the ISTHMUS UN-MALTHUS AS MANTHUS SHAPED READING

Opening the new season of _________-Shaped Readings, Milwaukee’s BRENDA CARDENAS and ROBERTO HARRISON are joined by Madison’s TIM YU.

This mouthfill of a reading will take place Friday, January 27th, 7pm at Avol’s Books (315 W. Gorham).

Only the conjunctions of their three very distinct poetries can adequately show the overlaps and resonances between them, but we expect language of contemplation, declamation and humor that bridges continents and sings to possibilities for new politics of human community.

Biographical Notes:

Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two collections of poetry Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009) and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, Institute for Latino/a Studies, 2005). She also co-edited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). Cárdenas’ work has appeared in a range of publications, including The Wind Shifts: The New Latino Poetry, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, Achiote Seeds, RATTLE, and most recently in the literary journals Cream City Review and Pilgrimage, as well as the anthology Brute Neighbors: Urban Nature Poetry, Prose and Photography. She is currently serving as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate and is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee.

Timothy Yu is the author of two chapbooks: Journey to the West, winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman, and 15 Chinese Silences, forthcoming from Tinfish.  He is also the author of a scholarly book, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965.  His work has appeared in Kartika Review, SHAMPOO, and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century.  He teaches at UW-Madison.

Roberto Harrison‘s books include Os (subpress, 2006), Counter Daemons (Litmus, 2006), and a half dozen or so chapbooks. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Poems by the readers

Brenda Cardenas:

Why I’m Fighting in Wisconsin:
Erasure of an Op-Ed by Our Imperial Scooter, March 10, 2011

Outstanding first year in Wisconsin—
one of the best!
Reasonable changes force
schools to fire based on
my budget-repair bill,
which passed and awaits
cutting billions of dollars!
In Wisconsin, we are reforming
the way government works.
Our plan gives tools to total reduction.
Bold changes are modest:
State workers contribute
half of their health,
wages and benefits,
a sister-in-law, two beautiful kids.
A typical middle-class Wisconsin family
would love a deal like the one we’re proposing.
Concessions speak louder than words:
Local governments can pass
a hope and a prayer,
reward barriers that block innovation.
When Gov. Mitch Daniels repealed
collective bargaining in Indiana,
the average pay for Indiana state employees
actually ceased; employees’ pay ceases
when they do something exceptional.
Pass our budget-repair bill!
Good for the Badger State,
good for government employees
who overwhelmingly want their jobs.
In Wisconsin, we can avoid the teacher,
schools, America, the future, our children!
Dire consequences we face.
Taking the easy task each day,
there are protesters in and around
our state. They be hard.
But their voices cannot drown out
the voices of the countless payers
who want us, our budgets,
and, more importantly,
to make government work for them.

Published in Cream City Review, 35.1. Spring/Summer, 2011

Roberto Harrison:

A diversity in oneness

Earth^

Tim Yu:

Chinese Silence No. 4

after Billy Collins, “China” 

I am a cicada floating in a coffee cup
on the desk of the Poet Laureate.

Grant proposals are being written.
Many bottles of Napa wine are emptied.

But even when his nodding head
strikes the desk like a bobbing Buddha’s,

I lurk silently inside
my mug, chipped by the teeth of Ezra Pound.

hey it’s the QUASH CLEAR SOMETHING-SHAPED READING!

At Saturday, November 19th in Avol’s Books on 6pm – Mary Austin Speaker, Chris Martin, and Sarah Fox will be reading their poems.  This reading is guaranteed to be wonderful or somebody gets their clear something-shape back. Or quashad. Some bios and poems to follow and give you a sense (after this photograph):

Chris Martin is the author of Becoming Weather (Coffee House 2011) and American Music (Copper Canyon 2007).  He is also the author of several chapbooks, including How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem (Brave Men 2011) and the forthcoming Hymn that Is the Air (Ugly Duckling 2012).  He is an editor at Futurepoem books and curates the response blog Futurepost from the oldest house in Iowa City.

