Shadow Prison

Here are some of the fireworks from Saturday
in case you missed all of the Monday night fireworks at Sound Effects:

I read a new piece called Third of July, a revised account of last week's infamous feature, several Hal Sirowitz covers and some other random pieces. 









( thirteen more under the cut )

I am so glad I was at the Mama Javas open mic on Monday.

It's not very often that you get to see one person violate every one of your poetic precepts, in one half hour.



Arrive late enough to not only make an entrance, but to miss hearing what kind of poetry you are up against?? Check!

Bring a traveling entourage that consists only of your mom, just to project an awkward vibe from the very start? Check!

Give yourself an obnoxious stage name? Check!

Unfurl a gigantic banner displaying a graphics school dropout conceived logo? Check!

Undermine your own words, by reciting them over gimmicky music from your iPod? Check!

Unleash a non-stop barrage of well-worn cliches? Check!

Announce that you are in the process of ditching your obnoxious stage name, for a new stage name that promises to be even more obnoxious? Check!

Force people at the back of the room to begin giggling uncontrollably, as if they are trying in vain to be quiet during a church sermon? Check!

Allow the flimsy imagery of your writing to be upstaged by the vivid imagery of your tattoos? Check!

Confess that your ambition is to sell out your self-published chapbooks, not so you can get started on a new one, but so you can re-print those old ones with your updated stage name? Check!

Clear the room of half of the people who were hoping to hear some poetry? Check!

Manage to avoid stumbling onto one single line or phrase that resonates enough to be remembered the next day? Check!

as read at Mama Javas last night:


Dear Gay People haiku:


thanks for ruining
sanctity of governor
Mark Sanford's marriage



P.S. - I will save the rest of my comments from last night,
for a friends-only post, after I get some sleep....

So, I was a little anxious about our first night at Mama Javas. I was hoping we wouldn't lose a lot of our friends, since we changed both venues and days. Fortunately, Bill had a great crowd, last Monday...so there was some good momentum to build on.

Everything turned out fantastic. The place was packed, the open mic was lively. There were voices we were happy to hear, again. There were new voices that we hope to hear, again. Both feature sets were excellent. This month, we decided to have two couples feature. Jack and Judy were well prepared. There were several poems they had written together and they even put together a cool chapbook. Ernesto and Anna were on fire and they closed with an awesome e.e. cummings duet, that was good enough to be upper-case.

So we are very excited to become part of Bill's series. I think our readings fit together nicely and we try to create a similar environment. It's an excellent venue, too.





although we had a fun open mic, campana  can't help but lament the missing portrait of the flying carrot, that he grew to love.




Jack and Judy:




Ernesto and Anna:




( other pics, CUT for your convenience )

First, thanks to everyone who has supported our readings at Copper Star Coffee, over the past year. We had some big nights there and it became a pretty popular reading.

Unfortunately, the venue didn't appreciate what went on there, as much as Jack and I appreciated it. There were some minor problems, but the last straw was when they tried to cancel one of our recent shows, after double-booking the night.

Fortunately, one of our biggest supporters from the very start, Bill Campana, hosts an open mic poetry reading every Monday at Mama Javas coffeehouse and he has invited Jack and I to do our Caffeine Corridor Poetry Series, on one of his Mondays!

We will start this new phase TONIGHT. We will begin with open mic at 7pm, as always...and our features will be a "couples" theme. Ernesto Moncada and Anna Moncada will be featuring with Jack Evans and Judy Green-Davis.

Mama Javas Cofffeehouse is at 36th St and Indian School Rd.
and it's even open a little later, so we won't have to leave immediately, after the show.

hope to see some of you there,


Mama Javas Coffeehouse
3619 East Indian School Road, Phoenix, AZ 85018
602.840.JAVA

I was away from teh internets, the past few days (camping)...but I did want to mention that I had fun featuring at the Mesa Slam, last week. I think it was a pretty good set. A few other notes from that night:

1. The place is pretty funky, but it was cool. I thought it had more of a Grand Ave. vibe.

2. Jonathan's "Real Doll" piece is great.

3. Tufik and I were told that we would have extremely photogenic children together, if we were able to reproduce.

4. I was happy to see that Joseph Nieves came out to hear to me. I havent seen him forever and he was always one of my favorites. I would have liked to also hear him slam, but I guess he wasn't in a performing mood.

