work itself embodies definitions of crudeness: "in a natural or raw state; not yet processed or refined" or "constructed in a rudimentary or makeshift way" (to wit: the uncorrected spelling mistakes, typical of such as internet chat dialogue).

But it would be a mistake to rate Steve's work as low-quality or unimportant; it is a raw and serious power involved when you've got a room full of people absorbed in your poems! Steve might call this "boost", I would claim, if I understood the term as he uses it online; and although Steve's performance was in content and format often something more like a comedy act than a reading there was a sense of something greater at work, and not just because of Steve's celebrity. Steve had a liberal politics he would bring up but I don't think this is where we ended up, listening to him; I feel like mostly what was portrayed was a voice for the young generation of the audience; Steve himself jokingly pointed this out (about viz. "Calculating How Big..."): "relatable titles- captures the zeitgeist!" During his reading I think we were all able to return to the place that voice came from- sort of an ironic hysteria, everyone laughing at the baby-like language coming out of the poet's mouth, and him, too, laughing, to the point where it was occasionally hard for him to finish. Despite the ostensible flippancy of the spirit that Steve captures, Steve heightened it to a level of communion. And where else for nuance but in spiritual experience?--poetryburgh@gmail.com

Last Runaway Studios / Hay Street Reading Series ft. Me

Runaway Studio's last in their monthly Verse Sessions, open mics featuring mostly young poets, happened last night, at the tail end of a full day of performances at Andy McIntyre and Sadie Shaof's studio, home, and roof. Decorating the spaces at Runaway Stuidos were the remnants of the space's last art show: plaster sculptures, photographs with holes burned in them, large plastic sheets with drawings of naked bodies.

I showed up at 5:30, in time to catch the first half of Andy's play, entitled "Memories of One Night Stands" (paraphrased). This took place in Andy and Sadie's presumable bedroom, with the audience crowding the small space. The two actors in the play moved back and forth on the bed, went to the bathroom (and simulated bathroom sounds) danced to music, and discussed their relationship in broad, abstract terms. On the wall of the bedroom were written large words having something to do with the individual's context in society. It took about 10 minutes, and Andy stood in the corner DJ'ing the various musical tracks.

The second half of the play was stage read, with Andy calling out occasional stage directions that the actors didn't have to perform. This happened about three or four hours later, during the Verse Session part of the evening, in the large warehouse-like space of Runaway Studios (it was previously a sign-making factory, as the equipment in the basement still evidences). In between these two halves of the play I had somewhat dangerously biked down Penn Avenue semi-intoxicated with only one working brake all the way to the Hay Street Reading Series in Wilkinsburg, where I was slated to read. Kelsey Leach and Whitney Hayes run the series, and they had produced another lively crowd of about twenty people, many of them Chatham grad students. Readings that night prominently featured Kinsley Stocum and Sarah Shotland who talked about video games and prison, respectively.

Kinsley Stocum was great because she was able to pull off the difficult challenge of talking about such an ingrown subject as video gaming while still being relatable enough to perform a sincere emotional effort. My favorite line: "I lose control of the sticks, my gun's spinning towards the sky" (paraphrased). Sarah Shotland was good because she explored the somewhat taboo effects of a woman in prison, her being a jailhouse educator; she recognized the danger that she herself brings. "I'm a tick filled up with the outside and everyone wants me to land on their toe".

After I biked all the way back up Penn Avenue more drunk with still one brake and only one working light, I was able to return to Runaway Studios just in time for the the poetry of the collected readers. Every performer had something to say about Runaway Studios as preamble to their work; Jacob Mays and Daniel Jones Vincent and Carla (last name unrecorded) gave particularly impassioned speeches about how the Studio was a magical place that made a huge difference, how it was even like a family to some of them. All of this was somewhat and saddingly ironic to me, dear reader, because if you've been following my blog you know that my largest goal is to find a poetic community.

I've been a few times to the Verse Sessions before and was always unimpressed; and it's for that reason I haven't spent as much time as  could there. I think my grinch's heart for poetry grew size or two last night, though. It was indescribably hot in the Studio and there was no AC; everyone was fanning themselves with their poems to cool down. I had stayed up the previous night to revise the work I read at Hay St and was falling asleep during the musical performances; but for the poetry I stayed up. It wasn't "better" than it usually was but I started to want to stop using the metric "better" to describe anyone's work after a while. I was rooted in my seat, slowly detoxing and then retoxing with alcohol, after midnight with 15 other people who all knew each other, and as Carla pointed out, "we all stink, and I love it." Some guy came up to read a poem by Yates, "Adam's Curse" and I was taken by the performance; he read with such a slow and quiet strength:
"That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon." --poetryburgh@gmail.com

EX3: john mortara, dan mckloskey & some guy with a hockey mask

Really excellent reading, part of the John Mortara book tour. John Mortara delivered their work at first without paper in a loud busk, with almost a nervousness, and he invited the audience to applaud in order to make him feel more comfortable. John's poetry for the most part as I read it had a kind of jovial sarcasm and playfulness which when read out loud had a seriousness John lent to it, a feeling that they had spent a lot of time with what you might consider frivolous admissions. They had a long love poem which compared their love to segments of the Terminator and Alien movies. It was good, and very funny, while still being sincere and true: "Unfortunately, my love can not self-terminate, so you will have to push the button that lowers it into the lava." (parapharsed).

The first reader was hockey-mask guy, Paul Cunningham, who donned a custom-made hockey mask which matched the picture on the back of his chapbook, "Goal/Tender Meat/Tender." This chapbook was designed to talk about the experience of cannibalism during procreation, that of the female Praying Mantis, as re-enacted in a hockey rink. Paul wore a Penns shirt; apparently he has just moved in to Bloomfield, which is great, because he was good- the guy's an MFA from Notre Dame, and has that literary training to put together complex sound poems which have overarching and well-thought out theses played through them. I did get a sense of the cannibalism/procreation thing when he read, through a series of harsh, short, and even sexy explosive language, delivered convincingly through the mask. Masks have always had this Noh Theater thing for me where I get the sense that the point of the mask is to externalize the acting, for the mask to rule over the actor and for the actor to drive it, like a mecha; to create a pictoral representation of something other than (just) a human face. That thesis, the mask as a performance tool, played out well. Paul also had a few poems in the same fast-paced-percussive-but-well-measured manner about things like a toxic lake in china/ pitcher plants.

