Eric and new co-coordinator Craig hosted the latest Grey Borders proudly presents of bill bissett (Lunaria), Steve Zultanski (Brooklyn, NY), Pearl Pirie (Ottawa, ONT), Donato Mancini (Vancouver, BC) and Beatriz Hausner (Toronto, ONT).
Happily audiencing. (And the middle lady drove up from Niagara Falls for this.)
Formerly of Ottawa Ryan and Emily. Ryan wrote about the night here.
Some phafours. Jay and BookThuggery.
It was one of those stunning evenings of coming in from the cold and being able to say, ah, this is why people do poetry. This is why I stay involved. The vibe in the room was great. The poetry was unexpected, unstaid, rocketing askew.
I’ve read a couple times on of Donato Mancini’s books but there were two more to be had. Some letter-form vispo, some image-based vispo, statistical tangled spinning lists, all kinds of off the beaten path poetry. Mancini didn’t read from his new book of essays but new work. Many readers tend to leap from poem to poem of small emotional curves that can add to info overload of a reading. His sustained if digressions and progressions in main directions and aside kept it all glued together for a sustained longer poem on death row last meals. Both he and bill considered social consciousness in a political sense that didn’t lecture so much as engage the subjects.
I’d seen books pipping around by Steve Zultanski before but he wasn’t on my radar before. He runs the Segue reading series in NYC. You can sample his book, Agony from BookThug. There’s an effect of it continuing to pile on such as one of calculating breaths volumes against faces of lovers or places that are not lovers, deductive pushed past the nth degree. He did the whole slot on one poem which was strange and mad and rather absorbing line of digressions and zigzag thought of how to get rid of swimmers by dropping the Taipei building on an ocean which would not shatter because things don’t shatter in water.
I didn’t get a non-blurry shot of Beatriz while she read but caught her here.
Brian got a picture of Beatriz reading from her surreal novella-poem of racoon lovin’ lifestyle: Enter the Racoon.
I read from Where There’s Fire, and most everything else I’ve got on paper.
bill bissett did the re-launch of RUSH: what fuckan theory, a rerelease of his 1972 collection of essays and poems, as he wryly put it, written when he was about 12.
bill bissett performed his magical musical chants too. Wonderful to hear poems that seek unity and peace and position for confounding warring defaults of language.
Brian took a picture of the other side of the shot below:
Conversational flow after.