FRANCISCO ARAGON

Last night Francisco Aragon brought his poetry to town, with a reading at Foster Auditorium.  Francisco is the author of  PUERTA DEL SOL, from Bilingual Review Press.  

He is also the editor of THE WIND SHIFTS: NEW LATINO POETRY, perhaps the most far-reaching such anthology since Ray Gonzalez's AFTER AZTLAN.

One of the poems Francisco read was dedicated to Jack Spicer, one of the many subjects swirling around the table when we had lunch earlier in the day.

Love Poem

by Francisco Aragón

Just let the San Andreas stay put, keeping this tunnel intact, enough to amble out of it, past Louie’s Dim Sum a Saturday afternoon, breeze detectable off the bay—visible in the distance, carrying with it the smells of open air markets: crab freshly caught and seahorses piled in bins along Stockton... or Jack, strolling out of the tube connecting Polk Gulch and North Beach—on his way to Aquatic Park to spread the Sporting Green on his favorite patch of grass... He is ferrying the portable radio to his ear listening for the count in the bottom of the ninth at Candlestick, begins to smooth the pages with his palms before he sits to keep it dry: the split seat of his pants for Jack Spicer (1925–1965)

Francisco is on the staff of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, working out of their office in D.C.  Check out Francisco's work with the Institute at the Letras Latinas blog site.

CLICKAPHONICS: RAINA LEON READING

RAINA LEON'S RETURN

One of the first people I met when I came to Penn State University was poet and educator (but then she was a poet and student) Raina Leon.

We've remained in touch since she moved on to North Carolina and Nevada and Germany and I was pleased to get word that she was going to be in town this past weekend reading from her first book of poetry, Canticle of Idols, which has been published by Word Tech.  

I hadn't been to Websters Book Store for quite a while and was surprised to find a used vinyl store added to the books (a bit disconcerting, looking across the room during the poetry reading and seeing a record of my musical history spread out for sale), but all else, including a certain amount of disorganization and incomprehension (vital elements of any successful book emporium -- far more important than cats) was as I recalled from earlier readings.  In the past this venue has hosted Erica Hunt, Ed Roberson, Evie Shockley, Duriel Harris, Susan Wheeler and Jeffrey Renard Allen, so Raina (who had come years ago to the reading Alfred Arteaga did at Websters) was following an estimable tradition.

Raina brought with her poet/friend DeLana Dameron, whose own book, How God Ends Us, you can read about here.  A forward by Elizabeth Alexander . . . not shabby . . . 

Raina will be reading elsewhere as follows:

April 8
7:30pm 
Quail Ridge Bookstore
quailridgebooks.booksense.com
3522 Wade Ave
Raleigh, NC 27607
(919) 828-1588
reading and book signing with DeLana Dameron and Lenard D. Moore

April 9
9pm
Busboys and Poets
http://www.busboysandpoets.com/
Busboys @ 14th & V.
2021 14th St, DC
reading and book signing with DeLana Dameron

April 10
4pm
Green Line Cafe
4239 Baltimore Avenue
Philadelphia PA 19104
Informal poetry discussion and coffee 

Be sure to check her out -- you can order her book here.

Raina's work also appeared in the Ocho 15 edition of the MiPOesias project, edited by Francisco Aragon.  You can read about that here.  And you can hear Francisco read from his own poetry at Penn State on Wed., April 8.  Watch for a blog entry on that one soon.

COLLAPSIBLE POETICS THEATER

Don't tread on you? Entity. Of the expansive accumulative. Society. Inalienable? Dysynchronous. Siempre. Torn up and tearing. Sacred and profane. Silly and sublime. Ascendant. Techne. Of what's oppositional, of what's not. Of what's recuperative, of what's not. Walking tall. Life and death. Power and grace. Alienable Dividuals. Entities. Seek a freedom in, not from. Alienable Dividual. Sees the diff, bears the brunt, speaks the sum. A sliver of your own self, striving. Siempre.

Always something new out of Rodrigo Toscano -- this is one of the opening passages of "Truax Inimical," described here as "A trans-modern masque for four voices," which leads off his new book Collapsible Poetics.  The book was selected by Marjorie Welish for the National Poetry Series and was pubished by Fence Books.  Use Amazon to look inside the book, and order a copy while you're there.

NEW from MICHAEL GIZZI

I've been reading Michael Gizzi's poetry for three decades now, ever since I got a copy of his early Burning Deck book Bird As, which was the subject of one of my first book reviews.

Now, some sixteen books later and again from Burning Deck Press, comes Gizzi's latest, New Depths of Deadpan.

Here's one poem from the new collection:

AN OLD-FASHIONED

A good teacher instructs by swatting flies.

An elephant never forgets an excuse.

What made the tick choose anthropology?

Try this: repair a hubbub.

Studies suggest people who speak in tongues never eat with you again.

