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KGB Reading Series

October 13, 2008

Tonight @ KGB: the why and later

KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone
With original hosts Star Black & David Lehman

Monday, October 13, 2008: the why and later anthology reading, with: Jan Beatty, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Teresa Carson, Harriet Levin, Amanda McGuire, Kiely Sweatt, and editor Carly Sachs
7:30 PM
FREE

JAN BEATTY’s new book, Red Sugar, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in Spring, 2008. Other books include Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Ravenous, her limited edition chapbook, won the 1995 State Street Prize. Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker and an abortion counselor. She worked in maximum-security prisons and was a waitress for fifteen years. Her poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois Press, and University of Iowa Press. For the past fifteen years, she has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR-affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers. Beatty directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and teaches in the low-residency MFA program.

LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR is the author and of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, and of Small Gods of Grief which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001. Her third poetry collection, A New Hunger, was selected as an ALA Notable Book in 2008. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared in reviews such as The Washington Post, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, Harvard Review, and many others. She is the editor of four anthologies: Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars, Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades, Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the Cities, and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences. She translates American poetry into French and Flemish poetry into English. With her husband, poet Kurt Brown, she translated a selection of poems entitled The Plural of Happiness, by the Flemish poet, critic and essayist Herman de Coninck.

TERESA CARSON grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, as the youngest of ten in a blue-collar family. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first book, Elegy for the Floater, was recently published by CavanKerry Press.

HARRIET LEVIN’s first book of poetry, The Christmas Show, (Beacon Press) was chosen by Eavan Boland for a Barnard New Women Poet’s Prize. It also won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from The Poetry Society of America, a Grolier Poetry Prize and was a PEW Fellowship discipline winner. Her second manuscript, Girl in Cap and Gown, has been a finalist at numerous second book competitions including AWP, Tupelo, Carnegie Mellon, Ashland, and Crab Orchard. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, Many Mountains Moving, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review and others. She has been working on a an oral history project with her students at Drexel University and local “Lost Boys” of Sudan as part of One Book, One Philadelphia. These stories can be found on her blog: harrietmillan.blogspot.com

AMANDA MCGUIRE's poems have appeared in Noon: Journal of the Short Poem, The Cream City Review, 27 rue de fleures, So To Speak, and other literary journals. Her chapbook Limited Rhapsody was a finalist for 2006 The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series Award and the 2006 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. Amanda lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

CARLY SACHS is the editor of the why and later, an anthology of poems that women have written about rape and sexual assault (deep cleveland press 2007). She is currently an Arts Fellow at The Drisha Institute in New York City. Recent work has appeared in Nextbook, The New Vilna Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Present Tense. She received her MFA from The New School and teaches at George Washington University. Her first book of poems, the steam sequence won the 2006 Washington Writers’ Publishing House book prize.

KIELY SWEATT received her MFA in Poetry from the New School. Shortly thereafter, she fled the country to pursue a bohemian life in Spain, where she has been for the last four months practicing poems in Spanish and teaching English.

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Ave.) ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360

October 07, 2008

Last night at KGB Bar [by Julia Cohen]

On Monday nights, sometimes I think about buying groceries after work and then going straight home. This week I actually made it to the grocery store. But then instead of getting on the subway to Brooklyn, suddenly I'm at the KGB Bar, tucking my groceries under a table, waiting for the reading to begin.

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Julia Cohen (right) with Paige Taggart

photo by (c) Star Black

Last night the room was packed -- I was afraid my broccoli raab would be kicked by the crowd. Michael Lally and Terence Winch have such distinguished and dynamic careers, it's clear why the KGB was filled with a diverse and supportive audience. Lally is an actor, an anthology editor (re: None of the Above: New Poets of the USA, 1978), and the author of 27 books. On his blog, he characterizes himself as an, "ex-jazz-musician/proto-rapper/Jersey-Irish-poet-actor/print-junkie/film-raptor/beat-hipster-"white Negro"-rhapsodizer/ex-hippie-punk-'60s-radical-organizer's take on all things cultural, political, spiritual & aggrandizing." His poems have an intense musicality to them, a blend of Irish ballads, disco, and jazz that at some points spin out into archly political poems that address the disgraces of the Bush administration and at other times refocus on the microcosm of tensions embedded in his own Irish American culture/childhood that created a sense of rich tradition and community to the exclusion and expense of others, which Lally still contends with.

Winch is an acclaimed musician, a short fiction and a non-fiction writer, as well as a poet. Switching between elegies, villanelles, the Q&A format, and humorous but biting narrative digressions about his youth, Winch steered his reader through his Irish Catholic upbringing and examines the personal experiences, the larger social movements, and philosophies that made him test his faith. It's as though he has opened his memory box and allowed us to sort through it. In the process, we find much more than birthday cards and old love letters -- there are broken beer bottles, communion wafers, and a few flakes of dried blood.

-- Julia Cohen


Ed note:  Terence Winch was a guest blogger on this site back in August.  Read his posts here.

Lally & Winch at KGB Last Evening

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Terence Winch
photo by (c) Star Black
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Michael Lally and son Flynn
Photo by (c) Star Black

October 06, 2008

Tonight @ KGB: Michael Lally & Terence Winch

KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone
With original hosts Star Black & David Lehman

Monday, October 6, 2008: Michael Lally & Terence Winch
7:30 PM
FREE

Continue reading "Tonight @ KGB: Michael Lally & Terence Winch" »

September 30, 2008

Nicole Cooley & Kimiko Hahn at KGB [by Julia Cohen]

            Often, poets spend most of their allotted time reading from their most recently published book. Not Nicole Cooley or Kimiko Hahn. While Cooley's The Afflicted Girls and Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior were on display (and on sale) last night at KGB Bar, the poets read predominantly from various projects in the works. I like these sneak peaks.

