JASON BALDINGER'S THE LOWER FORTY-EIGHT

Well, ladies and gentleman. Youve seen me here before. Peeking at the corner of yr reading. Thinking I'm better than everyone else. Concerned with the outcome. Bored or happy. The same old shit as usual bc we're stuck in the city. Jason isn't he travels, he has some world experience.

The Lower Forty-Eight is a series of poems. Jason Baldinger once made the whole van drive around the city a second time to tell a story in the car. It was about these kids who hosted Jason and co. who were clueless. They were my age and they bought him coffees from starbucks in their backpacks, and warmed them up in the oven, because they didn't have a coffee maker.

Jason writes about not having health care. He writes about coming into a record collection and living off the proceeds for a year. My professor said "I don't know what you're going to find out there in Pittsburgh, Peter, there's a few Labor Poets, but that's about it."

Basically, I show up to Jason's readings, and there's a few flavors: 1/2 bad, 1/4 middling, 1/4 good. The good one is a guy expressing legitimate tragedy. It's sort of the David Newman flavor. I assume Newman lead the charge. I assume there's some history.

What David Newman does write is the essential panic of Pittsburgh. Alcoholics combined with bad employers. You know, I'm pretty sheltered. But if you're about one rung down from where I am there's a certain panic, I know my peers feel it... It's all these yinzers who are still used to paying employees nada and then drinking with them later. There's a lot of bars here but they're all $3.50 a beer??

Pittsburgh has a series of speakeasies you have to apply to get into... My one friend said like "yeah, I got molested there". It's not a good or basically decent thing that these Pittsburghers are drawing on, the you know working-class shit... at least, nostalgia guarantees very little...

a review of "vast necrohol" by caolan madden

I played final fantasy XII and I too experienced the magic moment when you encounter the optional "necrohol" dungeon and are warned by your party members to turn back. Then there's a bunch of level 30 goblins that attack you.

I would call "vast necrohol" by caolan madden "a complete failure to use the video game lexicon in poetry". Probably because I've seen the "disintigrating art text" thing a bunch of times before, and sometimes better. but it's usually just an impediment.

I keep on thinking of those 30 something year old poets, in pgh, basically all the people almost close to the frame of reference that I love, you know, video game culture. I have no idea if caolan is 30. But I keep seeing that total failure to interact with the video game thing, in a way that I like, personally. I keep thinking those 30 year olds grew up with MTV values and that's why they act like this.

]\this book like lou welch says "maybe it's better if the poet was reading it out loud." Ok, I say, I can wring more out of it I read it out loud and there's a certain something in there sometimes but it's still a poor man's descent of allette which I wasn't crazy about anyway.

I have to explain why I'd call it a "complte failure to use the video game lexicon in poetry." Ok, it's not a complete failure. The churning of items in your stomach = the churning of items in your inventory. Domesticity of videogames == grinding loot. These are images which we give credit to the writer for.

But hey, I still don't like leet speak in the captain's name because it's just there to give the appearence of digital shit going on. which I guess is the point of leet speak anyway. It is maybe a valid argument against this chapbook to say "how much are caps and italics and leet speak and white space doing the drama". How much is imitation middle english there to just seem impressive. Well I'll give the imitation middle english stuff some credit as it does lend a lot of sound to what's going on. But it's also pretty tiresome.

ok mashing a = grinding in video games = erotic and frustrating, cracking femme oppression. But fuck the poems don't really do it, they're not banging, if you read it right and had personality when you read it you could get them off but maybe if you were at a tough bar everyone wouldn't give a shit?

Poetryburgh Presents: "Under the Bridge"

This was a night of poetry I arranged at my friend's house.

The actual event was definitely one of my favorite poetry events I've attended. It sounds self-serving but there was a lot of good qualities:

• I really liked all the readers.
• I got to present, and host, and make things the way I wanted, and look pretty and wear gym shorts and eye shadow (thanks to Karla Lamb)
• Jenson Leonard's performance was _excellent_ and I got to react while listening by moving my body.
• A lot of people and a lot of cool people showed up.
• We ran out of toilet paper and had to emergency restock from Shur-Save
• We got a noise complaint.
• BD and Carlisle's backyard, where we read, overlooked the Bloomfield Bridge and the valley below *and the train tracks and bus way*, it's probably one of the most beautiful views in Pittsburgh.

