A Brenda Changed My Life

BOOG CITY
Issue 11
November 2003
Free
A Brenda
Changed
My Life
BY JON BERGER
A
Brenda changed my life, once. I was still living in my old
college town, when Alex suggested that we see the “All
Strung Out” show at a nearby school. I had nothing better
to do, so I agreed to see these three major label acts doing solo
acoustic shows.
First up was Brenda Kahn.
‘Mint Juleps and Needles,’ has the
memorably slutty line, ‘You’re cracked,
you’ve gone mad. It’s hopelessly sad,
but I like you better than most of the
men I’ve had.’
She was gorgeous, she was diminutive, she was a ravenhaired Jew, and she approached the mic to say, “Is Chaz here?
I was playing pool with Chaz before, and I told him to come to
the show. Chaz, you out there?”
Brenda Kahn was featured on this bill of Columbia acts with
other important songwriters, playing at this prestigious school,
and she was asking about some schnook she’d just met. This
semi-celebrity before my eyes had already personalized her
performance, as if she were in some coffeehouse. That was so
cool.
Her set was cool, too. She played songs from her recent
Columbia debut, Epiphany in Brooklyn, the cover of which
featured a photo of her bangy knees trying to remain in frame.
That cover was like her voice, which ranged from squealing and
shouting to moaning. (I liked the moaning best.) The other acts on
the bill were good, but, well, they weren’t Brenda Kahn.
I was exceedingly taken with Ms. Kahn and got her album
right away. Probably the strongest cut was “Mint Juleps and
Needles,” which Brenda produced, and included the memorably
slutty line, “You’re cracked, you’ve gone mad. It’s hopelessly sad,
but I like you better than most of the men I’ve had.” There was a
New York feel to the album. When I moved to New York soon
N A N C Y S E E WA L D
is
Eating Well on a Lousy
But Steady Income
I
wanted to try Itzocan Café (438 E. 9th St.) for a while
because I had heard a lot of buzz about the place from
friends. It’s small, the staff is friendly, and they serve Sangria.
Go early to be seated immediately, otherwise plan to wait.
Though they serve burritos and quesadillas for lunch, dinner fare
is more interesting, with offerings you won’t see at your average
burrito joint.
The first time I went, my friend and I ordered two entrees to
split—chicken stuffed with goat cheese and vegetables ($12.50),
and the flank steak with semolina dumplings ($13.95). Both
were good, but neither had a real kick. I thought the dumplings
were interesting, but bland. As a New Yorker, I’m admittedly not
too familiar with Mexican cooking, and it’s quite possible that
the jalapeno-laden red sauces I’m accustomed to were actually
created in the U.S.A.
I went back another time, however, because I couldn’t stop
thinking about the appetizers I hadn’t tried. Who can resist
Mexican-style cheese fondue? I also realized I could afford
four appetizers, which would be about the same price as, if
Brenda Lee in concert
BLP, Inc. photo
after, I saw she played one week at
the historic CBGB’s and the next at the
unknown Sidewalk Café.
That’s where I learned about Antifolk and other hidden musical genres. I
discovered that behind every corner you
can find a thousand hidden prizes, if you
knew how to look—a lot of times, even if
you didn’t.
My infatuation with Brenda’s music
didn’t last at quite that fevered pitch. No
album amazed me as much as Epiphany,
and how could it? That album and that
artist were vital in my development.
Who would I be without Brenda
Kahn? I can only answer the opposite.
Probably, I wouldn’t have become such
a proponent of independent music. It’s
unlikely I would have started a fanzine. I
never would have become a poet, or a
bandleader, or met most of the people
I know now, or gotten that neat job
desktop publishing, or gone to Brazil or
Hong Kong. And it all started with a girl
named Brenda.
I don’t see her much now. These
days, Ms. Kahn doesn’t play many
shows. After releasing five full-length
albums, Brenda Kahn has begun to
devote herself to other projects. She’s
the brains behind www.womanrock.
com, a webzine devoted to independent
women artists. “We can change the
way music is heard, film is seen, and
art is experienced,” she says in her
womanrock.com editor’s message.
It’s a pretty big vision for such a small
person, but I figure she’ll do it. After all,
Brenda Kahn changed my life.
Not Your Average Mexican Food
not less than, two entrees. Speaking from a purely economic
standpoint, the entrees would probably make better leftovers.
In addition to the fondue, my friend and I chose the crispy
goat cheese ravioli, tortilla with shredded chicken in tomatochipotle sauce, and a soufflé made with sweet corn and
huitlacoche mushrooms. All of the appetizers were $6, except
for the tortilla, which was given in quite a generous portion,
and for only $4.50.
The fondue was the best, because underneath the cheesy
exterior was a spicy red sauce thick with mushrooms, poblano
peppers, and chorizo. The fondue was really the only dish
that had that spicy kick I associate with Mexican food. The
ravioli speaks for itself—it was fried and filled with cheese. My
friend was unimpressed by both the soufflé and tortilla. I liked
the soufflé because I never eat it, and the tortilla because
its tomato-based sauce and black beans helped cut the
egginess of the former.
I made the mistake of ordering too many cheese-based
appetizers. There were other options, including a green
salad, guacamole, soup of the day, or one of the specials.
Asparagus with mango and a Mexican cheese was a special
on both of the nights I ate at Itzocan. For dessert, the waitress
suggested that special, the pumpkin crème brulée. It was
made perfectly, but after all that dairy at dinner, I probably
would have enjoyed another option, like the mole chocolate
cake with hazelnut sauce.
As I write this review, I feel within myself a growing
determination to develop an appreciation for the more subtle
flavors that Itzocan uses in its cooking. The cactus leaf burrito
awaits my return. FYI, Itzocan Café does not accept credit
cards.
Brenda Bordofsky
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Happy
I ran, I walked in the free public
who is curvy and intelligent
relax, it’s relief
happy is relief sometimes
it sits in your neck, waiting
for pacific oceans
leave the grovel of cities
and lot’s wife
for mist in the morning
a child body surfs in America
among past, resistance and deed
and recently I’ve figured out deed
BOOG CITY
EDIT
Issue 11, November 2003, free
editor/publisher
David A. Kirschenbaum
[email protected]
copy editor
Corina Copp
music editor
Jon Berger
poetry editor
Stephanie Young
small press editor
Jane Sprague
columnist-at-large
Greg Fuchs
poetry calendar editor
Rj Gambale
counsel
Ian S. Wilder
First printing, 2,000 copies. Additional copies of this issue may be
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Brendamania
L
adies and gentlemen—Welcome to the Brenda
issue. Why a Brenda issue, you might ask? Why
not I say. It started like this. There are three poets
who I know in the scene that revolves around the Poetry
Project at St. Mark’s Church who have the first name
Brenda—Bordofsky, Coultas, and Iijima. And I’d hear
people mentioning Brenda said this, and I’d be, which
Brenda.
I thought wouldn’t it be fun if we had a Brenda
issue and gathered work on and by a whole bunch of
Brendas. And so, that is what we have done.
I must, however, address a Brenda we neglected to
write upon, a Miss Brenda Walsh. She may have just
been a character on Beverly Hills 90210 portrayed
by Shannen Doherty, but she was always more than
fictional to me.
Letters to the Editor:
[email protected]
Elliott Smith,
1969-2003
I
stumbled upon Elliott Smith because I went to a Mary
Lou Lord show and he was on the bill. It was a quick
sell, hearing him sing about his troubles with junk,
love, really just life in general.
After that I saw him play whenever I could—the
since-closed Tramps on West 22nd Street here in NYC;
opening for Beck and Ben Folds Five at Jones Beach,
where he had his sometimes backing band, Quasi’s
Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss, she also of SleaterKinney; and New Year’s Eve 1999 at the Knitting
Factory, when he yelled out at two minutes to 2000, “I
need a two minute song,” and I yelled out “Say Yes,” my
favorite song of his, and he played it before bringing his
girlfriend on stage, counting off from 10, yelling happy
new year, and swigging from a just-popped bottle of
champagne before passing it to us to swig from.
