PhillySound: new poetry

"I find myself larger than I am and floating in oxygen and light

I
a drinker
and lover of the dark"

--from the book, by Logan Ryan Smith


FANTASTIC BOOK! AND IT'S A FREE PDF, WHAT, ARE, YOU, WAITING FOR! CLICK HERE!

"how quick I am despite my heavy conscience" he writes much later in the poem. It's been a long time since I've read and liked a poem, or anything, where the poet/writer compares themselves with non-human animals to find the world to see themselves. Usually there's an endless listing of similes, which make me cringe and stop reading.

This could be set to music, I think, with the poet reading, better than most poems around. It begs for such a thing to happen. Here's a favorite color passage:


"in the water garden
of our bodies
the red sometimes
takes over the blue
and the vessels
still move"


A HUGE FAN of Smith's book THE SINGERS, I was excited to see this PDF available from Dusie on Goodreads.com, and am glad to have given it a nice, slow, drink. And the water in this poem is part blood, and blood of the poem is like all blood, the PH of ocean water, thus.... How many samples are too many samples? I mean, do people get angry if you use too many? Well, I want to use one more, even though the whole poem awaits to be sampled, frankly, but its readers:


"but I’ll speak now
I’ll speak for you and me
since it’ll one day be our innards
they’ll be judging:

I cannot claim that I didn’t know better
and I never meant to hurt a thing
but I cannot explain
desire
anymore
than you can cause time to stop

Time to stop.

oh how I just wanted things to slow down"


OK, so, can you HEAR it set to music with me now? You would have to be tone deaf to not hear it, and if you are tone deaf I'm sad for you.

CAConrad

Maria Raha forwarded this to me today:

In an interview with the political newspaper Politico and the Internet portal Yahoo, Bush also said he gave up golf in 2003 out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the war, which has now lasted more than five years.

(posted by CAConrad)

Please join us for our 3rd biennial Silent Art Auction Fundraiser! View work from established and emerging visual artists. Enjoy live performances and readings at the top of each hour (3, 4, 5, & 6 pm) on the Sanctuary stage. Shop for rare and signed books and printed matter. Purvey the activity from the (free) wine bar on the balcony, then outbid your friends and fellow enthusiasts on your favorite works of art.

Performances by Richard Hell; Jeni Olin; Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers; Franklin Bruno; and Legends (Elizabeth Reddin, Raquel Vogl and James Loman).

Participating artists and writers include: Yvonne Jacquette, Suzan Frecon, Pamela Lawton, Emilie Clark, Etel Adnan, Susan Bee, Star Black, Rackstraw Downes, Simone Fattal, Vincent Katz, Vivien Bittencourt, Beka Goedde, Brenda Iijima, George Schneeman, Anne Waldman, Erica Svec, Christopher Warrington, Zach Wollard, Bill Berkson, Andrei Codrescu, Maureen Owen, Michael Friedman, Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Stephen Rosenthal, Reg E. Gaines, Robert Creeley, James Franklin, Richard Hell, Emily XYZ, Ted Greenwald, Hal Saulson, Mimi Gross, Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne, Ken Mikolowski, Ron Padgett, Ed Ruscha, Will Yackulic, Jim Dine, Fielding Dawson, Donna Brook, Simon Pettet, Steve Carey, May Pang, Henry Edwards, Terry Southern, Michael Cooper, Mick Rock, Baron Wolman, Lee Friedlander, Eve Babitz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer, Peter Schjeldahl, Richard O'Russa, David Abel, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Greg Fuchs, Alison Collins, Nate Ethier, Anne Tardos, KB Jones, Andrew Mister, Elizabeth Zechel, Patricia Spears Jones, Hannah Weiner, Ted Berrigan & Fairfield Porter, Alfred Leslie, Justin Theroux, Marc Andre Robinson, Veselovsky Pitts, Geoffrey Hendricks, Elizabeth Robinson & Fran Herndon, Karl Klingbiel, Oren Slor, Nick Piombino, Jack Collom, Erica Wessmann, Danny Fields, Kate Simon, Yoko Ono, Kiki Smith, Phong Bui, Basil King, Elizabeth Castagna & Edwin Torres, Debra Jenks, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Felver, Tony Fitzpatrick, Hank O'Neal, and more t.b.a. PLUS: bid on a tarot reading with CAConrad, bid to compose a collaborative poem with Ted Greenwald, bid on a hypnosis session with Maggie Dubris, and more otherworldly experiences!