View of the bridge. See also: fireplace.

• This view is entirely unrepresented in the film.
• I had a cheap mike and bass amp and that was our P.A.. Our lighting for the second half of the readings was a maglite taped to a railing and a floorlamp. We also had a campfire.
• We had four or five different areas where people could hang out, including a campfire in the backyard, next to the readings.
• We had an open-mic, untaped, on the city steps down to the valley. I made everyone only read two poems, and it was entirely dark except the lights/phones we brought. We had maybe ten fifteen people and it was really *hot* like *hot jazz*

For the video, Dave Williamson is responsible for the beauty of the framing. There's fire sparks in front of some of the poets and a beautiful spinning ceiling fan/light in the background for others. I instructed Dave to try to act as casual as possible to get the interviews and candid material and we got pretty much just enough for the video.

 I think the video drags during some of the readings-- it's hard to put a whole poem being read in the middle of a film like that, usually you want more cuts. I edited this all in one night and sat on it for a while, I never arranged for a second edit, so I decided just to publish what I had, even with the long readings in it, and the misspelled title, it's documentary at least, also I think a lot of the movie has verve.

I said the party/movie was based on "Debt Begins At Twenty" which is actually the founding text of this blog. The party was an ideal state of poetry for me, and very true to the phrase "I Want Pittsburgh To Be Fun".

The full lyric from DBAT is "I Want Pittsburgh To Be Fun, If It [doesn't change soon?] I Might Pull Out A Gun" [I have to rewatch the movie, it's offline].

I danced with my dad at a punk show revival night at SPACE downtown featuring the band "Carsickness", this same gallery having "Debt Begins at Twenty" playing in the back room. Jon (my dad) has a peculiar way of dancing, my mom told me this growing up. All I knew about my dad's residency in Pittsburgh in his 20's was that he did a lot of drugs and also danced at punk shows, he was also a huge fan of "Carsickness". So I got to dance with him to the same band he danced to when he was my age.

   The way Jon dances is he hangs his jaw out like a severe underbite, hunches his shoulders up, and twists back and forth. It looks completely without grace and I was wondering if there was something wrong with him; but there wasn't, he pulled me in and I did my own version of punk dancing which is like you know head bobbing shit. Also when I finished my beer the thing to do was just throw it on the ground, dad showed me that at that show.

The thing about that dance was that there was a lot of gracelessness to it, but it was entirely intentional, and entirely in the spirit of the thing, and we were dancing in good company with the other aged punks who showed up, we had mosh pits, I was shoving a small aging american around and throwing cups of water at my twin.

The main connection I make between that night and this night, was that in both cases there was a sort of odd perfection that the night was spelling out, relative to my personal everything, and it wasn't perfect for being completely good and not awkward but having a total form to it-- and in each case either was the result of careful artistic planning, my work for "Under the Bridge" and Dennis Childers and Larrey Rippel's for the SPACE gallery show.

Maybe there is one more thing which is impressing me which is the meta-form relations between these carefully planned artistic events, my movie, and "Debt Begins at Twenty". At all times I was aware, and I think maybe other people were too, during the events, and while I watched DBAT, that there was a certain ideal we could achieve, or an activity we could follow, in that sort of "being punk, being poets" vein. Mostly I am trying to activate that spirit if and when I am doing poetry or planning events.
--poetryburgh 5/9/17

A Review of Amit Majmudar's "Dothead"

(I wrote this on company time, trying to put up something for the CLPGH website. Not going to use this.)

What do we do with our ancestry? What do we do with our race, interpreted by our culture? Generally the habit of perhaps even the second generation of children of immigrants is to be stuck between the demands of an American life and the behavior of (a different culture). "Dothead" is surprising for handling this distinction so adroitly, with violence, on occasion, and to be reunited with violence. 