If you don’t know his music, pick something up, with
my choices being either/or or Elliott Smith if you want
something sparse. If you want something harder and a
bit fuller and faster, his work with the band Heatmiser,
which also featured Coomes, is great. There I’d pick
Mic City Sons.
It’s a sad time on this end, even sadder than Cobain
really.
d.a levy lives
each month celebrating a
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Oakland Press Tougher Than The Rest
BY JANE SPRAGUE
W
hile pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Mills College in Oakland,
California, James Meetze studied with Kathy Walkup in the
Book Arts Program. Investigating the history and practice of
typography and letterpress printing, he printed an edition of his own work, A
Race of Effort. Pleased with the results, he decided to start his own press.
He found himself faced with a dilemma not uncommon to small
independent presses. “My intention with the press was really to focus on
emerging and amazing poets,” said Meetze. “But, in reality, how many
people will buy a book by someone they’ve never heard of, published by
an imprint no one’s heard of?”
Citing Clark Coolidge as a significant influence on his evolution as a
poet, and considering Coolidge’s extensive volume of unpublished poetry,
Meetze approached him about publishing a letterpress edition of some of
his work. Coolidge’s On The Slates and Meetze’s mentor Peter Gizzi’s FIN
AMOR were published in 2002. Generous friends helped catch the pages
as they came off of the press, as well as with the folding and sewing. With
these publications, Tougher Disguises Press was born. (The imprint takes its
name from the first three lines of Jack Spicer’s poem, “Thing Language”:
“This ocean, humiliating in its disguises/ Tougher than anything./ No one
listens to poetry.”
Meetze admits a deep love for handmade books, but the labor-intensive
aspect of publishing them can be problematic. Wanting to move beyond
what is possible with handmade publications, he began approaching poets
about book-length manuscripts for publication as trade paperbacks. “If a
manuscript provokes me to think of it in book form, and perhaps challenges
my ideas of what form it should take, that’s a major part of it,” he says. “I
look at the book as the perfect—or in many cases, not-so-perfect—conjoining
or blending of two art forms, the text and the vehicle, or book.”
Meetze’s commitment to design and “contemporary writing that is
informed by and simultaneously incorporates the work of the avant-garde
movements of the past 100 years” works to create an aesthetic evident
in Tougher Disguises’ recent publications, The Frequencies, by Noah Eli
Gordon, and K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation.
Deer Head Nation is a spooky smashing of all things creepy in American
culture and their infinite creep into the national consciousness. It takes on
everything from redneck freak-outs to the pervasive slick sickening violence
that somehow might embody, or embalm, our post-millennium American
soul. From wet panties to Palestine, Iraq to “antler chandeliers,” “put a girl on
your desktop” and watch the Technicolor ghost of North America’s ruinous
ever-present-past gloat its guts all over the page.
“Puppy Craziness”
what we all really need is love
in these horrendous times
in this toxic atmosphere
some believe this thing, some believe that
people here think they need a new car and new clothes
but we see that what we really need
is something adult
sinister and just a little bit dark
Deer Head Nation takes on everything from
redneck freak-outs to the pervasive slick sickening
violence that somehow might embody, or embalm,
our post-millennium American soul.
Deer Head Nation delivers exactly that Mohammad
flashes a floodlight on the spurious consequences
of American brand-name globe-trotting capitalist
consumption, run amok with a spooky, bedeviled, and
ironic eye, offering an unsettling tour through the opaque
underbelly of our gruesome citizenship.
Gordon’s book-length poem The Frequencies charts
the twisting of lovers caught between mixed signals,
messages, and misunderstandings, tweaked by more
than the amplitude of mouths, with a poetic tour through
pop culture, the secret life of ornithologists, and playlist politics. Gordon’s work is marked by lines of clean,
complex prose, while he stages radio frequencies
as conduits to human intellect and tricky hearts. The
Frequencies deftly maneuvers links of language, to theory
to literature to love to the possibly unutterable idea of
comfort as a live thing, inside the radio box.
… Sure, the reception really
has no written language, nothing but a speaking voice &
the impossible idea of empty space, nothing but the room
inside the way we read the radio toward our own nowhere.
It’s the only thing I ever really wanted to give you. I’m sorry
love is sometimes so abstract.
Cool, wry, and incisively dubbed, The Frequencies
perfectly dizzies the places it takes you to and tunes you
back in again.
… Pardon me while I cover
the incision lines on your bookshelf sentimentality, drink
the tea you left at the station. So sweet. So cold. I know you
said the past always catches up with us, that there’s nothing
wrong with a little radio. After all, it’s how you hear it that
counts.
Forthcoming Tougher Disguises books include Chris
Stroffolino’s Speculative Primitive, Cynthia Sailers’ Lake
Systems (whose cover graphic is featured above), and
Stephanie Young’s Telling the Future Off, due out in late
2003 and spring of 2004. Tougher Disguises books
are distributed by Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.
org) and are also available directly from the publisher
(tougherdisguises.com).
Stop the Presses! It’s Brenda Starr
BY JOEL LIPMAN
Brenda Starr: Girl Reporter
Whitman Publishing, 1943
orget the storyline of this out-of-print, wartime edition,
which involves the “beautiful and clever” Brenda, “the girl
reporter of the New York Flash,” Muggs Walters, her boss
(“He had a pretty fancy set-up there, didn’t he?”), and Larry
Nickels, the novel’s male love interest. (“He picked her up in
his big, strong arms as though she were a toy, and held her
high in the air, grinning broadly, while she kicked and struggled
and beat at him with her small fists.”) The rest of the furniture
includes Tom Taylor; Flurry Snow; strange potions; spies; semidarkness; popular dance tunes; mad Professor Squell (“Why,
the old looney was double crossing us!”); Daphne Dimples; Bill
Bailey; Pesky Miller (“Get him, Pesky, Tom ordered”); gorgeous
gowns; flights to Sun Valley, New York City, and Chicago; 19
illustrations, and 248 pulp pages.
But don’t forget Racine, Wisconsin’s Whitman Publishing
Company—Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Doctor Dan the Bandage
Man, the Campfire Girls series, and a World War II list of
novels for boys and girls, built around popular comic strip
characters like Brenda, Steve Canyon, Invisible Scarlett O’Neil,
Dick Tracy, Blondie, and Tillie the Toiler; as well as a list
including novels based on film stars, including Ann Sheridan,
F
Betty Grable, Ann Rutherford, and Ginger Rogers. They’re all
there on the musty Whitman backlist, titles that offer previews
of Shock and Awe—April Kane and the Dragon Lady (a Terry
& the Pirates Adventure), Joyce and the Secret Squadron (a
Captain Midnight Adventure), or Smilin’ Jack and the Daredevil
Girl Pilot. The list includes titles from “the Exciting New Fighters
for Freedom Series: War novels of adventure for boys and girls”
(Norma Kent of the WAACS, Sally Scott of the WAVES, Barry
Blake and the Flying Fortress, Sparky Ames and Mary Mason
of the Ferry Command).
Eventually Whitman became a Western Publishers subsidiary.
The company still tracks the flicks—licenses include Disney and
Warner Brothers. They even published Liz Taylor and Jane
Powell paper doll cutouts in the ’50s and early ’60s.
Even if only for one animated glimpse of a storyboard’s
frame, remember Dale Messick, the first woman to snag a
regular strip (Sunday’s NY Daily News, 1940), and who drew
the independent, adventurous, sharp-dressing Brenda to flash
some cartoonish glam across news pages drab with war
reports. “Give us some leg, honey!” And Brenda did.
