Here’s a short list of confirmed dates for the first half of 2014, also updated on my Live Appearances page. Boston, Seattle, Iowa City, Chicago, and New York: I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive,and love me even as you know it…
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2/14. Brookline, MA. BASH series. Brookline Booksmith. w/ Gillian Devereux, and J. Hope Stein.
2/27. Seattle, WA. AWP Conference. Ping Pong & Poetry Crush reading. The Butterfly Lounge. Other readers TBA.
3/15. Boston, MA.Mr. Hip Presents. UFORGE Gallery. Other performers TBA.
4/5. Iowa City, IA. Mission Creek Festival. Black Ocean & Third Man Records event. Other performers TBA.
Because people have started asking me about AWP Boston reading venues, and because I’m sure this line of inquiry will only increase with frequency and urgency as the date draws near, I thought I’d just put a few ideas out there I can point people to…
The problem is that there really aren’t many venues near the convention center that would be receptive to poetry readings. That said, here are some places to try in the immediate vicinity:
Bukowski’s (bar)
Trident Bookseller Café
Raven Used Books
Café 939
The Lower Depths (bar)
There are many other bars in the area, but they’re mostly sports bars and on a weekend will be PACKED with obnoxious people.
Further away from the convention center, you could try Brookline Booksmith (a great bookstore with a reading space in Coolidge Corner area, which has a few bars and restaurants nearby).
I would also recommend looking at Inman Square, especially if a few people banded together to make it a “hot location.” It’s not accessible by public transportation but has a few potential reading venues, and a lot of bars and restaurants. For readings here I would recommend:
Lorem Ipsum Books
Outpost 186
Lily Pad
Then there’s also Harvard Square—which is a short bus ride from the convention center, and a hub of commerce in Boston. Here there is the Harvard Bookstore and the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, plus more bars and restaurants than you can shake a stick at.
For the ambitious event planner, I would also recommend Central Square (walking distance to Harvard Square and even closer to the convention center). Here there are a few live music venues you could try to secure (probably for a fee or cut of your door):
Middle East
TT the Bear’s
The Enormous Room
The Cantab Lounge
Plough & Stars
River Gods
Zuzu
Asgard
Aside from the bookstores listed above, you’ll probably have to make your case pretty aggressively to any of the bars listed. Bars are in short supply in Boston and thus also in high demand. If they’re going to surrender a night to your event they have to be assured that you’ll pack the place to the brim and help them sell a lot of drinks. Good luck, all!
I fly down to Atlanta in five days, to join Zachary Schomburg on tour through the southern leg of his epic Fjords tour. We’ll part ways after Arkansas on the 30th and then I’ll head up to Iowa City with Matt Henriksen to participate in the Mission Creek Festival (where we’ll be reading, and Black Ocean will have a table). From there, I’ll meet up with Adrianne Mathiowetz and head up to Minneapolis–where I may be reading at a book release party for Feng Sun Chen. All told I’ll be on the road for 13 days, through April 4th.
This year I’ve decided that for National Poetry Month, instead of writing 30 poems in 30 days I’m going to try to read a book of poems each day (with a few exceptions for longer collections). It will give me a chance to catch up on a bunch of books I’ve been meaning to read, and revisit some books I want to spend more time with. I’ll post my responses to these books on here as I complete them.
Because I’ll be spending the first four days of April on the road, I need to pack my first four books to take with me. So today, I started compiling my list, in no particular order:
The Dandelion Clock by Daniel Tiffany
Tuned Droves by Eric Baus
Chinoiserie by Karen Rigby
My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer by Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This Isa Nice Neighborhood by Farid Matuk
Goat in the Snow by Emily Pettit
Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon
Talk Poetry by Mairead Byrne
Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Ito
The Black Forest by Christopher DeWeese
Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon
Mercury by Ariana Reines
A Magic Book by Sasha Stephensen
Irresponsibility by Chris Vitiello
No Grave Can Hold My Body Down by Aaron McCollough
Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong
Flowers by Paul Killebrew
Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney
Voyager by Srikanth Reddy
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Iovis I by Anne Waldman
This list is exciting to even look at, and a bit intimidating… I know there’re only 21 titles so far, but I also know that there will be days I don’t finish some of these books and I want this to be fun, not a chore. Choosing somewhat arbitrarily from the slimmest volumes (that will weigh me down the least while I travel), I’ve decided to kick off with Hyesoon, DeWeese, Pettit, and Rigby.
