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