Dan McCloskey is writing Lesser-Known Predator short stories every time he is asked to read; last time he had a wig and pretended to write a letter onstage to act out his character, an old lady beset by lobsters. This time he just invited us to close our eyes, but said we didn't have to if that made us feel nervous. Like all the stories in the series this one was very good, had that gut-punch following the long drawn out anticipation that good short stories can do; it was about a woman who had a tunnel to some underground caves in her basement.

What made me nervous was the conversation I had afterward with Dan. Not the first, but the second, which happened after his s/o Sarah invitied me to talk to Dan about the history of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse. The C.A. house "began" in 2006, didn't start having artists until 2008. Dan invited me to start my own artist's collective, and I told him about my plans to move to New York, and that's when I freaked out. I was standing on a streetcorner afterwards, out of the rain, and cursing myself and talking to myself, and I ended up writing poems on the backs of the books I had bought, which was good. What freaked me out, I think, was just talking to Sarah and Dan about my hopes and dreams, "how I wanted my life to be about art." They got it, were understanding, and there was nothing wrong about what I said; but some invisible barrier had been crossed, for me, and now I was asking them for help. Why was that a problem? I'm always running from the things I desire most... understandable...

R/B Mertz also read and had some excellent poems about the police, suggesting maybe the thing that they too should do is grieve --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Why do I only like live poetry?

Good point. I don't know.

Maybe it's the personality that the physical people bring?
Maybe it's the crowd which tolerates it?
Maybe it's the sound? And the reading?

Better yet, the question, what makes written poetry so intolerable (to me)?
Ed Orchester had a poem about this:
"I hate it too...
The arch writing
The endless self reference
The obscure meanings"
(heavily, heavily paraphrased)
I think he was referring to all poetry,
even the spoken stuff. He mentioned
"open mics":
"imagine the longest most intolerable open mic you've ever been to"
(this in comparison to the artistic work of the emperor Niro)

I think the things I like about spoken poetry,
the ability to challenge me, the kind of terrifying, outspoken, original work,
is not what I look for in written work.
Like with all media, I need it to be absorbing,
or I stop reading/watching/looking.
I only trust that which has an immediate appeal.
When I'm at someone's live reading, I can't leave.
I can stop listening, with my immediate attention, and I can think about something else, like my ex-girlfriends.
But some part of me is always listening. And there are often moments where I'm not listening and I'm
pulled back in.
"Hooks."
Like when Ed Orchester said the quote above about Open Mics. I had to start listening.
Sometimes, the whole set is unignorable,
like with Jimmy Cvetic on Tuesday, who used a bizarre range of
multimedia and messages within his work,
spoke with such a heightened conviction that for me,
who knew Jimmy, a relatively calm guy I thought at all times,
I had to watch. When a poet has "hooks"
I have to pay attention. I suppose,
that's the trouble with written work...
it might have "hooks", but because I'm not actually there,
no part of me has to keep on listening when there's no "hook" and so I climb out of the pond altogether.
--poetryburgh@gmail.com

Hemingways: Night of 7/7, Michael Wurster, Judith Volmer, Terrance Hayes, Ed Orchester, Jimmy Cvetic

T. Hayes reads "Arbor for Butch" and a poem from How To Be Drawn, the one about having 192 kids with 192 women from the 192 nations of the world. Terrance, with like a wave of people behind him as he sits in the audience, seems like a celebrity, must deal with people after the event is over as if he were a celebrity. I got a chance to read in front of him, and drunk(-ish), I felt a powerful giving-over of myself while I read, as if inspired... After, as I squeezed past him to get back to my seat, I did not meet Terrance's eyes... I was able to restrain myself.
I was sitting in the inside corner of Hemingway's bifocals-shaped back room, unable, without leaning in front of my neighbor's presumable line of sight, to see the poets, so I mostly focused on their voices. Somewhat remarkable maybe how unimportant it was to see anyone's face; all these old men with their dead skin and fat hardly moving, but with such voices! Jimmy Cvetic, Ed Orchester, and Terrance Hayes all gave good performances. Terrance's reading was less notable for his par-for-the-course excellence, being a nationally lauded poet and all, and I don't think his 192 children poem is that good anyway. Jimmy, in a racially dubious moment, began his set by addressing Terrance, saying he had a song/poem based off a negro spiritual (I don't think he said "negro") and then he leaned in to the mic and intoned, hardly singing in the way people with about one band of vocal communication available to them sing, "no pussy for Jimmy / no pussy for Jimmy/ no pussy for Jimmy."
Jimmy Cvetic's set was unbelievable in the way that good poetry can be, I believe. First off after the moment with Hayes he pulled out a CD player and played a short thirty second clip of children's vocals singing a song that sounded more or less like the opening theme to "Doc McStuffins", this, apparently, something Jimmy wrote and got some kids to record, a song he woke up with at 3 AM one morning. "No more trouble, no more snails, pails or puppy dog tails" is about all I can remember from the lyrics, the song itself bright and upbeat and well produced enough that I'm still not 100% convinced it was really Jimmy's work. But he wore a t-shirt, red text on black, that said "Dog is a Poet", a shirt that he apparently wore when buying heroin, "to [evince] a certain craziness... it's hard to describe but you needed a certain craziness out there, hard to describe why unless you were out on the street, buying heroin!" The red standing for the blood of the broken hearts of policing, and the black for chaos, as he tells us, the monologues between poems kind of slipping in with the poems themselves. He read poems about his former police life,and tells us about a program he's running for kids, a police academy for kids, "the thin gold line." I ask him about his poetry after the reading and he says: "It's a way of life for me". Jimmy, last week, talked about the "way of life" visible in the work of all the poets in the Series, that that was what made their work great, this "way of life". For me, this quality is what I find so unbelievable about Jimmy, a kind of straightforwardness and humility about experience that seems impossible, all of the somewhat insane & disparate segments of a man and his performance coming together to describe something human.
Also that night was Michael Wurster, who reads his poems with such bland monotone occasionlessness that I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to get behind them yet. Joan Baur was sitting in the corner opposite mine and I got to look at her reactions and watch her applaud as if she were leading the crowd, sometimes, as she did I think during Michael's and maybe my reading, although she never did it without a personal sincerity. Ed Orchester had poems which were amazing and true enough for me that I'm considering buying his physical work with the hope of reading it to myself and enjoying it, which would be a near first for poetryburgh --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Hemingways: Night of 6/30

Summer reading at Hem's featuring Robin Clarke, Deb Bogen, & Robert Gibb tonight. I missed Fred Shaw's performance, as usual my place of work won't let me out in time. This reading was notable for Pittsburgh (for me) because it featured 2 surrealistic, associational, non-literal poets, Robin and Deb.

