PhillySound: new poetry

Giovanni's Room
345 South 12th St. (corner of 12th & Pine Sts.)
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215/923-2960
giovannis_room@verizon.net
http://www.queerbooks.com/

GIOVANNI'S ROOM BOOKSTORE in Philadelphia is the world's largest Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Feminist bookstore. The catalog of titles it holds for us is staggering, and no where in any brick and mortar store, independent or corporate, can we find all these titles together to browse whenever we want, to purchase whenever we want. I worked at the store for nearly 7 years, and its importance for LGBT and feminist readers around the world was something I felt, and took seriously when it was felt.

While independent bookstores have been disappearing, none have been disappearing as quickly as queer/feminist bookstores. Corporate bookstores WILL NOT carry ALL these titles for you to discover. I remember a woman coming into the store who was 78 years old, and had been married, had children, and was now wanting to come out of the closet. The Coming Out section of books is unlike any other in the world, and I also showed her the video NITRATE KISSES. I forget what she purchased, but I remember feeling, truly feeling the importance of Giovanni's Room Bookstore at helping create a place for this woman who was older than my grandmothers.

The store has survived MANY tough times, including bricks being thrown through the windows. The bricks from these hate crimes now line the owner's garden. Edwin Hermance, Skip, and all their amazing staff and volunteers are facing an enormous crisis. Major reconstruction is about to take place on the store's one wall, and it will cost A LOT of money. Edwin and Skip and all the staff want you to PLEASE shop at the store to help them in this time of need. IF THERE ARE BOOKS YOU WANT but cannot find, they WILL order them for you. Below is a note from Edwin Hermance with many more details. Please shop at Giovanni's Room, for all our sake! CAConrad

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from Edwin Hermance, owner of Giovanni's Room Bookstore

Giovanni's Room, the oldest independent LGBT bookstore in the United States today, needs your help and support to survive. Our 12th St. wall, which is structurally unsound, must be taken down and rebuilt from the ground up; construction will begin by sometime in August. The cost of this renovation, roughly $50,000, will not be easily paid; independent bookstores, lgbt bookstores included, have never been that profitable. Our store's success is measured by the people Giovanni's Room has helped in an almost limitless number of ways and by the exposure we have given to authors and publishers, filmmakers and musicians.

This will be a delicate time in the store's history. We need your support more than ever, and the store will remain open during the construction. Here is what we are asking you to do:

*Continue to shop at Giovanni's Room despite the challenges.
*Order in person, online, by email, and by phone.
*Show your support!

We have often faced adversity. In the beginning, in 1973, we had hardly any books to sell and the store was staffed 100% by volunteers. When homophobic landlords evicted us from the Spruce Street location and no one, on a major street, would rent to Giovanni's Room, we were able to raise the down payment for the current location by borrowing from you, our customers. Over 100 volunteers helped renovate the building to make the beautiful space we have occupied since 1979.

Now, at this defining juncture, we have formed a Committee that will be addressing fundraising, volunteers, special community and author events, and other activities to help meet the cost of this repair.

Keep gay heritage alive. Volunteer your time - make a financial pledge! Your support to Giovanni's Room will help us survive our 36th year.

Edwin Hermance

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HOPE YOU MAKE IT OVER TO GIOVANNI'S ROOM! LET'S KEEP THIS PLACE ALIVE!
CAConrad

As many of us know the PEW Fellowship in the Arts gives out individual grants to artists in various disciplines, and as many of us know poetry used to be in the rotation for those grants every two years. Then poetry was switched to every four years.

I've just spoken with people working at the PEW office in Philadelphia, and have learned that they are considering NOT having poetry in the rotation this year. Meaning if it's next year that it's now moved to every five years? If even next year, as it seems now that there're no guarantees for poetry grants.

I asked permission for an e-mail where we poets could send encouraging mail in the hopes that poetry be put into the rotation for this year's grant considerations. This is the e-mail: info@PCAH.US and I am asking every poet in the Philadelphia area to please write to this e-mail address AS SOON AS POSSIBLE with your letters of encouragement.

I say write AS SOON AS POSSIBLE because they are AT THIS MINUTE making the decision whether to include poetry or not in the rotation for this year.

NO TIME LEFT, WE MUST ACT NOW! WE MUST LET THEM KNOW WE POETS ARE HERE!
CAConrad

Brian Allen Carr seemingly had the balls (note "seemingly") to call Magdalena's novel "boring" and "student-grade," but when she takes him on online he suddenly wants to play a passive-aggressive game of back-peddling, saying such things as, but "I've recommended the book," yeah, well, that is nothing short of outrageous.