The Bat
for Sarah Fox

Self and
self’s subset
like a bell’s
tongue is part
of its sounding mechanism
also called a clapper
and will only travel out
in waves of beaten sonority
like how seeing strikes the seen
and the seen returns its blow
a limp fisticuff of color
that uncoils in animal brogue
a mouth of planes
that beat the eye
black with language
I travelled light
I literally
rode pulse
like a bat
like my mouth’s
wet flapping was tied
to maps of proximity
I consumed the room’s waste
to find a little place
inside the stanza for raising mammals
whose hands are also our cape
who love nothing above song
and make a map wherever
we bell into light
our crunched noses flush
against sun’s dénouement
a golden crown
devouring fruit
devouring whatever
echo suits us
there is never
enough to let go
we left coterie life
to map the night’s growth
_____________________________________________________________

Sarah Fox was born in the year, month, and hour of the Horse. She lives in NE Minneapolis where, with John Colburn, she co-imagines the Center for Visionary Poetics, and seeks to engage in any and all collaborative occupations that increase love, liberation, transparency, solidarity, and imaginative acreage in the collective psyche. Her book Because Why was published by Coffee House Press, and recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spout, Conduit, Tammy, humdrum, ElevenEleven, Action Yes, Boo: A Journal of Terrific Things, and Rain Taxi. She writes about occult motherhood, astropoetics, entheogenic plant medicines, and more on the multi-author blog montevidayo.com, teaches English, Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota, and serves as a doula. Two new books are forthcoming from Coffee House, including Doctrine of Signatures—a collection of poems the Milwaukee poet Antler has deemed “a Paleolithic hallucinogenic dreamstate phantasmagoric shaman voyage”—and Mother Substance—a book-length assemblage documenting the psychic and somatic catastrophes faced by women exposed in utero to the synthetic estrogen Diethylstilbestrol (DES) (“the worst drug disaster in American history”). She performs “poetry rituals” and other acts of intersubjective communion in public and private spaces whenever she can.

(from COM[M]A)

Kairos

I drownproofed myself and the dead
babies with shriek vests and we set
off across the lake on our raft towards
another shore whose inhabitants might
welcome us. We were transpersonal
pilgrims, the water revised us and we
knew that the lake was merely
the surface of our dream, like the raft
was just a borrowed womb the babies
couldn’t leak through. A clergy of crows
cropped up as magnetic chorus on
the horizon. I grew fins and amped up
our destiny. I was prepared to submit
to the crows’ reconfigurement, become
beak-scratched and claw-scrawled,
seam-spilling. Black caws feathering
my veins. I cradle the blood in my
hands, press prints onto the walls
of the chamber where I hoard all my skulls.
____________________________________________________________

Mary Austin Speaker is the author of four chapbooks: In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys, Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions 2009 and 2010), The Bridge (Push Press 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (forthcoming in 2012 from Ugly Duckling Presse). New work  has recently appeared in Pleiades, Big Bell, Boston Review, Boog City Reader, 20012, Iowa Review, la fovea, Bright Pink Mosquito, New Orleans Review and elsewhere. She teaches writing and works as a freelance book designer in Iowa City, IA.

from 20 Love Poems for 10 Months

3.

perched like
crows in the
sky’s highest
limbs so land
rolls its white
woolen rug
of winter
abominable
slowness
a flood
of yes

the ALES BEWARE MOOD-SHAPED READING

That’s right!

Jeff Alessandrelli
Trey Moody and
Joshua Ware

will visit us from Lincoln, Nebraska, to pelt us with amazing poems
this Friday, November 4th, at 7 p.m.
Avol’s Bookstore, 315 West Gorham

it will provide your life with a coherent structure of meaning, or will do something else that’s even more exciting.

We, your hosts, got to read with Messrs. Moody and Ware back in the spring, and are very happy that they and Jeff are coming to our neck of the prairie.

Here are some bios and poems, the formatting of which has been butchered by this medium. We apologize for the stubborn left margin.

Trey Moody is the author of Climate Reply (New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM) and Once Was a Weather (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming), and his poems appear in Best New Poets 2009, Boston Review (soon), Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Washington Square. He co-curates The Clean Part Reading Series in Lincoln, NE, where he teaches and works for Prairie Schooner.