Robin struck a very dark tone, asked the audience not to applaud, brought up as introduction {someone I failed to record the name of|}, a man who "was by all accounts and measures schizophrenic" and who though the government was monitoring and mind-controlling us, but as Robin points out, was not necessarily wrong (not a joke). Her poems followed that stream of conscious, fractured style you might in passing associate with schizophrenia: "Everyone wants to live, not even Robocop" "The powerful can do anything to your family in Pennsylvania" "To Warren Bogland, heads vanish into good intentions force, soldier". There were a great deal of powerful images, often in fragments, that displayed a kind of concern with disaster: "362 ghosts relay coal into trains day and night" "Smoke & Flames pouring down the shaft" "Calling them survivors was a mistake."

There was a silence in the audience as Robin read. Everyone had a look of concern or deep thought. In the past I've attributed this kind of look to boredom, assumed that, in the presence of poetry which is obscure and cannot be followed syntactically, people listen to humor the poet. With Robin's work this was clearly not the case, so I had a chance reexamine my assumptions.

Deb's work still made use of a lot of disconnects, but was less fractured... here are some excerpts: "4 heads burnt, no, branded by heat" "beneath the gargoyles the babies sleep" "no one says these stones aren't pillows". She had a poem about a tai chi lesson composed of little metaphors as spoken by a teacher: "your arms are broken sisters... make use of that joy." Several poems were titled in the format "_____ in the space of freefall" (e.g. "You in the space of freefall") and the method of freefall may have been the composition of these poems.

As I listened to Robert Gibb, I was overcome with nostalgia... thinking of the golden age of the 60's and 70's: Terence McKenna, wisdom gleaned from psychedelics, and so forth... not because any of his poetry was along those lines, but because of his voice, which was so mellow and understated, plus his appearance, with the beard, collared shirt, and age. Robert read "unconcerned", delivered his poetry as if nothing was troubling him, almost as if he was dead, although not without a great tenderness. Following his book "Sheet Music", and a trend in the night started by Deb who mentioned Roger Humpheries' band over in the north side, Robert talked mostly about Jazz... notable for me was a poem entitled "Early Jazz Greats Trading Cards Created by R. Crumb." Crumb is quoted in the poem, when listening to jazz: "One of the few times I actually [...] have a kind of love for humanity."

Gibb's last poem had quite a kick for its last line (also about jazz): "seemingly pitched to some infinite woe/ comes the last misshapen solo." Writing notes, sitting in the side of Hem's back room, wishing there was better lighting, I felt a kind of calm descend... Did not feel pushed or pressured into listening to poetry, rather just enjoying it... There's hope I think for poetry if the poets are good, and the crowd is at least a little friendly. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Chuck Joy, Jason Baldinger, Cee Williams, and Chatham MFAs, Oh My!

I finally found them... The Chatham Writing MFAs. Couched in a little house behind a school in Wilkinsburg, over on Hay Street, the coincidentally named Whitney Hayes (along with Kelsey Leach) hosts the Hay Street Reading series, a summer substitute for Chatham's Word Circus, a monthly event which hosts mostly Chatham writers. The Hay Street Reading Series is open to non-MFAs: when I got there, Amanda Collins, a local singer-songwriter, was performing. Hayes also stated that she wanted the event to be "more open to the community". I'll be reading next month, probably, and in any case, I read at the open mic this month, along with my twin and six other readers; it was a nice crowd of around twenty people, BYOB, etc. Featured readers included Ben Gwin who I sadly missed because I was over at East End Book Exchange, listening to Jason Baldinger, Cee Williams, and Chuck Joy at Chuck Joy's new book release, the book being: "Said The Growling Dog."

Jason Baldinger as usual talked about local Pittsburgh/Pennsylvania haunts including a long poem about a shitty diner called "Hagerstown Sometimes." As usual Jason was notable for his clear, local, and fatal eye: "When you're in Hagerstown, you have to ask if the sun hasn't already set." He also talked about a UPMC commerical location scout visiting, and being told to fuck off out of, Jason's record store.

Cee Williams was next, and I've heard Cee's name a few times before, although I hadn't seen him previously. He started with something memorized that seemed like slam, but then broke out the print-outs and had a few less end-rhmey poems... "You Picked a Fine Time To Spank Me, Lucille" recounted, in not particularly humorous terms, Cee's painful time in Catholic school (fraught with racial inequality). He also had a poem about Ronald Reagan... "only poverty trickles down."

Jason and Cee both had affected eading voices. Jason seems to have a kind of arch, romantic, and revelationary tone: his speech is  always rising and falling in long arcs, even when he's talking about hangovers, and his poems tend to end with a defiant and concessionary exclamation from the self: 'I don't have health insurance but I told the UPMC guy to fuck off' (not a quote). Cee, as I said, is close to a traditional slam poet's voice in a lot of ways, but what I saw from him Saturday was more muted. Chuck Joy, however, the poet that everyone had gathered to see, was kind of a powerhouse when it came to affect. He had a sort of nasal blast that would accentuate his meter... the effect I thought was "Newyorkian"... He even recited a poem in series about his trip to New York. Moments from this poem: goes to a NY restaurant, repeats "house beer!" in disbelief... uses the book he is reading from as a prop: "sign here on the contract." --poetryburgh@gmail.com

now to find the CMU MFAs, please contact me if you are out there and here in PGH this summer xoxo

"loser" poetry

I talked to Jay of Curbside Twist LLC last night at Little Lou's in lieu of the usual Haven people, who had either blown off the night or left early with some biker chicks on a trip I wasn't invited to be a part of :( . Jay talked about his past in Trinidad, the intricacies of marketing, and argued with another guy Max about outsourcing (Jay was against it). At one point Jay made a graph illustrating various bottom lines and modes of power, using beer bottles, Max's phone, a pack of Newports, etc. Then Max turns to me, asks me what my passion is, I say "poetry" so he leans back says ok do some.