5. Of all the bizarre and crazy events that I tend to perform at, I probably get more nervous about featuring at a Slam. I feel more out-of-my-element there, than I do at bars, laundromats and churches! So it was helpful to see some friendly faces and everyone there (even the people who I didn't know) made me feel very welcome. It was much appreciated.

6. Even though it's wayyy on the other side of town from me, I intend to come back every once in awhile.

Leave it to the Canadians.

One of my poems is being published in the new issue of a Toronto magazine, due out at the end of this month.
If you came to my recent reading at Glendale Community College, it was one of the pieces I performed.




Ash to Ash to Dust to Stone


Within the pages of a recent magazine interview,
Keith Richards finally admitted to snorting
a line of his dead father’s ashes. Upon hearing
this news, Robert Downey Jr.
Lindsay Lohan, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss
immediately begged to have their fathers cremated.

Founding Stones guitarist Brian Jones
used to take his father’s ashes swimming. Charlie Watts
uses two pencils to tap on the urn
that holds his father’s ashes and he’s been tapping
the same damn beat for forty years.

Keith Richards had the audacity to charge $175
for a back-row balcony-seat glimpse
of his father’s ashes during the first
of many farewell tours. Critics claim
that the ashes of Keith Richards’ father are merely evaporated
leftovers of muddy waters and are kept
in the same old urn that was stolen
from the ashes of Howling Wolf’s father.

The ashes of Keith Richards father can’t get no satisfaction.
They once sat on an Altamont stage, dumbfounded in the urn
while Keith launched into a guitar solo, as the Hell’s Angels
stabbed a man to death.

The ashes of Bill Wyman’s father spend each night
inside a barely-legal urn, an urn so young
that it’s often mistaken for his daughter’s ashes.

Tina Turner knows that the ashes of Mick Jagger’s father
have been laced with brown sugar and are kept
in an urn that’s painted, painted, painted,
painted black. The ashes of Mick Jagger’s father have allegedly
been mixed in the same urn as the ashes of David Bowie’s father
but no one will confirm or deny this rumour.

To this day, Mel Gibson’s dad denies
that Keith Richards’ father
was ever cremated, in the first place.






If I have any Toronto friends reading this, you can go and check out the launch party for this issue. haha.

Since Jessica is trying to recover from an intense couple of weeks, Jonathan will be filling in for her tomorrow.


May 14th featured readers Cat Klotsche & Jonathan Standifird

open mic starts at 7pm


Copper Star Coffee
4220 N. 7th Ave. (north of Indian School Rd.)
Phoenix, AZ
602-266-2136

http://www.myspace.com/cspoets


***We will also be making an announcement about the future of our series.

During random moments at work, I would start laughing because I would suddenly remember some part of campana  's rollicking feature at Words In The Alley, the other night. His Slam Bored Game and love poem excerpts had me laughing so hard that my eyes were filled with tears.

synagogues panic
epidemic plague of swine
flu isn't kosher

So the show that we put together for the West Valley Art Museum was pretty intense. I was very proud of the lineup. It was such a diverse mix of styles, but everyone was on top of their game. Very few people in the audience were familiar with all four of the poets, so most of them were getting introduced to something new. It was basically what Jack and I have been doing with our Caffeine Corridor series, but on a larger scale (since I was able to showcase four poets, instead of two).

I went first, so I could break the ice.

I had David Chorlton go next and it was one of his best sets. Halfway through, Bakeem walked over to me and said "I ought to punch you in the face for making me follow this guy." Hahah. I think people might have expected his writing to be excellent, but I think people were surprised at how well he delivers it.

Bakeem didn't have to worry. His set was amazing and he had people laughing one minute and tearing up, with the next...but all in a genuine way. All pure, no gimmick. People were truly blown away.