I generally don't enjoy poetry. I didn't really enjoy Dothead, except for the one excerpt from the titular poem: 

my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats, 

their flesh in little puddles underneath, 

pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet. 

I also enjoy the shape of the poem, which manages to transmit some funk across these rhyming schoolboy lines. I didn't read the rest of the book. 

Dothead: the term itself a slur, being modified/owned by the descendant. In general the rhyming is insufferable and the poems themselves obsessed with the conceit of poemhood as all this book generally is. All books of poems that have singular word as the title, meant to express some wondrous victimhood, tend to be this way, and I think the average consumer reacts as if each book were a wounded bird.  

Maybe you nurse this bird back to life, but guess what, it's wing's broken, so it's just gonna fly around your house and crap everywhere, but do a half-flying with one broken wing that ends up suicidal mostly. And like all animals it's just obsessed with its self. You can raise it but for slowly getting the sense that you could have just nature take care of this and have everyone, book/bird included, be better off.  

I think books should generally make you feel uncomfortable, albeit as forms of entertainment, those that do might not leave the shelf. But I remember Al Columbia's The Golden Bear Days which is all violence and obscene kids and I think about how a book can summon a great terrible nonsense that your eyes seem peeled to, take in a certain patter and leave and if you want and get that patter back you return to (it). 

Patter they is, great and terrible it's not, Indian-ess sure, and sort of diversity-esque writing that has at least some of that great terrible violence. I think the moment when schoolyard Amit blazes his fellow kids with the dot on his head is better for being literal.

The Odd Communion: TRPGs, Poetry, Videogames, virtualworlds and more Andrea Coates

My next project for Pittsburgh is to have writers write about videogames. In general I think pop culture subject matter makes a poem fresh. It's relatable and it's not flowers or valleys and like I spend 2/3 of my day staring at a screen, so.

I live in a world most defined by the commercialsprawl thing that Andrea Coates talks about here*. Products, logos, not necessarily all bent to sell me things because the machine throws sparks, too. Nothing's perfect, and not too many people are at the helm.

In this popmedia sprawl lies video games, commercial structures included. Is it just my particular ///sidenote: check out this Andrea quote and the future of Alt Lit as it does not exist sadly:

http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue43/feminarkist

In this popmedia sprawl, as I was saying, exists a fun and potentially valid future venue of art called gaming; the ultimate V.R. experience which is as well the future "3d experience" of other various digital medias. To a lesser extent, i.e. the poetry's equivalent, lies role-playing games, those on the tabletop, involving paper and pencils.////

///Ok, for the record, here's my life experience right now: I loaded up, on my twin brother's advice, the Donald Glover short film "Clapping For The Wrong Reasons" to watch as I wrote this piece. Somehow the video ended up paused and an Andrea Coates poem, Dear Shane Smith, started playing on Soundcloud in a background tab. Little did I know of any of this, as I thought the still image of Don Glover lying in bed while Andrea Coates' growly revolutionary message played in the background was, having not recognized the voice of A.C., that this was the actual Don Glover film. I thought it was pretty good.    ....All this while I try to type and simultaneously load up the Arcane Kids' faux-virtual-reality Soundcloud/Unity webdevice.... My computer threatens to crash. All my blogging may delete. I'm running a Chromebook which has very little RAM. You may begin to get a sense of the strained techno-interpersonal connections of my life. A.C. begins screaming as I try to pause the Don Glover movie which doesn't seem to be actually playing, the whole façade begins falling apart as the computer does crash, and I'm left with a digital silence at least along with my writing which was not deleted. This as I sit in my parent's house 1 year after a 5-year college english-degree completion with little-to-nothing to do during my 15-hour workweek. I can't write poetry because no one cares. I type up a blogspot.////

The obsession that has entered my life lately is the rpgs as made by Zak Smith, Patrick Stuart, James Raggi: Lamenations of the Flame Princess. A stripped-down version of D&D meant to semi-emulate original-edition D&D but built with more horror in mind. Kinda eldritch, kinda disempowering, kinda simple character creation to replace the dead characters who died fighting that evil thing at 1st level.

