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.