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.

Presently the Teacup Stirred

I am missing out on a reading/discussion on James Merrill and his masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover next week.  But that does not mean you have to.  Here's some information on the event, and a bit of what I had to say on Merrill, thanks to the queries of Kathleen Kirk.

http://www.escapeintolife.com/uncategorized/familiar-spirits/

And here's Richard Fox saying things more cogently than I:

http://www.escapeintolife.com/blog/changing-light/

Finally, here's the man Merrill himself, reading a poem about using the Ouija board for the first time.

(As an aside, did you know that "Ouija" was just the French yes and ther German yes put together, because someone at Milton Bradley thought it made a foreign and mystical-sounding word?  it's better, at any rate, than communicating with the spirits on your yes-yes board.)

One Can Always Fall in Love Online

With poems, at least.  And falling in love with a poem or a poet online is safer than, say, falling in love with a profile on a dating website, or a grainy video of a stranger. Herewith some poems I have come across online that made my heart leap in my chest like a fish being chased by a larger fish.

First up, Heather Abner, in the journal Shot Glass.  Note to self: send some short poems there soon. Note to others: do likewise.

Next I turn my attentions to the realm of Ocean Voung's blog.  This young man is an extremely talented poet.  You can read some of his work here.  But he also, on his blog, posts poems that have had a profound influence on his spirit and his writing.  All of his choices thus far have been stellar, but this is the one I personally have found the most memorable.

I think my friend Richard Fox is brilliant.

"The sky holds the rain
like a sigh in a bag."

(See?  I think I might give up a tooth to have written those lines. But if I followed that logic and Richard with any frequency, I'd be a toothless man.)

Here are some recent poems of Richard's, featured in Escape Into Life.


While I was forced offline by the lack of home internet service, I read A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos.  I need to write more about Tim's work--I call him "Tim" like he's a friend, but he died at the age of 40 of AIDS, and I never met him.  Nonetheless, much like my first experience reading Frank O'Hara, I felt, reading Tim's work, like I had discovered a new friend, complicated, funny, arch, dry, broken and broken-hearted as well as golden with light...ah--I am nattering on. Just read his masterpiece, here, and you will want to read the complete big, generous volume and get to know him too.


One can always fall in love with a voice on the page.

Here Is Clean

We've had straightforward poetry, some visual art in the mix, and now Richard Fox presents his adopted poem in a sound format.  It's got a beat, you can dance to it.   And if you like it, you can download the thing for free, because Richard is a giver, and because Lives of the Spiders shies away from commerce.

"One Collaborates With the World"

I have been thinking a lot about collaboration, because my friend Richard Fox is working with another poet on poems right now.  And because I have been asked to work with a songwriter and make one or more of my poems into songs. (With music and everything.) And because of my "Abandon a Poem/Adopt a Poem Project."  And because of loneliness, and who wants to be a solitary singer, and is it still a barbaric yawp in the woods if no one hears it.  I just read this on John Gallaher's blog:

"Poems, in reality, come from everywhere the poet can find them: memory, environment, gum wrappers. It’s all reaching out into the context to add something new. The poet just tunes in to whatever works. It’s been my general feeling all my writing life that all writing is collaborative. One collaborates with the world. Working on this book has made it literal. It’s given the world an email address, so to speak."

The book he's speaking about is his collaboration with  G.C. Waldrep, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.

A Poem by Richard Fox

To conclude  my series focusing on the work of poet Richard Fox, here's a new poem he kindly provided to Lives of the Spiders. 

He says: "Here's a new(ish) poem. It will probably will form the centerpiece of the next manuscript on which I'd like to start work, possibly in the new year. I have another "Swaggeresque" collection that will begin to make the rounds of the winter/spring contests. It's called "Heft" & was kind of cast from the mold of "Swagger & Remorse." Anyway, here ye be:


The Lamp Affixes Its Beam


What means
a bell tower
tolling the hour

behind Act One
when the gun
always seems

to misfire
& tramps
the scene

or when the
scuba gear
breaks down

& the neoprene
wet suit sticks
on a deep-sea wire

What goes arrears
runs aground
Let the lamp

affix its beam



Thanks to Richard for the use of his work!