Monday, September 30, 2013

Readings attended weekend / plus, 2 of a Beefy 3rd




Two unmissed readings this past weekendish - Kevin Young, winner of a 2013 PEN award, finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, read his writing to a full hall at Vanderbilt's maddened campus the other night. I made it slightly late, plopped down in the grey carpet wing with grapes and sippycup with wine and consumed almost an entire claw of grapes. 'Rhythmic spaces for breathy still / tonality cleared against, and blues, and puns, lightly pedagogical / some pausal end with no end / I guess antagonistic to mere forms / safety / money, odes / a poetry sometimes teaches against itself,' then a drawing that looks like spaghetti mopped over some old seaman's jaws.





Then Ciona Rouse's lovely event - Lyrical Brew - brought together three readers to present their work in expanding volumes per round, versatility, volume, relation. The format, as always, entices, fosters. Stephanie Pruitt Gaines, Tiana Clark, and fervent Bill Brown read to a packed sector at West End's Barnes & Noble.  Bill Brown stands out as a leaning, warry, experiential voice, at one point hollering "Bomb - Womb - Tomb" repeatedly peering out with a Creeley smear. Though a small number of reading series have appeared in the slumber of PoetrySucks!, I think Lyrical Brew may be the most accessible ( though intimate ), unpretentious ( and surprising ), sociable ( but varied ) milieu. Every month at the end of the month at the B&N across from Centennial Park at 7pm.




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Been spending most of the times over at Rhino ( check out their back issues, plus Founders' Prize ) and revolution and/or poetry, & listening my hair out to Echo Comets, and Haunted Horses.












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And the Beefies, Beefering Beef Oven had music at divest Nashville Springwater missing bassnotes and a bassman but are recording their EP exactly now, so that's grand, and are set to play a fistfull of shows in October - like their effbook for updates and schtuff.








Monday, September 23, 2013

Chicagi Spread




A day from the Chicagi* visit and reeling, time with the spearhead of family, maternals, fraternal, being all up on their skin in the same rooms, something chemical, what Frank Lloyd Wright did with mass - compression & release, how 'ol Frankie made his theory masses how I am with family.





Flight, we are panels of a thing afraid of its insides, far from the openness of Wright Brothers, last week they had very difficult times flying for more than a minute, from airport a milky eyed man has trouble defining his city to me, it maybe moves past his experience of it to me.





First night the hotel didn't give access so brother Tom and I poked our heads into the town slightly and by slightly I mean infinitely; hooch was obtained in our five hour walk, southside, then the sky opened like Bowles understands god, and our puny purple hoods were weak, absolute is a word that comes to mind, the absolute of rain's watery range was our context, brother Tom heavily upset but me ( rum ) well enough and already the instance pupped along memory and closeness of compression & release, the combinations of emotion and fury, of direction and efficiency, location and movement.

A day later some nightlong affair of shootings.



Mute rental cars, deep pizza, walking, alcohol, obsessions over the bean, failed drug dialogues, flat -






Myopic bookstore came recommended and was visited, snatched up Aase Berg's Dark Matter.

The sun was never absent or stagnant, in my vision the glare of a moving sun is a word repeated on objects I pass.


Hardcore burgers, walking, Charles Shaw, men fighting men, running across Lakeshore to skit around Michigan Lake, and television, the hollow gems have a filling which is to say when you go looking for one thing you may have a hard time finding it, when you go look for anything you have a much easier time of the entire thing.





Flight, journal re-appraisal, offered whiskey by executive young typewriter pants girlish woman, accepted, small gazey poem jotted on napkin that went 'I am trying percussions against every other person, the planes talk about each other over some clouds, there are only a small amount of moments we are actually in movement' and ended 'how does it always arrowing?"

Airports are never without a tension of pasts, airports cannot produce anything but negative histories, it is itself a place of conduit, for the movements, and they reek of the shallow tube they are, pent.


Walked out of the airport on their lawns into the throat of the freeway side, then penetrated deep head high bush of poison ivy and black lizard rocks and stream spider web held to decipher fence from thick screaching brush then up and lean and into and over these and adventure smile with ripped pants and some small blood, small itching, I am unallergic to that from which I emerge, Nashville then.


















*Lew Welch's oft quoted repeated Chicago Poem