Visit our online auction database. We are adding items everyday!
http://www.poetryproject.com/auction2008.php

If you can’t make the party, please contact us at 212-674-0910 or info@poetryproject.com for information on proxy bidding. Every dollar earned will benefit the continuance of the Poetry Project!

(posted by CAConrad)

What a strange and beautiful book. If this is Ophelia of Hamlet's Ophelia, she has new songs, new life. She rises out of her drowning. The voices, especially of Ophelia and Ophelio are sometimes different genders of the same body, but maybe that's me seeing what's not there. What's marvelous is that Sakkis's sublime, sensual minimalism gives the reader a lot of room to be in the poem, which is why I shouldn't say much more than that. Say less, is what I should do. But I like the play off of RUDE BOY, the edgy delinquents, feeling their way in the world THEIR WAY!


This book is FREE (note that it's a PDF) so there's no reason to not read it NOW! Here's a favorite passage of mine from the voice of Ophelio:

I could Love
only a quarantine
of dialects
to the station
thin and cold surface
have their way
as if a wire
above the water
glancing back

To download the PDF, click HERE, PDF on the DURATION PRESS website. It would be GREAT to see this performed! But if I were directing it Ophelio would be a drag queen dressed in patent leather from head to toe. And a strawberry wig, not curly.

CAConrad

Dear Barbara Bush, I've only recently seen footage of the destruction caused to your home on the beach in Kennebunkport when it was battered and flooded by the storm of 1991. Much of your husband's memorabilia for his presidential library was washed away or forever ruined. This is the home after all where he conducted his famous command post for his famous Gulf War. All his precious memories of war were gone forever, his giant presidential footprint suddenly blurred.

The footage I saw though is not just of your damaged home, but of you, and your husband picking through the wreckage. Do you remember when one of the reporters asked you and your husband what you intended to DO NEXT? You were both clearly irritated by the question. Your husband turned to the camera and snapped, "This is our HOME, it's our family home, we're going to rebuild!" And you? You added, "We need to pick up the pieces and go on." Do you remember that? Do you remember being in that home with your husband, and reporters, and feeling put upon by the idea that it was all over for you at Kennebunkport?

Do you remember what you said years later in Huston after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and many of that storm's victims were taking refuge in your state of Texas? Instead of thinking about your misfortune from years prior, and how you could lend an empathetic hand to the suffering citizens of your country who were literally ON THE FLOOR of the sports arena around you, you chose the most selfish, most wicked thing to say. Let me remind you:

What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

With this deplorable, dismissive statement you make it very clear how devoid you are of sympathy, but more important, devoid of empathy. YOU are the wife and mother of presidents and you choose to lend no one your hand as you walk among them, their lives in shambles. YOU who could say such a thing gave birth to, and reared a son who would be nicknamed The Death Penalty Governor. But that's nothing of course compared to his one million dead in Iraq. Your son, the man Alexander Cockburn said would be "better if he claimed he'd been turned out on a mountainside in infancy and suckled by wolves."

Maybe Cockburn is right about the wolf mother. Your sons have all been treacherous scoundrels with S&L scams, stealing elections, torturing and bombing. But really you are no different from many of the other mothers and wives of American presidents. A country whose brutal murder, theft and enslavement has been given the revisionist fairy tale of rugged individualism. The PROUD American making the world safer and whiter and whiter and brighter.

But just the same, I look forward to your death Barbara Bush, and the deaths of all your wicked, racist, sexist, homophobic, Jesus Loving men. And I would tell you to go to Hell, but Hell is what you and your men have already brought us. So I'm not sure where to tell you to go, but I'd settle for anything off the planet, and THE SOONER THE BETTER!

CAConrad

After the Jerome Rothernberg event at the Writers House the other day some of us drove over to Bartram's Garden to see the Franklina Tree, which Jonathan Williams sat beneath to write his famous poem in his New Directions book titled AN EAR IN BARTRAM'S TREE.

In honor of Jonathan's poems, Life, and his Love of Bartram's tree (named Franklina after his good friend Benjamin Franklin), we want to have a reading THIS AUGUST when the Franklinia is in bloom! Anyone interested in reading a Jonathan Williams poem should contact me at
CAConrad13@aol.com.

