Reeves & Krosinsky to Feature at the Harwood!

Reeves & Krosinsky to Feature at the Harwood!

Robert Arthur Reeves and Sari Krosinsky read at the Harwood Art Center in the upstairs cafeteria on Wednesday, May 16, 7-8:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:30 p.m.) Books, chapbooks and CDs will be available for purchase, $7-10. Here’s a Google map to the venue. There will also be 30 minutes of open mic.

Krosinsky will read from her forthcoming book “god-chaser” and new material from the CD “Complications.” Reeves will read unpublished poems and selections from his latest books, “Because” and “The Dead Have Children.”

Reeves was born in Urbana, Illinois and grew up (so to speak) in the Boston area. As a baby he sat on Carl Sandburg’s lap. Allen Ginsberg recommended his teenage poetry to Gregory Corso. He lives in Albuquerque, N.M., where he has taught philosophy, religion and humanities at the University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College. His poems have appeared in Fulcrum, Skidrow Penthouse, The Blind Man’s Rainbow, Arsenic Lobster, The Homestead Review, Adobe Walls and many other journals. He has published 11 poetry collections and a chapbook, “Yossele: A Tale in Poems,” with his partner Sari Krosinsky. Visit them at outerchildpoetry.com.

Krosinsky writes about the mundane in mythology and the sublime (and sublimely awful) in the ordinary. Her first full-length book, “god-chaser,” is forthcoming from CW Books. She publishes Fickle Muses, an online journal of mythic poetry and fiction. Her poems appear regularly in literary and genre magazines. She received a B.A. in religious studies and M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. She lives in Albuquerque, N.M., with her partner and cat.

 

Dig it,

Rich Boucher

Hand-To-Tongue: Reed, Tanaya, Teresa

This Saturday at 1 pm in the Wells Fargo Theater at the National Hispanic Culture Center, Local Poets Guild presents Hand-to-Tongue: A Celebration of Threatened Languages with Reed Adair Bobroff, Tanaya Winder, and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke. This showcase is our collaboration with the amazing world music festival Globalquerque, takes place during the free daytime programming of the Global Fiesta, and is going to be powerful: a look at the loss of Native languages, the work of preservation of Navajo, the joy and intimacy of American Sign Language—with sign language and vocal interpreters on site to make everything accessible. Poet Sari Krosinsky has written a nice article for UNM today which gives a bit more background and information.

Reed, at 17, has already been featured on HBO as part of their look at Brave New Voices, the national Youth Slam. Tanaya, still in progress with her MFA at UNM, has been winning prestigious awards left and right for poems, including one from AROHO. Teresa might well be the first deaf woman in this country to earn her PhD in Philosophy. Me, I’ll be the proud host, eager to take in everything they have to say–or sign!

Please join us. And remember, the Global Fiesta runs from 10:30 to 4:oo with all kinds of amazing events and languages. See this link for the schedule.

And you won’t want to miss all the world music festivities of Friday and Saturday night either, so check out the schedule and affordable pricing here at this link.

Big weekend. More posts forthcoming.

–LG

Brian Hendrickson: The Roost Playback OOT Style

A Sense of Play: On the OOT Trio’s 8/14 Performance at The Roost’s 8x8x8 Series, Sundays at The Projects

It began imperceptibly, a jangling from saxophonist Tracy McMullen rummaging through a tin lunch pail of random metal objects; drummer Rob Wallace adjusting, readjusting his stool, arranging his incomplete skeleton of a set—snare drum, hi-hat, a disassembled bass(?); Hal Onserud’s double bass rising quietly in the background to yawn as if just

waking up. All the mundane chaos of musicians finding their bearings on the stage. Which is exactly what the OOT Trio wanted the audience to think. Then rethink.

As something bordering on organized chaos—undeniably intentional, for lack of a better word; momentous—arose from the various cranking and ratcheting apparati, foot shuffling, bells, I found myself uncontrollably giddy. That’s right. I do my best to wear my masculinity on my sleeve, but I was giddy—maybe not schoolgirl giddy, but pre-sexual kindergartener loose on the playground giddy. I glanced over my shoulder through the dark deepened by The Projects’ pitch black walls, accented only by graffiti catching stage light, at the audience around me, all grinning as foolishly as I was. How could we refrain? We were watching grownups lost in play. Organized chaos, wherein the only perceptible organizing force was the occasional refrain from McMullen’s saxophone, or often an incomprehensible mantra muttered by Wallace through a vuvuzela. But mostly the “organization” was an intuitive fluidity negotiated between musicians, each riffing off the other. Like teenagers flying in a stolen car through the midnight streets of a dead town, they were testing what the rest of us would let them get away with. Where our ears would let them take us. And the audience’s foolish grins were all telling them, “Drive.”