I finally updated my Readings page, clearing out all the past dates and adding in upcoming ones. Pour vous, avec moi:
3/27. Boston, MA. Wheelock College. Reading, Q&A and book-signing.
4/3. Iowa City, IA. Mission Creek Festival. Brix Cheese Shop and Wine Bar. Writing Industry Roundtable. w/ Roxane Gay ([PANK] Magazine) and Trinity Ray (Tuesday Agency ).
4/3. Iowa City, IA. Mission Creek Festival. The Mill. w/ Michael Zapruder performing Pink Thunder.
Like Orpheus I play death on the strings of life, and to the beauty of the Earth and your eyes, which administer heaven, I can only speak of darkness.
Don’t forget that you also, suddenly, on that morning when your camp was still damp with dew, and the carnation slept in your heart, you saw the dark stream race past you.
The string of silence taut on the pulse of blood, I grasped your beating heart. Your curls were transformed into the shadow hair of night, black flakes of darkness buried your face.
And I don’t belong to you. Both of us mourn now.
But like Orpheus I know life on the side of death, and the deepening blue of your forever closed eye.
Black Ocean, a poetry press teamed up with SF musician Michael Zapruder which resulted in Zapruder expertly crafting contemporary poetry into indie pop gems! The book consist of some excellent poems & Zapruder’s cd shows his uncanny ability to remain true to the poetry but also shine as a songwriter (a tough task that most fail miserably at). The book is beautiful and features the poems plus art and photographs. I ordered early so I could snag the 4 song 7-inch.
A little while ago Danniel Schoonebeek asked a handful of poets this question: “If you wrote the poem that most completely satisfied your ambition and ideas about poetry as art, what song would it be?” Last week he posted Part One of the replies he received (featuring me, Lisa Ciccarello, and Mark Leidner), and this week he has posted Part Two (featuring Ben Kopel, Matthew Zingg, and Emily Hunt). Below I’ve re-posted my own answer to serve as a kind of preview…
Despite listening to a lot of drone and doom metal while I write, I knew off the bat when you asked this question that I would have to choose a blues song … but which one and by what artist? Skip James came to mind for his otherworldly voice and popularization of the D minor tuning (taught to him, incidentally, by a guy named Stuckey). Son House was also a strong contender because of how he allows himself to be possessed by the “lowdown shaking chill” of the blues. But let’s be honest; I’m just a Montessori-schooled white kid who has been heavily influenced by their work… But you know who else matches that description? Jack White. What I love about Jack’s playing is his emotive guitar work, which mirrors how I strive to use silence in my poems. Silence in a poem, like a guitar solo in a blues-based rock song, should come at the moment when words fail, and say what language alone cannot. Jack does this masterfully in the controlled and sorrowful solo that comes at 1:52 in “I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart.” However, if I had to pick only one White Stripes song that embodies what my own work aspires to, I’d have to choose a live performance of the “Death Letter / Grinnin’ In Your Face / Little Bird” medley found in their Blackpool concert. “Death Letter” and “Grinnin’ In Your Face” are Son House staples, the hauntingly minimal originals given new urgency in the White Stripes’ hands. Meanwhile “Little Bird” only makes a cameo in this medley via a few notes at the very end, but I know the lyrics to that song (I got a little bird / I’m gonna take her home / put her in a cage / disconnect the phone) and the absence of them makes it all the more personally poignant. The wildly moaning guitar work found in this performance perfectly embodies, with a kind of frenzied duende, the silence I strive for in my own work—and the dark, elliptical lyrics tell intensely intimate stories of quiet desperation that resonate deeply with subject matter I find myself returning to again and again.