I find communion in these objects -- gametexts, online virtual webtoys, and yeah I guess videogames themselves-- when they occasionally create cohesion between individuals, as opposed to the more regular solitary cohesion between individual and produkt. I mean the online gaming experience, with its modulated microphone voices ringing through virtual death machines, these, your friends. I also mean sitting around a table and bullshitting about what you're going to do to a white dragon. There's dice involved, in virtual reality too, and these mechanical components seem to strain-- usefully-- against the more nuanced and forgiving social interactions. You can commit a player to death on the back of lady luck, and similarity, you can stomp a public server of noobs** if you've mastered the art of clicking and clacking fast enough. 

Poetry in these circumstances I think doesn't lie with the storywriting behind the gametexts- virtual or not- or with the social interactions, or with the mechanical interactions. I think the poetry connection lies in the making of love to a machine.  The obsequity of man serving machine, machine pleasing human, in an endless loop for hours. This in a possibly ritualistic formal setting between you and your friends. This is the kinda poetry I'm after, making sense of this digital-mechanical-psychological connection which bounces back and forth in my living room for days at a time. It's an odd communion.

~poetryburgh

*Note that this, the article I wanna talk about, wherein A.C. takes down Tao Lin for  a kind of rampant commercialism which both emodies his work as well as the environment we live in (as millennials, or really everyone on earth), this article has been been made private on Andrea's former blog. This too is the condition of internet literature: temporary publications. Everything is accessible but for limited times! It's hard not to feel as if I'm standing by the edge of grinding pit, digital publications being as vulnerable as they are... some of my favorite writing lost forever... As well it would probably be a good blog post to write about the increasing ability of artists themselves to sequester their own work from the free-online space.

**outdated...

Poetryburgh Reviews Canadian non-poet Andrea Coates's Blog: Watch As I Try to Label it "Insane" In a Good Way

SPRING BREAKERS 2.0: Only God Forgives \\ Trailer - Andrea Coates & Harmony Korine from Andrea Coates on Vimeo.

The above is one of Coates' videos, a near-unwatchable mashup right? Kinda masterfully dense collaboration of her own ideas of celebrity with her music and with pop images. I'm not discussing her videos for this post though, I'm discussing the writing on her blog at thehighwayoftears.blogspot.ca. I just have the above for color. Also if anyone knows more about Coates' current figuring in Canadian culture please email me at peterbowensewebb@gmail.com

Why is Andrea Coates good? She’s a radical, willing to see multiple sides of one issue, including the otherwise “insane” ones. I use the word "insane" not because I believe in insanity as a legit social identifier but because I think people will connect with what I'm talking about when I say it. Is that implicit-ly supporting the label "insane"? Andrea Coates would probably empathize with my use of it.

Coates understands that empathizing with all human beings is the project, and that a general sympathy for all humans isn't just a moral necessity, it's a pathway into interesting ideas:

"Nowhere in modern politics, in Canada or elsewhere - besides here, this blog - will you find an individual or association campaigning for the societal and economic rights of Organized Criminals as such. Which means, to my mind, the “Gangster Human-Rights Advocate” is a political niche waiting to be filled, and, considering I am the first person I know of to point to the absence of an Organized Criminal perspective in the public debate around recreational drug-policies, I think I ought to doodle it in. Not because I personally sell recreationals (rather I hang out with people who do and listen to their stories and give them advice), but because I am willing to take on the difficult task of empathizing with and articulating the position of the professional Organized Criminal in a hypocritical legal culture."

