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.

Introduction: Kevin Goodan

Who will angel what remains? For what is the earth but a thing to make time visible? Sparse birds, bright barns, Kevin Goodan’s poems try to decide what is noun from verb, are a winter storm’s augery. To elm & silence, to ripe the fruit, to rot the fruit, to know death is a place and each thing lives there. Listen to Adam singing in the weeds, he writes, how will I master the green language, the arrival of something unseen. Sing nones, sing vespers, satellites shimmer in abeyance to stars. Pigeon blood drying on the shit spreader, soil recalibrates simple desire or the freezer lambs calling to the unchosen. To coax dead flies from slumber, to choose the bird, to voice the bird: is brightening, miasma. Give me thorns and I will praise, and will not live to winter, which is a language I know. That my intelligence belongs to field, puddles at the base of thistle, every platelet hungry for the earth. Kevin Goodan’s poems are some vireos working toward rapture, a kingbird in the mind. The wicked shall be known as preachers of beauty, of fields, poplar that are verbs. O verb of verbs, shape me, bless me, realizing I have become what it was I wanted to be. The fallowing, feraling. Kevin Goodan.

Photographs -- June 11th, 2009

Oni Buchanan

Kevin Goodan

Jessica Flynn

Oni Buchanan, Kevin Goodan and Jessica Flynn

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Oni Buchanan, Kevin Goodan, and Jessica Flynn

Thursday, June 11th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

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

Please join us for the next evening of Chin Music, the Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series. On June 11th, we are excited to feature three excellent poets: Oni Buchanan, Kevin Goodan, and Jessica Flynn. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Sarah Manguso, Dan Albergotti, Paige Starzinger, Blue Chevigny, 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 WRITERS

Oni Buchanan is the author of SPRING, selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series, and published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2008. Her first poetry book, WHAT ANIMAL, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. Oni is also a concert pianist, has released three solo piano CDs, and actively performs across the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Boston, where she maintains a private piano teaching studio.

Kevin Goodan’s second collection of poems, WINTER TENOR, was released this spring by Alice James Books. His first book, IN THE GHOST-HOUSE ACQUAINTED, was published by Alice James in 2004, and received the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for 2005. He was raised in Montana, fought forest fires for many years, and he attended the University of Montana, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He currently lives on a small farm in western Massachusetts.

Jessica Flynn's poems have appeared in Sonora Review and Phoebe. She currently works as a program coordinator at the NYU Creative Writing Program.

Introduction: Lytton Smith

But there’s nothing magical about the magical: leave your instruments at the entrance. Lytton Smith’s poems fathom tule fog, minehaul and birdfright, a natural world turned human agent between weather and earthlight. My physicians say the spirits of animals flow within our hollow nerves, he writes, a mutiny in the lungs of children sealbark, wolfhowl. How you were chosen for laying on hands: belief would be an orchard, reliquary of seeds. You’re within the fantastical tent, the rubber man’s cabinet of exotic moths, the hollow hairs of winter animals. If only you had the eyes for it, this itinerance, this merry going round. At edge of the furze I’ve hidden a monster theory: a fear of wheatfields, of groundbeetles, a confusion of daughters, a liminality of, an aloneness of, a hic est monstrum of [monsters]. On unsteady feet, Lytton Smith’s poems rescue flotsam of dismantled carousels, the hot air of zeppelins, a forest washed ashore one winter. He maps the taut nerves, the bright coax, of the beyond-limits, the harnessed bird’s-eye view, hindsight more clearly charted, the slant scripts, as she asked him: comma, anvil, torn. Lytton Smith.