Dalia Messick assumed the sexually ambiguous Dale
after unsuccessfully struggling to launch a regular comic strip.
Her unpublished early efforts included “Weegee,” “Mimi the
Mermaid,” the sassy “Struglettes,” and “Streamline Babies.”
Influenced by Hearst cartoonist Nell Brinkley, whose curly-
haired, glamorous Brinkley Girls influenced Charles Dana
Gibson and foreshadowed Messick’s Brenda, Messick drew
the strip until 1980, when she retired. Since then, the still-running
Brenda Starr has been drawn by Ramona Fradon and, most
recently, June Brigman.
Messick’s illustrations are fashionable, flaky, heroic, teasing.
Brenda always looks super—her suitcase never empties out
its frocks. Tom is rugged, his pipe clenched in a steel, square
jaw. Larry Nickels is tall, blond, rich, smug. The newspaper
background and the reporter’s high-energy dash for the hot
story are nostalgic, charmingly silly. Ah, comics and fifth-grade
reading levels.
Brenda’s skirt snaps just above her knees. Her hats are
turned for feathers and pins. Brenda’s hair is deliciously red,
curly, and full of angles and perfect poses. She’s pure stardom,
tinsel-tease, the dame who’ll get you in and out of trouble just
in time for more.
And if there’s jingoism, evil sexism, nasty politics, and wartime
censorship, this reviewer will giggle, smell the old newsprint, and
accept the bunk. Brenda, vintage 1943, trumps goofy George
W. Bush, the non-president, a truly vapid cartoon drawn to pose
like Ken on steroids stuffed in a flight suit.
Come back, Brenda! And bring with you Deanna Durbin,
Polly the Powers Model, Bonita Granville, the Outdoor Girls,
Invisible Scarlett O’Neil, even hunky Rex, King of the Deep.
NOVEMBER 2003 BOOG CITY 3
Brenda
Weiler
ou think you’ve seen her before. Brenda Weiler’s
got that look, like she’s someone you sort of
know, hauntingly familiar. Maybe a girl from high
school: cute, so she was always on the periphery of
your thoughts, but also strange, like she wrote arcane
words in charcoal in the parking lot—or on her arm.
(Anyway, the name “Brenda” just sounds like one you
know really well, right?)
Brenda Weiler sounds familiar, and odd, too—at
least, she does on her brand new, nationally distributed,
Virt Records debut Cold Weather. It’s the Fargo native’s
fifth record since she graduated from high school and
smashed her college plans and became a full-time
musician. The vocals on Cold Weather are warm, the
music memorable, and all of it sweetly weird.
The beautiful “Sacred” tells us, “Some woman
stepped up once to tell me that all this was just in my head, but I was not convinced of that, so I simply
stepped away.” The lines don’t rhyme, their meaning is opaque, but the rhythm, the melody, and the ache
within the words all stick with you, days after listening.
Most of the new album, like her earlier releases, remains on the folk-rock section of the Venn diagram—
subtle, minimal, but with a grander musical scope. The anthem-like army of voices in the chorus of “Trouble,”
the full-on rock attack of “Scatter,” and the creepy sound affects on the opener, “Faucet,” all represent the
sense of exploration Weiler must be experiencing, touring incessantly these last eight years, even moving
from her recent home of Minnesota’s Twin Cities to Oregon. Or maybe that’s just projection.
It all sounds good, of course, and it sounds like you’ve heard it before, these biting tales of disappointment
and love. You must know the songs, this sweet voice. Maybe it was in the back of the school, maybe in
an old coffee house, maybe on your sister’s stereo. Or maybe it’s just that you should know them.
—Jon Berger
Brenda Strong
I
f you’re a student of popular culture, you’ve seen Brenda Strong
between the cracks, which is strange, because she’s a big woman.
She’s substantial, impressive. Brenda Strong is Amazon hot.
Here are the places I witnessed Strong without realizing it:
Seinfeld, where she played Sue Ellen, “The Braless Wonder” (she’s
in that reverse episode, too); Gilmore Girls (she asks Luke out, even
though he’s so totally hot for Lorelei); Sports Night (as Sally Sasser);
Starship Troopers (she’s a captain that gets killed by the bugs); and
Seventh Heaven. (Hey, do I seem like I watch Seventh Heaven?)
In most of the roles I’ve seen her, Brenda Strong plays a
sexpot. But she’s more than that, as her statuesque beauty and her
intelligence somehow set her apart. There’s a sensitivity to her role
in Sports Night that makes the seemingly manipulative schemer very
identifiable. Plus she’s smokin’!
Brenda Strong is multitalented. She’s produced yoga videos
and is even in the Los Angeles Millennium Choir. I don’t know
much about yoga or choral music, but with this powerful presence
involved, I could imagine taking an interest. She’s also featured in
Harry Shearer’s recent Teddy Bears’ Picnic.
—JB
Brenda Lee
T
here is one woman and one woman only in both the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame,
and her name is Brenda Lee. She has been making hit
records for over 40 years, sold more than 100,000,000 records,
and one of her signature hits, “I’m Sorry,” is one of the top-selling
records of the 20th century. All this from a lady who’s not even
five feet tall.
Back when Brenda Lee was new at the whole rock and roll
thing, in the wake of Jerry Lee (no relation) Lewis’s marriage to
his 14-year-old cousin, Lee’s management decided to say that the
tiny 15-year-old was, in fact, a 32-year-old midget. That went over
really well in France.
Known as Little Miss Dynamite, Brenda Lee (born Brenda Mae
Tarpley) has recorded such substantial numbers as “Rockin’ Around
the Christmas Tree,” “Sweet Nothin’s,” and “Is It True?”
She continues to tour after 45 years, and, after a recent
“appearance” (played by Kelly Clarkson) on NBC’s American
Dreams, is it possible there might be a resurgence of interest in this
international celebrity? Might we be witnessing the beginning of a
new wave of Brendamania? Only time will tell.
—JB
4 BOOG CITY NOVEMBER 2003
The Grand Permission: New Writings on Motherhood and Poetics
Edited by Patricia Dienstfrey and Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press, 2003
few months ago, I dreamt that had I googled “motherhood AND
sleep,” which directed me to a site listing “Five Foolproof Ways to Get
Your Baby to Sleep So That You Can Finally Get Your Mind Back And
Maybe Get Some Writing Done.” Alas, I was awakened from this dream, as I
have been from dozens of others, by the sound of my infant son crying.
While The Grand Permission does not offer any sleep recipes, it provides a
wide range of food for thought. In the 32 essays comprising the anthology, the
most interesting ones are those preoccupied with the time/space necessary
for any artistic endeavor. Pam Rehm confesses: “I’ve learned to take a day and
run it into the night. I cope with time in that way. But I’ve also learned how to
take a day and curse it the whole way to bed.” Maureen Owen describes
writing under the influence of exhaustion. “I would keep typing even in a halfasleep state,” says Owen. “A sort of somnambulant verse evolved.”
Alice Notley relates how living in a cramped apartment “under salon
conditions” with a husband and two young sons informed her work. “[My
sons] were as inventive in conversation as all the poets who visited were; they
made themselves just as high talking, were less melodramatic and intense;
their feelings were cleaner and there was a pure clean light around their talk
which I liked to be near and which I liked to include in my work.” C.D. Wright’s
hilarious account of her son’s early years is summed up by this statement: “He
is. Therefore and nevertheless, I poetry.”
Other standouts include essays by Stephanie Brown, Claudia Keelan,
Kathleen Fraser, and co-editor Brenda Hillman. As with any anthology, there
are a few clunkers swamped in abstraction and pretentiousness. And curiously,
there aren’t any essays that focus on the economic realities of being a poet
and a mother. Some mention the subject in passing, but, overall, it is treated
like the proverbial elephant in the living room. In any case, this collection is a
must-read for women poets who have, or are thinking of having, children.