- http://thehighwayoftears.blogspot.ca/p/marijuana-legalization-in-canada-where.html

With the above, the "insane" perspective is a way to examine drug politics. But I also label Andrea as "insane" because you'd identify the celebrity-identification that she does as a common pattern of "insane" people: claiming that celebrities stole ideas from her, calling the owner of VICE her future he-doesn't-know-it-yet-but-he-will-be-my boyfriend; we've all seen enough examples of this practice to dismiss it out of hand. But Andrea uses the practice (self-consciously) to display the rather particular lines of power which draw out from celebrity to individual, and to conjecture the bounds of our current, and possibly future society:

"Shane Smith is letting Tao Lin, Specifically, as the Literary Writer of Highest Rank in the VICE Cotterie, get away with suggesting his Wife / GFs / Crushes for Employment @ VICE over Women of Notable Literary Talent because Shane Smith himSelf harbours a Fantasy of forcing a Literary Woman into the Position of having to Sxually please him for his Attention as an Artist, but SS cannot act on this Fantasy with the Ease Tao can as a Mere Peon of his, because what with Technology xposing People as it does, EveryOne would know about the Affair and it would reflect Poorly on SS as a Boss: so he lives the Fantasy out Vicariously, through Tao Lin, and in doing so attracts the Attention of the Woman he wants to force into this Position, who is me, the First Person to pick up on the Trend @ VICE and get Angry about it, who will subvert the Fantasy and make it reflect Well on Shane Smith and I as opposed to Poorly, by coming up with the Apology Idea: if SS apologizes for VICE’s Misogyny Generally, the Public will forgive him for taking a Mistress, and he can go on accumulating Power in CEOland with Moral Impunity. Coming to an Understanding of how Hierarchy works has been Vital to my figuring out how to subvert Feminine Xploitation : Once Hierarchal Power Relationships are made Visible, it is amazing how Much More Human Activity makes Sense, and how Much Clearer where to apply Pressure to promote Change becomes."

from: http://htmlgiant.com/interviews-2/an-artic-fox-interviews-andrea-coates/

What Andrea does here: proposes a conspiracy between Tao Lin (former prince-king of Alt Lit) and Shane Smith (founder of VICE) wherein the gender power dynamics of the Alt Lit scene and their respective publication through VICE are semi-credibly analyzed. She then proposes, and in fact, predicts herself to be the solution: her own brand of gender-politics and her physical self will caulk Shaun Smith's anxiety and allow for a less misogynistic publication.

This is, again, a move of empathy, twofold: first, she finds an empathetic solution to VICE's misogyny, and second, she legitimizes her own nonentity/celebrity relationship. Empathy for the self is a powerful thing and by drawing a larger obfuscated politics through her own person, Andrea manages to conceive both a potential understanding of VICE as well as a more workable future.  I don't think it matters that this plan is unlikely to work; it's sorta like speculative lit.

~poetryburgh

Cory in The Abyss & The Poet's Meme

Cory in The Abyss, scrolling, gives me the sensation of a long scream of desperation; anxiety; tender moments played through a frustration so immense that they conglomerate into a cultural hellstate. As the Blackness in our culture resides in nothing; as sex is parodied long past the point of an actual sex life; these things are generally dealt with humor, to make the mixture universally palatable; but as this humor is an absurdist humor, the deeper faults of comedy come to the surface, to be solidified into meme.

I think Cory memes form a cogent narrative across the page, as compared to the general splay of something like imgur.com. "Cory" is one particular creator who does have a tone and a business; his message is pop-art burlesque, basically, carnivalesque parody of what's new, what's political, what's lightly taboo. This breaks down in some points to semi-poetic noncommentary, a collage of various cultural bright points into a dream or nightmare upon waking. It's very Lisa Frank.

Cultural significance of The Abyss = the cultural significance of Lisa Frank= image making, with the intent to market. Essentially Cory is "on blast." He's attempting to produce something relatable. Thus his memes are for their own sake. That there is a significant part of cultural commentary in the mix may very well be there just for the appeal. It seems hard to isolate.

Lisa Frank

Cory in The Abyss 

"Cory" himself's a poet. He's going to apply to grad school for poetry. As his greatest success is perhaps in something not-at-all poetry there is perhaps a lot to be said; I would like to say that the cross-cultural connections of poets are particularly potent for being imaginative and for existing in a space where the current culture has to be entirely fled. I would like to embrace "the new" wherever it comes up and I believe that memes as combination of collage and cellular distribution are "new." As a model for poetry they, I think, accomplish some of poetry's greater goals. That being said I feel a great hesitance when confronted with The Abyss; something feels shallow. Where's the next step. A missing depth in the memes. Still searching.

