In Stereo Press

Tim Z. Hernandez and Jason F. McDaniel at the East Harlem Cafe

Daniel — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:15:28 +0000

by: Daniel Dissinger

On June 9th, 2010, Tim Z. Hernandez read at the East Harlem Cafe along with fellow writer, and friend, Jason F. McDaniel. Closing out the last leg of his promotional tour for his new book, Breathing, In Dust, Tim Hernandez wowed an attentive audience on 104th street and Lexington Avenue.

This is Tim’s second book. In 2004, Tim’s first book, a collection of poems called Skin Tax, waspublished and won the American Book Award. Breathing, In Dust will be his first published full-length novel.

A master storyteller, Tim Hernandez mixes emotionally filled details with a poetic rhythm missing in most prose and contemporary poetry, which also comes out strongly in his live readings. Here is an excerpt from the introduction of his book entitled “What it means to say Catela”:

On the other side of town, Hmong women crouch in their gardens, flooding baby bok choy until the water slithers down and across the road. Meanwhile their sons and daughters mix it up with Chicano hip-hoppers who buy, sell, and trade car parts and rims that spin at a standstill. Somewhere, the pudgy stay-at-home moms are gossiping about Jesus’s sister, Ana, who lost her virginity at age thirteen in a grape field by the boys on her block, whispering abut how they laid her out on raisin paper and took turns– why, she’s got three kids now and no man wants her.

Beyond this, land, land, and more land, cultivated or just waiting to. A pug farm on the outskirts. A driveway made of mud and loose gravel. A house with a dim porch light, where a young boy thumbs over a three-dimensional globe. His soft fingers roll over the mountains of Appalachia, then south to Machu Picchu. He spins the ball on its axis and lands on Sweden. Hits the lights. Puts himself to bed. And listens for the distant clacking of the passing train singing, Catela, Catela, Catela, Catela. (Hernandez xiii).

Jason McDaniel, another great storyteller, opened the reading with his story “Walk Like a Man”, which was published by the online Zine Retort Magazine. The rawness of the dialogue, brought the narrative to newheights, and his performance of the piece was just as enjoyable as reading it on paper. A snapshot of emotionally driven redemption and righting of wrongs, “Walk Like a Man” is relatable to anyone familiar with the heaviness of a guilty concience:

The clock next to the bed said Vasso was a half hour late, but Kendell wasn’t in a hurry to leave anyhow. The rain had finally stopped. Kendell stood in the window looking at the wet street. He had the smell of Lydia all over him and wished it could last for days and days.
Vasso’s car pulled up in the parking lot under his window. He honked once and looked up at Kendell’s window.
Kendell nodded. “It’s time baby.”
Lydia opened her eyes into hazy slits. “You really gonna do this?”
“Come on baby. Vasso’s outside.”
“I want to go with you.”
“We’ve already been through that. I don’t want nothing coming down on you harder than it already has.”
She got up, wrapped the sheets around her waist and walked over to him. “I love you.”
“I know.”
She followed him to the door, dragging the sheets across the carpet. “I’ll write you. And send money, too.”
Kendell let himself imagine her actually writing him. Maybe this time she would. He said, “Yeah, baby. Write me about every little thing.”
She threw herself around him. He kissed her hard. It would have been easier just to not feel anything, but then it wouldn’t have been worth nothing. (McDaniel)

At the end of the reading, there were only two copies of Breathing, In Dust to be sold; I grabbed one up immediately, and started to read it on the 6 train back home.

Psychopomp

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:35:50 +0000

by: Seth McKelvey

Music by: Chelsea Rice

when you say that the most effective method of reducing the number of elderly people diagnosed with cancer is to stop diagnosing it altogether

Bacchus

back of us

back us

Bach

die on ice us

The dark approaches at an oddly quick rate as both the sun sets and we descend into the valley.

I tried to watch the traffic in the opposite direction and decide which cars were speeding.

Seth McKelvey recently graduated summa cum laude with Highest Honors with degrees in English and journalism from the University of Georgia. He completed his undergraduate honors thesis, The Skeleton Keyhole, on contemporary experimental poetry, poetics, and collaboration under the guidance of his mentor and friend, Andrew Zawacki. His work has appeared on WUOG 90.5fm and in Stillpoint.

Chelsea Rice recently graduated cum laude with degrees in English and English Education from the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in a self-published book of poetry entitled Fleet of Minds and Stillpoint Literary Magazine. She will begin her MA this fall at King’s College of London. A classical trained pianist, she hopes to continue collaboration with writers and musicians alike.