Fortunately, I still had Bill to weigh down the closer spot. I knew he was one of the only poets around, who could sustain and build on the earlier performances and he really came through. His set was focused and energetic and his pacing was excellent. He somehow managed to transition between rollicking fun and somber contemplation, without giving anyone emotional whiplash.


I heard a lot of good things, afterward...so I think people enjoyed it as much as I did. A writer from Phoenix Magazine was there and he had such a good time that he wanted to meet up with us to talk poetry for awhile, after the show.

It was really pretty self-indulgent, when I think about it.
I just tried to up together the kind of poetry reading that I would love to see.

This is where most of my National Poetry Month energy and focus has been directed. 

We are putting together an event for this Saturday to give the far West Valley a glimpse of live poetry.

It's a great venue and we will be giving them a great show. But we have no idea how much of an audience we will have.
The area has never been exposed to this sort of thing, so we don't know how much interest there will be.

But even if there are only ten people who show up, they will experience something that will be worth talking about, telling their friends about, and keeping an eye out for...something worth bringing other people to, if there is a next time.


----------------------------------------

Celebrate National Poetry Month at the West Valley Art Museum with a showcase of popular local poets.

featured poets include Shawnte Orion, Bakeem Lloyd, David Chorlton and Bill Campana

Saturday April 25th 7pm




The Rorschach Poetry Collective was formed by a diverse and accomplished group of West Valley poets to bring contemporary poetry to the West side of the valley. Celebrating a range of styles and forms, Rorschach Poets have been published in top literary journals around the world, been invited to perform at National Slam festivals, the Mesa Arts Center, ASU's Kerr Cultural Center and everywhere in between.

tickets are $5 ($4 for museum members, $3 for teens)

Directions: West Valley Art Museum is located at 17420 N. Avenue of the Arts in Surprise, A Z -North 114 A venue & Bell Road

From I-101 (north or south):Take Bell Road exit head West at bottom of hill turn right on Avenue of the Arts Museum located on left about 1 block north of Bell road

Parking: Plenty of free parking conveniently located in front of the Museum.

Even if you despise poetry, this will be cheaper than normal Museum admission, so you can just check out the exhibits!

I saw Sunshine Cleaning the other day and I loved it.

It's about two sisters mired in their miserable lives, who try to start their own crime scene cleanup business.
The cast was great. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt were excellent.

That was totally wicked awesome.
We had 60 or 70 people out at our first Free Association Open Mic reading at Glendale Community College, last night. They had to keep going out to find more chairs to bring in.
26 people signed up for the open mic.  We are officially off to a good start.
Huge thanks to wordmule  for all of her hard work putting this together, so I could just show up and read to a bunch of people who wanted to listen.


score so far:

Rorschach Poets- 1
West Valley Complacency- 0



Lynda Mae had Jonathan and Bakeem playing music with her on a couple of pieces, during her set. Nice.


Since it was such a new crowd, I tried to mix old and new material. It was kind of fun to read a few old ones to people who hadn't already heard them.
What I was able to cram into 30 minutes:


Astronaut (or monk)/Unheard Symphony mix
Dedication
Unraveled From A Sphere
Irreversible
On The Absence of Racism In Ancient Greece
Papercuts
Series Of Concentric Stanzas
Barracuda
Unexpected Guest
Things That Make Me Cry
Bookcase Inventory
Avoiding Aphids
Geometry Of Truth
Abortionist's Garden
Birthplace Of Clouds
Ash To Ash To Dust to Stone
haiku about altar boys, Freud's Valentine, Mel Gibson, Pro-life Hogwarts, and txt messaging
Bodies Meant To Be Found
Winter Migrations
Why Poetry Readings Ar Better Than Sex

This Thursday is our new Poetry reading at Glendale Community College.

I will be featuring along with Lynda Mae and we will have some open mic start at 7pm.

We hope this will be a good start to our evil plot to infiltrate the West Valley with high quality poetry events, until they surrender and embrace them.




