c/c reading 013:

(Saturday, June 2nd)

Happy Jawbone Family Band

Frank Sherlock

Ryan Eckes

We are very excited to invite you to the thirteenth c/c reading with two writers & a rock ‘n’ roll outfit.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St

700pm to 900pm

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A DeBoer

Happy Jawbone Family Band were all born in a bathtime suicide mission.  nothing was left but a pair of sunglasses that are still bleeding to this day.  at the stroke of midnight you can hear them sing out of desperation.  You can visit their website here and see there music film, Fresh Gash, here.

Frank Sherlock is a recipient of the Equinox Chapbook Award, selected for publication by Fact-Simile Press in 2012.  He is the author of of Over Here (Factory School), , The City Real & Imagined (w/ CAConrad)(Factory School), and a collaboration with Brett Evans entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink).  New poems will soon appear in Aufgabe, Bright Pink Mosquito and Rethinking Marxism.

Ryan Eckes was born in Philadelphia in 1979.  He’s the author of Old News (Furniture Press 2011) and when i come here (Plan B Press 2007).  More of his poetry can be found on his blog, Old News, and in various magazines.  He works at Community College of Philadelphia and Temple University.

Here are our introductions for the most recent and wonderful c/c event!

Patrick Lucy: As a kid my grandmother had a small white bookcase in the backyard. It was so I could make multi-level sand-castles. It was amazing, connecting up little ponds by straws, those summer hours with a grandparents unending love. “I take the sunrise whole in my mouth each morning, asking What’s your name?, looking for my own name,’ Patrick Lucy writes in The Land of Mouth Breathers and through this connect, this worry, this curiosity that asks for the entirety of the sun to gather a kind identity with him that brought me on board.

Lucy’s got this strange infinite availability for the present, but it isn’t his, like possess, but a bit of us, or a bit of all of us. As if through his hands and feet he connects deep the tissue of our smiles, our contained senses of where we might want to feel this life as good together. It’s hard to explain, like his eyes are really big and when they look at you, they are really, so wide, that you can see a real and actualizing hug with you. In Live Fields: Growths 1-5, he writes, “standing in a doorframe/flooded by light and memory/flooded by white blood cells,” and yes, that’s what it is, light, memory, blood cells. Yes. Please welcome Patrick Lucy. ND

CAConrad: A deeper kind of beating, the way one heart can step through and be in the world. You can’t find the right words, an emanation, an invoking. CAConrad doesn’t have time for bullshit. In Aphrodisoios he writes, “argued up the evolution of/borrowed faces to/angle potent/my pregnancy dream told me/not born but evicted.” Maybe I find a slight ditto in our rural knowledge, a call-out letter to get up and speak on spare time of others, to spin the bottle of the oracle, to be full, so full of life, a coldness not kept in the warmth or the wellness of this planet.

If we are really lucky, the words we use up give the strength to attend to the struggle. I know of this slight tone in my chest that leans up into my voice, acknowledge that I can be emotional today, free enough to be emotional about how the world is and what it’s doing. Conrad writes in Express an Interest in Listening or Flowers Won’t Bother, “greed it/seems/has no/memory//the little/bones they/throw us/break/my heart//some/days/i taste/the world/in a poem and/want/to be of/service/to that/taste.” Being poets, we ask is poetry enough in a world that is no shelter for anyone but the very wealthy, where the real flames of life are burning out all over this planet, cabled up, hung from the scaffoldings of all this white-light-buildings. I don’t know. I know that this voice helps, says, if you need to cry, you can cry. In that same poem, he writes, “They say crying/in private helps/non one//they say touch/a gill of light/down there.” Well, hello. Please welcome CAConrad. ND

Camille Roy has a badass statement of poetics called Experimentalism, which you can read on the internet. One of the things Roy writes here is, “We are impossible beings, ruthlessly evading scrutiny. Yet recognition is the beginning of transformative emotion.”

There’s two other quotes I’ve been circling around.  In the introduction to Cold Heaven, Roy writes, “With something constantly at stake, timing is everything.”  & in 2 Pure Girls, “June & I look at one another; something is at stake here and we don’t know what.”