Bartram's Garden is VERY EASY to get to (not sure which trolley leads to it at the moment, but I'll find out).

(photo is, L to R: Miranda Reality Torn Brown, Lee Ann Brown, CAConrad, Michael Hennessey, photo taken by Tony Torn)

CAConrad

If Longshoremen shut down 29 West Coast ports on Mayday to protest the Iraq War & nobody reports it, did it actually happen?

Of course it did! Read about it here.

Also, a rant about the lack of media coverage here- link courtesy of Gina Myers.

- Frank Sherlock

Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life refuses to die, much like its home base- the Crescent City. As Chairman Andrei Codrescu said of the first post-Katrina edition: "We festered, we raged, we contemplated suicide, and in the end, voted for life because we are a Corpse already and we hate to keep on dying, just like the ideals of the Republic."

This edition of the online journal is guest-edited by Bill Lavender.

Check it out here.

- Frank Sherlock

A few nights ago I had a dream that I dressed as a woman in order to marry Joe Massey, in order to be able to visit him in prison. I remember Joe saying something like, "No one's ever going to believe you're a woman," and he was right, and I had to spend a lot of time, an endless amount of time looking better. It was a disjointed jaunt this dream, but I do remember walking on the streets of Joe's California seaside town and no one paid us any mind, which was all we really needed, to pass.

Luckily Joe has recently found out that he is SAFE AND CLEAR! For those who don't know, our friend Mr. Massey had a bad trip with a pot brownie (MUST HAVE BEEN SOME POT BROWNIE!) and went to the hospital emergency room where the trip only slid downdowndown DOWN from there. The end result was that the police came, TAZED him, (how do you spell tazed? like with a tazer gun?) and took him away.

With a clean record under his belt and a good lawyer, and lots and lots of letters of support for the judge from his friends, Joe is NOT GOING TO HAVE TO write his Prison Poems, or Prison Journals, or whatever. And he needn't fear showers, or prison riots. Those one-piece orange suits are kind of cool though, but we can always get one of those for Joe to wear to readings, or the movies, or walks on the beach. And I DON'T HAVE TO SPEND HOURS AND HOURS plucking eyebrows and shaving my legs!

In other words, WE'RE ALL HAPPY YOU'RE FREE JOSEPH MASSEY!
Your friend,
CAConrad

Chris, thanks for letting me know. I think Gmail hates AOL, or, AOL hate Gmail. This keeps happening lately, and it makes me sad. I got an angry phone call from a friend who thought I was avoiding her. It's Gmail, I think. Or AOL, I think. Shit. Well. I don't know what to do. But THANKS Chris for letting me know. See you tomorrow! And for those who don't KNOW what we're doing tomorrow, click HERE! HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE, IT'S GOING TO BE TERRIFIC! Oh, and on Monday maybe you might want to come to THIS panel. See you soon, CAConrad

Hey there Conrad,

I've been trying to respond to yr last couple o' emails, & Jenn's tried to write to you, too, but the emails keep bouncing back...

Wanted to let you know we've been trying, though. See you tomorrow.

Chris

(P.S. Sorry for this on the public blog - not sure how else to get this message to you!)

If you missed THE AMAZING Jerome Rothenberg reading earlier this week at the Kelly Writers House, and the brunch of Q&A the next day, now you can SEE and HEAR it all! Click HERE for the details!

What an amazing Old Soul! I feel fortunate to have been there, and to have finally met this bountiful poet of the Ethnopoetics!
CAConrad
p.s. what do you think about Bob Perelman's "joke" in the "Discussion" Section? He said that younger poets "all write alike." It was said with sarcasm. Then he added that he was only joking. How is that a joke? Who thinks it's funny? Hmmmm, part of me thinks it's a safe form of critique, like, I'LL SAY IT, then retract it artfully by saying it's a joke. But HOW is it a joke? Is it a joke because he and his friends joke about such things? And if so, how do they joke about it? I'm not so sure it's a joke. I'm not so sure at all! THE ONLY FUNNY THING to me about is that it's EXACTLY what I've heard others say for years about Perelman and his friends. Not that I agree, in fact I've always DISAGREED, but yet it's FUNNY, since it's what Mr. Perelman now wants to claim (as a "joke" or not) about younger poets. But who? Which younger poets? JUST BECAUSE he said it was a joke doesn't mean I'm going to forget he said it, and said into a microphone for public record at that!