I am not an aficionado of improvisational or experimental jazz. As a poet, I live and die by the integrity of the line. And when I play, I play seriously. I demand your attention. I will make you work. But on Sunday night, listening to, watching, relishing the OOT Trio at play, I was reminded that experimentation isn’t always pretentious. Be it a song or a poem, we often brush off what doesn’t immediately make sense to us, assuming the composer is intentionally talking over our heads—as if we’re being forced to listen to some elite club’s inside joke, and we’re the butt of it. Much of the false dichotomy of stage/page poetry arises from this central insecurity. We demand to “feel” the words, sounds, images right away, meaning we demand that they make the kind of sense to us that we are conditioned to expect. But the end result of such an unwavering demand is your-way, right-away, fast food art. And what could be more pretentious than demanding that everything always make sense to you? On the other hand, what could be less pretentious than pure, unadulterated play?

I’m not saying meaning-, sense- and music-making have no place in art. Sometimes we just have to tell it like it is. Truth must be spoken to power. The curse must be thrown, the lie given to the liar. And the latent energy of form must be harnessed through a devotion to craft—not just when we resist, but also when we celebrate. “To every thing there is a season,” says the author of Ecclesiastes. Personally, I’d like to more often give myself permission to play with abandon, knowing by watching the OOT Trio that all my years of seriously studying craft should sufficiently inform the choices I intuitively make. I want my audience, whether stage or page, to be reminded of what it’s like to be children again, to find value in harnessing their full creative potentials unbounded by the need to make themselves understood, but also to appreciate the almost imperceptible intonations of a very adult devotion to craft underlying my seemingly unbridled commitment to the moment and all its possibilities. I don’t know how in the hell I’m going to do this with any success. The OOT Trio made it look and sound easy, but that’s all part of the illusion. Regardless, I’d like to give it a try.

Even the littlest bit of the OOT Trio’s adventurous sense of play would go a long way in shaking up our various poetry scenes here in Albuquerque (my poetry included), and the current partnership between the Local Poets Guild and The Roost in hosting the 8x8x8 series is the perfect catalyst for just such a shake-up.

–Brian Hendrickson

(Thanks Brian for this!!! Brian was also the featured poet kicking off the OOT performance… Next week Bob Reeves and Sari Krosinsky open for THin Air Trio at 7:30 pm on Sunday August 21 $5 cover and venue is The Projects at 3614 High STreet NE, just east of edith, north of candelaria, through the garage doors…)

16 Poets at Edith of Edith Last Night – An Attempt At A Recap

My head is still a little dizzy from it. There’s still so much to think about after last night’s stellar East of Edith Open Mic at the Projects. I know that this word can easily be overused, but it was inspiring to see a full house on a Monday night for poetry; there were sixteen (yes, 16) poets on the open mic list last night, all of them reading intelligent, engaging and thought-provoking works of their own and poems by other authors, too. The flow of all the poems last night to me seemed quite remarkable; as the host, it was stunning to see how one poet’s contribution to the open mic seeming to perfectly complement the next poet’s contribution – this pattern carried out through the whole night and to me it almost seemed as if everyone was on the exact same wavelength – such a rare thing to witness and experience. And talk about range. The subjects for the poems last night were all over the map and just right. Survival of physical and emotional abuse, requiem,  current and topical rhapsodies in snark, Bob Dylan,  fantasy, terror, and fairy tales to name only a few of the places we were all taken to last night. There was so, so much range in the poems read last night; I have hosted hundreds of open mic nights in my time and I have to say that last night was one of the best.

It was (and is) an honor to host an event like this. I love how organically this reading is developing. It’s becoming quite strong, with its own characteristics fleshing themselves out week after week. In my experience it can take months, if not years, for a local poetry reading to begin to acquire the traits that this reading is already showing off. If you’re a poet and you’ve stopped by here for the first time today, reading this post, please come to the East of Edith and see for yourself what I’m describing here. A couple of quick words of thanks are in order here; thank you so much to all those who gave generously to the donation box; thank you to Mitch Rayes for hooking up the nice overhead fan and the new lights for the stage; thank you to Aaron Greenwood for bringing some nice fresh fruits for everyone, and thank you to Jules Nyquist for bringing some delicious pecans for everyone, as well!

