Introduction: Roddy Lumsden

Sulphur, globster, stinkhorn, horse & brie: on our first night together, I held off wolves. Since you ask, lass, if you're to join me in a little sinning, we have missed the thaw by days. Lindworm, Tatzelwurm and yeti, Roddy Lumsden's poems stroke your bible head, make your madness better. In this ugly pieta, he writes, I splashed on Gio, creased my 615s & the celtic serpent tattoo twists all over the pale force of her body. It's difficult with both of us seeing people, bracing to pull hot wax strips from your calves. You who thrived where the horse trod until, sleepless without you, I whispered this. These beer tins, deer scat, thrawn branks, and her well-thumbed copy of The Joy of Sex. While their mother is out on rooftops, mapping the stars, they must, since we must, have the sound of rain, of the silent film of me. Faint heart, fair maid, and all that jazz. Scallions scowled in a jelly pan. The long cosh of a thaw? An advancing swarm? I'd mope but I could live with that, the malt musk of Laphroaig about her mouth. These dog-watch dalliances, these matinees, Roddy Lumsden's poems record rain at night, biscuits crushed in paper pokes at Xmas, cryptozoologies. Or else I imagine Judas, a keek of Rauschenberg's stuffed goat, Mid 1990s, Scotland, dead of winter. When my ex-wife found magnetic north in my sock drawer, you poured a pale sky down. Because even minker's bairns have angelwings. Roddy Lumsden.

Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Farnoosh Fathi

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Farnoosh Fathi

Thursday, October 29th, 2009 @ 7:00 PM

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

http://chinmusicpoetry.blogspot.com

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On October 29th, we are thrilled to feature three excellent poets: Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Farnoosh Fathi. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Monica de la Torre, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ian Douglas, Aaron Fagan, Aracelis Girmay, and Stuart Greenhouse.

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

Roddy Lumsden’s poetry collections include YEAH, YEAH, YEAH (Bloodaxe, 1997), RODDY LUMSDEN IS DEAD (Wrecking Ball Press, 2001), MISCHIEF NIGHT: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe, 2004), and THIRD WISH WASTED (Bloodaxe, 2009). Lumsden has worked as a freelance writer, editor, teacher, and writer of puzzles and quizzes for newspapers. He also composed a poem, “Bloom,” on the set of “Flowers for Kate”—a photo shoot of the model Kate Moss for V magazine. He was born in St. Andrews, Scotland, and lives in London.

Jynne Dilling Martin's poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Review and elsewhere. In March, she was one of four winners of the 92nd Street Y "Discovery" Poetry Contest, which since 1951 has recognized the achievements of poets who have not yet published a first book. She lives in Brooklyn.

Farnoosh Fathi recently received a Fulbright Fellowship to travel to Brazil and write poems. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Fence and Boston Review. She currently lives in New York City.

Introduction: Steve Gehrke

In the marrowless dialects, trying to find a crescendo of moth wings, I imagined my wife, botanical and numbed. My body a box of piano strings, of bird, no center, no storm eye, of his soft tissues through the trees, I've been trying to make a song from the body's gaps. Like poison in a snake's gum, Steve Gehrke's poems ink and conceal, occupy only the backyard syntax, sing to feel the violence. As I inhale him, he writes, from the noose of elegy, she was both alive and dead in me. At the dirty clenched Pacific, whatever self was left was lost in the acoustics of the frontal lobe: past/future him. St. Paul said, because of sin, the soul scars and cholesterols, undying cell-by-cell. He wrote his executioners to entice the wild beasts, the language like the body no false god of formula. The soil had made the fucking branches the body's lock, the priest's hands, corseted, amnesiac. These God-sphinxed walking texts, God-less, corpsed with the creatures whorled into the stone. Having entered the mind, Steve Gehrke's poems quicken the soil of us, the harbor frozen, electricity and feathers, that vertigo, that swift. Like a lamp of a fragile ark on which our chromosomes suck a vision through, Eugene O'Neill, St. Ignatius dive back into himself. Bowered world, words that try to father, can’t you feel the music burning? Steve Gehrke.

Philip Levine, Steve Gehrke, and Jason Koo

Chin Music: The Poetry Reading Series @ Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Philip Levine, Steve Gehrke, and Jason Koo

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 @ 7:00 PM

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

Please join us for our next evening of Chin Music @ Pacific Standard. On October 22nd, we are thrilled to feature three excellent poets: Philip Levine, Steve Gehrke, and Jason Koo. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include Monica de la Torre, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ian Douglas, Aaron Fagan, Aracelis Girmay, Stuart Greenhouse, Roddy Lumsden, Jynne Dilling Martin, and Akilah Oliver.

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

Philip Levine's new collection of poetry is NEWS OF THE WORLD, published this autumn by Knopf. He is the author of sixteen collections of poems and two books of essays. He has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1980 for ASHES and again in 1991 for WHAT WORK IS, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for THE SIMPLE TRUTH. Mr. Levine divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California.

Steve Gehrke has published three books of poems, most recently MICHELANGELO'S SEIZURE, which was selected for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has earned him a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize and has been published in numerous journals. He holds degrees from Minnesota State University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Missouri. He has previously taught creative writing and literature courses at the University of Missouri and Seton Hall University. He is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at Gettysburg College.

Jason Koo is the author of MAN ON EXTREMELY SMALL ISLAND, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review. He earned his B.A. in English from Yale, his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Houston and his Ph.D. in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He currently lives in New York, where he teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent.

Introduction: MC Hyland

Down in the junkyard there is a god, submarine & therefore. If therefore, then breathe in the house haunted be bees--you are particle, naked in the camera's stuttering eye. MC Hyland's silent films & new architectures are a motion she makes occur, are the way light closes with the hands. Write me when you get to Texas, she asks, living funny in rented rooms, leave a map in every room. The moon can be taken apart, built as in tires & clay, a house of distraction. A refrigerator coos to potted basil on the sill, murderous soil turned suddenly to walls. If bones form a frame, & then you, we stand on the lawn in evening gowns, all the bats out into nightliness. A house is a house only in countryside shifting reference about loss--as in residue, her memory as though under glass. House of lunar aureole with a book hand-drawn--inverted roof, wings--the holes in the sky are closing up, but we remove our clothes & adieu/ so beautiful. Noun, noun. To denote a train or clockwork she is walking away from us. Here is the edge, MC Hyland's poems hint & cipher, let time slip through this isolation. What winter these stanzas. I am shouting in my sleep in this hot junkyard then. And then you--to the grass, laughing. MC Hyland.