Brian Allen Carr you can't have it both ways! You can't slam someone in print by calling them boring, then CLAIM that YOU REALLY REALLY REALLY ACTUALLY LIKE THE BOOK AND IN FACT LIKE IT SO MUCH ACTUALLY THAT YOU ACTUALLY RECOMMENDED IT TO OTHERS, YEAH, REALLY, REALLY! What? Really? You want us to believe that you recommend books that you think are boring? Wow, that's so weird!

I would have had respect for Brian Allen Carr if he had ACTUALLY had the balls to stand behind his original convictions about the book. This pathetic game of HATE YOU, LOVE YOU is a big warning sign. And I say a big warning sign to ANYONE out there ever interested in dating the guy.

But I thank Brian Allen Carr for making my choice for me about whether to have respect for him as a reviewer. I certainly do not!

Oh, and I simply do NOT believe for a second that Brian Allen Carr would call a book boring in print, then recommend it privately, secretly, to friends. No way.

And I also HATED the "I'm sorry if you think my review was unfair," bullshit. What's unfair is the unsaid game of "I know I called your book BORING and STUDENT-GRADE but, but, but LOVE ME ANYWAY!" NO! FUCK OFF, how's that?

CAConrad

My FACEBOOK husband Magdalena Zurawski has been caught in the cross-hairs more than once since winning the Ronald Sukenick Award for Innovative Fiction for her novel THE BRUISE. I admire her latest post about innovation, and in particular about the Brian Allen Carr review of the book.

Carr responds, which you can see at the bottom, but my question is whether Carr himself lives up the standards of innovation, of The New? Judge for yourself with this poem. The question might be whether Carr wants innovation in other writers and, well, not so much for his own work? To be honest I like this recent poem by Carr, but I would never point to it as shifting the paradigm, not for a second would I say so.

The po(e)t calling the kettle black?

And it feels so funny sometimes talking about such topics with the LANGUAGE poets now writing ballads, writing sonnets, writing New York School-like poems at times.

Do I think THE BRUISE is great!? Have you never spoken to me? THE BRUISE is one of my favorite books in recent years. It's something I read without stop, and more than once.

CAConrad

Cathleen, for Tuesday there's a free bus. The link is HERE and I have no idea how many seats are left. See you Tuesday! CAConrad

Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance Bus Trip at http://savetheartspabus.eventbrite.com/

Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Bus Trip at http://www.proartstickets.org/events/view/369

ArtsQuest Bus Trip at

passist1@fest.org

• Contact your legislators' offices tomorrow to schedule a visit while you are in Harrisburg. You can find phone numbers for their Capitol offices on the General Assembly website. If you can't schedule with the legislator, ask to talk to a staff member in charge of budget related issues.
  
  
• Call your legislators and invite them to attend the rally. Tell them how many people you are bringing to Harrisburg and suggest they come to the Main Rotunda to have their photo taken with your group.
  
  
• Wear red or black (to indicate being in the red or in the black)
  
  
• Bring signs identifying your geographic location as well as your organization.
  
  
• Wear comfortable shoes. The Capitol floor, while beautiful, is not conducive for standing long periods of time.

If you have any questions, please contact Jenny Hershour at jlh@citizensfortheartsinpa.org or at 717-234-0959. Please help us ensure a future for the arts in Pennsylvania

At the last Chapterhouse reading, I had the pleasure of meeting Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, a student in Film and Media Arts at Temple University who has initiated a fun project called Exhibit Corpse. Based on the collaborative art-making procedure of exquisite corpse, the idea is to "paper our streets" (however ephemerally) with lines written by different people throughout the city. 10-11 line poems written by 10-11 people, each person responding to the line that came before. The poems began with a variation on the first line of Robert Frost's "The Most of It":

"He thought he kept the universe alone."

Aggie has documented the process with some short films, which you can check out here.

-- R. Eckes

BOOKSLUT editor and writer John Zuarino just interviewed me about Advanced ELVIS Course for their site! Check it out HERE!!!!

Elvisito Gloriana Yustavalia,
CAConrad

OK, so, my new book Advanced Elvis Course is OUT, and I do mean OUT, as the reviews (while they've been really good reviews) are finally mentioning the queer content of the book. Well, it's making some Elvis fans INSANE with rage that I would DARE make Elvis MY OWN, for me, as who I am. I've gotten called Faggot by a few, but I was called Faggot more often than my actual name in high school, so, eh, it has no real bullet penetration for me anymore.

One dude wrote to me, "You know Elvis was straight, don't you?"