I tell him that I already thought this out, I've already looked ahead to the point in the evening when someone would ask me to do poetry, and I'd already thought about how I would say that me not reciting poetry then and there was kind of the basis of my poetry, that basis of being "a loser", not a "do-er" like these two entrepreneurial gentlemen. I've got "do-er"s in my family: my sister was focused on her future since middle school, shot up like a rocket through Ivy League and kept going, now lives in Philadelphia doing some kind of work with NPR, raising millions per year. My brother just started a business education at Pitt... we'll see if he gets as far...

Jay was selling his business persona the way some business people will do anytime they meet someone in a bar... like it's not just your full-time job, it's your nightlife too. That kinda state is my ideal goal for my poetry, to be a poet "around the clock."So what to do when someone asks you to do poetry "on the spot"? Well, I'm really into surrealism...--poetryburgh@gmail.com

Barbara Edelmen, Mike Schneider, Michael Smith & Ellen Smith @ Hemingway's

Barbara Edelman and friends killed it. I'm (full disclosure) a personal friend and once-classmate of Barbara's, who's name, as she brought up in one of her poems, means "Stranger", this I assume having to do with the Barbara/Barbarian etymology. Barbara's poems, issues of critical distance aside, made me look up from the crook of my arms, where I had collapsed in penitent hunger (I eventually folded and bought a Baja burger). Ms. Edelman's performative voice was excellent; she took on multiple personas, ranging from the more standard literary poet to a crazy-over-talkative drone, and never missed a beat. Her poems were also extremely good in the way that you can expect academic's to be... "The poem shudders through the ice-drawn branches." (this is a complete misquote... I didn't buy the book).

I saw Mike Schneider the night before at East End Book Exchange and didn't really pay attention to him then, but this night he stood out with his long and heartfelt (his voice quavered at appropriate moments) poems about WWII and the Boy Scouts. I admired Michael Smith, the founder of Autumn House Press, by the way, for sort of similar reasons, he had some impassioned political appeals in verse in a style that I've been trying to evince myself lately, sort of just directly talking to the audience in broad values-terms about issues such as war while maintaining a good sound. The way Michael broached these topics made me think that I'd have to look him up to improve my own technique. Ellen Smith read a series of poems in the format of instructions on how to sell various products for advertising agencies... "how to sell catheters" and, more abstractly "how to sell sleep." These were funny and straightforward and well composed in a appealing way, and they took the time to reveal some deeper thoughts about advertising and desire in general.

I came out as "against" PGH poetry in a certain way, threatening to move to New York in a previous post, and even now I'm planning my escape... but it's good to know my dissatisfaction isn't as straightforward as I may have planned... there are good artists here, of course there are -- poetryburgh@gmail.com

porpentine. == poetry?

if you want to see work which is "unignorable"
if you want to see work which is "fresh"
if you want to see work which is accessible
if you want to see work which does new things with language
if you want to see work which broaches a lot of intense personal subjects
go look at porpentine porpentine porpentine

these are "games" more than poems... but still composed entirely out of language in sort of poem-like ways... using hyperlinks and macros... perhaps closer to interactive fiction (as the site advertises)? but assuredly unlike fiction in many ways...

from: howling dogs

We can consider this poetry b/c it's experimental... Poetry I guess is closer to the lines of "experimental words" or "experimental literature" than fiction? But again, maybe aspects of this isn't entirely experimental... "Nonstandard Literature"? Genre distinctions, the black hole of criticism/analysis...

What I mean to say is, Porp's games have a sort of defining quality in being attractive and click-through-able and innovative and also undoubtedly "literature"... But they are also built around a kind of punk aesthetic, see this excerpt from some of her writing:

Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms.

This quote being part of the work porp + friends built around the experience of being trans, being abused by various communities and treated as trash and so forth. A lot of the art comes as a consequence and method of coping to this abuse... therefore "trashbabe." Here's some more...

This is an original motivation + struggle + creative impulse, resulting in glorious, fresh, and appealing art... and it's in a (mostly written) form... You'd be lucky to find that in poetry. "Poetry is dead," as they say, but, you know, people are still doing interesting things with language and verse and lyric in different mediums such as for example rap... news to no-one... but this trans art trashbabe stuff also happens to be in the form of and strongly about video games, that defining new medium which most people don't have a whole lot of good things to say about, gamergate discussions non-nonwithstanding...

I just largely want to say: in the greater world of art, not just in Pittsburgh, I'm always frustrated by my own indifference to poetry... all the poetry put in front of me, I barely care about, can't really finish a chapbook without it feeling like work. However, there's a lot of language stuff I do care about which isn't really poetry, stuff that I spend much time with, like the work of porp... but to exclude these things from poetry is to put limitations on what poetry can be. Better than to stick to a genre, as I have done, is to stick to whatever appeals to you... stay less focused on one place, find the true patterns of your meaning--poetryburgh@gmail.com

HYCANITH GIRL + GIGANTIC SEQUINS PRESS // STEPHEN LIN // RUNAWAY STUDIOS VERSE SESSION // POND HOCKEY ETC.

"If I had to choose between body or mind, I would still choose both" says Kimberly Ann Southwick at the Gigantic Sequins  + Hycanith Girl Press Reading last night, the 20th... One of several readers over at Modern Formations... Kimberly's work was that which most impressed me, she built a kind of power out of insouciance to support her literary po-mo stuff... I think I heard her read poems about snakes going to prom last year at "Free Snake Poems About Snakes. Lets Do This.", another Hycanith Girl Press event.

Last Night: I went to four or five events, the Hycanith Girl/Gigantic Sequins Reading, a punk show over at City Grows featuring my poet friend Stephen Lin, part of the verse session at Runaway Studios, and the Bloomfield Tavern Bridge which featured Pond Hockey, a rock band composed of some of PGH's great literary minds, i.e. Scott Silsbe and Jason Baldinger, playing for the birthday celebration of Tommy Amobea, who is married to Phat Man Dee, who sang (Tommy Amobea also sang).