—Kristen Hanlon
A
Coultas
Exhibits
Characters
A Handmade Museum
Brenda Coultas
Coffee House Press, 2003
ith A Handmade Museum, Brenda Coultas
catalogues the detritus-filled wake of “progress”
(“as a person one paycheck away from the
street”), assuming the oral and objective histories capitalism
has consigned to public character (“the person on the street
who knows everyone and whom everyone knows”), and in the
process, expelling poetry from its own kind of privacy: “to think
about the possibility of leaving the anonymity of the page and
becoming … a public poet.”
For Coultas, there is no refuge in wilderness, not to speak of suburbia, only the two landscapes of poor
America. From Gary Snyder’s “Bubbs Creek Haircut”: “Goodwill … room of/ unfixed junk downstairs … finally
freed/ from human need … room of empty sun of peaks and ridges/ a universe of junk, all left alone.” One
landscape has little room for the obsolete (“and, having no place for them, out onto the street they went”) and
one has “space for both new and old things” where “people, if they really want, can have (keep) it all” (a
barn full of push mowers).
Of course, these are the places where the stray, the retarded, the sick, the crazy, and the dead are either
allowed to stick around or to get thrown onto the street. But this is no simple division between urban and
pastoral. Coultas instead brilliantly applies the methods of nature writing, after Gilbert White or H.D. Thoreau,
to the urban landscape.
Coultas’s rural meditations (the “farming poems”) combine hayrolls, cows, and John Deere like some Joseph
Cornell box of the cornbelt in the book’s “The Bowery Project” section. But what emerges is a singularly
unromantic view of the “American” century—from the bottom-feeder-cam, as it were, of those living off waste
rather than profit.
Geopolitical tides and the shock of events, including 9/11, are charted in “The Bowery Project” in entropic
exfoliations: “Two matching sofas with TV resting on seat. A day later, TV on sidewalk between them and only
the wooden skeletons of couches remain.” The “Bowery bum” who ends up sleeping inside of these wooden
skeletons is no more or less visible than the dead of the World Trade Center or the terrorists themselves: “Were
they ever visible from this street? Does it matter if I say they were visible from Houston & Bowery if they weren’t?
But most certainly they were.”
Those hungry for another serving of Coultas’s American gothic pie (her dismemberments and burials, as in,
“I threw [money] a bone … I could have it buried with me. We’d rest on my grandma’s grave. I’d be in a little
box, my bone an amulet of DNA on top”); her exquisite music—a poet fishing in prose, her words hook, cut,
and release the cadences of sentences more alive than any written today; or for her oddball humor will not be
disappointed. But the real service of this book—the best of 2003—is in devoting that sensibility to an accounting
of our endangered public lives, the “human need” we ignore at our peril.
—Jonathan Skinner
W
Bob Gwaltney photo
Y
Mother May I
Prospect Heights,
Brooklyn
from Animate
& Inanimate
Aims
O pupils
Of oppression
Destroy your want of big things
Inscrutable personal nothingness
Or have a cheap machine. Nude
Harmonious now out of scale.
Balking at physics
I bite into the big picture
This tease is on view at the
American Folk Art Museum
Coda: continuing fluttering
Movement and intervening
Bulwark of forms. Iconic like
Fright. Max of the maximum
Fear factor. Iron grillwork I
Hurl over my heel a foot on
The face.
Do you know anyone pricked
Its stigma who is enlightened
At the brink who has reached
This higher plane of being
In the real world (ly) (ing) (s) (ate)
And going with this the worship
And suffering as an end in itself.
The Incas versus the Aztecs
Abjectly and they at least abolished
Human sacrifice, on a colossal scale
Look at Rome.
Savagery is always taken seriously
Torture as cultural treasure. Self
Flagellation is no archaeological
Remain. Moribund not at
All. Leonine nature. Germane.
Thine and thy hence the maker
Wherast dearest a tulip today seen
Scarce ere I’ th’
I virgin thee and weep a kind a taper’s
Light not wake or knew’st when
Not excess knew else die coming
I no we too strong for fantasy
Enter dream arm in arm
Aqueduct
To ocean.
I am a machine of growing cells
And my essence is weak.
Now I live in Crete. After the auto
Biography of Cronos. He ate all of
His off spring except Zeus. I prefer
My parties without full armor the
Lions are enthusiastic. A fallacy
Could be grosser. Ecstasy as they
Say, a demonic mood.
Looking closely at similar
Designs. Bronze motivations
Stone urges. Dolomites
Determined and mined.
Anyway
You might call a still life
By Caravaggio a form of pornography.
Gluttonously the ripe fruit rot is splayed.
How engorged the grapes are. Technicolor
Sense of succulence with no flavor just the
Topmost oily sheen seen. Bones to prop up
Flesh filled out with pink malaise or the
Sacrifice religiously. Penthouse still. Still I
Appreciate its meditation
On color and the molecular disturbance of
Oozing fruit in relation to meat.
A shank of ham. Visualize a dark plantation
Of firs. A fist
Moist.
Did (where the painting) a bird
Alighting resumes shortly after
(I paint myself) as a gap in
Nostalgia with wave breaking on it.
Observed the sense is. Down
A country lane. Talk about the technique.
Forging metal, the skills and domain
Of the metallurgist
That shaft of expertise.
The first peopling on this lake
Were rave
(ens) gift giv
(ers) they brought su
(n) light with their
Wings a footprint
Can be found under
A wooden bowl swept
Out to sea carved
Especially capable
Of human speech. Short
Skirt next to naked skin,
In general a
Porous grace tinged.
Stained glass
Wreckage we build
Leafy alliances
Bilingual collections
Door opening edge.
Brenda Coultas
the East Village
A True Account of
When We Lived in a
Haunted House
When I was a welder and a fashion model, I lived on the
second floor of a haunted mansion with my sister. From the street
the house appeared to be abandoned, it was a three story brick
with heavy shrubs, rotting gutters, one block from the river in an
old Victorian neighborhood that was half ghetto and half old
money where river boat captains and the movers and shakers
of 19th century industry had once lived in gilded splendor, those
mansions had been chopped up into tiny and sometimes bizarre
apartments and were owned by one slumlord who pounded his
property signs into the thread bare grass.
Our landlord’s daughter was a traveling salesperson who
lived in the apartment next door. She said she often heard
singing and smelled flowers sometimes and that the place had
once been a nursing home.
The rent was cheap because of the unfinished bathroom and
various broken pipes, yet the apartment had charm. An ornate
fireplace, hardwood floors, large living room, old light fixtures.
Because the house appeared abandoned, antique dealers
would break into the ground floor just to look around, we even
joined them sometimes. The ground floor was fully furnished,
with more ornate fireplaces and woodwork. Sheets covered the
furniture and in one room there was evidence that someone had
squatted there in the past.
The haunting begin with the sound of rocking, there were
Oh
Yah;
Yah, yah yah yah
Yah yah yah (with
Heritage)
Stave the russet wilted
Booth
Daring
Basilicas in spaces
Remain. Declared weathered
By faded plaid emblems yielding
Heart’s ardor, bulky and damp.
As in Hölderlin’s outlook
Not tangible
Harpsichord
Hail…steel orbs of ice
Crash through impression
Fish tank such as this
Hermopolis
Happens.
Blatant tablature chromed
Over in an abode built for grammar
His gyration grown in house
Coupled for eyes that insist sentence.
Fury directed at the media hounds.
The coming so far for carnage.
Carthage.