Cooley, who was raised in New Orleans, read from her new project The Flood Notebooks, a cross-genre project focusing on Katrina and the hurricane's aftermath. It's easy to see that pop culture's saturated with paparazzi photos of celebrities and reality starlets and magazine articles that turn their personal lives into urgent drama for public fodder. And often it's hard to miss the flaunting of material possessions and how bored they look with the excess. Using newspaper clippings, personal narrative, and text from George Oppen's daybooks, Cooley shifts the attention away from a media immersed in glittery surplus and asks us to examine the social and political ramifications when the excess is flood water, the deaths of your neighbors, and the destruction of whole communities. Beyond the natural disaster, she questions the disparity between our engagement with and attention to the media, and the seemingly rampant complacency of politicians and citizens who watched the events unfold without further intervention and action. In this bewilderment, she admits in one poem, "I'm looking for something tiny and unfindable." In the second half of her reading, Cooley read from her forthcoming book, Breach, which also concentrates on Katrina and incorporates her trip back to Louisiana a year after the storm. These poems are packed with descriptions like "houses like sick fish waiting for gutting" and statements like "It swallows and swallows and swallows" that let you feel both the expansiveness and emptiness of the landscape.

             In poems like "Borough Hall 2001," in The Narrow Road to the Interior, Hahn mixes a refined imagism of traditional Japanese poetics with close attention to the visceral details of the WTC clean up crews: the attention to flowers and nature intertwine with the melting bootsoles & SSNs scrawled on body parts until there is no melodrama, only the act of experiencing the tragic in relation to the commonplace. Switching gears to her new project, the crowd especially loved her meditative and wry poems inspired by the NY Times science section. Hahn claimed, "The language of science is utterly exotic to me. I love it and I have no idea what they're talking about." Her poems prove otherwise.

-- Julia Cohen

Last night at KGB Bar. . .

Last night Nicole Cooley and Kimiko Hahn read at KGB Bar. Many of Cooley's poems centered on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in her native New Orleans. Hahn read a scary but amusing, or funny but frightening, poem about the mating habits of the praying mantis.
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Kimiko Hahn and Nicole Cooley
photo credit Star Black

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Michael Quattrone and Star Black
photo credit David Lehman

September 28, 2008

Nicole Cooley & Kimiko Hahn @ KGB

KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone
With original hosts Star Black & David Lehman

Monday, September 29, 2008: Nicole Cooley & Kimiko Hahn
7:30 PM
FREE

Continue reading "Nicole Cooley & Kimiko Hahn @ KGB" »

September 24, 2008

Caroline Knox, Michael Quattrone, and Danielle Pafunda

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Caroline Knox, Michael Quattrone, and Danielle Pafudna
at KGB Bar, September 22, 2008
photo by Star Black

September 23, 2008

Last night at KGB Bar [by Julia Cohen]

The KGB reading last night spotlighted Danielle Pafunda and Carline Knox, both recently published by two independent presses whose books I'm always looking out for: Bloof Books and Wave Books.

Before reading from My Zorba, Pafunda waved her magenta book (with a hatchet on the cover) at the audience and advocated "very, very pink: good for cocktail parties and dark alleys." Then, in a confident and poised style, she read from the beginning of her new collection. If the sentence is a tree, than Pafunda has chopped up the trunk, rearranged the branches, and clipped the limbs together with bird beaks and candles to form poems that rustle and glow.

These poems feature a young female narrator who's constantly engaged by but also in conflict with Zorba, a gender-shifting, controlling, older, alter-ego/invisible playmate. In some sense, Zorba is a guide through a baffling adult world who encourages testing boundaries of etiquette and customs ("She devoured / a [nightbird] and chucked its bones from the [precipice]," when others choose to repress gut-desire and awe. Yet in other scenes, Zorba manipulates the narrator, "When I tried to cover the hair with pancake, Zorba intercepted" or forces her into roles that create priorities she doesn't necessarily accept ("She asked for a profit margin"). In living with and then in exorcizing Zorba from her body/psyche, she battles the urge to internalize the standards and irrationality of the familiar. The process of extrication (if that's possible) and realization of culpability or positioning is agonizing and exhilarating: "When Zorba prayed for me, I ducked."

Knox, who described her poems as "mouthfuls," is also a poet who can make a recipe for a salad seem like a scientific experiment (as in, for example, her poem, "Salad"). Knox read from her sixth book of poetry, Quaker Guns. She floated from poems that began with her husband bolting up in bed after dreaming of a statue of Mary made of rubber foam to a poem ending with "Oh, Dorothy Parker! oh, Dorothy Oh, a fine actor!" Many of her poems seem to originate in a setting that seems domestic or mundane -- a husband in bed, the death of a dog, the drive to donate used books - and then shift into lists, facts, word play, and observations that veer away from the traditional, creating an erratic arc the reader wants to follow.

-- Julia Cohen

September 22, 2008

Tonight @ KGB: Caroline Knox & Danielle Pafunda

KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone
With original hosts Star Black & David Lehman

Monday, September 22, 2008
7:30 PM
FREE

Continue reading "Tonight @ KGB: Caroline Knox & Danielle Pafunda" »