Last night, in addition to the prize of getting to host East of Edith, I was also able to provide a (hopefully) fun prompt for the poets: share a phrase or a sentence, during your time at the mic, that you are sure no one could either begin a poem with or base a poem on. I’m anxious to learn (at some future point) what results may come of this. Here are the phrases I was able to collect, if you would like to try your hand at making a poem out of any of these results (if I missed a couple, I apologize; it was difficult to transcribe some of this as rapidly as they were delivered – I’m looking at YOU, Don McIver!):

“The Speaker of the House can be found on certain, but not all, beads of the Rosary.” – Reeves

“Literally nothing happened today.” – Krohn

“The road to salvation is a three-way with Palin and Beck.” – Greenwood

“When the doctors pulled the clarinet from my anus, I swore I’d have my revenge on that baboon.” – Maxson

“Great, I’m dead.” – Rayes

“The silly putty in his thong did not redound well upon the rebound.” – Crandall

“I ran into my grandmother at the orgy; my heart was a sinking galleon aboard the Titanic.” – Boucher

“A toast to Sir Edward Shakelton’s oldest bottle of whiskey, found buried & frozen at the South Pole.” – Nyquist

“Music goes up; music goes down; I speak but there is no sound.” – Dahvid

“Plutonium: I probably lit a candle – probably.” – Warren

¥

Thank you so much to Kenneth, Bob, Aaron, Teresa, Jules, Jennifer, Mitch, Nate, Sari, Stewart, Striving, Dahvid, Susy, Don, Eric, and Sirena. And thank you, Lisa Gill, for entrusting me with doing this thing last night.

All the best,

Rich Boucher

Two New Pages Added and Nice Choices

You can now check out Taryn Marie‘s page. (She is aka TeaSea Inc.) [Photo by Gina Marselle]

And under ABQ series you can now find proper information for Smokin Slam and a link to a full page. It’s a good event to check out today, as the Smokin Slam is one of your options for tonight. The Smokin Slam has host Carlos Contreras tonight and features Joaquin Zihuatanejo and the Off the Page and on a Tangent Tour (Katrina Guarascio pictured here in a photo by Mark Peevy, plus poets Zach Kluckman, and Jessica Helen Lopez.)

The other option is Triptych at the Projects 7:00 pm at 3614 High Street NE (east of Edith and North of Candelaria) with Sarah McKinstry Brown from Omaha, Jasmine Cuffee, and Sari Krosinsky.)

A difficult choice: you win either way.

Sari Krosinsky June 9th: How Fragments Create Echoes

Sari Krosinky says, “My poems most often start as fragments–as images or ideas or words come to me, I write them in a poetry journal I carry around. The fragments come both from random things that strike me and from whatever I’m obsessing about at the moment–most often something to do with death and/or relationships. When I’ve collected enough fragments, I start picking through them, cluster the ones that seem like they fit together, build on the individual pieces and draw out connections between them. I don’t really think about craft or what I’m trying to do in a poem until it’s done. Then I hope the poem communicates something that others will find either echoes their own experience or shows them a new perspective. But ultimately I just write whatever I feel driven to write. “

And one of her poems:

Hunger

I cook like my grandmother, whipping up a badass stew

from spare parts. Hers, variations on leached chicken

swimming in grease. Mine, resurrecting potatoes-on-the-edge

with a couple cans green chilé. I mince garlic as you read

to me, baritone against the percussion of popping oil.

Looking at you, I reach for the pot, char my finger.

I thrust my hand under the tap; you go on reading

as cold water seals the burn in a scar.

Like my grandmother, I cook to feed armies. She rallied

relatives, friends, strangers to divide the booty.

I have you. Like her, will I never learn

to cook for one? Or like Orpheus, would I follow you

to Hades and, failing, survive still? When you’re gone,

I’ll play your cd, seal my hunger in your voice.

You can hear Sari Krosinsky read at Triptych this Thursday at 7:00 pm at the Projects (3614 High Street NE, through the garage doors, North of Candelaria and East of Edith.) She’ll be featured alongside Sarah McKinstry-Brown and Jasmine Cuffee.

I’m really looking forward to this night!

lg