Introduction: John Casteen

Who is the linchpin, the clevis, the keystone, the hinge? The cartographers convinced us of nothing. A dictionary of flowers is a register we populate, we punctuate. Like declensions of dead-language verbs, John Casteen’s poems wax, fill, new, sugartrace and say thus we have its measure: a wrench for a valve on a mothballed sub, smoke in pears, tinnitus, tin pines, tin oaks. Away from where things smell like us, I wanted to be a simple machine, he writes, like Miro, the old guys worked like Miro. This is not that poem like dowsing is, is the loam smell, is a valve without a governor. We’re all afternoon with augurs, the sodium traces drought leaves, wishing I was drunk and waiting. The finally flowering weeds. The smell of ether in the carb. Four winesaps and blood blossom. As I write, the range of variables narrows. It was crazing making. To the landfill for a clean start, then—we knew the bitch payback was. Whose insurgences are whose street riots. John Casteen can map how the annealing tool makes the colors of flowers in his eyes. The animals are gone. And barns like churches. And phloem, vocabularies that char, nomenclatures that say: I don’t want to die because I don’t and the spare room has the sphagnum smell. But it might just be those cool fall nights. John Casteen.

Randall Mann, John Casteen, and Will Dowd

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Randall Mann, John Casteen, and Will Dowd

Thursday, September 17th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for opening night of Chin Music’s Autumn/Winter 2009 season. On September 17th, we are excited to feature three fine poets: Randall Mann, John Casteen, and Will Dowd.

FEATURED WRITERS

Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN (Zoo/Orchises, 2004), and co-author of the textbook WRITING POEMS (Pearson Longman, 2007). He lives in San Francisco.

John Casteen was self-employed as a designer and builder of custom furniture for ten years after graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at The University of Virginia and at Sweet Briar College. He has contributed poems to The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other literary magazines; he has also written for Slate.com and Virginia Quarterly Review, where he serves on the editorial staff. His book, FREE UNION, appeared this spring from the University of Georgia Press. He lives outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and their two young children.

Will Dowd's work appeared recently in 32 Poems, The Comstock Review, and Post Road Magazine. He received a B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. from MIT. In 2007, he was named a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. He is currently pursuing an MFA at New York University.

Photographs -- June 18th, 2009

Sarah Manguso

Dan Albergotti

Blue Chevigny

Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny

Thursday, June 18th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for the season finale of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On June 18th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, and Blue Chevigny. Writers on-deck for the autumn season include Roddy Lumsden, John Casteen, Paige Starzinger, Major Jackson, and David Baker.

Please note our earlier reading time of 7:00PM.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED POETS

Sarah Manguso is the author of the memoir THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY, recently released in paperback by FSG. It was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her other books include the story collection HARD TO ADMIT AND HARDER TO ESCAPE (2007), included in McSweeney's 145 Stories in a Small Box, and the poetry collections SISTE VIATOR (2006) and THE CAPTAIN LANDS IN PARADISE (2002), which was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Village Voice. In 2008 she received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born and raised near Boston, she lives in Brooklyn.

Dan Albergotti’s collection of poems, THE BOATLOADS, was selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and published in April 2008. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. His chapbook, CHARON’S MANIFEST, won the 2005 Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Chapbook Competition. Former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, he currently edits the online journal Waccamaw (www.waccamawjournal.com) and teaches creative writing and literature courses at Coastal Carolina University.

Blue Chevigny is a native New Yorker who writes a lot of her poems on long subway commutes. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose and Salamander Jacket. She is also a social worker and radio producer for public radio, and lives in Brooklyn.