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

****CANCELLED****     Thanks to that old Hurricane we are going to take a breather.  Event will hopefully be rescheduled in the not so distant future.

c/c reading 011:

(Saturday, 27 Aug 2011)

Brian Teare

Stacy Szymaszek

Sarah Dowling

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We are very pleased to invite you to the eleventh installment of the c/c reading series, featuring three phenomenal writers.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St

700pm to 900pm

(Free – $5 suggest donation)

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

Sarah Dowling‘s work has appeared in journals such as P-Queue, EOAGH, How2, and West Coast Line. Her first book, Security Posture, was published by Snare Books as the winner of the 2009 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Sarah’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GLQ and Canadian Literature, and Sarah is international editor at Jacket2.

Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1969 and grew up there. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009), both published by Litmus Press, as well as numerous chapbooks, including Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005), Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), and from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009). From 1999 to 2005, she worked at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. In 2005, she moved to New York City, where she is the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

Brian Teare is the author of three full-length books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and the Lambda-award winning Pleasure—as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim, Transcendental Grammar Crown and ^. After over a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Assistant Professor at Temple University, and lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

c/c reading 010:

(Friday, 5 August 2011)

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Geoffrey Olsen

E. Tracy Grinnell

We’d like to ecstatically invite you to the tenth installment of the c/c reading series, featuring an outstanding trio of writers.

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

Sueyeun Juliette Lee currently lives in Pittsburgh, where she edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to innovative multi-ethnic writing.  Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Books) and Underground National (Factory School).  She is a contributing editor to the Constant Critic and to EOAGH.

Geoffrey Olsen lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York and works at the Cooper Union in Manhattan.  He is the author of the chapbooks Not of Distends * Address Panicked (minutes books) and End Notebook (petrichord press).

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Helen: A Fugue (Belladonna Elder Series #1, 2008), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks Mirrorly, A Window (flynpyntar press, 2009), Leukadia (Trafficker Press, 2008), Hell and Lower Evil (Lyre Lyre Pants on Fire, 2008), Humoresque (Blood Pudding/Dusie #3, 2008), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks, 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2004) and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 2000).  She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the founding editor and director of Litmus Press.

We had the superb pleasure this past weekend of introducing Joseph Bradshaw, Thom Donovan & Dana Ward.  Our introductions can be found below.

Joseph Bradshaw: The muscle memory in the hands, or in the light-of-the-gesture, see as speech.  Often, I connect with someone on that interlocking shake, that nervousness that is tissue’s stuck pause, dropped up to say the thing.  In Bradshaw’s The Way Birds Become Homonyms: An Aviary, he writes, “…rhyming shafts of ocean split/as if a last rind unpeeling.”  And when I look to this, I think of the gesture residing in communication, a viral pattern that talks, is coy to be an ocean cut of even rips, a rind wary, alone, a state that is not repair.  I have excitements, and as Bradshaw writes, “to wash my fingers of/absence, what be you or/I, in Idaho.”  I miss backwards, I think of early morning Indiana, where the pull of the sun strings the clouds over a winter coat.  i think of my adolescence, where the invocation of being alive was one of alienation, but in Bradshaw’s poetry, it’s not an alienation in the sense of ‘I was no one here’ but of ‘Other, do you hear me.  Other, what is this location, what is it here?  What is it to cool the waters on the flesh.’  Maybe that grand impulse, to say a thing might just be a restore of an experiential knowledge.  Maybe, I think that’s a chill way to see as speech.  Please welcome Joseph Bradshaw.  ND

Thom Donovan: Thinking of introductions. About 2 years ago CA Conrad told me that I should meet Thom Donovan. He believed we would have a lot to talk about. I think soon after we chatted briefly at Dirty Frank’s on a number of different subjects, and I remember being immediately struck by the level of intelligence, engagement, and honest expression. I also think about finding the online copy of ON1 about a year and a half ago, pouring over the incredible wealth of new critical work that Thom and others so carefully facilitated, and again, felt like I was being introduced to something new. I remember asking to Thom to submit an essay on Jay-Z and Zukofsky to our second issue of con/crescent, and Thom responding, not just with an essay, but with a charge to spearhead a whole section on rap prosody within contemporary experimental poetics. And I haven’t even begun to discuss Thom’s rich poetic work, which traces the body charged and dissembled by culture and politics, but here’s a taste just to whet your appetite: “To breathe to some- / times come / Matter stuck /To which machine // Corrupts, makes us / Bold, the body / Brought down / From this cross // Of concepts, like / Time itself /Remains a / mould / So spirit clings” (Installing Spirit)). When I think of introducing Thom Donovan, I feel grateful, for knowing him, for being a friend, and excited for those who may not have had a chance to hear his work or meet him yet, but will tonight. Everyone, put your hands together for Thom Donovan. JT

Dana Ward: Dana Ward’s texts are many things. Like Whitman, or Ginsberg, those poets of living before him, Dana Ward refuses to see barriers separating poetry from any aspect of day-to-day life. Culture’s “ecstatic set of identifications” as he puts it, are on display in work that maps dazzling connections between raw materials and the perceptive states that illuminate them. In “Crying” Dana writes: “I want to reorganize everything I know / each relation named again but then goes golden fleece / read Weiners’ “A Poem for the Dead / I Know” so the cheese in my mind / wears its spotlight as a dissipating August shower, spent”. I sometimes think of poetry as a process of mind-reading — mind-reading in movies is always so lame, the phrases come so direct and perfectly composed, as if communication were simple, as if what separates us are merely the filters of what we choose to say out loud. Reading Dana’s open conversation in verse, it’s restlessly active, paratactical, and deep culturally-attuned perspective, feels like an actually experience of mind-reading, of moving with another through the elusive, multidirectional leaps the mind takes in the process of seeing and understanding — as, ultimately, the pulling together of many worlds into a strange and beautiful aggregation; liminal, uncanny. In “Roseland” Dana confesses the divine tension at the heart of his work: “so I can arrange / so I can prosecute / so I can negotiate / FEELING”. In all these efforts, a place, finally, to BE — feeling it all out. Please welcome Dana Ward. JT