17 Poets! 2013 Spring Schedule (Feb-June)

Last Thursday was the opening of our 2013 Spring Season (10 Years!)  with a contributor reading from FUCK poems and John Sinclair also with music by Katarina Boudreaux and our amazing poets at a completely full list for the open mic hosted by Jimmy Ross.

Fuck Poems anthology Contributors & (right) editor Vincent Cellucci

Poets Dave Brinks and Andrei Codrescu read this Thursday at 8PM. Codrescu and Brinks will both be signing new books available for purchase at the front door.

Here's what we have planned the rest of the season:

17 POETS! LITERARY & PERFOMRANCE SERIES

Spring 2013 @ Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine St. (www.17poets.com)

Feb 21: Andrei Codrescu / Dave Brinks

Feb 28: Barbara Henning / Jamey Jones

March 7: Bernadette Mayer / Philip Good

March 14: HiIlary G. / Peter Orr / Anis Shivani

March 21: Rodger Kamenetz/ JS Makkos

March 28: Katarina Boudreaux / Maurice Ruffin

April 4: Brett Evans / Mary Elizabeth

April 11: Gina Myers / Nasimiyu Murumba

April 18: Kelly Davio / Freddi Evans / Kit Robinson

April 25: Bill Zavatsky / Michael Tod Edgerton

May 2: Cyril Neville & Friends, Jazz Poetry Session

May 9: Christian Champagne / Bryan Spitzfaden

May 16: Mel Coyle / Quo Vadis Gex Breaux / Asali DeVan

May 23: Megan Kaminski / Jonathan Brown

May 30: Chris Carrier / Quess

June 6: Megan Burns / Brad Richard

Join us in celebrating hosting poetry in the French Quarter for the last 10 Years! 

New From Trembling Pillow Press: SUPER NATURAL

Tracey McTague's SUPER NATURAL is now available from Trembling Pillow Press. 

Also available as an ebook for Kindle. 

Advance Praise for SUPER NATURAL:

“A hornbook for the fledgling seer. A trickster’s bible. Mystic, domestic, ritualistic, caustic. Tracey McTague’s book invokes the spaces between the worlds with poems that demand to be read aloud, incantations against—or for—those liminal places where spirits flap free. With sensual vulgarity and profane beauty, her poems draw close to the divine, stripping language down to its glowing bones. I know this place; it stalks me. And I believe in these poems”

-Lauren Ireland

“Edgar Allen Poe famously wrote, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Indeed, stare for too long at any gorgeous flower and one begins to be stunned by its essential grotesquerie, which then in some mysterious way doubles back to make the blossom more beautiful still. Similarly, Tracey McTague’s poems tinker with the proportion of beauty to strangeness, finding just the right balance, as a Thai chef might with sweetness, acidity, salt, and spiciness.

It just so happens that Tracey has one of the most beautiful gardens in Brooklyn…I’m not sure whether she has transferred the skill set of gardening into poetry or vice versa, or whether the dynamic is simply more complementary, but the poems are like enchanted terrariums, tiny organic assemblages in the “syntax of [an] unknown tongue.”

The lines are short and this economy helps us not to lose such exquisite, sound-attentive moments as “prank mask feasts,” “double bloom Twombly,’ “porch minks,” and “faux pas paw prints.” I almost want to call these “euphoria infested” poems gemlike, with their strange and unembarrassed (i.e. uncontested) beauty, but perhaps it is more accurate to compare them to amber. With her fine and surreal sense of juxtaposition and arrangement, Tracey is sure to work in insects and delicate mischief among the loveliness: there is a “nymph detainment center”, a “chocolate mingle turn-ons at herpes camp” and even a “Cartesian spider monkey [that] yells,

‘Titans – show us your tits’”!

To which one can only respond:

Tracey! Show us your poems!”

-Nada Gordon

Tracey McTague is a “sorceress in sweet depravity/ & general decay.” She calls forth a world crowded with the debris of daily life, lit by “the wide-eyed radiance” of the poet’s mind: Antigone brand condoms and H.R. department emoticons.