Susan Larson reviewed Ready-To-Eat Individual today in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Check it out here.


- Frank Sherlock

I am so sad that I will not be able to make the reading on Sunday, but I am participating in a group show at DaVinci Art Alliance and our opening is at the same time. I know you all will be listening to poetry at 4pm on Sunday, but this show will be up for the month of May, and there are a number of free performances and film screenings that are happening throughout the month.

I hope some of you can stop by and see the show.

--cathleen

trans-gression artists’ collective
Multidisciplinary Arts Festival

Opening Reception Sunday May 4th, 4-6PM

DaVinci Art Alliance
704 Catharine St.
Philadelphia, PA 19147

GALLERY HOURS: May 7th - 30th
Wednesday 12-4PM & 6-8PM
Thursday - Sunday 12-4PM

for more information see
http:/www.trans-gression.org

FEATURING ARTISTS:
Tally Brennan, Deborah Caiola, Justin DeForest
Justin Jain, Susan DiPronio, Cathleen Miller
Heather Marie Davis-Jones, Kirsten Knoblauch,
Laureen Griffin, Martina Plag

PERFORMANCES:
Film Night - Sat. May 17, 7PM & 8PM
Tally Brennan’s INTERview - Sun. May 18, 4PM
Justin DeForest’s Transman Crossing - Sat. May 24 & Sun. May 25, 4PM
Martina Plag’s EMMA - Mon. May 19, Fri. May 23 & 30, 7PM
Justin Jain’s Marlowe and Squiggly - Mon. May 19 & Fri. May 30, 8PM

Admission to the art exhibit and performances is free; donations are appreciated.

trans-gression is an artists' collective dedicated to creating opportunities to examine, play with and break gender stereotypes while building a safe space for artistic and personal exploration. We provide support, mutual inspiration, and access to resources for individual and group projects.

I'm on a panel with Cecily Kellogg and Ed Pettit, Monday, May 5th at 3pm, details here. Hope to see you then, CAConrad

I have never been able to understand why Ron Silliman dislikes this museum so much, it's one of my favorites, FAVORITES! The SFMOMA has one of my favorite Rothko paintings!

Poet Suzanne Stein works at the museum, and has JUST STARTED a very interesting blog! Another favorite poet of mine, Eleni Stecopoulos (whose chapbook AUTOIMMUNITY is something everyone should own!) just wrote a blog entry you don't want to miss, called Small Wars.

I'll be checking in on this blog frequently!
Thanks Suzanne for starting this!
CAConrad

Labels: SFMOMA

Hello all,

A bit of self-promotion:

Scantily Clad Press has just published a long-ish poem of mine, "The Black Book," as a free e-chap. Many thanks to Andrew Lundwall at Scantily Clad for making the poem available as part of his fine series.

Chris McC

Barack Obama is My New Bicycle

Because Barack Obama made me balloon

animals, bought me a pony, saved me

the last red velvet cupcake.

Because Barack Obama added me

as a friend, left me two new photo

comments, wrote on my FunWall.

Because Barack Obama built me

a robot, made me a mixtape, thought

I could use some candy.

Because Barack Obama asked about my

day, poured me a cup of coffee, Tivo'd Battlestar

Galactica for me when I worked late.

Because Barack Obama sorted my laundry, paid

my parking tickets, spent the whole afternoon

setting up my new wireless router.

Because Barack Obama ran back into a burning

building to rescue my baby, got my cat out of

the tree, saved me from drowning.

Because invoking the tongue-in-cheek fangirl feels

easier, & hope without irony feels foreign, & I'm tired

of feeling it's best not to get too excited about anything.

Because if a Will.I.Am video featuring Scarlett

Johannsen & John Legend can choke me up, then

anything is possible, even change.

Happy Voting, kittens.

love, jenn mccreary.

PS:

Barack Obama told me he really wanted to meet

you, told me to tell you he said "hello," took off

when he heard you weren't coming.

*with thanks to www.barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com*

The Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo is
pleased to announce the schedule and
list of speakers for
"George Oppen: A Centenary Conversation,"
to take place from April 23-April 25.

A link for the conference is HERE.

--posted by Divya Victor