North Pole & Loose Thread

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:35:40 +0000

by: Daniel Hales and The Frost Heaves

Daniel Hales is a writer and musician living in Western Massachusetts. His poems and flash fictions have been published in Conduit, Bateau, Verse Daily, Shadowbox, and elsewhere. These tracks are off “Frost Heaves,” the latest album by Daniel hales, and the frost heaves. His home page is: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~djselah

House of Compassion, House of Memory, House of Change

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:35:08 +0000

by: Sarah Cooke

House of Compassion

a diamond in the flesh –

flash of light that

mingles with the sunrise or

set.

a hand on your back

when you cry.

the warmth of giving birth

when it lingers in the air

we all breathe it in

House of Memory

tender trinket torn

from its resting place

on her collar bone

but kept in a box

on the top shelf

of her medicine cabinet.

fawning filigree flare

but recalling violence

as she fingers it

one weekday afternoon,

sensing her knowledge

like sacred devastation.

House of Change

on your face

the scabs have turned

to scars

there is a horn

where your lips

used to be

and now you have

goggles for eyes

when you stand

at full height

before a crowd

you can’t see your toes

and the crown of your head

now reaches for the ceiling

Sarah Cooke is currently completing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Naropa University. She writes largely poetry. Her work has been published in journals such as the Black Mountain Review and Monkey Puzzle. Sarah is an avid runner and aspiring yogi.

WATING FOR THE FIRE TO GO OUT & SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE WOULD-BE CARTOGRAPHER

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:32:36 +0000

by: Harold Whit Williams

WAITING FOR THE FIRE TO GO OUT

Each day we give our words to wind.

Watch them disperse among the wood smoke.

Words like yes, no, maybe, ornithology,

And the Spanish word for owl, which is búho.

The owl I saw as a child is long dead

But that doesn’t stop me scanning treetops at dusk.

Tonight, our dying star sun lingers in the live oak

And grandfather’s rifle is a twelve-hour drive from here.

SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE WOULD-BE CARTOGRAPHER

Far from these coordinates

Where we sleep and eat, northeastward

Thru cotton field and pine thicket

To some forgotten corner of Alabama,

Where latitude and longitude lines

Fluctuate in shimmering summer heat-

I am a towheaded child

Pulling a red wagon rattling with fossils,

Or napping in tissue paper snowdrifts

Under a fake Christmas tree,

Or drawling a book report on Charlotte’s Web

To a classroom cramped with

Future drug addicts, military drones,

Thirty-year-old grandmothers. Or,

Not so far away, due south

Over Rio Grande scrub, grapefruit farms,

Almost to the edge of tropics

I am planted, a withered shrub of a man

Filling up my garage apartment

With empty tequila bottles,

Begging street corner migrant workers

For spare change and scraps of food,

Swearing to swaying palms that one day

I will sit down with pen and ink

And map out my very own flat earth.

Harold Whit Williams is a native Alabamian living in Austin, TX, working in library cataloging at UT. He played guitar for a decade in the critically-acclaimed power pop band Cotton Mather, but these days, he mostly writes poems and does studio work. Whit Williams’ home recording project is called KIBOSH.

His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Concho River Review, Zero Ducats, Bedouin Books Swap/Concessions, and is forthcoming in Oxford American and The Oklahoma Review.

[ ]

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:31:27 +0000

by: Brandon Arthur

it was beginning in the attic. air gulped. but we forgot and pushed me out. smoke pulled into the ashtray. months ended it lifting dirt into walls. sparrows squatted into burnt out bulbs so scabs would harden and there’d be growth. wind circled houses pulling minerals from pores. thunder stopped and there was something green. veins. you poured water in. it erased itself from you. geese blank in the sky. the flood fell out of it. a black raft above. mud was mud again.

bits from the nest. no mountains. months spun into brown air. no warning scent. cells in the juncture thickening. you standing in the door. names fell off. it dried. leaves stained like speech. the sockets going bad. my finger twitching. they changed the curtains first but there was no more tape.

or the basement. from one corner. wind under the foundation stomping outside to the hollow of the elbow. centipedes surface from cracks behind a box on the floor. it could not house it all. paint cracked from heat. it leaked. small distant mounds had no grass. jars emptied. beyond window and thorns sand in a tractor tire and even if the taste of dirt no longer stings teeth we can never say it.

the liquid though split could find itself. hands. lumps under snow. put this under eventual leaves. wait until the moth hatches. bury. lift fingers. it bubbles into grass that is ants coming up. gum webbing against the pull. reaching through stings. nudging between. then skipped & repetitive. bones hit you.

