Sunday, March 24, 2013

Vacancy





Dear Vacancy,

You’ve remained on the buzzing
neon sign at the Driftwood Inn
on Red Arrow Highway for so long now
that folks
might start to wonder
if you secretly
own
the place:
the sandlot out front where
stray cats like to scratch,
and yellowed bones
of beech trees near that ditch
by the road. The shutters
on the windows?
They’re fake, and look, one’s
fallen off. Blue
paint on the doors, it tears away
like strips of paper;
the only rented rooms
are the yellowjacket nests.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Live and on Stage!

I will be reading live and in person at three venues in the next three months.  It's like a mini-tour, but all within Chicago, so it has a slightly larger scope than the "tiny tour" that Dorothea Lasky did a couple years ago, where she did readings in different rooms in her apartment.  You can read more about that worthy project here. But enough about that, what about MY readings?  I am sure you are dying to know. So here they are in chronological order.

1. Thursday, March 21 at 6:30 PM.  Poetry night at City Lit Books! Local poets Jen Besemer, Robert McDonald, and Richard Fox read work. The three of us are long-time friends and sometime collaborators, and we'll all be reading poems that use collage or spring from other texts as part of our reading.

2. Thursday, April 25th at 7 PM. Poetry night at The Book Cellar. This will be the 6th or 7th year in a row that Richard Fox and I have read at The Book Cellar for National Poetry Month.  Jen Besemer will be joining in the fun here too, and I think a couple of other colleagues will be joining us. I love this place, and the owner Suzy rocks.  So does the cheese plate you can buy here to go with your glass of wine.


3. Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at 7:30 PM. Reading at the Tuesday Funk series, right in my own neighborhood of Andersonville, at the Hopleaf. This will without a doubt be the reading with the best beer selection in the city that night. Readers include:
  • Suzanne Clores
  • Mary Beth Hoerner
  • Robert McDonald
  • Dion Walton
  • Sara Ross Witt

This dog on a picnic table really wants you to make it to one of these readings.  See the concerned expression on his big face.