A WEATHER

Why a. Why not bring bodies
back to home. Bones
before our tracks, after parks
cleared leaves. Why radio. Listen
listlessly, then sleep. Why weather
becomes a lack—language suffers, like you.
Paths, too, refuse use. Why department.
Why soda. Five calendars of blue.
Light lingers long as memory, but
why winter. Music
wanes, despite the view.

Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of the little book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press, 2011) and the chapbook Don’t Let Me Forget To Feed the Sharks (Poor Claudia, forthcoming) and currently lives in Lincoln, NE, where, along with Trey Moody, he co-curates the latest incarnation of The Clean Part Reading Series. Recent work by him appears/is forthcoming in Sentence, Quarterly West, Forklift, Ohio, CutBank and Eleven Eleven, among others.

Poem with Limbs

The audible shape
of a billowing scream,

avalanche that began milk-white
and died dark dark red.

The sun shining;
the resort’s holiday weekend package.

Too many birds staring
from the newly-understood limbs

of an upstanding tree.

Joshua Ware lives in Lincoln, NE. His first book, Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley, won the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize and was published this past summer. He is the author of the chapbooks Excavations (Further Adventures Press) and A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations (Scantily Clad Press, as well as the co-author of I, NE: Iterations of the Junco. His writing has appeared in many journals, such as American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, and Western Humanities Review.

You Sure Have Taken a Shine to that Cowpoke

Under
the fluorescent
gloss of art
“I”
facial
lighting, we sing
and collide. A scope and array
of colors and shapes
dizzy us into agreeing
every angle is needed
to view a panoramic of our
selves against fragmented
skies and rooms made
of grass.
________________________________________________________________________

Marge Simpson once said: “You sure have taken a shine to that cowpoke.”

In their younger days, the poets would get stoned and go to the grocery in search of Walt Whitman; they never found him. Although, they usually left feeling a bit dazzled by the large quantity of products available to consumers, not to mention the amount of “choices” available when a person is in need of one of those specific products.

Adorno once wrote: “Art now dutifully admits to being a commodity, abjures its autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumer goods.”

During the poets’ aforementioned grocery visits, they would become disoriented by the vibrantly colored packaging.

THE SHAPE CANOLA-SHAPED READING

SEPTEMBER 24th, a saturday, AVOL’S BOOKS, 7 pm

Whit Griffin (all the way from Memphis), Rebecca Steffy Couch, and Jordan Dunn (two localites) will shape the canola (shake the cannoli?) (whatever that means). Please attend, they are each amazing, and collectively / adjacently no one knows yet, it will be so good. If you’ve met any of these people you already know what I’m talking about. Biographical notes and some poems immediately proceed this note:

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:

Rebecca Steffy Couch is a writer, reader, teacher, and a developing researcher-critic in English literary studies at UW-Madison. She grew up just outside the small town of Manheim in Lancaster County, PA. Ordinarily handy with plants, Rebecca has been challenged by a new and not-thriving hibiscus at home. If anyone has any tips on this or other things, please speak with her after the reading.

Whit Griffin studied at Bennington College and Brooklyn College, respectively, and was an intern for the Jargon Society.  He is the author of Pentateuch: The First Five Books (Skysill Press, 2010).  Chaplets include Fugitive Cant (Country Valley, 2010) and Cathedral Ring (Longhouse, 2011).  With Andrew Hughes he co-founded the journals Tight and BPM.  He currently resides in western Tennessee.

Jordan Dunn lives in Madison, WI, where he manages an artisan dairy, and takes daily adventures with his toddler son, Owen.  He supports bicycles, bourbon, and fine English shotguns.

POEMS:

Jordan Dunn

Twelve to Three

Some wine for the ghost, Chinese landscape monograph, little person, that counts, it counts more, traveling from valley to valley, concerned with weather, cirrus crisp morning, the mind like a jewel, unpolished, or the mind like void, a jeweled void, woodpecker striking the barn roof, cricket autumn, the thing thing thing he taught her, how to determine surface, origin, the probability of being evaluated, dragged to the river bank, let loose to cannibal logic in the thrust grove, morning, fog dense in redwood boughs, drinking wine, eucalyptus favors, I go, return, forget words, now relax and enjoy you on you, another parody wish list, foreclosed closet, bumper wheat crop, reevaluation of the thing itself, itself, itself, the thing, what, margin of error, translation recipe, dash off, sweet one, hidden energy will push you to the limit of purpose, song, sing, along you go.

