MUSELETTER #20
2/26/2000
Greetings!
Poetry news is coming to you from every direction this week:
- SOUTH, the first Museletter report from our new Florida correspondent, Leonardo Della Rocca
- NORTH, a snowy Museletter update from Ian Ferrier in Montreal
- EAST, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz reports from New England on poetry at the Winter X Games
- WEST, Gary Glazner contributes a feature story on Poetry & Art in Santa Fe
Margy Snyder & Bob Holman
Your About.com Poetry Guides
POETRY IS EVERYWHERE AT ABOUT.COM
About.com's guide to Women Writers, Colleen Devlin, has compiled pages of resources on some of the best female poets from ancient times to the present. Check these out:
MIAMI/FLORIDA
Greetings from Florida. Poetry is bursting from the coconuts down here, so I'll just jump in.
Some Poetry Organizations
The Society of Poets formerly known as the South Florida Poetry Institute has monthly readings and workshops all over Broward County. It also conducts a bilingual (not that there's anything wrong with that) reading in Dade County. For info about that email Michael Earle Carlton.
The Poets of the Palm Beaches also has readings and workshops. Email John Palozzi.
Poets of Sunrise in Broward has a monthly reading and workshop, too. For info, email Zelda Jacobs.
The Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation (HKPF) has offered poetry readings by the likes of Anthony Hecht, Dana Gioia, Carolyne Kizer, Yehuda Amichai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Duhamel, Janet Holmes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nick Carbo, Carolyne Wright and more. We also support local poets. The Wild Horse Poetry Series is the only reading in South Florida that pays an honorarium ($50) to local poets to read. Email your correspondent for more on this venue.
Ongoing Stuff
Books & Books on Aragon Avenue in Coral Gables is home to The Last Friday of the Month Poetry Reading at 7:30 pm hosted by Miami poet, lawyer & Cultural Newsletter editor, Jonathan Rose. B&B was the gathering place for South Florida's best poets in the 80s. The store is owned by Mitchell Kaplan, founder of the Miami International Book Fair. Kaplan was featured in an article in last month's issue of Poets & Writers. Everybody -- from Merwin to Olds -- has read at this November book fair. (We enjoyed Richard Howard, poet and editor of Paris Review and Western Humanities, Denise Duhamel, Miami poet Mia Leonin, Sharon Olds, Diane DiPrima and others at the last one.)
Lee Kline of Miami Dade Community College conducts Butterfly Lightning, a reading by one poet and one fiction writer at Tobacco Road, a blues saloon just outside downtown Miami.
Richard Ryal conducts what has been dubbed the “Best Open Mic in Broward County” by XS Magazine (now City Link) at 7:30 pm every second Friday of the month at Borders in Coral Springs. Email him at richryal@mindspring.com.
Shamele Jenkins runs Lip, Tongue & Ear Productions which features Poetry Jam, an in-your-face performance by Miami poets on the 4th Tuesday of every month at Borders, 3390 Mary St., Coconut Grove. She has a newsletter available by email.
Mind Elevation is an open mic spoken word event at 8 pm every Thursday at SUBCULTURE cafe, 180 NW 62nd Street, Miami, 305-758-2776. $5.
Artemis Performance Network has taken over SPACE 72, 742 SW 16th Street, Miami, where ongoing poetry readings and performance shoves its lovely juice in the ears of listeners. Call 305-643-6611.
SOL Gallery, 3137 Commodore Plaza, Miami, hosts Literary Tertulia at 8 pm on the third Saturday of every month, hosted by Jaime Camacho. Call 305-774-7130.
Leonardo DellaRocca conducts a contemporary poetry discussion group every third Thursday of the month at Borders in Coral Springs. We typically have themes like “Poems about fire,” etc. Email me for info.
Who's Who at the Universities
University of Miami (UM) is home to John Balaban, author of nine books of poetry (Locusts at the Edge of Summer was nominated for a National Book Award last summer), fiction, translation, and nonfiction. After Our War won the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets and also a nomination for the National Book Award. Balaban is probably most noted for his poetry stemming from his time spent in Vietnam where he recorded folk stories, songs and poems. Readers may have read about him in last month's issue of Poets & Writers. He leaves for North Carolina in June.
Maxine Kumin is a frequent visiting professor at UM. She is getting along nicely after an accident back at her farm in New Hampshire where a wagon she was in overturned. Kumin has a zillion books of poetry out, and everyone seems to know her poem, “The Swimmer.”