***POETRYBURGH'S VISION FOR THE UNIVERSAL VIRTUAL FUTURE: ***

1,000 people out of work will still do something and if it's not crime it might still look obscene. Let's say goodbye to the era of workmanly cause-and-effect and embrace the era of confounding cultural astigmatism where attention is everything and love evaporates in the deep-settled mines of a forgotten past. Nostalgia overflowing essentially into substance. This before or perhaps after the Matrix gets ahold of us, the dulling effect first thought practical seen to be overridden by enormous leechlike neural networks of blazing paranoia. Can culture itself be reduced to a pure, homeostatic oil? At least in the form of latticed image this seems possible.

~poetryburgh

POETRY AS COMMUNION: THE RETURN OF PBURGH; JESUS POETRY @ MWFA

FREE SNAKE MONSTER JESUS POEMS ABOUT SNAKES MONSTERS JESUS LET'S DO THIS
August 28th, 2016 @ Most Wanted Fine Art, 5015 Penn Avenue.
Celebratory Unrelated Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8llsiEIvvM0

Call me an unbeliever... call me someone with MESSED UP FEELINGS... CALL ME SOMEONE WITH FRIENDS... not that good friends... essentially, after tonight, I was left with two questions:
1. What is Love?
2. What is Fuck?

I think there's something essential about loneliness. The way it drives us... "The core of solitude is love"... that was another thought I had tonight, in the MWFA bathroom. A kind of of "romance" had taken over the evening, even a kind of "gothicism"... I wonder if rich people feel this way.

I wonder if there's legitimately challenging, good music in Pittsburgh, for the rich... like the jazz artists at the Jefferson Awards, who were good... Somehow I (less rich) am stuck with this tentative semiart scene, like the art is halfway family-friendly, only occasionally strange.

There are many artists in Pittsburgh, and their art has an almost economic effect: you have your artist friends and they practice polyamorous weird sex lives and art forms, they create an "intense weirdness", and they spread this to others. This can be poetry, but I think if we're being honest, as we should be, we have to admit that it's not simply poetry that we're looking for; it's a certain attitude, a certain environment, not locatable within any particular genre but answerable to the requirements of many; a series of artistic traditions, linked to a city and time.

If you are like me, you want all your best friends to perform in ways that F'N WORK in an environment that goes late, and for this I have to thank Margaret Bashaar; I have to thank her and Rachael Deacon and all the rest of the people who get this done. I think, as much as it is a shaping of the environment, this art is personal, a living of a life, taking a residence within a city, among people who you have these tenebrous relationships with; kinda artsy, kinda limited; there and not there. What is Love? (What is Fuck?)

The world (in Pittsburgh) is limited, and the world inside me, too, is limited, and it's all less than ideal, but at least it's practiced as poetry, which is an art form, and I've found the promise of being an artist is to have this tenebrous connection to a force deeper than yourself, a semireligous connection (art used to be subservient to religion, right?) So even the anti-Jesus poems that cropped up, like the real legitimate atheist scarred-by-Christianity poems, these poems contributed to, rather than took away from, a faith which was the blatant point of "Free Jesus Poems About Jesus, Let's Do This". Just like Snake or Monster poems before it, it was a kind of heightened semi-sarcastic semi-childish and (especially with Jesus poems) sacrilegious (but so equally, religous!) communion.

I wrote about communion before when Steve Roggenbuck came to town. When Rachael Deacon did "Come Thou Font of Every Blessing" it was sort of completely sincere and I sat on the floor, and everything was in kind of in that spirit. Religious ecstasy, a more-or-less joining of souls.

(Free Jesus Poems was organized by Rachael Deacon and Margaret Bashaar and is part of the annual series Free ____ Poems about _____. Let's Do this.)

~poetryburgh

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