Most notable thing was Stephen Lin reading poems off a posterboard with post-it-notes on it, these poems composed of lines from the post-it-notes which were individually tied to letters of the alphabet which formed words chosen by the crowd. That is, Stephen asks the crowd for a word, someone says "Testosterone", so he links a poem together from the lines on the post-it-notes tied to T, E, S... This all sounds cheesy and gimmicky, but as I said to Stephen after the show, "I thought it was gimmicky but once you started doing it the poems were too good to ignore." These poems were too good to ignore, and everyone in the crowd was impressed, not just enthused.   ...I was also impressed. Maybe it's that the lines themselves were curbed from Stephen's other poems and therefore displayed his skill with sound and arch imagination: "His teeth rattled in his skull, as if in song." But I also think that the aleatory method behind the composition gave the poems a natural, organic feel; most of Stephen's poems are polemic, but these poster-board poems didn't have that opportunity.

At the Runaway Studio Verse Session: some guy I failed to record the name of, a mathematician who doesn't write much poetry, had some great poems, I think I can recite them by memory: here's one:

"pigfuck chuck" 

There was a kid named chuck in our school who fucked pigs. we knew this because he showed us pictures he took of himself fucking pigs. We would laugh at him and call him pigfuck chuck on the bus. He wasn't careful and left the pictures on his desk at school, and so a teacher saw it, and he was never heard from again. That was the end of pigfuck chuck.

This poem is very appealing. Cool things about this poem:

• It's impossible to make fun of.
• It's impossible to ignore.
• I can recite it from memory, only having heard it once, and it doesn't matter if it's paraphrased.
• It's controversial.

Is that what I'm headed for, when I think of "punk" poetry? Disturbing... --poetryburgh@gmail.com

also: check out stephen's bandcamp: http://stephenlinpoetry.bandcamp.com/

I ALSO WENT TO VERSIFY BUT IT WAS TOTALLY FORGETTABLE

Cornelius Eady @ Cave Canem

I cried a little during Eady's set... during this line: "For those of you that would rather stay inside your clubhouse, and keep me out of it: I am a brick in the house that is being built around your house." The crowd was under City of Asylum's "Alphabet City" tent, which was getting pounded with rain and threatening to blow over, climatically enough, during Eady's blues song, which I think may have been about Emmett Till, although somehow, it was in a positive light: during the song, Eady would coquettishely glance upwards, at the huge destructive rain, in a kind of battle/dance with the rain, as if he had some sort of past history with it, knowing, as none of the audience did, that the last line of his song was: "if you can stand the soaking!" He said this and then the crowd, half-crazed the way crowds get around giant amounts of weather, burst into laughter and applause.

Before the rain, it was hot. We were packed like sardines, about 2ft. sq space per person, and everyone was waving themselves with the programs... This was during Amber Flora Thomas's set (I arrived too late to see Willie Perdomo perform )-: ). Amber read with less affect, with a more subtle personality than Eady, or even Toi Derricote, who was only present in the form of a video and her son and grandson, who read poems for her. These by-proxy poems were often about the readers; see: "A Note on My Son's Face", which was read by the subject of the poem, the grandson. The evening revolved around the absent Toi, who had taken sick or something; Toi is a co-founder of Cave Canem (as the website quotes from Nikky Finney: "...the major watering hole and air pocket for black poetry") and both Amber and Eady talked about her importance to the group. Eady made it a point to discuss how Toi was a revolutionary, although people didn't often know it, because she was so loving and calm: a revolutionary on the basis of her saying "no"... Eady also discussed, briefly, the Charleston shooting. This was certainly something on the minds of everyone... A security guard outside the event, he and I exchanged a look, sort of in my mind confirming the fact, yes, it was obvious to both of us, that in my torn jeans and flip flops, no, I wasn't going to be shooting anyone, but also: yes, he was there to check, because of what had happened, although it was unlikely. Racial tensions are a thing in Pittsburgh, even the location of City of Asylum as a kind of bridge between the Mexican War streets upper-class communities and the rest of the North Side, a largely black population, has the stink of possible (or definite) gentrification... All of this in the air, inside the tent... But we were equally under the buckets of rain that started during Eady's set, and moreover, his words... Eady said, when talking about the Charleston shooting, that "the only thing we can do is resist. And the only thing we have are words." I think the black community on the whole is more willing to provide verbal accolades/assent/"hmm" noises during the work of poets. But under the tent, during the "brick in the house" moment, we all shouted, and it was loud... louder than the rain. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

surrealist pittsburgh: "Teleportaterz", "Poke Cake", inarticulate questions becoming articulate and an artist I know only as "Gunner"

I don't know the gender of Gunner or the preferred pronouns, and I'm only in the state of mind to talk about such things as pronouns b/c my friends/social media/personal self-education are becoming more and more gender-conscious over the years, more focused on that new brand of activism/ social justice/ trans-ness which I don't know how to google search for a term broad enough to summarize. My own relationship to the movement is this weird cis-y het white maleish side-to-side lean-y thing like the dance new husbands do at weddings... un-hip by default, the stick bug watches the butterfly emerge from zer cocoon... albeit my metaphor fails b/c as much as I am a part of the process, I do not understand my role in it... a totality of meaning that kind of empties itself out when examined, like some parts of quantum physics.