UM publishes Mangrove, a great literary journal whose last issue included then visiting poet-in-residence Carolyne Wright, Denise Duhamel and well, shucks, me.
Florida International University is where Campbell McGrath teaches. McGrath has won almost all the Big Ones -- the Kingsley Tufts Award for $50,000, a Guggenheim and last summer, the McArthur Foundation's so-called “Genius” Award -- to the tune of $280,000 over five years. Needless to say, “Wonder Boy” (as Dorianne Laux called him) is working only one day per week. (Yeah, I could do that.) He is taking a caravan of poets to Dublin in June for workshops, music, and dance. Last year Seamus Heaney read and Bob Dylan and Van Morrison provided the music.
FIU is also home to Gulfstream Magazine, one of the best journals in the South. The editor is best-selling fiction writer Lynne Barrett.
Moving north is Florida Atlantic University where Susan Mitchell teaches when she's not at home in Vermont. Mitchell's book Rapture was nominated for a National Book Award. She was the first poet to receive the Kingsley Tufts Award. She tends to keep to herself and rarely makes local events. Mitchell will read Wednesday, February 23 at Liberties books in Boca Raton from her new book, Erotikon.
FAU has had a series of great poets come through, including just recently, Reginald Gibbons. In the past I've caught Mark Doty, Charles Bernstein, Robert Pinsky, Stanley Kunick and James Merrill there.
Miami Dade Community College (MDCC) is host to the Miami International Bookfair each November. It continues to sponsor poetry readings throughout the year.
Broward Community College (BCC) offers a plethora of poetry readings throughout the year. Peter Meinke is a frequent visitor. Meinke lives on the west coast of Florida, near Tampa.
Major Events: January - April
JANUARY 2000:
Yusef Komunyakaa read at FIU (co-hosted by HKPF) and was among the best readings I've ever attended. (I've been attending them for 20 years so that's saying something, I think.)
Marvin Bell read at BCC south Campus from his Book of the Dead Man poems. I confessed to his wife afterward that I really never cared for Bell, but had been converted. He was astonishing! Bell is a real down-to-earth kind of man, originally from Long Island (where I'm from).
FEBRUARY:
Miami Poet Diane Thiel read at Butterfly Lightning on the 7th. Thiel can be found in The Best American Poetry 1999 series edited by David Lehman (who read at FIU in December). Thiel is a rising star, so keep your eyes peeled to the literary zines. Her first book of poetry comes out in the fall.
Lourdes Simon is a Latin-tinged poet and singer, who combines old cabaret Cuban songs with her own poetry. She's making a big splash down here in the lower latitudes. She read at Butterfly Lightning on the 21st.
Poet, playwright & actor John Arndt performed Gleaning Laughter. . . Gleaning Light poems, stories & narration about how he came to be in a wheelchair. The event took place at Flamingo Park Studios in West Palm Beach on February 11th. Arndt was selected for inclusion in Pinsky's anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, the culmination of his Favorite Poem Project. Arndt is co-founder of the Beach Road Poetry Workshop in Palm Beach County.
On Saturday, February 12, I attended Poems from the Black Box, a two-woman show featuring Stacie M. Kiner (the other Beach Road Poetry Workshop cofounder) and Josephine Cannon Posti, at the Milagro Center, here in Delray Beach. Kiner is always great, and for the first time I heard Posti, a relative new-comer to the poetry scene down here. The poems about her son and living in Pittsburgh where she last lived were great.
Diane Thiel read at HKPF's Wild Horse Poetry Series February 19. The reading takes place in February, May and August at Warehaus 57, 1904B Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Local poets are paid $50 to read and we pay W57 $50 to put out a spread -- chocolate covered strawberries, asparagus & other veggies, caviar (seriously!) and more.
Former Puerto Rican and Florida Poet and now Georgia Poet, Judith Ortiz Cofer, will read her Latin-sweetened poetry at 8 pm on Tuesday, February 23 at Broward Community College, in Pembroke Pines. Cofer was poetry editor of the legendary and now long defunct Florida Arts Gazette.
Miami Poet Jay Snodgrass will perform his “Godzilla Poems” and more at Lee Kline's poetry and fiction series, Butterfly Lightning at 8 pm, Monday (BL is always on a Monday night), February 28.
MARCH:
The weekend of March 3-5 will bring the South Florida Writer's Conference 2000 (isn't everything “2000” this year?). John Balaban and Fred D'Aguiar will lecture and read. D'Aguiar took Balaban's place at UM as Creative Writing Director or whatever he is (Balaban is on hiatus & I'm not in the System, so I don't know academic titles). D'Aguiar has four collections of poetry, two novels, a play and two poem-documentaries made for BBC TV.