Quandary
Known as canyon.
two rocking chairs in the hallway outside our door but when we
looked out they were silent and motionless. Around midnight,
we would hear footsteps in the attic above our bedroom, like
someone walking in a circle. The attic door was unlocked and
down the end of the dark hall. Millions of pigeons lived and
died in it, millions of pigeons raised whole families and fought
great battles over territory and love in the our attic. There was a
broken window from which they gained entry and the bodies of
birds covered the floor.
There were so many strange noises that we stopped
paying attention. One day a man knocked on the door asking
directions, when I looked down I saw his erection and slammed
the door. I got my sister and a frying pan for a weapon, and we
went looking for him. An elderly man on the street even joined
the hunt, but we never found him.
The stalking started after my sister moved away, and I was
living alone and working at Firestone Steel, one of about five
women among of two hundred men. I was nineteen and fresh
from the cornfields of Spencer county just like Abe Lincoln, and
I wore full makeup everywhere. I had went to a molding school
called Beautiful People, and as a result of my model education,
I always, even in the steel plant, wore eye makeup, powder, and
lipstick. A story had appeared about me in the local newspaper
about how I was a welder and a model. I got invited to the
Kentucky governors’ mansion and was even made a Kentucky
Colonel.
The first time someone opened the transom above the door
and left my door standing open. The second time it happened
I secured the transom with a butter knife, the third time I came
home and there were cigarette butts in a heap outside the door
like he had been waiting for me. I never spent the night there
again. I moved and did not give anyone my address or phone
number.
I never found out who my stalker was, but years later I heard
that a Peeping Tom lived next door. Also there was a man at the
This egg like eco
System/ is a bastion a/bout
To hatch. Or a tornado will wail
Nailing poles of telecommunication.
I might get out of this
Chair back
Flip toward the
Trees. No hands, head above
Loam might dig
Hole bury
Ear
Brazen might cloud
Scream cause
Rain moment wistful
Trouble ample
Struggle amplitude
Wrangle trial
Minuet
Minute
Simple as circle
Swirling only velocity.
Brenda Iijima art (2)
Brenda Iijima
plant, a stranger, who gave me an extravagant Valentine’s day
present out of the blue. Years later I met a woman who had
lived in the landlord’s daughter’s apartment. She talked about
how the apartment was thick with roaches, so much so that they
were inside the wallpaper eating the glue. That’s a sure sign of
a haunting, masses of uncontrollable vermin.
NOVEMBER 2003 BOOG CITY 5
POETRY
Brenda Hillman
to conceal
North Berkeley, California
Cascadia
Prior to 130 million years ago much of California lay beneath ocean waters. It was bordered
on the east by the mainland of North America and on the west by a land mass known as
Cascadia.
Robert Durrenberger, Elements of California Geography
Holiday Inn
Lompoc
hydrangea
one of those
teeth bedspreads
most natives
say Lom-poke
made glad
Capri Motel
Ojai
an undernevered spider &
pre-Naugahyde
chair
marbleized
sidetable
a shape-shaped
inner courtyard
Country Inn
and Suites
Costa Mesa
couch having
its horizon
remote
control
teabag
Four Points
Saint
Monica
to sing and
In the search for the search
During the experiments with wheels
After the scripted caverns
When what had been attached
Was no longer attached
After choosing the type of building
In which no one has died
We recalled a land or condition
Whose shape was formal
Formality gave pleasure
A shadow’s shadow dragged it
Back to the sea of eyes
A poem floats inside its margins
They are death and birth receding
Beauty is not an impasse
Better not to blame
The loved one for a slip
God had a slip of not existing
All girls are an island
Those trucks on 101 with reclining
Decals of flame and smoke
The willless breath outshocked her
In Chualar a boy threw up
Behind a case of Coke
In the search for the east to admire
After reconsidering which was west
In an era of not singing
At the school of lyric abstraction
The skin of an unthought is thought
After kissing Los Angeles once
The landmass known as Cascadia
His parents pick strawberries for us
The I caused flagrant slipping
Sing sank sunk in the Something-ocene
Earth started out loose
Pretty loose
just debris
California motels sometimes have
Colonial type scallops in the moulding
The boy must have been hot
The business of margins waiting
What must Drake have thought
When he strolled past the bankruptcy office
Marigolds on the boardwalk
The back of a poem is brighter
Than the back of a painting
Osiris rode a ferris wheel
Ophelia rollerbladed
Syntax is the understudy for infinity
They don’t know what caused Cascadia
As the arrangements became larger
The lyric had become depressed
Abalone chips in the sidewalk
There were little mirrors in his spine
As he threw up
Do you still love the sentence
Aristotle’s four causes of change
Formal Material Efficient Final
And what of the warbler latitudes
And what of the unknown where
The inexhaustible plays against form
A compass went south of crazy
Missions indicated by green squares
The skin of a thought is a thought
Torn earth is better than conquerors
His parents pick strawberries for us
He picks strawberries for us
On where Cascadia slid
We found a glassy spot to be assembled
A merging subverts the categories
6 BOOG CITY NOVEMBER 2003
Motel 6
Lost Hills
dandelion seed
cream
shower
Fame
corrugated wind
Best Western
Village Inn
Fresno
our girl such a
Neo-Platonist
song not
a
thought
Then did
La Quinta Inn
Redding
nun-colored
channel-changer
magpie
nunning by
Radisson
San Diego
To will
the future panicked
anti-song
post-Naugahyde
truth
Country Inn
And Suites
Some words shouldn’t marry
Consider flow for example
And the unmarried rocks
In the east for the search to admire
We spoke the stuttering the slurred
Spiky poplars near Atascadero
Rose to protect the empty
Some moths live only two hours
Formal cause means definition
Means ask your friend in the blue shirt
Why Cascadia’s hair is noisy
In issues of representation
He threw up from being sick
When the land mass had slid under
After a feathered response
Water running in the motel
To get the being stained out
The immortal precedes the left margin
A million pagers not working
A satellite had turned left
Into a round-sided life
A truck turned left at the Pacific
A sofa-unit in its flat-bed
A line is a unit of attention
California’s lines so separate
The dirt was heard chip-chipping
Silicon A forbidden wren
The second cause of change said the search
Material cause what it’s made of
The Countess of Tripoli listened
Don’t try to get the stain out
The red made you live faster
No longer eating strawberries
He had another call coming in
Nestled down in the paisley pattern
The island proposed a merger
Half-moon Dewy and the Secret Julys
Cascadia didn’t merge it floated
His song survived his supply
She peeled back the skin of meaning
Change has four causes slid Aristotle
The boy hardly bent throwing up
He had little mirrors in his spine
Material cause means why
Because of what
All boys are an island
In issues of representation
Had a pretty good head on her shoulders
His head made up of singing
Loss of meaning is made up
Of two things loss and meaning
Phenomenal accuracy as a moral stance
Kildeer love the really shitty fields
Near the missile-testing site in Lompoc
They run past drought tolerant gardens
The talk of the town
Shirley flies a plane in that one
Nail City Bravo Pizza Taco Loco
The beyond sang the anti-lyric
His parents pick strawberries for us
He picks strawberries For us
World champion Nafta unacceptable stain
The cloud of unknowing knew
In the search for the C in Cascadia
She felt chastened by angularity
Credit unions offering farm credit
Damselflies over ferrous chloride
The land mass coddled the sea trench
They turned right into the argument