Here, we don’t know what is at stake but we can be sure that something always is and remember when you live here, timing is everything. Here is the place between people, between social categories, between registers, between identities. You could call it poetry or queerness or being a girl or Sherwood Forest. It is the moment ruthlessly erased by dominant modes of narrative, which, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it, feature de facto cisgendered hetero masculine subject positions and make the complexity of almost everybody’s experience (erotic and social) illegible.

In Roy’s writing, I find these moments, of porousness, precariousness, made legible. And the sense of recognition I feel in reading, hurts, really good, like the beginning of any transformative emotion.

Please welcome Camille Roy to Philadelphia. MB

It was a real charmer having the likely superstars of this reading around our table!

Jenn McCreary: Let us take the story apart phoneme by phoneme: “recognizing the echoes imposed / upon Persephone–persis meaning / pillage, & phonos, murder–one / realizes there are few accidents” (“In which opposition & sister squares are reconciled.”) – because the words will guide us down parallel paths into the woods where, as we glance across, the object and the visual obstructions form a flickering yet singular body. We encounter the image of one taken, figured, conscripted in language; what is passed through, what appears between two lenses, two pathways of sight, the real or the accepted. As the colons that bookend her titles suggest, Jenn McCreary’s poetry exists in the midst of a process; something squeezed through, momentarily docked, or in a queue, but never static. The essence is rare (to paraphrase gang of four) or better yet “everything is archetypal” as Jenn states in “the calendar of lucky and unlucky days”. Her book’s title – “Ab ovo” or “from the egg” – speaks of metamorphosis, latencies, expectation of a shift, and as Jenn’s sonorous verses illustrate the spirits of bare expression hover always above us: “Gone beyond becoming, we filled / the house with phantoms & called / up monsters from the deep.” (“Haunted Forest”). Please welcome Jenn McCreary. JT

Paul Foster Johnson:  The monstrous city in facets, beautiful, illusory: “I may have synaesthesia / or a memoir eroded by stress / into so many pixels” (“Bronx Safe Room”). Paul’s poems present a tightly mannered, yet multi-dimensional rotating perspective, like cubism in sound, or stark russian futurist monuments in miniature – a steely world slightly tilted, pitchshifted, overexposed. I’ve become fixated on Paul’s work, it’s oddly familiar off-balances and sustained tones that call forth both the urbane and alien, hugging an ever thinning line that runs between the two. As my poet friends will tell you, I’ve often said that I think Paul’s “Palace of Youth” may be a perfect poem, at least a perfect capturing of tonality and image colliding, where the poem is not just seen but felt, under the skin; an experience at which Paul truly excels: “My / favorite said / she was / a lone wolf. I / saw her examine / the ground outside / then break into / a run. She could / not not not stop / adjusting herself / when chucked into / the force field”. These terse, nervy lines displaying logopoeia and melopoeia bound together, doing double time to extend the narrative into the body, linking the limbs, lungs, and nerves together to run a perfect circuit of energy. A chain reaction. An irresistible groove within the glitch. Please give a warm welcome to Paul Foster Johnson.  JT

Mel Nichols: Yearn to be more present.  Not just, ‘In a moment that passes’ but focally, an insulation of the organs of the body that splits the difference through language.  Nichols writes, ‘got lost watching birds at the feeder all day/for what is love but falling//and a telemarketer calls back again.’  I get a little ecstatic, I get a looking over it, the ledge of the self that sees through my own dimensions, like peep holes.  ‘absence becomes presence epiphany/look under the leaves and you will find me,’ Nichols writes in Bicycle Day.  It’s this, an algorithm of real movement, a brief rain that somehow covers my whole face.  Earlier in the year, through the wonderful Jupiter 88 video series, run by CAConrad, Nichols debuted a new poem.  At first, I got an irreverent laugh, but then it grew for about a month.  What might have started as a lark, a Pythonesque ‘Funniest Joke in the World’ didn’t kill me with laughter, but started to fiber out.  ‘I don’t Google anybody else/And when I think about you I Google myself!’  A bit of narcissism mixed with the intimacy that one has with themselves all day long.  The translation to watchwords, and that watchword is Mel Nichols.  ND

As it were, today, I have the bad-ass super kickin’ it pleasure of pointing out that Little Red Leaves is set to unleash a new LRL e-edition, On Michael Cross’s Haecceities: A Group Review & Sourcebook.

What this includes is a discussion on Michael’s work, between David Brazil, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, C.J. Martin, Kyle Schlesinger & Jamie Townsend that took place between Sep 2010 through Feb 2011.