All of this is relevant to Gunner's art... see: "Teleportaterz", written by Gunner, a musical put on over at the Spirit Lounge, more or less about queers in a science-fiction dystopia, a narrative that "disintegrates like a thomas pynchon novel" according to the bearded lawrenceville hipster guy I only sort-of know who lambasted me after the performance for criticizing the sloppiness of the second half of the musical . Sloppy is by nature part of Gunner's work: last night at the tail end of a samey hardcore punk show organized by Jackson Boytim as part of his last-minute Dumb and Also Bad Fest, Gunner + Caitlyn Bender (previously featured on this blog) + other friends did a little five-ten-twenty-minute-long performance titled, as I was able to awkwardly extract from Gunner a few minutes after we (the audience) stopped watching Bender lie motionless on the floor whilst medium-loud feedback played, after Bender gave up apparently on the expectation of us just leaving her there and got up turned off the speakers and got dressed, after that I was able to learn from Gunner who was sitting with a friend outside the venue, City Grows, a small independent gardening store in Lawrenceville curiously hosting this hardcore-y punk show, with the clerk at the front counter, maybe just the after-hours clerk or not an employee at all, being somewhat subtly rude to me I thought, me going to the venue that night wearing a bright pink striped button-down shirt, large white khaki pants, and flip-flops, in a style Jackson described as "cuban grandpa", this clerk not giving me my 50c change for the water I had purchased until I had to yell over the punk hardcore music that I wanted my 50c, the clerk then sort of edge-of-perception disdainfully handing me the two quarters, the rudeness therof I didn't know what to make of and may just assume was the clerk's reaction to my outfit but who knows(?), I was smiling a kind of strained smile much of the night due to having arrived alone but by the end of the night I felt pretty comfortable, partially comforted by the performances including the last, weird, caitlyn-bender-lying-on-the-floor-reciting-the-alec-baldwin-monologue-from-glengarry-glen-ross-the-movie-comma-not-the-play-while-gunner-sang-christian-church-music-and-occasionally-distributed-strange-objects-to-the-crowd-at-one-point-bringing-out-a-cake-which-in-its-center-had-what-appeared-to-be-bloody-testicle-like-objects-wrapped-in-a-female-condom-and-ate-part-of-the-cake-then-placed-it-on-the-staircase-such-that-several-punks-almost-stepped-in-it-while-another-of-gunner's-friends-wore-a-tinfoil-hat-that-had-a-second-tinfoil-hat-attached-to-it-like-a-satellite-and-got-audience-members-to-wear-this-attached-satellite-hat-while-they-looked-in-each-others-eyes-all-this-while-a-recording-of-bender-reciting-the-same-above-mentioned-monologue-played-over-a-loud-amplifier-but-was-schizophrenically-edited-such-that-a-phrase-would-only-be-uttered-every-couple-seconds-all-of-this-with-a-trigger-warning-at-the-start, and being so comforted by the veracity and inclusiveness of this performance I was able to extract from Gunner who clearly didn't want to have a conversation with me, sitting on the stoop outside the venue and kind of turning away from me and facing towards Gunner's friend while I sort-of half stooped to let them know I wanted their attention, it being obvious at this point b/c of the body language that they did not want to give their attention to me, I was comfortable enough to be able to emit a loud sort of squeaky yawp to formalize my request for Gunner's attention, which worked, and when I asked, "did that thing have a name?" Gunner looked at me and not unkindly replied "pokercake... the name was pokercake" (paraphrased) and I said "thanks" and walked away.

I haven't seen much else in PGH along the same lines of Gunner's work, Sunshine Ears the touring performance artist being a close exception. Gunner was also present at that performance over at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse, which like a true Apocalypse has lingered threateningly on the edge of my Pittsburgh experience... always threatening my perceptions of the PGH art scene with strange, young, appealing art from persons like Gunner. These people aren't from New York. I don't see them at (most) of the poetry events I go to. Did they all meet in college? Are they the remains of some other scene? Is there stuff in Lawrenceville I don't know about? It's disconcerting... The artists crawl out of their hole, put on some sort of insane display for no money, and go back. I don't think it would be necessarily impossible to crawl in there with them, but, as I think I talked about above, in my case there has to be some level of self-purification and -destruction to even get up the courage to ask. Jesus, the plot thickens--poetryburgh@gmail.com

The Pittsburgh Poetry Scene

I have to admit, I've seen very few poets writing exciting poetry in Pittsburgh... this has become a point of infinite trepidation for me. I consider where I could possibly find the kind of poetry I've learned to love, and I can think only of New York. I would not rate myself someone brave enough, or financially secure enough to move to New York, but it's fast becoming my poetry destiny.
Consider HeyEvent searches, over at heyevent.com (an event aggregator):
  "Pittsburgh poetry" pulls 14 events off HeyEvent.
  "Baltimore poetry" pulls 23 events.
  "Philadelphia poetry" pulls 33.
  "New York poetry" pulls 209, including events today, including events tomorrow, including events with poets I already know and love.

It's the [sad] fact that my current challenge, if I want to be true to myself, is not developing an understanding of the PGH Poetry scene. My current challenge is finding a way to move to New York.
--poetryburgh@gmail.com

Michael Albright/ Joan Baur @ Classic Lines (Sign of the Bear Reading Series) ALSO AMAZING BOOKS OPEN MIC

It's been a stacked night... I don't have too much time to write.

I went to the last half hour of the Sign of the Bear Reading Series and it was Alright.

Joan Baur killed it and had a couple good poems.

All of her gestures were totally potent.

She accenuated certain lines, and moved quickly over others.

She had great feeling and made eye contact with the audience.

Michael Albright said mostly nostalgiac poems.

A lot of them were from the perspective of children.

"Grandma gave me a taste for the sweetest things." (paraphrased)

He read with wet, round tones.

I spent some time over at Amazing Books.
There was an open mic.

They were hosting an event to benefit Summer Reading for children.

There was a group of young people there! And they host their own readings...

I gave them my networking info, so I'm very excited. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

June 9th Slam -- And What My Relationship to Slam Poetry Is, Again

You know what's cool in Pittsburgh? The Slam Poetry community... Specifically known as: The Pittsburgh Poetry Collective. They run weekly slams and monthly workshops... I have to get these on my calendar.

I've attended only one other slam event before, and it was in the same format as this one: up to eight poets read poems in three rounds; each poem is judged by random audience members using a rating between zero and ten. The winner receives a $25 prize. The event this week was enthusiastically hosted by Slammaster Lori Beth Jones.

I was one of the randomly selected audience members to judge. I gave both high and low scores; in the first round I thought I was only going to give everyone 5's and 7.5's, but by the end I had handed out at least one 9. Slam poetry is unignorable. The poets put a lot of emotion and energy and preparation into their performance; and being able to deliver a good performance is one of the essential bases of the art, unlike in (for lack of a better term) "literary" poetry. There were several gripping performances the night I attended-- the highlight goes to the contest winner, Rhetorical Arts, who was able to deliver an intense & loud anger without ever losing the pace or clarity of their poems, covering topics including their own chidhood autism diagnosis ("they said autistic, when they should have said artistic") and troubles with depression (central metaphor: sharing a [relation-]ship with their disease, understanding that they have to live with it... but if it won't cooperate, they will starve it).

I'm at odds with the social justice and positivity that slam promotes. The emotional reality of what is being said comes through to me, but there's always a righteous moral positioning that I do not vibe with. At the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange workshop earlier this month, Joseph Karas discussed how he always looked for poetry "which does not spare the writer." In that vein, I don't think the slam I've heard was composed with that kind of self-destructive tendency that I appreciate. This may be from the genre expectations: slam is still considered to be a community-building resource, a venue for positive social messages, while "literary" poetry has the benefit of being a mostly defunct mode of art. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Millvale Mash-- Grist House Brewing

The Millvale Mash is an monthly open-mic run by my friend Adam Dove. Adam also runs the Writer's Workshop hosted at the Millvale Library; so I have to check that out too.