Leonardo DellaRocca will read at Warehaus 57 on Saturday, March 11 at the request of friends. (Not a self-serving HKPF event, I promise.)
At 2 pm on Sunday, March 12, local poet Dorothy Held, will read in HKPF's The Electric Chair, a reading in which a poet is chosen to read to a hand-picked, invitational-only audience. The audience is encouraged to raise hands and ask questions, between the poems. This has worked for 11 years. It opens a great dialogue between poet and listeners. The poet has three hours to read, answer questions and provide background info, etc. It takes place at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, 2855 Coral Springs Drive, Coral Springs. $3.
Carolyne Wright, who has about 10 books of poetry out, is returning to South Florida (she was recently poet-in-residence at UM last summer). Poet Dr. Barbra Nightingale (Songs in the Key of L) of BCC has arranged for Wright to read at BCC's south Campus in Pembroke Pines at 8 pm on Tuesday, March 14. Wright is currently poet-in-residence in Oklahoma working with/for Ai. [Gossip: According to Denise Duhamel, Wright is “a wild woman on the dance floor.” Also, she was once a “roommate” of Yusef Komunyakaa. And according to unnamed sources in Miami, Wright puts ads in Poets & Writers to find a poet-in-residence (so-to-speak) -- for herself.]
Ricardo Pau Llosa, Cuban exile, poet, art historian and author of several books of poetry (Cuba, Bread of the Imagined, Sorting Mediphors -- winner of the Anhinga Prize, and Vereda Tropical) will read at BCC south campus, Pembroke Pines at 8 pm on Thursday, March 16. It is the first joint venture between BCC and HKPF. Pau Llosa teaches at MDCC Kendall campus, Miami, and loves his cigars.
Miami poet Peter Schmidt will read at Butterfly Lightning at 8 pm on Monday, March 20.
On March 27, 1996, the Beat Café made its debut. Since then, it has been a yearly tradition during Arts & Letters Days. Bring your poetry to read during open mike sessions, or just sit and listen as published writers read their original work and renowned musicians perform. Free coffee and munchies. Beat Café in located in room K-413 at 11011 SW 104 street, Miami. Email Marta Magellan.
APRIL:
In a joint venture with The Writer's Voice (a YMCA program), HKPF will host Enid Shomer for a reading and workshop on Saturday, April 1. Workshop at 2 pm, reading at 7:30 pm at ArtServe, Fort Lauderdale Library, 1350 E. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. The workshop costs $15 for HKPF members, $50 for nonmembers. Shomer's work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Paris Review, New Criterion, and she is the author of three books of poetry (Stalking the Florida Panther, This Close to the Earth, and Black Drum). She spends spring semester as Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.
Links
- Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination and other Newly Discovered Florida Poets. Some of Florida's best poets are here.
- Florida's best press: Anhinga Press (located in Tallahassee)
MONTREAL/CANADA
Exploding Head Man Finally Blows!
Well, last weekend my head finally did blow. The occasion was a night when Planete Rebelle Press, Wired on Words, CKUT radio, CBC radio and YAWP! productions all combined to bring the Exploding Head Man CD book launch to a peak crescendo around 11 pm EST. BOOM!!!!!
This has been an amazing last month, and I say so partly because I've been buried in it until just this second. The winter here usually hits around November, but this year it waited till the 15th of January before just socking us with cold, wind, snow, more wind and more snow. And the city was buried in the depths of a series of storms that turned the whole world white. In the days before the Exploding Head show storm after storm poured through, and the sidewalks turned into footpaths where one person could walk, one foot in front of another.
At night as I sat and typed I could hear the snowplows, dump-trucks, graders, sidewalk tractors and snowblowers all rumbling, beeping into reverse, roaring forward again: an army moving troops up to the border between ourselves and the cold universe.
Legba
In the midst of all this we got three of the best shows we've ever had here. In late January, Alex Boutros and Kaarla Sundstrom put together one of the best of their Legba shows on record. Legba has always been a poetry/music/theatre cabaret, and this time it came with a standout performance from Debby Young. Her powerful monologue combined snatches of history and song and wove a web between her and Billie Holiday that will not come apart soon. Motion from Toronto was in to do a set, as was Montreal's Manchild, both of whom work with a hip-hop beat rumbling beneath their words.
The show took place at the Lion d'or (The Golden Lion), a large showbar in the city's Centre sud region. This is a big venue, and they filled it with a good 300 people coming in from the cold to hear.
