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