I had no idea Adam was a part of this, so it was a pleasant surprise to meet him at the event. Grist House Brewing is lovely: there's a large porch that merges into the bar which merges into the brewery itself. It's intimate and the crowd is local and friendly. During the Mash, it was raining outside sporadically, and the pirates game was playing in the background; when it wasn't raining here it was raining on the Pirates downtown.

I was the only poetry act; luckily, I killed it. I met a group of people incl. Adam's friends and Anita Kulina Smith, a kind of local historian; we had some great talks about the early days of Greenfield where there were apparently gangs outside of every store, which makes sense, because that neighborhood has always felt like a reformed gangland to me. Notable acts included Kim Sedlock reading her story about adultery-tempted skiers, Amy Dean playing a Japanese flute with a cover of El Condor Pasa, and Adam and his friend nailing a Mewithoutyou and Coco Rose cover. The night ended with a group performance of "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

I'm thinking about moving to Millvale. It's closer to the city than I thought, it's dirt cheap and it's beautiful. A valley neighborhood... tree enclosed, it feels so isolated and quiet... and Mr. Smalls is right there! --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Missed West Word b/c I've got flu... here's some thoughts on community

The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.

—Stephen Murphy

I'm fine admitting this blog is more of a self-care action, in a lot of ways, it's me searching for a community to inhabit with my poetry... but this goes along with a lot of what I understand poetry does: self-care... those at the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange were talking about how poetry can be written just for the writer, how it doesn't have to be for an audience... and those at the Hour after Happy Hour were talking about how there are "more poets than poetry readers." It's an odd central thing w/ poetry: it's easy to write a poem, but not exactly guaranteed to be enjoyable to listen to: it's a cliche that poetry is bad. 

I'd like it if poetry was not bad. The central question of this blog is, how can poetry be [fun, punk, sexy, exciting == good]? Right now, in answering those questions, I'm hung up on communities. This is partially attributable to the lesson behind the quote above: I'm looking for the imaginary community that guarantees fun/punk/sexy/exciting poetry, along with commensurate fun/punk/sexy/exciting people. Think of the Beats, or the Modernist writers, or the popular image of artists in general; think of 'Midnight in Paris'.

As the quote suggests, though, this search for a perfect community is a trap. It is an attempt to displace personal pressures onto exterior social pressures; "someday I will find the right people for me."

I've been saying this repeatedly so I think I'll just come out and state that the purpose of this blog is not to "find the perfect community" but to learn as much about Pittsburgh's poetry communities as I can, for my own and for the reader's education. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

PRETTY OWL POETRY @ CLASSIC LINES /// Hour After Happy Hour Followup

Today's post is transcribed from the notes of my twin who visited Classic Lines's Pretty Owl Poetry Spotlight Series today. I was at The Hour After Happy Hour Workshop, who reviewed and trashed my poetry. They said it didn't connect with them! for the most part. I get it.

Reading at the Spotlight Series were: Deena November, Kazumi Chin, Dakota R. Garilli, and Dan Nowak. Here's Rob (my twin)'s notes:

Deena:
"Dickwad" (the title of Deena's chapbook -ed) is from a graffiti (sic) on a bathroom stall- where all wisdom comes from. Her poetry is ephemeral & familiar with the grossness of life, while holding back little, including alcoholics, sex w/ 15 yr olds, being a mean mom. Her voice is subtlety poetry voice, almost too quiet, although her piece about birthing was very pushy.

Kazumi:
Entertaining, enthusiastically bashing race politics. Really he seems alienated by his body due to him understanding his own whiteness. He uses his hands to tell us the meter, and enthusiastically sways. He makes beautiful metaphors while staying political. Mostly he could write less but it's not his style. He is telling these beautiful stories that mostly are about hate & alienation. Funny though, & he has obsessions with Ariana Grande.

Dakota:
Nonfiction writer turned poet --a queer poet, not that it matters. He has a sense of humor that's quiet. His poems are sexual, tantalizingly so- while his masculinity keeps it in check. His voice is powerful, measured & aware of the tension in his poetry. People know not to laugh, yet they sit; encaptured by his words. His brevity at times leads to cliche & often it ends without flourish, but with a whimper.

Dan Nowak:
In the introduction, he asked the person reading his bio to lie about him. Then he told us he did that. He thinks he is reading a storybook, but he's forgotten to show us the pages. His voice fails to capture the weight of what's being said. He's funny though, he can talk about armadillos & leprosy.

Thanks to Rob Webb for that --poetryburgh@gmail.com

The Haven // Squirrel Hill Workshop @ Hem's

I spent part of last night at Lou's Little Corner Bar w/ The Haven people and the rest of it at Hem's for the readers from The Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop (or: the Squirrels).

The Haven: the group this week was four people not including me. It's an intimate space and they mostly workshop fiction, while drinking much beer and smoking a little pot, in the back porch of Lou's. Not much else to report besides that... I only stayed for ~30 minutes.

The Squirrell Hill Poetry Workshop: all the readers were either wearing orange or supposed to be wearing orange, in recognition of the issue of gun violence. There were about 13 readers! It was a long show! From what I've read Karen Lillis write about putting together a show, you probably should only have four or five; the event dragged, man! That's not to say the readers weren't good. There was a consistently high level of skill. Here are some of their last lines:

"Love is the loser in tennis, doesn't fare well in life either."
"Consider how even the most decisive action is mimicry"
"No longer chasing illusions of love/ I have had 20 years to value yours"
"We take things, not just because we have no money, but because we have parts missing."
"I regret nothing in my life, except I didn't stay in Paris with that other man"
"What is history but war? The rest is punctuation."
(Ann Curran, Erin Garstka, Christine Doreian Michaels, Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, Joanne Samraney, & Shirley Stevens)

Ziggy Edwards had a killer poem about Hansel & Gretel in space, and all of Shirley Stevens' poems were brutal. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange--- the workshop @ brentwood library

Brentwood library is like a mile down Brownsville Rd and there's a poster about the "persecuted church" of Christianity above the waterfountain but it's a nice building located next to a nice high school campus with an outdoor street hockey rink. The workshop took place in the rec room below the library, a large basement-but-above-ground space full of book sale books, fooseball and air hockey tables and other churchy parephenalia that was very cozy. Does the PPE have ties to the church? Their second-to-last reading was at the South Side Presbyterian, albeit their latest one was at Hemingway's, so for now it's only my sneaking suspicion...