Raised in the flatland of central Illinois, Brandon Arthur moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1999 and graduated from Colorado University at Boulder. He then received an M.F.A. in the Writing and Poetics Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute. His first book of poetry, expired Rx, is available through Monkey Puzzle Press. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado.

Cooker Gets First Hit & Palm Ghost

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:40:30 +0000

by: Richard Schwass
Cooker Gets First Hit
Audio on the way

Put your fishnets on Billy I’ll sell the tv for a one-inch balloon

He’s so ugly but I’ll do him for a hit

Cooker gets first hit

The mark at the bar

your everyday flit

Cooker gets first hit

Yank down your green afghanistan pants

Insist to kiss the addled twit

Cooker gets first hit

Slip off streaked white briefs

Straddle the bowl from which we sip

Cooker gets first hit

It’s a different trip with the spoon and spear

More of a generous mutual exit

Here at free-base cooker gets first hit

Your meltless lack of butter grace

Soon the mix gives up its tricks

Cooker gets first hit

The cooker threads his batch of knits

jackets a torso that just won’t quit

Cooker gets first hit

Where I’d lunch, a millionaire

purchase silver, rarified air, enforce my pornographic writ

Cooker gets first hit

I could really speak to you, your need, your loss, you’re almost crying

Just give me a minute

Cooker gets first hit

Your special treasure slipped, misplaced, a craven aspect to your face

If I had a child I’d eat it

Cooker gets first hit

Tight demand, hunched open knees

Pipe-shaft blows the bedsheet grit

Cooker gets first hit

Again and again we burn our baby’s blistered lips

You know your score. You know your limit

Cooker gets first hit

Sink repetitive insane

Swallowing folly without chewing it

Cooker gets first hit

My titillating theory is up for crit

The fragrant ether our pores emit

Cooker gets first hit

Inhale another place to get it

There might be a glitch in the safety-clip

Cooker gets first hit

Why did I buy this fucking shit

The pyre of the lapsed is carefully lit

Cooker gets first hit

Human faggots in a bunch

make for a fire with stink enough to immolate the witch

Cooker gets first hit

My blood pump stretched, is atrophied

flesh of my heart on a plastic drip

Cooker gets first hit

Smudged photo raw soul’s

cytoplasmic limit

Cooker gets first hit

A regiment of habit we hunt camps for the kill

In the ovens, against a fence, remember it. Remember it

Cooker gets first hit

Joey your body conforms

awkward to a desperate strip

Cooker gets first hit

Effortless paraphernalia joins

master chefs, their viscera chipped

Cooker gets first hit

Before we drop each other off

divide a final split

Cooker gets first hit

Ancient alleyways await

the spit-stain on your face from my decrepit spirit

Cooker gets first hit

At the bottom of the bowl, too centrifugal to quit

Agony and debt’ll soon pay their little visit

Cooker gets first hit

One suck, commit to years of sleep

for another hit

Cooker gets first hit

Adhered to gray sheets

suspend in smoked formaldehyde, extract our strand of sticky net

Cooker gets first hit

In a dream a proffered tit squirts laughing down a funnel pit

An angry wound with a cruel wit

Pissed-on pages in an unread book

I’d go back now if I could cook ‘cause

Cooker gets first

Cooker gets first COOKER GETS FIRST

gets first hit

Cooker gets first hit

Palm Ghost

A hand is reaching out from the future scraped by his summit ridge

with a boy’s bloody mouth in its palm his forehead bloody in the eye

center struck by a stone

thrown by his brother at Waikiki Beach

The hand reaches back from the dark and for what

Everyday ghosts emerge from the sea below a rainbow leis around their necks

An irritated mother smokes in a little kitchen in Army-Navy Housing and

the unfair race is on a boy running and his brother on his bike

Tumbled troubled rolling in a surf wash safe baby at the beach

Sleepless seas because the wind screams softly like approaching sirens in the bottom of the

night footsteps run up to the blinded window

run away again furtive up the concrete flight

like the slaps of a dog’s feathered tail on the bed murky dawn when she wants to go out

Gelatinous monsters refresh themselves in corners to absent themselves

to deeper light

return home in filth persistent braver narrows in the house crevices

caught in bitten fingers

Closeted with her retinue closeted at his game powdered cheek rotting teeth insidious

grey symbols ritual of orange waters unseen art unmade

site of anthropology survival past dreaming the hand comes from elsewhere

the knuckle turns in solace arms fold defensive on a beautiful chest

death advances anyway fascinates resistance

conviction’s residue rears again turtles snap at biscuits proffered

in the palms of lovely two-faced vixens

Richard Schwass is a 2008 graduate of the Masters Program in Writing & Poetics at

The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Boulder.