Whit Griffin

Valley Sanctuary

Paralyzed by fears at night that
don’t even register during day.  Defending
the border of a hostile imagination.
Where are the wondrous animals that
will unlock the misery we’re living in?
Attend to various pleasures, populate
the vibrations.  Learn to sing with your
mouth closed.  Golden chime.  A fishing
tabernacle floored in stumps and knuckle
bones.  A tenuous connection with
the outside world, trying to arrange
a binding.  The crystal has grown
dark. The dove, country pigeon, bobs
and scurries with its mate.  It
rains, it snows, where’s the tomato?
How fast can you row away from a
former friend you once shared Xmas
dinner with?  Panic down by the water.
Cleanse the wristwatches, the wandering
uterus of Beirut.  There’ve been no
good statues since the invention of trousers.
Of leaving, of arriving.  I don’t drink
but have been known to sniff dough.  As
the baker manages his yeasts, no un-
believer was allowed to eat oranges in
Moorish Spain.  How many had to be stricken
before a plant’s poisonous nature was common
knowledge?  To live, to die, healed.

Rebecca Steffy

the eerie back tense

what follows
a noun in motion
from an idea
in shivers

for summer being done
all things stand in thickets
if they looked behind them
a hemisphere o’er shoulder
in no proper place
is past back
must be dorsal

geo-cache this news world
the shouldest
stifle mouth
it is eerie time around second
and third

fight Roger Clegg

The Horseshoe’s Mouth-Shaped Reading

The ________-Shaped Reading Series returns to joyfully bring you the amazing poems of CONNIE DEANOVICH and MAUREEN SEATON. They happen at Avol’s Bookstore, 315 West Gorham in Madison, on Thursday, August 4th, at 7 p.m. An open mic will follow. Like a faithful dog. Or like sunshine follows rain. Or vice-versa. Or like conclusions follow premises. Sometimes. Oh, dear… this metaphor generator must be low on batteries.

Trust us. It’ll be amazing.

Connie Deanovich is a Whiting Writers Award winner and author of Zombie Jet and Watusi Titanic.  She lives in Madison WI.

Maureen Seaton is the author of fourteen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon, ’09); America Loves Carney (Sow’s Ear, ‘09); Stealth, with Sam Ace (Chax Press, ‘11); and Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds, with Neil de la Flor (Sentence Book Award, Firewheel, ‘11). A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, ’08), won the Lambda Literary Award, and her poetry has received many honors, including the Lammy, the Audre Lorde Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the NEA, and the Pushcart. You can find her at http://almostdorothy.wordpress.com/category/themes/glit-lit/ and www.maureenseaton.com and teaching poetry at the University of Miami, Florida.

 

DIVESTITURE

Here’s your mistake back
you never made it

here’s the cushion
reshaping on the couch

your shadow slips under the threshold
you never crossed it

private paradise
is just another storm splitting in space

the sheets you never crumpled
fold up again

the words you spoke
were never spoken

when I walk into the library
I’m not thinking of you

when my heart drains like sand from a shoe
I’m not thinking of you

something was having trouble ending
think of energy’s mutations not of you

yesterday I devirginized
my own story

stuck my fingers in and out of my own future
until I broke its promise

today I’m not thinking of you
but of a souvenir tossed on the compost

a smelly time unpettaling
blackening rain and garbage

–Connie Deanovich

 

Lorraine Hansberry’s Grave

What is the name of the water in the bowl inside the sea, I once said to my lover, who took me to Hansberry’s grave on a winter evening—the name of the water contained within the larger water, I asked, rain in my mouth, rain in the boats of my shoes. All around us: deer shit and the dampened opinions of dead people. We walked past the graves with rain on our faces. Grass grew in sheets down the hills and rainwater glossed the marble. Is the body unclosed as the bowl in the ocean is unclosed, or is the enclosed body unclosed in the ocean of the soul, I persisted, the bowl in the sea, the body in the sea of the soul? My lover said: Droplet, Sea-bowl, Little Grave Seeker. They buried Hansberry on a hillside in Croton-on-Hudson beside white people and a river plunging south. We searched for her for an hour in the rain, my lover and I, wishing for slickers and luck and long lives to come. It was I who found her and shouted to my lover, who leapt to me from among the dead, her body aslosh with joy.

