7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
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Andrew Joron
REVERSING RIVER
"The system is blinking red." That's what the man said.
Then what is stopping us? To arms, already!
Does the Revolution wait in words? Where do we find those (s)words?
Did the door dilate like an eye? Then what is located by the X of want, the Y of why?
I would argue that language allows the animal to jump out of its skin.
I would argue that information wants to be communist.
Dear maker, thy form = swarm.
* * *
But isn't the in-drawn, life-giving breath a silencing? And the expelled breath,
necessary to voice, a rehearsal of the last breath?
Are we exiled into sound? No, call back the animal.
The shock of being human, as it passes through the body, is the shock of language.
Laura Moriarty
from Personal Volcano
Open
at the top
self-constructed of detritus
hardened into a temporary
tower or pyramidal entity with
communication options unlike speech though
articulate enough in their expression of facts
of life potentially deadly to the alive thing and to
the sense of stability the living like to ascribe to the ground
we walk on or the mountains as solid as mountains we look up TO
Jared Stanley
from Abundance
...Some poems are
Only instructions, still points, dimes,
Muddy droplets: how to live, what to do.
“Think like a jackrabbit, let them think
You’re extinct; Change the habitat, we
Creatures call it hiding;” or “we’ll all
Have tender feet in the new world.” Do
These console? At first they’re sensitive,
Then the feet grow calloused, hard.
Equanimity is a kind of
Retreat, an adaptation. But isn’t
Poetry as much the fertile
Making of a new sense of how we
Might hide in a copse of familiar
Invaders as it is a resistant
Place for imagining new ways of
Crying out alongside phenomena
Like dreamy bioengineering
Which is bullshit until it saves your life?
Andrew Joron is the author of The Absolute Letter, a collection of poems published by Flood Editions (2017). Joron’s previous poetry collections include Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010), The Removes (Hard Press, 1999), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. From the German, he has translated the Literary Essays of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Perpetual Motion Machine by the proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart (Wakefield Press, 2011). As a musician, Joron plays the theremin in various experimental and free-jazz ensembles. Joron teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University
Laura Moriarty’s recent books are Verne & Lemurian Objects from Mindmade (just out), The Fugitive Notebook(Couch Press, 2014), Who That Divines (Nightboat Books, 2014), A Tonalist (Nightboat Books, 2010), A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007 (Omnidawn, 2007) and the novel Ultravioleta (Atelos, 2006). Awards include Poetry Center Book Award, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant. She is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution and lives in Richmond.
Jared Stanley is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Ears (Nightboat 2017). Recent work has appeared in Triple Canopy, Poets.org, and in the Handmande/Homemade Book Arts Exhibition. He lives in Reno, Nevada.
False starts is curated by Steven Seidenberg (falsestartsreadingseries@gmail.com)