Switching to de-caf was the problem
Cercamon and Peire Cardenal
Material cause what it’s made of
Fat-free chocolate envelope
I’ll be good mama you can come out
In heaven we’ll be recognized
The left had a fear of margins
Some moths live only two hours
From flying low in the fields
The face-shaped vault of infinity
Her address was mad at her
Powerbar
I laughed or
it cried
Ellis Motel
Tulelake
Formica
kitchenette
after the owl
true
Naugahyde
Quality Inn
bath gel
Executive Inn
shower cap
Country Inn
And Suites
shoe cloth under
soap
little soap
little
soap
It wasn’t just the not singing
We anguished it up and released it
Whatever gets old and scary
Baja snapped off at Malibu
Which rhymes with pale blue
Tattoos on the backs of nymphettes
We could have been happy sooner
Californians aren’t good at merging
Little mirrors in his spine
Cascadia didn’t merge it floated
Why did the chicken cross the ocean
Get someone to help you do it
A poem touches its margins gently
Twelve=the waltz X 4 causes
The scrub jay cracks seeds for hazel
Thought it was Charlie knocking
We’ll eat no more strawberries
She thought envelopes are fattening
Her letters arrived unsealed
In the trench for the east to admire
In one motel was a gooey spirit
Read The Highwayman as children
Black-haired woman tied up
Shoots herself to warn him
They’ll write in the noir of heaven
The Ojai mountains near Jane’s house
Quiet as the soul of Because
Too much earth for each strawberry
The little seeds get stuck in your teeth
On earth they will be noticed
And all the human themes
In recognized it will be heaven
The final cause of change said Aristotle
The reason to which things tend
The beyond is made of the beyond
She had a face lift on her hands
Space prone punctuation driven
The change didn’t sink it floated
You of missing cities
The island sang right in slow motion
They’d call this their great lost love
But the cliff knows
Where to find the ocean
People think poets make poems
Poems make poems lying down
The final cause the Goddish reason
There’s a song that sang all night
There were mirrors in his spine
He bowed like California
Todos los dios estan una isla
This accidental May
Didn’t fear the right margin
The reason to which things hover
In the next millennium
Don’t wake your sleeping brother
In the earth for the search
After considering which was west
They came upon a piece of land
It had fragments in its spine
It had everything you wanted
In the tablets on which it was written
There’s a space that sings all night
Not knowing the lyric was broken
The sun looking pretty strange
Lying down on 101 it floated
You want to or you don’t
Want to change but you’ll change
Brenda Bordofsky
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Happy
After Gregory Corso
I have refused
to underestimate
I know this estimate and these arms
are not mine by judgment, but given
by accident
no love and no thieves
how this day the matchmaker
glows when she has dressed
all in town or how a box of standard
letters from one soldier in Vietnam to
one woman we shall call my motherqueen
(afraid equally of life and death
myself an addition to this crippling)
pattern and habit mighty about their
affect on god, children and the rot
of houseplants
will collapse “I wish he would have died in Vietnam”
she is indiscreetly dying
never was dying
replaced by a dark house in the valley
dying
a live wife’s nightmare
a dead wife’s mantra
dying
sits in the concrete
in the back-yard-house-in-the-valley
applying and applying sun burnt sod
with the neighbors
Brendas Reading
Bordofsky • Iijima
and more
Sun. Nov. 23, 3:00 p.m., $3
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (& 1st St.)
New from O Books: iduna by kari edwards
104 pages, ISBN # 1-882022-49-1, $12.00
O Books: 5729 Clover Dr Oakland CA 94618
“If benign linearity marks the last vestige of Cartesian consciousness, Vitruvian space and Spinozan
ethics, then iduna signalizes its catalectic adieu. For there is no return after this. kari edwards
has written and conceived a bold, complex text that pushes lyricism to the brink of an interstice,
between the Dictionary and its scream. Auto-translative, self-contaminatory, iduna never renounces
its splendid linguistic excess, fabricating a textural world of legibility and illegibility, gravitation and
non-gravitation, that powers its dweller (for one must dwell in iduna) gesturally around and among its
morphs and torques. If Deleuze and Guattari are correct when they aver that writing ‘has nothing to
do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come’ then iduna
provides a special map to a certain dream of Coleridge’s: the frontiers of a post-cognitive.”
— Steve McCaffery
“Paratexts and processing suggestions stream through kari edwards’s iduna... The constant drive
to make use of formal possibilities at the level of page and opening brings graphic format into
substantive play...A machinic drive echoes in this work as a human, subjective voice struggles to
come through the registers of current language events, noise, news, records, communications. The
shape of a human outcry presses through the mass of mediated material. Form embodies possibilities
enabled by the instructions of forced justification, font shifts, hard returns, tabs, chunked blocks, and
other basic elements of text processing...Before we can ask what something means when we read
it, we must ask what it means to read — and edwards poses that as a high-stakes question providing
the point of departure for current poetic production.
— Johanna Drucker
“Having evacuated the endemic patriarchal script, edwards writes hir own rules of the game in
the wee hours when the sky turns green and binary logic decamps posthaste. Under the ruins of
gender, iduna is a wild garden where ‘sexuality begets language.’ The anarchic profusion of voices,
discourses, idiolects, fonts and typographies that seem to rain down upon the page becomes the
new ‘formlessness’ which is the political signature of this resistant and absorptive text.” — Chris Tysh
also by kari edwards: a day in the life of p., from: Subpress Collective /ISBN # 1-930068-18-2. $12.00
Distributed by SPD: 510-524-1668. 1341 Seventh St. Berkeley CA 94710 http://www.
spdbooks.org/
Paid for by the Committee to Eliminate Gender
NOVEMBER 2003 BOOG CITY 7
NYC POETRY CALENDAR
6:00pm
(CSC) Cornelia Street Cafe ($6)
Featured poets.
7:00pm
(ZB) Zinc Talk ($4)
Featured poets.
MONDAY
4:00pm
(BPC) Segue Series Poets’ Plays ($5)
(BPC) Segue Series ($5)
6:00pm
(CSC) Ziryab ($6)
(BPC) Tribes ($10)
(CSC) The Viking Hillbilly
Apocalypse Revue ($6)
Featured upstairs.
(CSC) Italian-American writers ($6)
Featured downstairs.
(BPC) Bethany Brooks ($6)
(BPC) From Griot to Rapper:
Bringing Our Poetic Roots Home
($15)
(MM) Girlsalon Literary Night ($7)
(CC) Chaos Club (free)
Open mike.
4:00pm
7:00pm
(BPC) Hip-Hop Greets Poetry ($12)
8:00pm
(SMC) Open Reading ($8)
9:00pm
(AAWW) Asian American Poetry
Festival ($10)
10:00pm
4:30pm
6:30pm
(BPC) The MacGuffin
(BPC) The O'Debra Twins "Show &
Tell" ($3)
TUESDAY
5:30pm
(BPC) Roundtable Reading
8:00pm
(MC) Muddy Cup
Featured poet + open mike.
8:30pm
(BU) Buttafly
Open mike/performance.
9:00pm
(ML) M Lounge (free)
Open mike.
WEDNESDAY
7:30pm
(BPC) Saul Williams ($15)
11:59pm
(BPC) Amayo’s Fu-Akrist-Ra ($10)
SUNDAY 2
11:00am
(BPC) People Like Us ($5)
1:00pm
(Hal) Wordsmiths (free)
2:00pm
(BPC) Poetry on the Bowery ($8)
4:00pm
(BPC) Barretta Books (Free)
(OB) Poet to Poet ($3 + $3 min)
Featured poets + open mike.
6:00pm
(BPC) Book Party
Harriet Sohmers Zwerling’s Notes of
a Nude Model
8:00pm
(BPC) All Soul's Party
(SMC) Kenneth King ($12)
(JW) Java and Wood (free)
Open reading.
(CU) Rev. Jen’s Anti-Slam ($3)
Open mike.
(SMC) The Poetry Project ($8)
Featured readers. Not available Nov. 26th.
(BPC) First Sundays ($5)
JohnnyO & De La Guarda
8:30pm
(NPC) Nuyorican Slam Open ($5)
Open slam with third week for Hip Hop.
THURSDAY
7:00pm
(BCC) Brown Chocolate Cafe ($7)
Open mike.
7:30pm
(BPC) NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam ($5)
Long-running championship slam.