–Maureen Seaton

The UnderoneroushipShaped Reading

That’s right!

Flaunting and taunting superstition,
this Friday, May 13th, we proudly present
NOAH GERSHMAN and RON CZERWIEN
reading poems at Avol’s Bookstore, 315 West Gorham, at 7 p.m.

Noah Gershman travels frequently.  His occupations are tenuous.  Right now he’s touring the country with his new poetry collection, The Enthusiast (Snail Press, 2011), of which Rachel Glaser writes:

“In these poems it’s as if each snow globe has its own society.  Gershman reveals the private moments of the players in a weird history.  His monsters have style.  To read these poems is to imagine all new occupations.  These are twisted old tales, written in 1708, but found recently and published.  Step inside them and rejoice.”

Ron Czerwien is the owner of Avol’s, a used and out-of-print bookstore in Madison, WI. Most recently his poems have appeared on-line at Moria, Nth Position, Qarrstiluni, Right Hand Pointing, and Shampoo. Ron hosts the monthly “First Thursday Open Mike Poetry Readings” at Avol’s. His latest project involves constraint-based writing. For more details attend the damn reading.

Aviary–Noah Gershman

This morning I opened my mouth
and a sparrow flew out.
It had something in its talons,
but before I could protest
it was gone.  I ate a second bowl of cereal
to fill the added space.
Brushing my teeth, it happened again.
A magpie absconded
and nearly crashed into the mirror.
At work I was asked for an opinion
and a crested thrasher made the break.
Business calls were a disaster,
the office filling up with birds.
On the train I coughed a meadowlark,
a warbler and a thrush.  Then she appeared
in her cumulous white tunic.
“Today I lost everything,” I told her.
She took my hand.
A partridge landed on her hat.

Stone Banjo–Ron Czerwien

What he came home with
was never revealed.
Curious hands across
the ocean of talk find
their journey is over,
one song learned
from singing along.
All kinds of hints
got repurposed
when not absorbing
outsiders. His prayer
winded the world
sleeping on a goat,
never learned
to cue the mythic sky.
The unquestionable maps
no place. Our people
on the ground
are down to earth.
Maybe the cab driver was
inexplicably profound?
The hours of lost swirling
blur the walk.

The Coins’ Must-Shaped Reading

That’s right. The coins have must, and the must has a shape, and the shape is the shape of this reading by Nick Demske, Matthew Klane and Nicholas Ravnikar. Ouch. The goodness of it hurts already. Come hear them and hang out afterwards somewhere nearby.

It happens on Saturday, April 30th, at 7 p.m., at Avol’s Bookstore, 315 West Gorham, Madison, WI.

Nick Demske lives in Racine, Wisconsin, and works there at the Racine Public Library. His self-titled manuscript was selected by Joyelle McSweeney for the Fence Modern Poets Series prize and was published in 2010. One goodreads reviewer has said of it, “If I wanted ‘clever’ play with cliche and idiom I’d go watch really bad poetry slam performances on YouTube.” Also found on goodreads, regarding his book: “…reading this feels like watching family guy.”

Nick is a curator of the BONK! Performance series, an editor of the online venue boo: a journal of terrific things and a founder of the Racquetball Chapbook Tournament and Press. He founded it with the incredibly stupid, lame-ass poetaster Nicholas Michael Ravnikar. We all make mistakes.

In his spare time, Nick brands social networking giants in his poet bios. An example of this would be goodreads. This activity is pro bono, though Nick imagines goodreads to be very grateful for the attention.

This is the fifth paragraph in Nick’s bio. How many paragraphs did Nicholas Michael Ravnikar’s bio have? Probably less. Just saying.

So visit Nick Demske sometime at nickipoo.wordpress.com . Your life will be as good as the reads which you find there.

and I’ve attached two poems because you deserve them. they were both published in Action Yes. this is still part of my bio.

i love you,
nick (the good[reads] nick)

Matthew Klane is editor and co-founder of Flim Forum Press. His book is
B_____ Meditations (Stockport Flats, 2008). Recent work can be found in
muthafucka, Harp&Altar, and Word For/Word. He currently lives and writes in Iowa City.

