Peace On A presents: Stacy Szymaszek & Sam Truitt

“I don’t do stuff for the dead. I keep promises.”
~ Jerome Caja

Peace On A

presents

Stacy Szymaszek & Sam Truitt

Friday, May 9th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Stacy Szymaszek's latest publication is *Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane* (Faux Press). Her self-portraits, along with texts by Killian, Jarnot, Gladman and 5 others, written in response, are featured in a new OMG chapbook called *Stacy S: Autoportraits*. Her 2nd full-length book is *Hyperglossia*, forthcoming from Litmus Press in January 2009. There are no ships in it. She holds down the fort at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suit, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-eyed woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a Hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane’s magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change. " Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard."
~ Stacy Szymaszek, from Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane
Faux Press, 2008

Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of *Vertical Elegies: Three Works* (UDP, 2008) and the forthcoming *Street Mete: A Work in Vertical Elegies* (Palm, 2008) as well as *Vertical Elegies 5: The Section* (U. of Georgia, 2003) and *Anamorphosis Eisenhower* (Lost Roads, 1998), among other books. Sam Truitt holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently a PhD Candidate at the University at Albany, where he teaches, as he does at the College of St. Rose and Bard College. He lives with his family along the Hudson in a warehouse district.

from "THE SONG OF RASPUTIN," part 1??What began in confusion ended in a pencil-thin mustache??& 3 centuries have passed like a dream.?St. Petersburg stands, lovely & vast, at the edge of a sea on a marsh bristling?with fleas in a match-box dancing in the Gypsy Quarter where R sleeps? dipping tonight?to a dramatically low décolleté shaped with underwire cups,?hands black from tilling the soil boldly up the steps of the throne?to share the power, the bed & the Byzantine luxury of queens!?Huge enterprises had come into being. An epidemic of suicides swept? through the city?& the courts crowded with hysterics listening.?For everything was available. Vice was everywhere. Sensualists &? pessimists.?An insane, tremendous male vigor like an airplane?Nijinsky, the great male dancer, displayed to the world outside?But it is too terrible. I won’t do it again.?The particular charm of his person turned into a conviction arriving a?complete surprise by post afterward,?a typical story considering the vacillations and strange lack of?communication between the upper & lower portions of life? unbridgeable, even by good will.?Or what entered through one door fell through.?Or we have ikons, the Japanese shells.?Or T interned in the Peter & Paul Fortress soaked her mattress? in paraffin, lit it & lay down?beneath the moon beneath the stars the sod burning during the war in? humid August?as Moscow & trams were overturned.?& everybody was Kung-fu fighting they were fast as lightening? incinerating herself like love extending?continuous rays until the eternity of eternities receded onto a painted screen? of camouflaged figures.?Or the folds of an umbrella on an overcast afternoon tucked into a? shoulder bag & left in the carriage?this page, this blank page! this??England ! a corked jug & shaggy head braced in a vice mumbling scripture.?The hope is that somehow he gets his mouth to the lip of the jug to tear the? seal & jerk it, gulping, up?to spare himself thereby the grief of coming to.?Because across every page of the manuscript’s scrawled in magic gunk? “Exterminate the brutes!”?The water pounds the shore. The back of his head explodes.?The projector switch gets thrown. Everything is spun, inside or out.?What will in will out.?What happens here makes the spout?at the center of the fountain splash on the bare-breasted marble naiad?who configured with some dolphin is an aspect of the collective tug? yawning at our abdomen.?Though poesy, sweet rhyme, remains necessarily like politics an oral fixation? concerned with tracing a stain on the scrotum??Infringements of vice like lace at panty-edge? mumbling scripture??For in this emotion where these two sad seasons meet?I stand the blue ribbon of blood clots coiled around my feet,?vigorous & vast. The brush. The dirt clouds. The steam.?Bits of sad broken glass ground under a cloud perplexed.?Yet where hope springs water leaks?& shadow of leaf pattern on hard-packed earth,?Diotima, sound that fell to it humming the new pink lake in the middle of? New Jersey at the edge of the industrial accident.?Beneath the roof with the moss growing on it?opening our mouths at the dentist’s office, a cherub?plunging an arm through our genitals the stories?are re-emerging out of the technologies?as a brazen head wedged in a vice flailing in a formula of trying x what? fits which?like so many of her thoughts does into a ratchet-set?picked up off the ground overheard &?cranked to catch the thing as it spills still?out there. Though the thing remains an etude
~ Sam Truitt

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

EXCLUSIVE: The pub. date for Truitt's VE: 3 Works is June 5th. UDP's Matvei Yankelevich will be on hand to sell prepublication copies of the book at an extra-special, exclusive, to-be-announced reduced price.

Sam Truitt’s expansive sequences enact a “radical human recomposition of what we are or were or will become,” widening the frame of the human. See here how our many skins (language, world, self, the quotidian) are perforated with the senses. These forays into our various and secret registers help rip the holes wider, where sunlight floods in.
~ Eleni Sikelianos