ALSO, it contains Taylor Brady’s Unabridged Jacket Copy, and an essay by Michael Cross, Notes on Labor and Regeneration.

So, as we all wait for the new LRL, go pick up a copy of Haecceities, which came out on Cuneiform Press.  If you haven’t already picked up this magnificent book, um, what the fuck you waiting for?

You can find yourself a sneak preview or the new LRL right here and you can go here to find your hands in a copy of Haecceities for real.

Seriously.  Like now.

Last weekend was a breeze of a good time and thus, we post here our three introductions for our three super special readers.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee: “To recount dreams,” tracing a path back along a chain of proteins.  What the unconscious mind untangles: dimensionality, the constant play of various energies, infinite expanse, really just charting a grid of what we call ‘home’.  Each field full of vivid color and contrast, and we acccept these as a form of love, that love requires a constant and grave vulnerability, it asks us, the immanent potentiality of wreckage.  To read Juliette is to marvel with her at what appears, but equally, to marvel at the process of seeing, then finding recognition within these appearances – consciousness bleeding out, mingling with its locale – patterns of thinking mirroring landscapes, weather systems, endless bodies or careening ecologies of chaos and balance: “the unknowability of ‘there’ emerges as a / natural phenomenon, which I am a contributor to and consequence / of” (“The Benefit of Having a Human Body”).  What lies ahead, at the borders of time, a strangely familiar musculature for the mind, the heart, the eyes; a constant hunter, always moving: “Pursue me across numerous divides, over chasms of understatement now clothed in a subtextual, “common sense” racination.  First I am blue and then a movement, a future in song remanded to the stomach, a pair of milky eyes that refuse to triangulate, a stereoscopic ocean floor. (“I am a hammerhead shark.  I make no sound”).  Please welcome back Sueyeun Juliette Lee. JT

Geoffry Olsen: We do not have moods, we have spatial nerve endings that spread along four-dimensional time.  “drew leer this some / link back / it’s us to be? / how tincture lifts / spherical / / give turning it into where followed / / I was that figure before so.”  In the brevity of our active lives, our portion of being as past, where we drew our sight, that leer, a sense of ‘some’ connects us to a question, a question that is not so sure of itself, of us to be.  And there is this almost cosmic mathematical love inside our life, this planet made of oceanic caverns of thought, a miraculous turning.  “I was a figure before so.”

I read Olsen’s Not of Distends* Address Panicked on the fire escape at my office, the words shape change to the beat of my heart, a moving paralysis that locates the vague void like pulse of an identity, that vulnerable clear wince into self by an other who is the self.  It was a brief moment, a cigarette, the space of five minutes, but it gave over to me.  We do not have complexity, we have the strong pivot, overturns of a thought into its opposite and its similar as thought they have always been.  “as you / outer rim without grief it is as this figure, interact with long single tone.  That is what the receiver takes.  I am unwilling to begin here hollowing here.”  It is with great warmth that I welcome Geoffrey Olsen. ND

E. Tracy Grinnell: “the body / first, the battlegrounds” (Stone Clear Souvenir).  I hear Tracy Grinnell’s poetry as a lyric charge; that to closely examine correspondences, between the whole and the fragment, the image and its cast shade, reveals an uncanny symmetry; form unflinchingly interrogating itself.  Questions inevitably emerge: how does the piece, the smallest portion, the singular beat, self-replicate to compose and intricate suite?  How to diligently follow lines that curl always towards a latent closeness, proximal yet never complete (overlapping, bodies pressed together, yet distinct?)  In verse we study an infinity mirror for the remainders of fixed identity: “dreams are also / limited / / for me who the concrete / the real / / what can I do? / in the narrow mirror / showing the part for all? (“Beyond Leucadia”).  Tracy’s words are the challenge of balance and disequilibrium coexisting – that to find a self, or to find any history, is to uncover a system of endless connections and breakages, latent paths covered over or brushed away – “credible” time holding the physical hostage.  Our words: thought shaped by muscle, conscripted to draw focus to the forgotten, passed by, locked away.  Song within the patterns uncovered; here we can understand the need for these most tenuous products of the body – poems, a guide-rope into the kaleidoscopic real, our uncertainty.  Please welcome E. Tracy Grinnell. JT