First of all, NO, I don't know that, and neither does Dude. I think it's VERY SAFE to say that YES, Elvis liked women, and liked them A LOT! But who is to say that he didn't also like men?

So I wrote back to Dude, "OH REALLY!? LET'S GO OVER THE LYRICS TO "JAILHOUSE ROCK" TOGETHER, SHALL WE?????"

"Spider Murphy played the tenor saxophone
Little Joe was blowin on his slide trombone. (yeah, BONE all right!)
The drummer boy from Illinois went crash, boom, bang, (OOOO! SOUNDS HOT!)
The whole rhythm section was the purple gang." PURPLE GANG?

There's not A SINGLE female pronoun or female name in this entire song, I challenge ANYONE to find her between the tromBONE and the purple gang! But wait, we're not finished (this will break the Elvis snow globe open!):

"Number 47 said to Number 3:
You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,
Come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me."

WHAT????????? Number 47 and Number 3, those are prisoner numbers, right? There's no such thing as a co-ed prison in 2009, and I certainly don't believe there was one in 1957 either! But wait, we're not finished:

"Shifty Henry said to Bugs, for heavens sake,
No ones lookin, now's our chance to make a break.
Bugsy turned to Shifty and he said, nix nix,
I wanna stick around a while and get my kicks."

BUGSY is so turned on he's not even interested in escaping when he's got the chance! OH MY GOD THIS IS SUCH A FAG SONG GIVE ME A BREAK THEY'RE ALL FAGS! This song is Prison Fantasy Fag Studies 101. "Jailhouse Rock" is a FAG song, END of fucking story!

AH, but wait, there's even more! There's THIS mysterious section:

"The sad sack was sittin on a block of stone
Way over in the corner weepin all alone.
The warden said, hey, buddy, don't you be no square.
If you can't find a partner use a wooden chair."

What's HE CRYING ABOUT!? "...weeping all alone." Was he just gang raped in the shower? He makes me a little sad. He makes me want to walk into the song, sit with him, hold his hand, and tell him, "It's OK Honey, it only hurts the first time. You'll see Sweety, it's going to get easier AND EASIER! You might even get to where you look FORWARD to shower time!"

Well, as you can imagine, this did NOT go over well with Dude, deconstructing "Jailhouse Rock" for him in this manner, to which he replied with the single word "PERVERT!" Ah, yes, Dude got that one right at least! Good one Dude, good one! All I'm trying to do is open Dude's mind, well, and his sphincter!

BRING IT ON BABY! I'VE BEEN TESTED BY FIRE FOR 43 YEARS AND STILL BURNING BRIGHT BABY, STILL BURNING BRIGHT!
CAConrad

This author photo for my new book advanced ELVIS course (Soft Skull Press), was taken by THE AMAZING Heather Raquel Phillips. Heather will be selling prints of Elvis impersonators alongside copies of my new book at THE ELVIS SOLSTICE CELEBRATION!

THIS FRIDAY, June 19th, 6pm
at MOONSTONE Arts Center
(2nd floor of the old Robin's Bookstore space)

110A S. 13th Street
(on 13th between Chestnut and Sansom)

ELVIS MUSIC, ELVIS FOOD, ELVIS PHOTOS, ELVIS BOOK
IT'S ELVIS SOLSTICE!

SEE YOU THERE!
CAConrad

...speech I've seen so far this year to a graduating class, click here.
CAConrad

Night Flag presents

Jenn McCreary & Sunshine O'Donnell
Sunday June 14 @ 7:30pm
L'Etage (6th & Bainbridge)

Jenn McCreary is the author of :ab ovo:, published by Dusie Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks: errata stigmata (Potes & Poets Press), and four o'clock pocket chiming (Beautiful Swimmer Press); the e-chapbook :Maps & Legends: (Scantily Clad Press) and a doctrine of signatures (Singing Horse Press). Her poetry has been published in magazines including Combo, Lungfull!, Tool: A Magazine, POM2, So To Speak, Tangent, & How2. She lives with her family in Philadelphia where she co-edits ixnay press with Chris McCreary, works for the Mural Arts Program, and serves on the board of the Philly Spells Writing Center.

Sunshine O'Donnell... and yes, Sunshine is her real name, given to her by hippie parents in 1971. Despite this, O’Donnell has developed a long and diverse professional history in both teaching and writing, including the publication of her novel, Open Me, which was selected for the 2007 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Series and has been translated into Dutch and Hebrew. Her nonfiction work was recently published in W.W. Norton’s Anthology of Best Creative Nonfiction and has also been featured in magazines and online. For the past fifteen years, O’Donnell has been teaching creative writing to underserved children in poverty-stricken schools and residential facilities throughout Pennsylvania through The Coffeehouse Project, a mobile literacy classroom she founded in 1994. She has published hundreds of literary magazines of creative writing by abused and abandoned youth and has been honored for her work as an agent of social change. O’Donnell lives in the Germantown section of Philadelphia with her husband and awesome son, Kieran.