These poems brim with wonder, but also warning. They gather global gods and folk rituals, as if the present, or, more precisely, the future, required the resurrection of every possible power — hope here residing not above us but in the ways such prayers access “the primordial wisdom in the world as it is.”

-Allison Cobb

Tracey McTague is a streetwise detective of the most unusual details; some of her poems read like a pile of stuff discovered in an alley -- mysterious, then interesting, then meaningful, beautiful, and rewarding to the careful eye.  Other poems seem channeled from the distant flare of a blinking star; on top of her Brooklyn hill, McTague is a strangely-alloyed antennae picking up eons-old cosmic messages.   My favorite poems are the ones that demand to be reread.  As soon as I finished this book, I started it anew.  

-Shafer Hall

Tracey McTague’s amazing collection of poetry Supernatural, fires up the language. Folklore, nature, and the quotidian meld into bars of gold and silver. These poems dedicated to family and friends, lift off the page and light up poetry’s sky. Grounded in folklore, McTague’s poems can’t be nailed to the wall, they are tricksters, shape shifters that defy our expectations and rules.

-Brenda Coultas 

Delivered with the spontaneous mind of "first thought best thought," each word is also a well wrought amulet stowed in the shelves of the poem. It's their sense of strangeness, vast associative possibility and sonic kinkiness that makes me feel we can use them as chants to combat commonplace wrong-doers. As she writes, "bird-herald appears/making a joyful noise/& always pays your debts."

-Stacy Szymaszek

I Endorse That Strip (from the poetics of Nicki Minaj)

[performance: I play the first :35 seconds of this song, then I lower the volume and read the poem over the rest of the song. It's probably helpful to listen to the entire song and then read the poem as well.] 

From the Poetics of Nicki Minaj

I Endorse That Strip

“what women are we talking about when we say women” –bell hooks

what we talk about when we say strippers

what we talk  about when we say prostitutes

when we say hoes, when we say sex workers

what we talk about when we say sluts

what we talk about when we say mom

what we talk about when we say daddy’s girl

shaming in the I can’t help but be bodied & error

the object’s recoil, in the traphouse of gossip

when we say: delicate, fluid, unreason, hysterical

brided, obey, the right to choose, the guilt

how violence is fed to us, micro aggressions

self defense classes, how you walk to your car

clutching your keys, the drugs in your drink,

pantied or not beneath skirt, asking for it,

girl friended in weapons, betrayal double bound

armed for the thinness, masked in display

I endorse the performance in the radical binary

the feminist politics of irony/ ironing/ commercials

of cleaning products/ magazine gloss of the neglected

photoshop seen & distilled, I endorse the make-up

empty spaced, the glazing in a postal hegemonic

patriarchal white supremacist gaze, I endorse cultural desire

& the critique, womanhating not solely the realm of men,

the rapeable body, I endorse its rage, beyond solace, beyond

getting over it, the exhaustion, the divorce not of love but necessity

the suicide of escape from the container

the excision of the dollness that is a temperate

line, the balance of a passive darkness, oh you know better

discourse of abuses, the frame beyond the film’s script

where the beatings and the coercions find her double fisted

in the ass, find her bounced off walls but no bruising on the face

for the close-up, what we talk about when we say porn, what we

talk about when we confuse a woman’s desire for any power, for any autonomy

for the nodding agreement to stake a spot in misogyny, because

misandry does not exist at any institutional level, so when you

pull up to the table of self-denigration, eat deep, smile sweet

I endorse that naked grin, I endorse the clip of the clit that the mother

hands down and says: now we are all one

what are we talking about when we say women 

poem:  copyright Megan Burns 

The Next Big Thing

the next big thing

Deborah Poe tagged me to take part in The Next Big Thing. 

What is the title of the book?

Sound and Basin 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry

*

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I would let the people of the Gulf play themselves. 

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

If we kill our waters, we all die. 

*

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

Three Years 

*

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

*

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

From HEWN

this is the starving cradle
babies carved down to skin
&
this
our death present
our new millenia

*

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

It will be published by Lavender Ink next month: http://www.lavenderink.org/content/

Tagged Writers for the next big thing: Geoff Munsterman, Kristin Sanders, Daniela Olszewska and Nathan Hauke