And that pieman once thought to be a berry (now a wooden boat) died of seahorse strokes.

He used to baby-sit Leadbelly.

Music--the conduit through which you blindly come into view.

Listen: your initials on the moon.

You can find Burning Deck's web site and catalogue here.

Burning deck editions are also available from Small Press Distribution.

CELEBRATING CHESTER HIMES

Just before Spring Break, Penn State hosted a centennial symposium on the life and works of novelist Chester Himes. Like all too many of my generation, I hadn't known of Himes until movie adaptations of his works began to appear, movies like Cotton Comes to Harlem. Those movies, along with Himes's autobiographical works, brought about a late life resurgence of interest in his novels. I still remember the irremediably cool Himes being interviewed on educational television (that's what we called it back in the day) wearing a turtleneck sweater and an attitude.

The Penn State symposium was organized by Jonathan Eburne and brought to campus a group of scholars and writers that included Steve Cannon, Norlisha Crawford, Tyrone Simpson, Christopher Breau, Will Turner, Justus Nieland, Pim Higginson, Kevin Bell, Wendy Walters and Lisa Fluet.

Watch for a publication to emerge from this gathering in the future.

New from Abigail Child

Laura Hinton's Mermaid Tenement Press has just released this new chapbook from Abigail Child.  (I love the name "Mermaid Tenement" for the vision it summons of a mermaid flopping around in one of those kitchen bathtubs with feet I used to see in older New York buildings.)

The chapbook, Counterclock, is described as the first part of "An Experiment in Autobiography" which Child read at the St. Marks Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club in 2007 and 2008.  The cover image you see here is from Child's film The Future is Behind You.

The work starts:

Start here. Uncompensated tongue. Pressure point mortality periodicals linking the present to earlier structural loves.  Read forward, sharp reds. The words take off. Think. It starts. Evaporation of certain volatiles stitched unto space hurtling forward. Hunker present to left stickling pins in a back hammer pile. Enrich the feeling. Elixir. Lucked Structure with which to

You can find more information about Tenement Press publications here.

CLICKAPHONICS: ED ROBERSON AUDIO

Click in title area to hear Ed Roberson read "The Motorcycle Crossing."

LOUISVILLE SLUGGERS

I'm not sure what this guy was doing there, but I was at the university of Louisville to hear poet Ed Roberson.

It was time for the conference formerly known as the Twentieth Century Literature Conference. Rumor has it that as the 21st century unfolded, a select committee considered this unpronounceable symbol of a symbol as a conference logo, before settling finally on "The Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900."

In any event, the event began with Roberson's understated but powerfully read statement, including work from two new books that will be published in the coming months.

Spontaneous Bop T-Shirt




The final speaker of the conference, holding down the slot I filled at last year's meeting, was Cinema Studies Professor David James, who detailed the early stages of Rock 'n Roll film.



At the after party we played a rousing game of "guess which poet belongs to these socks."






Also among the featured readers was Los Angeles novelist Percival Everett, who presented passages from I AM NOT SYDNEY POITIER.

STERLING BROWN -- AFTER WINTER

This striking portrait of Sterling Brown by Jack Coughlin graces the cover of an indispensible new book just out from Oxford University Press.  After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown, edited by John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy, makes a powerful follow-up to the recently published A Negro Looks at the South, also from Oxford and edited by Tidwell with Mark Sanders.  Quite some time separated these volumes from the earlier collection of Brown's essays, edited by Sanders, and so this veritable flood of Sterling's work and responses to it is even more than usually welcome.

"After Winter" is the title of one of Brown's most moving poems, one he often liked to use to close readings.  It's a poem that looks back to his childhood days on a farm near Laurel, Maryland, a retreat from the Brown family's busier days in D.C.  After Winter is also the title of Haile Gerima's too-seldom screened 1985 documentary film about Sterling Brown in which you can see him read the title poem and identify himself as the "little feller" of the poem.  If you'd like to arrange a screening of this important film you can find details here.

In addition to new essays on Brown, this volume collects such crucial earlier responses as Alain Locke's piece on Brown as New Negro folk poet, James Weldon Johnson's original introduction to Southern Road, Charles Rowell's Callaloo interview with Brown and Lorenzo Thomas's essay on Sterling Brown's theory of the blues.  The book also offers such useful materials as a short Brown chronology, an annotated bibliography and a discography that not only lists recordings of Brown, but details recordings relevant to individual poems by Brown.  For one example, lovers of the Slim Greer series can supplement their readings of "Slim in Atlanta" with the song "Negro Got No Justice" on a Rounder Records compilation identified in the discography.

It's always the poetry itself that brings us back to Brown, though, and this book also brings us two "lost" sonnets Brown published in the 1920s that were not collected in any of his subsequent books.

Like C.L.R. James, Sterling Brown's life encompassed the greater part of the twentieth century, and After Winter is a treasure of a book that will help us understand much of the transformations Brown lived through and impelled.