Typical bio:
Nicholas Michael Ravnikar lives in Racine, WI with his Carly-Anne and their two cats. He teaches public speaking, composition and oral/interpersonal communication at UW-Parkside and Gateway Technical College. He publishes the irregular zine/chapbook series The Bathroom, has facilitated poetry workshops in prisons and schools and bookstores, and likes to dabble in video.

Honest bio:
Nicholas Michael Ravnikar is a real poet. Nicholas feels uncomfortable writing his bio. Bio is weird. It’s not even a recognized word. It’s a root, a morpheme, two freakin’ syllables. Still, bio occupies a place in the lexicon, and Nicholas is pretty sure he knows how to use it.

“sample” poems

Socialite

Balaclava terrorist fist bumps a goggle of cloroxy colleagues. Copywrite cliché, city of that ol’ nasty, the twinkles be spare teeth in syphilitic night. Skeetly deetly deet. The sex video leaked green night vision ecto like a promise like a promise, damn. That’s just a regressive stereotype. Swine love pearls. As much as any any puckersuck DUI, TTYN. The beauty star headlights we deer so thank-God. The world, we all warm our hands over the same blazing trash can. This unity. Smattering o dirty blond, jailbreak heiress, georgics sweep siren candy diddling your stupid cilia. The semi-automatic sunrise splashes bleach on your skin. That’s hot.
The starfucker makes a joke. Looks around to see who laughs. Halo noose pussy o, quench your canines, filed so, upon this furburger meadow. The simple life is death. See there—it flees a swerving limo’s brights. Poor immortal, waxed asshole, burkha designer name as far above your means and still. Through face shines moon as bone as skull. The fires of hell hath no light.

Nick Demske

Solitary Confinement – She and I

My – shy
elliptical shell –
tiny winter
crypt

My shell
shy – white line
lonely lyric
-elle

Matthew Klane

An Evening at Home

Dust perfumes the scratch of a comb
Harping down to her shoulder. The moon does not
Rise like bubbles in a flute of champagne.
A boatload of clowns arrives at the docks.

She holds her lovers by their names beneath her thumb,
Slides and adjusts them, arranges them on the screen
Of her smart phone. An auction opens and the bids
Inflate her spirit. Gum snaps a cute pattern

between her teeth and tongue. The spades appear
to her as pierced, black hearts. An orange rind
jigsawed into five rough domes beside some change
on mahogany, kidney-colored, steals her eyes.

This makes her consider how to be more
considerate. They left again
with no place to go. Again, she will muse
at the silence and dust. The comb clacks on the wood.

She makes peace with the shadows of buildings,
the sound of a tide she cannot see.
The hamstrings of the gargoyle across the way
are crumbling; moonlight leaks through an alley

to spill down the curb. Even a yawn feels wrong now.
She needs to vacuum. She needs to make an appointment
To see the doctor tomorrow. Her veins glow
And she twists the plastic knob at the base of the white gazebo

That fits in her hand and twinkles in time
with her tiny pulse. Here comes the bride, toward her
from the only photograph in a gilt frame,
stepping out of the slow sea. She hasn’t the heart

for such eyes anymore. She hasn’t the bones
to stock her soup this week. She hasn’t the groom
to bow his head, nor desire enough to turn
soil in terra cotta pots, drier each day around

this apartment. “Wait,” he says. “I love that song.”
She looks up at the interruption: he stands
In a doorway, wearing the top hat from the photo
And, crossing to her, takes the toy

with hands too cold for summer. Being numb,
They fumble and the trinket shatters. “Okay,”
She says, “it’s okay,” and looks to the broom in the corner.
“I couldn’t take another fucking drinking song tonight.”

Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

The Sempiternal Roads-Shaped Reading (4/16 at Avol’s, 7pm)

The ________-Shaped Reading series is back after a four month hiatus, and it’s Sempiternal Roads-Shaped. Surprise!