The group this week was 13 people, ages 60+ with a handful of exceptions, myself included. They are a delightful. intelligent, and capable group of workshoppers; informed digressions, such as the etymology of "normalcy" (at length!), were not uncommon. Michael Wurster is the bon roi of the group, hosting and contributing to and leading discussion; his work always goes last, and he is the only writer to actively defend his work, but he is pleasant and educated and fair and a great leader for the group.

The format is: everyone brings 16 copies of a poem to distribute during their turn and reads the poem aloud, once. Then everyone else gives feedback from that alone. Many workshops rely on email lists and the like to give everyone a chance to prepare responses, but the PPE does analysis by first impression. This gives the workshop a somewhat looser feel, a somewhat more informal and even playing field; everyone has to live by their wits so to speak and can only give the advice that is obvious enough to be formulated in a few minute's time. It also takes away the pressure of reading work before the event.

There was a mix of poems I personally liked and some I did not like; the group neither reserved judgement on controversial poems nor displayed passive-aggression or cruelty. There were strong opinions and tensions, particularly regarding one poem about elephant poaching, but those involved were mature enough to keep everything honest and respectable. It think it's the advantage of having an older group of people, that kind of maturity and above-the-board honesty, as well as the sheer education and experience; but there was also a great deal of energy in the room, it felt very productive.

I presented & read, too, and everyone loved my poem. My work, I think, was the least conventional of the bunch, I'd posit, so that might be both a) the thing distinguishing me from the group and b) the thing I'm bringing to the group... so often I feel like these two points are in conflict, I'm always looking for a group of poets who write like me who I can commiserate with... leveraging my own individuality against communities. What occurs to me is the advice given to me by members of the Haven last week: "you're looking for what you can get from the scene instead of what you can contribute." A continuing dilemma for poetryburgh... I'm going to go see the Haven ppl again tonight for their formal workshop and maybe some of the Hem's reading, so you'll hear about that --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Ben Gwin, Jennifer Bannan, Ben Stein, Michael T. Fournier @ East End

Host Karen Lillis introduced the night as "three novelists and a poet"; the poet was Ben Stein. Ben Stein reads with a lilting thick and high voice, and his poems covered everyday topics; many of these poems were from a collection of "Sunday Poems"; he and long-distance friends would send each other poems on Sunday.

"Either this cat think he's laundry,
or the half-empty hamper
is too warm to pass up"
- from "Apartment"

Ben Gwin and Michael Fournier both read fiction, in a way that really turns my dials: clear enunciation, slow and measured, stories about "fucking" or in the case of Mike, fast food service and "punching people in the face." All emotional rumination in their stories happened more or less in the context of action, and in simple-ish sentences. Mike did the voices of some of the characters-- these are all the qualities I would look for in performed poetry, a kind of conservancy of words, making an emotional impact with only a few tools. Plus they were both thirty-something-plus deep-voiced writers, reading stories about blunt subject matter, which as I said are just some things that I go for. And I'll honor that:  the writing that appeals to you immediately is the stuff that gets to the meat of what writing can be in our world.

I talked to Karen Lillis after the show in what was one of my most productive blog-network-conversations yet. She talked about composing and promoting readings, the trick thereof being inviting writers from several different "cliques", therefore bringing in several different audiences. Poetry in PGH is apparently made of "weird little bubbles" of people (this quote overheard from Ben Gwin in an adjacent convo). As I expressed to Karen, "it would be great for me [poetryburgh] just to know about all of those cliques." So, if anything, that's one good use of the blog part of this blog: I can verbally detail these different groups, come up with good ways of describing them, share my thoughts, document them, maybe make them a little less disparate, as Karen was doing.

I'm going to the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange workshop tonight, as I said I would, so I'll have more to share on that group of people and their sensibilities. --poetryburgh@gmail.com

Musicburgh goes to Acquired Taste // Runaway Studios Again

Well, there wasn't any poetry at Acquired Taste. A.T. is a reading series meant to highlight literary food writing, which last night featured two fiction writers (including one who was supposed to be a poet, I thought, Mark Brazaitis) and a rock band performing a short rock opera. The rock opera was my favorite part, everyone's skill was tight and they distributed a libretto so you could follow along with the lyrics.

The Band was Tecumseh EQs and the opera was "Bonnie Wipes It All Clean" which was I think about some guy's psychic girlfriend causing the apocalypse. There were some rocking tracks and the lyrics were pretty excellent and dare I say poetic at times:

"I thought it was over. I thought she'd turn herself in.
But she put on her shoes, unplugged the toaster, and just started walking.
She doesn't get tired like me, glad I've got my bike bro.
We spent the night in the office of an ice cream cone factory.
Somehow the old credit card trick really worked. She was holding my hand.
You know how it goes."
-- from [That Tune], 4 tracks in. (Everything was sung faced paced and with varying pitches and levels of enunciation, the libretto helped.)

The set ended with a cover of "Moonage Daydream" which was sped up and lacked the guitar solo and was not as good as Bowie. The opera was cool because the lyrics were less psychadelic than Moonage Daydream, more narrative, but it still managed to capture Bowie's frenetic energy which was pushed through by the the band's hard-line musical effort.

///////

After Tecumseh EQ wound down me and the other Webb twin biked across half the city to get to Runaway Studios, which was featuring some art by Josh Lopata, in an exhibit titled "Nowhere Specific". "Nowhere Specific" was composed of a series of tribal-imagery, paintings, sculptures, and masks, which featured bright colors Lopata traces back to Doug Mahnke's The Mask. Everything was on sale and was reasonably priced for college students, $10-$40, including some large and ornate pieces. There were so many young and beautiful people there! I networked for an hour before heading to a bar and drinking half a yuengling while talking about girls. --poetryburgh@gmail.com





you should probably check out Lopata's vimeo of stop-motion even though this too is not poetry, poetry in motion maybe? not to stretch the term too thin... lord knows it's hardly credible as is