From Newport, RI, he is making a final push to the opposite sea, damn The Great Divide.

The New Philadelphia Poets Come to Bowery Poetry Club

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:40:03 +0000

On January 16, 2010, The New Philadelphia Poets came to NYC to perform at Bowery Poetry Club. Performing as a group, The New Philadelphia Poets’ “reading” was filled with sharp wit that was only heightened by the theatrical presentation. It was a fresh, and much needed approach to the performance aspect of poetry. Below are a few photographs from this event, and visit their website for more information about The New Philadelphia Poets.

From the New Philadelphia Poets Website:

REDEMPTIVE STRIKE: RECKONING THE DECADE

At the beginning of the century, we found ourselves in a dark wood. The past ten years saw the collapse of the Twin Towers, the marriage of religious fundamentalism and global politics, and the rise of digital communities. With this in mind, The New Philadelphia Poets launch a redemptive strike on the past decade. Join us for a reconsideration of this yet unnamed era.

Featuring: Gregory Bem, Sarah Heady, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Angel Hogan, Matthew Landis, Carlos Soto Román, and Jamie Townsend.

The Romantics, The Beats, and the Human Experience

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:39:52 +0000

by: Sarah Cooke

At City Lights, poetic lineage is almost tangible. I certainly owe much of my evolution as a writer to the Beats. And on January 12, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael McClure, and Leslie Scalapino gave us a glimpse of the ways in which the lineage of the Romantic poets has shaped their work.

The gathering, called “An Evening of Romantic Poetry,” featured Rothenberg, McClure, and Scalapino reading works predominantly from Poems for the Millennium, co-edited by Rothenberg. There were readings of Shelley, Byron, and Keats, as well as the readers’ own work and various pieces by a number of writers whose work has been influenced by the Romantics. The event boasted a turnout of about 50 people, packed tightly into the bookstore’s second-level poetry room. And the readers were accompanied by the music of a busker playing Johnny Cash. When asked if the music distracted him, McClure responded, “I don’t give a f**k.” An authentic City Lights moment.

Rothenberg introduced the event by suggesting that there are a number of parallels between what has been happening in writing since the end of the 20^th Century, and what the Romantic poets were exploring. This concept fascinated me. The Romantics were at the forefront of social thought, to be sure. At a time when much of Western culture was reeling from the Enlightenment, the Romantics emphasized the value of emotion, intuition, and spirituality. Empirical thought was being touted as the path to progress, but the Romantics, while not denying the importance of positivism, strove to remind us that there is something about the nature of human existence that can’t be measured quantitatively. Something that goes beyond – or possibly precedes – rational though. The experience of the human soul in the present moment is at least as much about consciousness, emotion, and intuition as it is about reason.

Contemporary writers seem to be exploring many of the same issues. Existence is something that must be felt to be understood. It seems that poets today are experimenting with new ways to directly represent experience through language. Eleni Sikelianos’s Book of Jon, for example, enters into an understanding of a relationship through numerous methods. It utilizes prose, poetry, lists, and dialogue in an attempt to get at the reality of the relationship is explores. Sikelianos understands that experience is multidimensional and cannot be fully represented in only one mode.

Brenda Coultas’s A Handmade Museum, with its utilization of poetry, interviews, and other forms explores urban existence from many different overlapping angles. Again, there is a recognition that life cannot be simplified to what is rational or quantifiable.

Certainly, the Beats promoted this view of existence, as well. Clearly, the Romantics played an important role in furthering the belief that the human experience entails something intangible. The Beats took that notion a step further, and contemporary writers continue to push our understanding of poetry’s ability to represent experience more directly.

Gorbotron & Peru

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:39:42 +0000

by: Scott Alexander Jones

Surgery in the Attic is the musical project of Scott Alexander Jones, author of a collection of poems: “One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here” (Bedouin Books, 2009). He completed his MFA at The University of Montana, and was a writer in residence at The Montana Artists Refuge. He is co-founder of Zero Ducats, a literary journal comprised entirely of pilfered materials, and he is currently teaching himself the Tuvan art of throat-singing in Missoula, Montana surrounded by yellow & yellowish & yellowing leaves. www.myspace.com/surgeryintheattic