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