April 16th 7pm-9:30pm

Student Union Room 104E @ Glendale Community College 59th Avenue and Olive in Glendale

There is a coffee shop inside the student union, so you can grab coffee and snacks. There will be tables set up so you can sprawl and write if so inspired. There will be amazing poetry and performances from our features and readers. Please note: This is an uncensored event!




( I am posting a map under this cut, so you know where it is located on the campus... )

I was curious to see if anything productive would come from forcing myself to a 30 poems in 30 days pace, since it's such a contrast to my usual writing habits. However, it has been very hectic and I am a little behind.

The main reason is because I have decided to focus most of my National Poetry Month energy on some other ambitions. I am involved with some cool events literary events that take place downtown and I occasionally even go over to the East side, but there is a poetic void on my side of town. So I formed a group (the Rorschach Poetry Collective) with a few other "neighborhood" poets (Jessica, Jonathan, Bakeem and myself) to promote and spread poetry throughout the West Valley, this month. We are organizing two big events in the next two weeks and we already have several others waiting for us.


This week we will have a reading at Glendale Community College
and next week we will have a showcase at the West Valley Art Museum.

I will post all of the details later this week, but both of those will probably become regular events.
This will be interesting.

Our reading last night was excellent! We had a great open mic to start out, so people who stumbled in on accident were sticking around because they were so entertained by what they were hearing. People were coming up to me to ask how often we do this and when our next event was going to take place.

Then we got to our featured readers, who were great. We put two poets together who would have never ended up reading together. Jack and I have these evil plans of putting together some people who we want to expose to new audiences and new poets and it can be a risky move, but tonight it worked perfectly.



Rosemarie Dombrowski has a PhD in English and teaches writing at ASU. She is the editor of an awesome local journal called Merge (www.mergepoetry.com) and she has been published in National Journals like Columbia Review.



Aaron Johnson is a great writer who is also a big-time performer who is well known in the national slam community. He has toured through 40 states and performed in all kinds of difficult situations (like bars and laundromats and comic book stores), so he has chops.



One of the things I loved was that they were both very nervous about what selections to read, because they both knew that they were performing for a little bit different crowd than they are used to. It's exciting to be able to present good poets to new listeners and that's one of the reasons that Jack and I put this series together. They were both great and everyone seemed very happy about it.

By the way, Aaron had some new chapbooks and he almost sold out. That was also nice to see.

April 9th featured readers Rosemarie Dombrowski & Aaron Johnson


open mic starts at 7pm

co-hosted by Shawnte & Jack Evans


Copper Star Coffee
4220 N. 7th Ave. (north of Indian School Rd.)
Phoenix, AZ
602-266-2136


Rosemarie Dombrowski is passionate about American poetry, from the Puritans to Prufrock to Plath.  She teaches creative non-fiction and literature courses at ASU's Downtown Phx campus, and her students typically find her pithy remarks amusing.  She is the editor of Merge.  She also loves couture fashion and can make a convincing argument for the parallels between runway art and poetry.



Aaron Johnson is the 2001 International Poetry Interpretation Champion and former Assistant Executive Director of NORAZ Poets, a non-profit organization that makes poetry more accessible to rural communities and small cities in Northern Arizona. He has performed in 40 states, over the past three years.


more details and info on past events:
http://www.myspace.com/cspoets





While I am posting, here is April poem #5 out of 30:



kitten you can keep
your collar and your claws but
not your uterus

I am certain that it is only coincidence that April is both National Poetry Month and STD Awareness Month

On the poetry front, I have some big things in the works for this month. I will elaborate on some of them soon. Details are still being worked out, conspiracies are being hatched, complacency is being overthrown.

In spite of how busy I am with these new endeavors, I would like to try to keep up with the April Poem-A-Day challenge. I don't normally share hurried writing exercises, so I will be posting those as friends-only posts. I doubt they will be very accomplished (writing is not easy for me, I labor over edits and rewrites for awhile, before they stop embarrassing me), but I hope to have thirty decent ideas at the end of the month, that I can go back and work on, until something interesting happens.