Peace On A
presents
readings by PhillySound
featuring:
CAConrad
Mytili Jagannathan
Dorothea Lasky
Chris McCreary
Frank Sherlock
and Kevin Varrone
Saturday, March 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation
curated by CAConrad and hosted by Thom Donovan at:
166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009
about the readers:
Son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2008). He can be found at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com
10 minutes into worry
needing us
a total attempt in vain some days
igniting a fashion for this blasted placement
my old thought of where we are going to bleed on the sofa
all around me this watered motion claps winter on the neck
we are not between trees between hairs
split mine in two so you can get it going
keep it soaring
~ CAConrad, from "going to 108"
Mytili Jagannathan lives in Philadelphia and currently works at the Asian Arts Initiative. She is the author of Acts, a chapbook from Habenicht Press, and her poems have appeared in EOAGH, Rattapallax, Combo, Interlope, Mirage#4/Period[ical], and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics. She’s given many readings across Philadelphia, as well as in New York, D.C, and San Francisco. She is the recipient of an Emerging Artist grant from the Leeway Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. Her first book, AWE, came out in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series along with the poet Michael Carr and is pursuing a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.
The Process of Explication
I.
Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.
Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags
Likewise, hello and goodbye.
II.
Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.
Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.
III.
Students, I can't lie, I'd rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.
I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.
And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.
~Dorothea Lasky
Chris McCreary is the author of two books of poems, Dismembers and The Effacements. Current work can be found online at e.ratio and Tool. He co-edits ixnay press with Jenn McCreary.
Ultraviolence
Tiny Vikings break Jane Austen.
They play grab-
ass in class, crash their dad's Stratus
on the weekends. They
come together
in clusters to imagine our overthrow,
gossip about our bad
breath. They creep into our beds
as we sleep, gut us
w/ hunting knives, curl up to nap
wrapped in bloodied sheets.
~Chris McCreary, from "Fiend Folio"
Kevin Varrone is the author of g-point Almanac: id est (Instance Press, 2007) and g-point Almanac: Passyunk Lost (forthcoming, Ugling Duckling Presse, 2008). g-point Almanac (6.21-9.21) was published as a chapbook by ixnay press and Stenos for Indian Summer, a e-chapbook can be viewed at http://durationpress.com/bookstore/index.htm. Individual poems have recently appeared in Big Bridge #12(http://www.bigbridge.org/bigkvarrone.htm) and cross connect(http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/i24/g/contents.html). He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing at Temple University and The University of the Arts.
dear russell I woke this morning three am
ish my family all sleeping and I couldn’t
stop thinking of pollination and shrapnel
what a word o the transfer of energy
therein seems obvious enough. it’s too cold
still and walking through this sunken square
to where I sometimes wonder
if I might not break into blossom,
what would students think if I came to class
in blossom? I thought of swallows and providence
and bees how it’s all congealed in a drop of sunlight
and capistrano ain’t where it used to be even
continents drift when bart died I was moved
by all the people moved by him and not by blood
and the two black women who in a room full of
hospital administrators sang a gospel song
their acapella voices ached and near asphyxiated me
I had forbidden the use of soul in workshop
yet when they sang it is well it is well it is well
I knew it wasn’t, not with mine own,
which was bones in my pocket,
a spherical case, fragments
of a word that had metathesized
from coal.
~Kevin Varrone, from sortameditation
Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
scholars. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements,
introductions and reading selections.
“till other voices wake
us or we drown”
~ George Oppen
*
*thanks to Nathaniel Siegel & Dottie Lasky for pics!
