This Thursday the next edition of the A B Series brings Penn Kemp to town.
Later this month is Clifton Joseph, John Sobol and Robert Priest come.
Mid-May it’s Christian Bök who spoke and performed at the 2008 Canadian Literature symposium, which had a focus on the postmodern last year (and there’s a sound file there of him among others).

There was a Factory Reading at a reading at Saw Gallery March 26th.

The winner of the PK Page Founders’ Award for 2009 is Shane Rhodes.

He read from his newest poetry manuscript in progress, “The Air”. It’s a sometimes Eunoiaesque explorations of subsets of sounds, looking around at etymologies. His skill in using devices of rhyme and meter is clear. One poem was a tribute, a monologue to a man who died of HIV, the narrator rebuking his whine that it wasn’t AIDs that messed you up; it was the decade of coke-use. Another poem spoke of a backyard where among the garden, melons, were the wrecks of old cars, warted leather convertibles that would be fixed into former glory one of these days.

His last work published was The Bindery.

(The painting in the background is an oil by Michael Harrington. Each has an interesting quality of light and color.)

Paul Tyler read from a blue chapbook. (I know, that’s as useful as “what kind of car do you have?” “Blue”.) They were poems about politics (“desire inventing dogma from the dust” in one about the Taliban blowing up Buddhas because they are unnatural, not created directly by Allah and he said something like as if history left alone grows Buddhas in the desert).

He also wrote of past workplaces, butcher shop and end-stage care of seniors and the people his mind can’t erase. And wouldn’t want to. Like Robert Louis Stevenson’s windows, it’s all communication made to be heard. There were some lovely phrasings that were easy to grasp on first pass such as all of the doors of me wanting this.

A good night out of poetry. 20 or 25 people came despite the cold rain and it being end of week.

Robert Brewer interviews Patricia Fargnoli, the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She says, “I only occasionally do simultaneous submissions […] more lately because I am 71 […] I can’t afford to wait a year to hear results anymore…especially since the competition is so fierce and rejection so frequent.”

Ross Priddle did a callout on issue #400 of 1cent which he and I are in (and he gives a full list of all who is).

What is a writing Workshop? from St. Augustine’s confessions.

“Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros dulciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari .” (“Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions,”)

As Stephen Kuusisto adds there, “There’s no room for a crystal throne in a good workshop.”

Equals as partners in learning getting along.

And how blessed of state it is when serendipity and whatever else is at play makes it happen and reoccur when it does.