A Conversation on the Occult Practices in the Arts Between Poet Janaka Stucky and Peter Bebergal
In 2015, Jack White’s Third Man Records launched a new publishing imprint, Third Man Books, and chose Janaka Stucky’s debut book of poetry, The Truth Is We Are Perfect, as their inaugural title. Stucky’s poems are at once incantatory, mystic, epigrammatic, and full of subtle esoteric, and occult influences. His influences, combined with a performative and almost ecstatic presence on stage, make him an unsurprising but nonetheless interesting choice for the record label’s first author.
Peter Bebergal’s book, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, was published by Tarcher-Penguin in 2014. Bebergal’s book explains how occult and mystical ideals gave rock and roll its heart and purpose, and made the music into more than just backbeat, and into part of a cultural revolution of political, spiritual, sexual, and social liberation.
Given Stucky’s influences and Bebergal’s interests (and the fact that they play in a Dungeons & Dragons group together), we thought it was natural that they strike up a conversation on the occult imagination in music, art, and poetry. What follows is a conversation exploring the influence of occult traditions on rock and roll—from the Beatles to Black Sabbath—and how the marriage between mysticism and music changed our world.
JANAKA STUCKY: My editor at Third Man shied away from the occult stuff in my book. But I was reading Season of the Witch when I was coming up with the book’s marketing and publicity plan, and it was fantastic for me to see how all of these rock icons express the occult imagination in their personas and in work. Especially the stuff that’s a little more subtle, but still mysterious: like Led Zeppelin’s sigils on their albums. The editor kept wanting to play these elements down a little, but I was like, “Guys this is rock and roll. What are you doing?”
PETER BEBERGAL: These ideas and symbols immediately key into some part of us that just resonates, and sometimes we’re afraid of them. Sometimes we whole-heartedly believe in them. Sometimes we think they are ridiculous, but all those things contribute to what I call the occult imagination. We usually think of the occult as a collection of practices, whether it’s Tarot cards, ceremonial magic, and/or a pagan Solstice ritual. What the practices tend to have in common, both in contemporary and historical ways, is that they tend toward being heterodox. They often position themselves against normative or mainstream ways of practicing a spiritual system. Whether the practices actually reference any real metaphysical state, or whether there are spirits or demons, or whether magic works or doesn’t work, is all in some ways irrelevant to the power of this part of our imagination.
JS: When people talk about imagination, they tend to think of fantasy or something made-up. But really imagination is a mode of perception. Which is maybe why so many artists have turned to the occult. Artists tend to feel like outsiders. Whether they are actually outsiders or not is also kind of irrelevant.
PB: We’re talking about rock and roll and contemporary poetry, but this has been going on for a long, long time. More often than not, whenever a poet, musician, or a composer felt that they were pushing up against what was mainstream—either in their field or in their craft—they often turned to occult or non-traditional, non-Christian mystical texts and readings. Occult practices and ideas can give weight and support to this kind of art. The artist is out on a limb and doing something that feels so different that it’s dangerous. And yet suddenly they realize there’s this whole spiritual system that acts as a framework: it gives another level of language to use for the creative process.
In rock and roll it gets complicated because we have people whose reputation is that of dark magicians. But, for example, there’s no evidence that Jimmy Page ever actually tried to cast a spell. But with Led Zeppelin there is the influence of occult images, the writings of Aleister Crowley, as well as Robert Plant’s interest in ancient Britain and Celtic folklore. Those become part of not just how the music sounds but the whole shape of the aesthetic and impact that the band had. Belief has nothing to do with how much these things actually shape culture.
Happy full moon solstice! Serendipitously I have a conversation with friend and fellow author, Peter Bebergal, about the occult & art over at The Believer today.
