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 . . .

Poetry Buffet Reading: Joel Dailey, Brett Evans, and Murray Shugars

Here's a poem from Joel Dailey who read yesterday at the Poetry Buffet held every first Saturday of the month at the Latter Library. Joel Dailey publishes the infamous Fell Swoop Journal in old school pseudo-mimeograph style. He has a new chapbook Surprised by French Fries, (Ugly Duckling Presse) that gets a review in the October issue of Entrepot. When Joel is not trying to spread internet viruses in order to shut down social networks, he can be found  giving a poetry reading every five years before bursting into flames. As I can't even find a picture of Joel Dailey on the internetz, I'm not really sure he exists. His daughter has been babysitting our 3 kids for about 8 years now, so I forgive him all proclivities.








Joining Mr. Dailey was poet Brett Evans who let me run off with a copy of his Pisa Can 74 (Fell Swoop, #109). Basically, as Evans describes, it's a shucking away of the interior guts of the Pisan Cantos (by Pound, do I need to say that?) as one would a mirliton in order to stuff it with delicious seafoody centers. In this case, the seafood stuffing is a mix of New Orleans history, tragedy, obscure references a la Poundian influence and a bit of raunchy flair as in the opening line:
"symbols and tits/ enormous tragedy of the wild country dream/ punc'd by Milano heels/ heels to the ceiling/ where in history's hide and seek/ will you find it?"

I love the dovetailing of the New Orleans imagery:

"lunch of: po-boy paper spread
 on flipped lid  
 
                                   Of the pick-up truck
                     tailgating with platonic oysters
                       soldiers taking their clothes off
                            Quick n Dirty boat building content"

Covers done by the amazing collagist, Tracey McTague. Let's hope this series continues, and I'd like to see the various New Orleans dialects and spoken languages creep in about the edges as well. Evans is also hard at work on a never ending project about how much he loves this American Life.

You can catch both Brett Evans and Tracey McTague reading a new collaboration they wrote this summer at 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series, October 27th along with features Lewis Warsh and Marilyn Kallet.



(Brett reading at 17 Poets, 2004)


Rounding out the Poetry Buffet offering yesterday, Vicksburg poet Murray Shugars reading from his book, Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (Dos Madres Press). He will be reading at the Maple Leaf today. Host of the Poetry Buffet,  Gina Ferrara is a big fan of Shugars' collection and brought him to New Orleans to share his work with us. Be sure to check out November's Poetry Buffet on the first Saturday, Nov. 5th with special guest host Jonathan Kline.

Gina Ferrara will be over at the Healing Center signing books as part of the annual Ladyfest New Orleans along with poets Lee Meitzen Grue and Valentine Pierce at the new Maple Street Bookstore Branch in the Healing Center 11-2pm.