Please come join us Saturday night the 16th of April at Avol’s Books (315 West Gorham) at 7 pm as we listen to three wonderful poets arriving here from ways away: Joel Craig, Andy Fitch, and Geoffrey Olsen (see bios and poems below). Then after words, I suggest we go for a drink somewhere nearby. What do you say?

BIOS:

Joel Craig is the author of the chapbook Shine Tomorrow (Lost Horse, 2009); and poems forthcoming or lately in TYPO, A Public Space, MoonLit, The Zoland Annual, GutCult, Iowa Review, and others. He lives in Chicago, IL where he is the poetry editor for MAKE: A Literary Magazine, and where he co-founded and curates The Danny’s Reading Series at Danny’s Tavern.

Andy Fitch has books forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press and Ugly Duckling Presse. The Song Cave recently released his chapbook Island. In 2010, Ugly Duckling published his collaboration with Jon Cotner Ten Walks/Two Talks. He teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program.

Geoffrey Olsen lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. He is the author of the chapbook End Notebook (petrichord press, 2008). His chapbook, Not of Distends * Address Panicked is forthcoming from Minutes Books.

POEMS:

Andy Fitch

Gravel

Gravel connects me to The Reservoir…the trip’s next highlight…the Jackie O…and the first shirtless boy of the season…chasing a doberman chasing pigeons…Oh this “shirtless boy” wears a peach-colored top…which still counts…until a shirtless man passes in skimpy shorts…clutching garments…two pierced hearts on his shoulder

Silence without street sounds from before…from which I’ll sniff warm pine needles…watch a camera bag bob…twirl…unknot itself…Tennis players pack the courts playing doubles…shoes skidding across the clay…the way clouds push the sun around this park…part of the city

Geoffrey Olsen

an excerpt from Not of Distends * Address Panicked

breath function

who’d they think I
though outside for
an hour fragmentary, attuned

insult widely those
partial fictive order
experience something solos
and its soloing though not withdrawn at

last inescapable somehow countering that
expected satisfaction. not cloying
rhythm. ours as later. the red coming down the white wool in thin
streams and with the pulse. a sheep. several
people there coughed

one left and walked to the door
able to leave.
week’s provenance berated. these dull colors.
which as memory responds
against. roots cleft. vague frequencies.
coherence turns.

so much rocky stuff
hold it
you’re supposed to.

rapt wince. today open clouds blue. receipt.

witness.

and poetry. the overlaps
affective. Formulating a response
it is removed

through time

as therefore I am to here’s
responding to an outside. Be
ing filled with anxiety about this presentation. but that is. pass.

 

Joel Craig

The Second Half of the Flight

Going on old gut instinct I said,
instead of pushing away your dead friends,
when you wake up try bringing them along
as allies during the day.
There was a smudge of blood on my collar, and I was staring at it
not really thinking anything at all when the roof fell in.
You don’t often get to hear the actual words of an early childhood
programming. With new emotions creeping into your life
perhaps higher frequency is compensated
by reduced intensity. After the debacle
in San Fernando Valley, I told her she could do anything
she felt like—a simple gesture
to reassure the child inside. At the top of the hill
there was a crumbling cement overlook and the remnants
of a spiral staircase to an upper level
that no longer existed. The traveler can see
a legion of bulldozers developing
extraordinary rapidity into the green, the millions
and millions of compounds that are known.
It is a project not a certainty. Christmas
in the hills, big smiles. The Russians recoil
from nothing, so I never try to force public opinion.
Not when it is so young.
Real caring, like love, cannot be forced,
and she should have sufficient insight of her own
to be aware of what her feelings toward me really are.
Trying to open my eyes
or lift a finger to deliver the most reassuring description.
Jesus Christ! There are foods
and metabolites, hormones, enzymes and minerals that in essence
define us. Like a mummy in an undiscovered tomb or a star
in some undescribed galaxy, they may be unknown to us,
but they might be present in a tealeaf, or a moss spore.
Not wanting to get in the way of the image, I speak quietly,
but at least now I can talk about it, looking at the way her body lay,
hands relaxed, fingers loosely curled at her sides.
I couldn’t figure out how I got outside. The view
was lovely, surrounded by palm trees and flowering bushes
of many kinds, and it was the tropics, the real tropics,
again. I also teach hypnotherapy. I’ve written a book and I’m doing
very,
very well. Would your dog fight a bear
for you? I’m thinking about this big zoom lens,
how I began exploring the world of administrative officialdom
for ultimate, magical overlaps. The reward
for this caper will be in the stamps, not the science.
Bigger bridges. Better bones. The victim was Catholic.
A lot of intensity and passion and wonderful Latin phrases.
It’s here that the two areas of my personal interest—
swamp collecting, God Saving Us—effectively overlap. A sherbet-cool breeze
coming through my open doors, to my immense relief.
I had been sweating in the earlier humid warmth, and now,
finally I was feeling comfortable. Peace and quiet
for a while. He sat back in his seat, looking at me thoughtfully
during liftoff. That makes very much sense, as you say. It is true
I should not be afraid of them. Why should I fear dead friends
who love me?

