This Sat: Busting Sod w/Maureen Thorson at Pleasant Plains

FB INVITE HERE and lazily posted below. Barrelhouse continues to be a multi-headed DC literary monster. I’m happy to be part of that monster.

Saturday, May 21 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Location	Pleasant Plains Workshop 2608 Georgia Avenue NW
Created By	Barrelhouse, Kristina Bilonick, Anthony Dihle
More Info	Barrelhouse presents an intimate reading by two of our favorite DC poets, Maureen Thorson and Joe Hall, at the studio of two of our favorite DC artists, Anthony Dihle and Kristina Bilonick.Maureen Thorson is the author of Applies to Oranges (Ugly Duckling Press, 2011) and a number of chapbooks, including Mayport, which won the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship for 2006. Her poems can be found in many antho…logies and journals, including the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, Exquisite Corpse, Hotel Amerika, LIT, The Hat, and 6×6. Maureen is the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center. http://www.reenhead.com/ Joe Hall‘s first book of poems is Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean Press 2010). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, HTML Giant, Barrelhouse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere. With Wade Fletcher he co-organizes the DC area reading series Cheryl’s Gone. http://joehalljoehall.wordpress.com/ Anthony Dihle has screen printed concert posters for local and internationally known bands such as Greenland, Exit Clov, Elvis Costello and Jay-Z. In addition to making work, he has curated multiple gallery shows at local art spaces such as Civilian Art Projects and the Athaneum, featuring works of other masterful printer-designers. Dihle also creates hand printed greeting cards and t-shirts. http://www.firestudiodc.com/ Kristina Bilonick is a native Washingtonian who uses screen printing, found objects and other media to create art installations that are often interactive. She has shown her work at at local art spaces such as Transformer, Honfleur Gallery, and Civilian Art Projects. Kristina also has an ever-changing line of clothing, accessories and housewares. http://www.kristinabilonick.net/ Space is limited so please arrive early. That way, we get to hang out a little more, too.

This Thurs: Art Taylor, Lauren Bender, Jennifer Depalma, & LunaSol @ Cheryl’s Gone

Art is going to mystery your ass off.

FB invite here.

Cherylsgone.com – Future events, archive of past readings.

May 12, 2011 – 8pm
Cheryl’s Gone presents…

Art Taylor (fiction)
Lauren Bender (poetry)
…Jennifer DePalma (poetry)
& music from LunaSol (folk duo)

Lauren Bender lives and works in Baltimore, where she is 1/3 of Narrow House and the whole director of the Show&Tell Series at Minás.

Art Taylor’s short fiction has appeared in several national magazines, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and North American Review; online at Fiction Weekly, Prick of the Spindle, and SmokeLong Quarterly; and in various regional publications. His story “A Voice from the Past” was an honorable mention for the 2010 Best American Mystery Stories anthology. His story “Rearview Mirror” won the 2011 Derringer Award for Best Novelette. He regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for the Washington Post and contributes frequently to Mystery Scene, among other publications. For more information: www.arttaylorwriter.com.

Jenn DePalma lives and works in Washington DC. She is an active member of the now defunct D’Steele Society of Advanced Poetics. She is half of the art collaborative the YAY team.

LunaSol is a female folk-rock band born in the beautiful Bay Area of Northern California in 2006. After meeting in law school, Lara and Heidi began performing together at local coffee shops and events in Berkeley, CA. After finishing law school in 2007, the band briefly separated until Heidi and Lara joyfully reunited in Washington, D.C. in 2008. LunaSol has since given several performances at Dahlak and Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C., singing a mixture of folk-rock favorites and original songs by Lara Eilhardt. Listen online at http://www.myspace.com/lunasoldc.

@ Big Bear Cafe
1st and R NW
Washington, DC

Jason Labbe on First Books

Jason Labbe wrote a very generous review of Pigafetta that appears in the current Colorado Review.

The introduction gives a particularly lucid view of the first book landscape:

The past several years have brought us an abundance of style-conscious first poetry books consisting (primarily or completely) of poems connected either by subject or formal treatment–and a good number of these series, sequences, and serial poems are highly crafted and quite enjoyable. The surplus of poets competing for first book prizes perhaps precludes, to some degree, a collection of discrete poems where we witness a younger poet trying her hand at various approaches, even failing sometimes. As I recently heard a well established poet say, “we’re in the age of the project.”

Jason infers that this is a ” monotonous” situation. I could read a whole essay on this alone.  So how ’bout it? To what degree are gatekeeping first book contests (and what we perceive they want) inflecting how we write?

Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry Is Not a Project at the very least affirms the idea that there is pressure for younger poets to have a project and that this emphasis on project is fundamentally wrongheaded–in that we are coming to value the project, the intellectual scaffolding, as much as the poem itself.

Or does the idea that a first book should be 60 MS pages turn all grand project ideas into little stones? Can we neatly wrap up in 60 pages writing about

the untimely death of our X

the photographs of y who mediates on z

?

It does seem like a project (as generated for a first book contest) can be a kind of self-imposed life-saver for poets. In that it keeps them above the water and gives them something concrete to hold onto while also drawing a tight circle around them and what they believe is fair game for their poetry to do. So what is the alternative? Forget first book contests run by academic presses? Start to value those presses whose vision is a bit more expansive–that take risks? I think so.

Either way, thanks to Jason. Check out his other review on Kate Greenstreet’s case sensitive and the others linked to on his blog. They’re worth your time.