Calliope’s Corner (WRHU 88.7FM)
Can also be heard online at WRHU.org.
8:00pm
9:30pm
MONDAY 3
7:30pm
(JO) Johnny O’s
(KGB) Featured Poets (free)
Open mike.
7:45pm
(SMC) The Poetry Project ($8)
Open mike.
8:00pm
(BPC) Bethany Brooks ($5)
(CL) Largo Reading Series (free)
(SMC) City Lights ($8)
50th Anniversary Celebration
(TB) Library Lounge (free)
TUESDAY 4
6:00pm
8:00pm
SUNDAY 9
12:00pm
(BPC) Armature ($3)
1:00pm
(BPC) Three Translators
“Distant Noise” by Jean Fremon
3:00pm
(BPC) Sifting Through Embers ($5)
4:00pm
(BPC) Writing New York Stories ($5)
(WSU) Kairos Cafe ($3)
6:00pm
(BPC) Words, Reeds, Dance ($5)
(TFC) Spiral Thought (free)
8:00pm
(BPC) The 4 Bags ($5)
10:00pm
(BPC) Comstock Presents
MONDAY 10
7:00pm
(PCS) Wax Poetic (free)
8:00pm
(11) Reading Between A&B (free)
(BPC) PlayGrounD: Agamemnon
by Stephen Berkoff
(SMC) Fanny Howe and John
Wilkinson ($8)
8:00pm
(BPC) Starpeople
THURSDAY 13
SATURDAY
12:00pm
(BPC) Respect the Mic ($5)
(BPC) Great Companions: A Workshop
in Poetical Derivation
$250 for 10 classes series
3:00pm
(TEI) The Ear Inn (free)
Three Featured Poets.
4:00pm
(BPC) Segue Series ($5)
7:30pm
(CI) Open Mic/Slam Competition ($5)
6:30pm
7:30pm
(Hal) Wordsmiths (free)
10:00pm
(BPC) Krunkadumpolis &
Game ($7)
FRIDAY 21
7:00pm
(BPC) Jason Nuzzo “Dead
Meat”
7:30pm
(LESTM) Noche Multicultural
(free)
8:00pm
(BPC) Ned Sublette ($10)
(CDS) The Buffalo Readings (free)
Featured readers + open mic.
SATURDAY 22
2:00pm
(BOB) Acentos ($5)
(BPC) Death of the Party
(Hal) Wordsmiths (free)
(BPC) Raquy Danziger & The
Birthday! ($10)
(BPC) Gypsies ($5)
5:00pm
No Events Listed.
THURSDAY 20
(BPC) Jason Nuzzo “Dead Meat”
(BPC) PHAG! ($5)
(BPC) The Bus
Part 1
WEDNESDAY 19
(BPC) Open Mic All Stars ($10)
(BPC) The African Party ($10)
(NPC) Nuyorican Poets Cafe ($5)
Spotlight poet + slam.
12:00am
9:15pm
(BPC) Karaoke + Poetry = Fun
($6)
(BPC) Wesley Clark Presidential
(BPC) Q2: Audre Lorde Praise
Day ($5)
(NPC) Nuyorican Poets Cafe ($5)
Open mike.
9:00pm
(BPC) Hal Sirowitz ($8)
(BPC) ExploText
(BPC) NYU MFA Reading Series ($5)
WEDNESDAY 5
9:30pm
(CB) Wordmusic ($7)
7:00pm
(BPC) Experiments and Disorders
(OCT) Ozzie’s Poetry Night (free)
Open readings.
10:00pm
6:30pm
(BPL) Poetry Readings (free)
WEDNESDAY 12
(BPC) Blue ($5)
(TOA) A Taste of Art (free)
10:00pm
6:00pm
10:00pm
8:00pm
8:00pm
TUESDAY 18
(BPC) Los Vinos ($5)
(BPC) Marc Ribot Trio ($10)
7:30pm
8:00pm
7:00pm
(BR) BBR Reading Series ($4)
(BPC) The Taylor Mead Show ($5)
6:00pm
(BPC) Shaba Sher ($6)
Persian Poetry
7:30pm
7:00pm
MONDAY 17
(CSC) Writer’s Room ($6)
TUESDAY 11
(CSC) Songwriters Workshop ($6)
6:30pm
9:00pm
(CUAA) New York Scores (free)
Student poetry slam.
7:00pm
6:00pm
(CSC) Pink Pony West ($6)
Featured poet + open mike.
8:00pm
(BPC) The 4 Bags ($5)
(BPC) The Bowery Poetry Club
Presents: Insert Band Name Here!
($12)9:
5:00pm
FRIDAY
7:00pm
(BPC) Galinsky Perfpo
Graduation
(BPC) Underground Poetiks ($10)
Open mike slam with $100 prize.
11:00am
(TA) Archway (free)
Open reading.
(KK) Kay’s Cafe ($5)
(VDP) Live Thursdays
Open mike/performance with Kerry Brown
jazz trio.
5:00pm
(BPC) Mud/Bone: I Will Hear
This Divinity ($10)
(SMC) Christopher Stackhouse
and Rebecca Wolff ($8)
(TB) Library Lounge (free)
11:59pm
(CCG) “Wanted: Poets”
Open mike.
8:00pm
7:30pm
10:00pm
7:00pm
(B13) Bar 13 ($5,$4 w/student ID)
Slams, readings, + open mike.
(Night) Saturn Series ($3)
Featured poets + open mike.
10:00pm
6:00pm
(TH) ALOUD! ($25/$50/$100/$240)
(SMC) Paul LaFarge and Frances
Richard ($8)
(BPC) Totally Open Slam ($3)
(WS) Wabi Sabi (free)
Open mike/performance with house dj.
4:00pm
(OB) Poet to Poet ($3 + $3 min)
Featured poet(s) + open mike.
(BPC) SubPress Party ($5)
(BPC) MacGuffin Tech
8:00pm
4:00pm
10:00pm
FRIDAY 14
7:30pm
SATURDAY 15
2:00pm
6:00pm
(BPC) All Out Poetry Jam ($5)
(CSC) Greek-American Writers ($6)
7:00pm
7:00pm
9:00pm
10:30pm
SUNDAY 23
3:00pm
(BPC) Four Brendas
5:00pm
(BPC) Resonant Voices
8:00pm
(BPC) Balaklava
MONDAY 24
7:00pm
(PCS) Wax Poetic (free)
8:00pm
(11) Reading Between A&B (free)
TUESDAY 25
5:00pm
(NS) Poetry Forum ($5)
(BPC) John Kearns Play (Free)
(BPC) Soft Skull Sneak A Peek ($5)
(Night) Artists Lounge ($3 + $1 min)
(BOB) Acentos ($5)
(BWB) Women’s Poetry Jam ($5)
Featured poets + open mike.
(BPC) Karaoke + Poetry = Fun $6
(BPC) The Em and Lo Show ($5)
7:00pm
7:00pm
8:00pm
9:00pm
8:00pm
11:00pm
(BPC) The Bus
Part 2
THURSDAY 6
6:00pm
WEDNESDAY 26
7:00pm
(BB)Tehuti’s Spoken Word Café ($5)
7:30pm
(ACA) D.A. Levy Lives (free)
Featured readers.
(AAWW) (re)collection ($5)
Featured readers + open mike.