SPORK CROWN-SHAPED Reading! It’s True!

It’s the SPORK CROWN-SHAPED Reading. It’s at 8pm, this Friday night (11/5) at The Project Lodge. Once there, you will hear poems read by the following exceptional poets who are living and visiting from near and much further:

LAUREL BASTIAN: Laurel is the Halls Emerging Artist Fellow for 2010-2011, awarded by the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is on the faculty of Madison College, teaches creative… writing at the University of Wisconsin Madison, runs a creative writing program for incarcerated adults, and curates “CROSSHATXH” a new and dynamic reading series here in Madison. You can read some of her recent publications at http://laurelbastian.org/home.html

JOHN BRADLEY: John is the author of Terrestrial Music, Curbstone Press, War on Words, BlazeVox, and You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, Cleveland State Univ. Poetry Center, winner of the 2009 Open Competition. He is the editor of three anthologies: Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, Coffee House Press, and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader, University of Arizona Press, and Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath, The Backwaters Press. Bradley is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Northern Illinois University.

SETH LANDMAN: Seth lives in Denver, CO, and is a member of the Agnes Fox Press Collective. He has two chapbooks: The Wild Hawk the Sea (Minutes Books, 2010) and Parker’s Band (Laminated Cats Ltd., 2009). Other poems appear (or will appear) in Jubilat, VOLT, Boston Review, Forklift, Ohio, and some other places.

Sample poems from a couple of the authors are directly below:

John Bradley:

Stopping by Words
Whose words these are I think I know.
Who can really own them though.
No one will see me stealing here
To watch these words became my own.

My little mouth must think it weird
To mouth such blather far and near
Into your ears, that lovely space
Both angels and cockroaches fear.

You give each word a goodly shake
And ask if this is some mistake.
This tune, on hands and feet, must creep
Out from the dreams of Robert Blake.

These words are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have syllables to keep,
And text to eat before I sleep,
And text to eat before I sleep.
Seth Landman:

Story

A very small train in silhouette is
a terrible way to travel is
to go back. Will you go back with me?
Your apartment goes back
into the desert in the suburbs at night
try counting the hedges.
When it’s dusk try counting
all of those leaves when you’re leaving
try coming back again.

The Xexoxial / Quincunx – Shaped Reading: Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey

Amazing poets traveling from England will be reading in Madison. Not fibbing. Xexoxial Editions and the Shaped Reading Series will co-host

ALAN HALSEY and GERALDINE MONK

at

The Project Lodge 817 E. Johnson St. Madison, WI

October 23rd at 7pm

Geraldine Monk is an English poet whose first publications appeared in the 1970s with Writers Forum and Pirate Press. Her major volumes of poetry include Interregnum (Creation Books 1995), Noctivagations 2001 and Escafeld Hangings 2005 (both published by West House Books). Her Selected Poems was published in 2003 (Salt Publishing). A collection of essays on her poetry, The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk edited by Scott Thurston, appeared in 2007.

Alan Halsey’s books include Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005), Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2005 (Salt 2006), Lives of the Poets (Five Seasons 2009) and Term as in Aftermath (Ahadada 2009). He is the editor of West House Books and ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 1979-1995. ‘With an antiquarian gentility, but a contemporary nous, Halsey mixes his materials until the work is emptied of even a post-modern grin’ (Nikki Santilli).