See you there.

- Frank Sherlock

Magic is a word I want us to reclaim from rolling eyes. It's a word we can use everyday, make it everyday to us in every way in making poetry strong enough to need no other magic. It's my extreme pleasure to have met an elder who has been cooking all the best sense of magic for many decades, strengthening poetry for us all, everyday. Tony Green needs little prompting from us to pay attention, as once he gets going we truly are in his realm, we're right with him. And he's never asking that we orbit him, but orbit poetry with him. Does that make sense? I WANT IT TO MAKE SENSE, but it can if you look at him on You Tube, click HERE.

This photograph by Al Filreis is of Tony Green reading one of his Poetry Tubes, which you can see on the You Tube link. Another link HERE, and another HERE.

Once the PENNSOUND Page is up I'll post it here, as you will want to see his reading, and the interview with Al Filreis that took place at Kelly Writers House today. Much was said, and I don't want to ruin it for you, but the Robert Creeley highlights, the history of Green's Tube Poetry highlights, well, it's all highlights.

The generosity of Tony Green is part of the joy of this day, his handing his beautiful, handmade Poetry Tubes for us to pass around and look at closely. He gave the Poetry Tube in this photograph to Ish Klein when the three of us went out for lunch. Ish then donated it to THE PENN BOOK CENTER at the corner of Sansom and 34th Streets, SO EVERY POET IN PHILLY, AND EVERY POET VISITING PHILLY, GET TO THE PENN BOOK CENTER TO SEE THE TONY GREEN POETRY TUBE FOR YOURSELF! And while you're there please support one of Philadelphia's BEST and last independent bookstores (THE BEST POETRY SECTION IN TOWN!)

One of the most generous moments was hearing him discuss NOT fitting into the university worlds he was working in, his work, his poems in particular NOT acceptable. He shows strength by having lived it, strength by sheer example.

Ish and I then took Tony Green to the Sun Ra exhibit at the ICA that Frank Sherlock has been raving about. Frank's been raving for good reason, IT'S A MUST SEE! Sun Ra, self proclaimed extraterrestrial has a giant fingerprint left behind. The film THE MAGIC SUN (1966) of Sun Ra & his Solar Arkestra reverberates in me even now, and I want to go back for more of it!

Seeing the Sun Ra exhibit after experiencing Tony Green's own extra-extraterrestrial experiments for winding the terrestrial upward was nothing short of perfect! Here's a small sample from his book 12 MiCRoChips & 2 PIEs:

impotence gardenias

so fucking needy this

mine was nearly cylinder

l'apres-midi d'un beige

watching new entrants

listening foam standing

de-eroticised mating in

step by instep

hesitation stop-time

square white fingernail

our world revolves around you

leather pouches shoulder

cardigan strawberries

gold rims fruit tartlet

cafe fug fusion rock

knees read newspaper

universe no borders

undisseminatable un-

reality day-time

box haircut high-rollers

weaponry water sip

this room was serviced by Tina

Aesthetic Ideology

passionate real estate

the sensory appearances of

what it enacts

there is to go on

standing underneath

double blind referees

lay crate flat

they are not signifiers

foundations of grammataology

I trust everything is to your liking

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Many thanks to The Kelly Writers House for doing all they do to bring the magic to us.

CAConrad

MANY THANKS TO AL FILREIS for the invitation to participate in this project. He asked 6 of us to speak to a group of students on a short poem of our choice. We each had 18 minutes.

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO AND/OR AUDIO

CAConrad

VERY EXCITED that my (Soma)tic Exercises just made it into STEPHANIE & STELLA'S HUMP DAY HUSTLER, I'M HONORED! CAConrad

CLICK SITE LINK
http://puppyflowers.com/11/11/11.html

posted by CAConrad

Author of The Holy Land Rauan Klassnik talks to CAConrad about The Book of Frank.

Check out Part One here

& Part Two here!


- Frank Sherlock

The season finale of Chapter & Verse will be part of a poetry double-header which begins at 5pm at Fergie's Pub with Brenda Iijima and Yedda Morrison, hosted by New Philadelphia Poets. Then we'll go a few blocks down to the Chapterhouse to hear Frank Sherlock and Simon Pettet at 8pm. For more info, click here.