(BPC) Tim Wells Welcome Party
(SMC) Paolo Javier and Rebecca
Reilly ($8)
6:30pm
7:00pm
8:00pm
8:30pm
(BPC) Ladies on the Mic ($7)
(GP) Green Pavilion ($3 + $5 min)
10:00pm
(BPC) Paradigm’s Hiphop
Revue ($10)
THURSDAY 27
(22) A Century of Life and Love ($10)
(BPC) Drunken Poetry Slam (free)
(BPC) Celena Glenn ($10)
CD Release Party
(BPC) Graffiti Magazine ($10)
(BPC) Daniel Bernard Roumain
& Band ($8)
(BPC) Urban Word Youth Slam ($5)
FRIDAY 7
5:00pm
(BPC) The Return of the Viking
Hillbilly (free)
6:30pm
(BPC) Tunnels ($8)
7:00pm
9:00pm
11:59pm
FRIDAY 28
7:00pm
SATURDAY 29
1:00pm
10:00pm
(BPC) Sixth Sense Presents
SUNDAY 30
6:00pm
(BPC) Latino America en el
Bowery ($5)
8:00pm
(BPC) Jeremiah Lockwood
8 BOOG CITY OCTOBER 2003
(Blue) Belladonna
SPREAD
THE WORD
Interested in your event being listed on
the NYC Poetry Calendar? Send your
request to [email protected], including
the name of event/series, name of venue,
date, time, price, and address.
7:00pm
(BWB) Women’s Poetry Jam ($2)
Featured poet + open mike.
(LB) The Poets Grimm (free)
(BN) Seaman Poetry Award (free)
10:00pm
(TH)
Town Hall
123 West 43rd
(TNS)
The New School, Tishman
Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
212.254.9628
(Tribes)
Tribes
285 East 3rd Street, 2nd Floor
http://www.tribes.org
212.674.3778
(VDP)
Via Della Pace
East 7th Street
(WH)
Wave Hill
675 West 252nd Street
http://www.wavehill.org
718.549.3200
(WS)
Wabi Sabi at Bar Below
209 Smith Street, Brooklyn
718.694.2277
(WSU)
Washington Square United
Methodist Church
135 West 4th Street
212.544.0005
(BF) Back Fence ($3|$3 min)
Featured poets + open mike.
(ABC) Our Unorganized Reading ($2)
Open mike.
2:00pm
(SJU)
Saint John’s University, Council
Hall
8000 Utopia Parkway
(SMC)
Saint Mark’s Church
131 East 10th Street
www.poetryproject.com
212.674.0910
[email protected]
(SS)
Soft Skull Shortwave Bookstore
71 Bond Street, Brooklyn
http://www.softskull.com
718.643.1599
(TA)
The Archway
Pinehurst Ave
212.923.5461
(TB)
Telephone Bar
149 2nd Avenue
http://www.telebar.com
(TEI)
The Ear Inn
326 Spring St
http://home.nyc.rr.com/earinnreadings
212.246.5074
[email protected]
(TFC)
The Fall Cafe
307 Smith Street, Brooklyn
718.832.2310
3:00pm
(149) Nomad’s Choir
Open reading.
3:00pm
(BPC) Scottish Reading Series
($5)
(Nest)
Nest
70 Washington Street
(Night)
Nightingale
213 Second Avenue
(NPC)
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe
236 East 3rd Street
http://www.nuyorican.org
212.505.8183
(NS)
The New School
66 West 12th Street
(NYOC)
New York Open Center
83 Spring Street
http://www.opencenter.org
212.219.2527
(OB)
The Orange Bear
47 Murray Street
(OCT)
Ozzie’s Coffee & Tea
251 5th Avenue, Brooklyn
718.840.0878
(PCS)
Pete’s Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg
www.petescandystore.com
718.302.3770
(SC)
Striver’s Cafe and Lounge
2611 Frederick Douglas
Boulevard
SATURDAY 1
L O C A T I O N S
(JW)
Java and Wood
110 Manhattan Avenu, Brooklyn
718-609-1820
(Hal)
Halcyon
227 Smith Street, Brooklyn
http://www.halcyonline.com
718.260.WAXY
(KK)
Kay’s Kafe
1345-4B Southern Blvd, Bronx
718.378.3434
(LB)
Labyrinth Books
536 West 112th Street
212.865.1588
(LESTM)
The Lower East Side Tenement
Museum
97 Orchard Street
(LT)
Lovinger Theatre
Lehman College
(MC)
The Muddy Cup
388 Van Duzer Street, Staten Island
718.818.8100
[email protected]
(ML)
M Lounge
291 Hooper Street, Brooklyn
(MM)
Meow Mix
269 East Houston Street
2:00pm
(SS) Frequency Reading Series (free)
2:00pm
2:00pm
(CLA) Poets On Sunday (free)
(WH) Wave Hill (free)
(CLA)
Central Library Auditorium
89-11 Merrick Blvd
(CSC)
The Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street
(CU)
Collective Unconscious
145 Ludlow Street
http://www.revjen.com
(CUAA)
Columbia University Alumni
Auditorium
650 West 168th Street
http://www.newyorkscores.org
212-563-3250
(ER)
Elysee Restaurant
199 Prince Street
http://www.metaphorical.biz
(FW)
Fort Wadsworth
End of Bay Street near School
Street
(Ford)
Fordham University at Lincoln
Center
113 West 60th Street, 12th Floor
212.371.5281
(GM)
Guggenheim Museum
5th Ave 89th Street
(GP)
Green Pavilion
4307 18th Avenue, Brooklyn
718-435-4722
EVENTS
(BPC) S.O.A.P.P.
Poetry: Commerce, Commodity, And
Commercialization
SUNDAY 16
(BWB)
Bluestockings Women’s
Bookstore & Cafe
172 Allen Street
212.777.6028
(CB)
CB’s Gallery
313 Bowery @ Bleecker
(CC)
Chaos Club
90-21 Springfield Boulevard, Queens
718.479.2594
(CDS)
Casa Del Sol
672-674 East 136th St, Bronx
www.casadelsol.org
718.742.2522
(CH)
The Center for the Humanities
365 Fifth Avenue
212.817.2006
(Church)
Undercroft of the First
Unitarian Church
50 Monroe Place, Brooklyn
(CI)
Cafe Iimani
148 Stuyvesant Avenue, Brooklyn
http://www.cafeiimani.com
718.574.6565
(CK)
Citykids
57 Leonard Street
http://www.citykids.com
212.925.3320
12:00pm
(BPC) Joel Forrester & People Like Us ($5)
1:00pm
(BCC)
Brown Chocolate Cafe
1084 Fulton Street
(BF)
Back Fence
155 Bleecker Street
(Blue)
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street
(BN)
Barnes & Noble
Union Square
212.252.0810
(BOB)
Blue Ox Bar
East 139th Street & 3rd Avenue
(BPC)
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
http://www.bowerypoetry.com
212.614.0505
(BPL)
Brooklyn Heights Public
Library
280 Cadman Plaza West
718.623.7100
(BR)
Bar Reis
375 Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn
718.832.5716
(BU)
Buttafly
769 Washington Ave, Brooklyn
http://www.butta-fly.com
718.636.1900
SUNDAY
SATURDAY 8
(11)
11th Street Bar
510 East 11th
(149)
149-155 Christopher St.
718.932.8007
[email protected]
(22)
22 Below Cabaret
155 East 22nd Street
212.228.0750
(AAWW)
The Asian American Writers’
Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10A
http://www.aaww.org
(ABC)
ABC NO RIO
156 Rivington Street
212.674.3585
(ACA)
ACA Galleries
529 West 20th Street, 5th flr.
(Art)
A Taste of Art
147 Duane Street
212.964.5493
(B13)
13 Bar/Lounge
35 East 13th Street
(BB)
Brownstone Books
409 Lewis Avenue, Brooklyn
718.953.7328
WEEKLY EVENTS S P E C I A L
SUPPORT
THEPOETRY
CALENDAR
The NYC Poetry Calendar needs your
help to survive! Donations are accepted,
appreciated, and encouraged. Help
keep New York City aware of the
local poetry events that happen every
day in your hometown.
If you wish to help sponsor a future
edition of the NYC Poetry Calendar,
you can call 212.842.2664 or email
[email protected].