NOLA and Brooklyn Poets Collabs and Readings

Happy to have with us all week the amazing poet Tracey McTague, poet-mama, curator of all growing things at the Mother Ship, editor at Lungfull Magazine and one of the curators of the Zinc reading series. She joined us Thursday night at 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series to read from a collaboration done with NOLA poet (Bucktown representin') Brett Evans. The collaboration began as a  project for the Boston Poetry Festival but it continues to flourish under the right circumstances, and we were happy to hear the two performing it live for our enjoyment. One of the constraints (joys?) of long distance collaborations other than the time delay in mailing (emailing) words across space is the lack of opportunity to hear the voice of the person you are working with: does the fictional voice you respond to parallel the flesh voice of the poem, and how does the work change when that intimate space of sharing and creating is breached and brought out into the public sphere?

The dynamic duo of Brett Evans and Tracey McTague were reunited again in under 24 hours to participate in the new series Left of the Dial hosted by poet Ben Kopel and housed at Euclid Records in the Bywater. Standing room only among LPs and waves of nostalgia, Brett Evans delivered his usual punch of wit, cynicism, and lyrical delight scraping the detritus of verbal spoofs, twists, and tongue twisters with comedic timing and surprising juxtapositions. Take for instance a series of poems titled "Versus Verses" which is both exactly what it implies with technicolor Evans panache:

"drunk tank vs. Panzer/ weeping willow vs Sword of Damocles/ emergency milk vs. needed ade/ Imaginary Friend vs. Bride of Mother-in-Law handshake/ Cross the Rubicon vs. Jump the Shark..."

From that surrealist game play, Evans turns towards a complicated invented form that involves a sonnet crossed with a cinquain crossed with Evans particular mode of transmitting the image along a play of word exchanges. "XIII" ends (in the sonnet form): "like I told you once in Oahu/ Suzanne Vega turned 50 today carbon dating/ reveals how long I've loved you"

Poet Tracey McTague celebrated her birthday in style by stepping up to the mic to share her blend of words and syllabic gymnastics to her soon-to-become new fans as well as the old. McTague's poems are like waterfalls, you have to just sit back and let them fall over you and just as your poetry eyes are lured into a slightly relaxed squint, the rainbows appear. McTague eschews narrative for the lightning connections made on the cerebral & subconscious levels allowing syllables and synapses to guide the jumps and ducks around the swirl of her language. Poems are filled with concrete nouns stacked up to create tumbling blocks of images as she sweeps around the puns and delicately trips among the catches and consonants that sing us our familiar sounds like a nursery rhyme. Suddenly, Shelley is standing mid-watered in his sea changed grave, a levee is made for breaching, a cup is turned over and your future falls out: That is the poetry of Tracey McTague.

 If these rock stars should grace a poetry venue in a town near you or perhaps you should wake up in the  middle of the night with the sweet sound of WHAM wafting through your walls: know you're in good hands. This review might be slightly biased as I adore WHAM, but who doesn't?

(photo by Michael Dominici)

Also, it's Ezra Pound's B-day. 

From Canto LXXXI






But to have done instead of not doing This is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame this is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

Found this picture on CA Conrad's Philly Sound site, and it cracks me up. Brett Evans and Frank Sherlock reading at the 17 Poets! Reading Series at the Gold Mine Saloon for Ready-To-Eat-Individual (Lavender Ink 2008) book release. They both look like it's Sept. 2005 in New Orleans, and they will take you for your crayfish pasta MRE. I love how the MRE next to the book makes it look as though it's a special book release MRE. Special MRE poet food in there. I think we ate that MRE shortly after this picture was taken. I remember Frank taking one MRE over to the side bar so he could inspect its contents in the light.

Special New Orleans MRE's contain little tiny tabasco sauce bottles. mmmmmm, tastes like home. The bags are actually filled with some interesting components. I ate the potato sticks which were still quite crunchy. In the directions for using the instant warming bags that thermal heat the tea and meat products, there is a picture of how to place the bags against a rock for maximum heating potential. And they even provide a little mint, because who needs bad breath on top of having to survive by eating MRE's.








This is the first of the five books from Dancing Girl Press' Summer Chapbook sale that I am going to read. Very exciting to get five awesome looking chaps in the mail. I picked this one for the title but now I think I'm leaning more towards the image on the cover that looks like some sort of mind melting apparatus that is waiting to suck brains out.


Here is a quote from Nicole Brossard's Intimate Journal that I read last night:

"It is in the white space that anybody who writes, trembles, dies and is reborn."


And I had the pleasure of going to a 5-year old princess dress up party today. My daughter promptly put on a snow white dress but kept her moccassins on and then ate about 4 chocolate chip cookies, 5 chocolate muffins, a slice of cake and a scoop of ice cream over a 2 hour period. The mother of the littles hostess is an artist and had so many beautiful paintings and sketches all over her walls. The dad was a musician who I found in the kitchen presiding over a huge pot of red beans and trays of chicken with crunchy french bread slices soaking in an olive oil sauce. He was then promptly stolen away by a much younger woman who occupied his time the rest of the party. That would be the seven week old baby of local singer Anais St. John, who looked amazingly beautiful for having a newborn. And her daughter was a little doll. I forget both of mine were that tiny once.