Writer Wayde Compton was here all the way from Vancouver reading “Legba Landed” and promoting his new book from Arsenal Pulp Press: 49th Parallel Psalm. There was theatre, dance, music, even a low-priced and delicious haute cuisine buffet lining one side of the salle.
A surprise guest was Roger Bonaire-Agard, the '99 individual slam champ. In his days in Montreal he appeared both at Legba and at Alexis O'Hara's Shaker Slam two days later at Blizzarts. Both shows were packed, and Agard's work generated a lot of interest. He lets the language of his pieces perform its own magic, with a relaxed delivery that lets images appear and happen in the mind of his audience.
Exploding Head Show
That weekend brought the scene to a new level here, I thought, and when it came time to do the Exploding Head launch, it became important for us to keep the audience just as happy as they'd been at Legba. The snow started to fall, and we got some good advance press, and by the time the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had installed all their mikes and wires and 8-tracks and digital audiotapes, the Jailhouse Rock Café was packed with people for this show as well.
Starting the evening was Fortner Anderson, whose profound sometimes I think CD was released last June. He set the tone with a howling knock-down drag-out version of his poem “The Birds.” Then came Catherine Kidd, who is truly some kind of language genius, taking you on a tour of how thought falls into words and then words carve new thought, and hang on as you never know where her voyages will go. Her sound design comes from jack beets, a US-born DJ composer whose soundtracks have become the world in which her performance works live. The set ended with Jake Brown cracking everyone up with his “Secret History of Canada.”
In the 2nd set I got to lead off with the new Exploding Head Band, which now includes 19 year old Michigan drumming sensation Will Glass. All of the musicians in this band are breaking out of their shoes. Sam Shalabi's work on the Molasses CD is selling at a clip in Europe, and his new solo CD will be launched at Vaudeville Automatique this weekend. In the meantime his guitar and oud are still wailing with the poets, and at the end of one poem he went into a break that just kept on coming. His musical roots are a rare mixture of free jazz, Middle Eastern trance and Steve Tibbetts-style crank up the feedback distortion. Acoustic bass player Andre Asselin came with the bow this time, and spent most of the set in the high harmonics, adding touches of colour wherever he felt they would fit.
The set was the most fun of any I've done, and the last two performers were great as well. One of the real knockouts of the evening was Alexis O'Hara (with Rob Stephens on music), whose whole show seems to have improved exponentially in the last year. Using a headset mike and a portable sampler, she did both poetry and improv theatre. One monologue starred a drugged-out half-recovering substance abuser explaining to the audience how her whole life will be coming together shortly. And I swear the character she created lived and breathed in that room. Alexis' voice control and her timing were just perfect. I'm not sure where she is going to take all this, but at the moment it is moving towards a mix of acting, music and spoken word, and it has been a lot of fun watching how she gets there.
The evening ended with Corey Frost, or at least one of his identities. Rail-thin from wrestling with a novel, he explained how his new talk show would do away with barriers, as he would perform the roles of both host, guest, cameraperson and audience by himself. The rest of us supplied the laugh track and thus ended the night.
Soirée des Contes
But wait, there's more! Two days later I got my first introduction to a show that's been going on for months in the French language. This spoken word event is Storytellers' night, the Soiree des Contes at the Sergent Recruteur micro-brewery. The show starts filling up at 6 pm for a capacity crowd start at 7:30. Master of ceremonies is Jean-Marc Massie, an amazing actor turned improv storyteller and pop music star who can regale an audience forever if necessary. Joining him on the bill were Andre Lemelin and a band called Zero de conduite, and five other performers. And it's all free!
In Closing: Links
Web surfers can check out Montreal's new Speakeasy cyber performance poetry café. Speakeasy is the work of Taien Ng Chan, Patti Sonntag and John Kerkhoven, and has made a huge difference to the Wired on Words site.
And another amazing site: the Museum of American Poetics. I was surfing one night and stopped here to find some of the most intriguing multimedia work about poets that I've hit ever. From Ezra Pound to Wallace Stevens, Gary Snyder, Kathy Acker and the Beats, this site is a perceptive, layered and loving homage to the people who have brought poetry to where it is, and the words they used to do it.
Finally, Realaudio surfers can catch a radio documentary on the Exploding Head Show at CBC (Canada's PBS), 5 pm EST on March 4th. You'll need the Realaudio 7 player to get a good signal.
Sayonara, and see you in six weeks when the rest of the pieces land.
