Poet Thomas Meyer, executive director of a society that published legendary Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley; will read from his work at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 4, at the Schlafly Bottleworks on 7260 Southwest Ave. in Maplewood as part of the Observable Readings series. He will be joined by Chicago poet Peter O’Leary, known for his metaphysical musings (“a god’s privacy is massive”), and St. Louisan Shane Seely, whose first book of verse, The Snowbound House, won the 2008 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Admission is free.

Thomas Meyer, who lives in Scaly Mountain, NC, is executive director of the Jargon Society, founded by his late partner, Black Mountain poet Jonathan Williams. Under Williams’ direction, the Jargon Society published the work of many of the experimental poets associated with Black Mountain College as well as the poetry of Meyer. Meyer’s most recent book of verse, Kintsugi, was published last year by Punch Press.

Shane Seely is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches composition and creative writing and serves as assistant director of the university’s freshman writing program.

Peter O’Leary’s books and chapbooks include: Watchfulness, A Mystical Theology of the Limbic Fissure, Wren/Omen, Benedicite, and Depth Theology. He teaches in the liberal arts and writing programs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Observable Readings is a part of the St. Louis Poetry Center. Both organizations are funded in part by the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council. For more information about the reading, contact Robert Lowes at robertlowes1@gmail.com.

For the words,

Nancy Hughes
Executive Director
St. Louis Poetry Center
www.stlouispoetrycenter.org
314-973-0616

In case you're not familiar with these two poets, here are their bios as published on the Observable Readings site:

Quincy Troupe

Quincy Troupe is the author of eight volumes of poetry and six non-fiction works. The Pursuit of Happyness, a biography, was a New York Times best-seller; The Architecture of Language, a book of poems, won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University.

Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of two poetry collections; Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award. His poems and essays have been published widely. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman's Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets.

Though I've often wanted to attend Observable Readings, this is the first time I've been able to make it all the way there. My time was well spent. The poets were excellent read in a welcoming ambiance of the Schlafly Bottleworks taproom and several of my friends among the assembled company.

Both Patrick and Quincy are empassioned poets encompassing the political and the personal in their work. Their reading matches their skill as poets. I need to say upfront that I'm normally not a big fan of Spoken Word performances of the type one tends to find at poetry slams and such. I find them overwhelming, often strident and insistent. These poets whose reading certainly leans in that direction (I'd guess) are not like that a'tall! Their embrace is so wide that the feeling the listener is left with is a sense of compassion for the tenderness and fragility of human life and the world we find ourselves in.

Both, to quote a Quincy Troupe line used in his introduction "come from the truth wid it." Their poetry is visceral, kinesthetic, and almost too hard to contain without making utterances and physical gestures. How I longed to be in an audience making this kind of expression of receiving the poetry, in concert. But, I didn't want to be the lone white woman at the back table, uulating or jumping up and down. I didn't want to misbehave. "Oh, misbehave!" Patrick Rosal urged when I brought this up in conversation after the reading.

So, instead, we had the polite applause in between poems and poets...the kind that I feel interrupts the flow of the reading. How I wished that an announcement had been made, saying, "Please hold your applause until the end, but feel free to hoot and holler, laugh, sigh, and cry, as much as you wish in response to these empassioned artists. You are riding in a Catillac, driven by a master."

Riehlife readers last heard from Aaron on January 23rd of this year when we enjoyed his poem "Swan Song" written just for us! You can read it again under Write Pen! Aaron is a modern man of letters, a university teacher, poet,reviewer, essayist, and organizer of St. Louis' Observable Readings. Through Aaron I met the Nigerian poet Obi Nwakanma who was a touchstone for me at last week's Soyinka Symposium in Carbondale.

Aaron Belz' “gravely hilarious” poems, as Denise Duhamel describes them, in “The Bird Hoverer” are worth a read. Even more, I wish for you to hear him read in person, as his drollery is fit for an 18th century chocolate house. Perhaps he'll make a CD for us, one of these soon days! Aaron was born in 1971 in Iowa City, but now lives in St. Louis, now, where he has hosted the Observable Reading series since fall of 2003, now in its fifth season. Observable Readings is, “not a reading group, exactly, but a reading series that showcases poets from all over the country,” he explains.

He's in the next generation younger than myself and has innovative ideas on the place of poetry in society. I love that he writes on poetry for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You can get links for his newspaper articles, essays, reviews, and new poems here:

---poems: http://meaningless.com
---website: belz.net
---blog: http://belz.wordpress.com
---observable readings, 2007-08: http://observable.org

And, now....read his idea on how to publish poetry through WEBCLIPS! I signed up on Gmail so I always know when a new poem of his goes up. You can, too. Read on! --JGR

______________________

The Poetics of Distraction: Publishing Poetry through Webclips
by Aaron Belz
copyright 2008

Ah yes. No one reads poetry anymore, and that's partly because no one reads anymore. We're too caught up!

Everything's happening at once: email, Quickbooks, a few important clicks around the web, then off to pick up the kids or drop off some important documents, packages, run a couple of timely errands. Eat out, maybe. Then at night we must watch "Lost," and after that, who has energy? Our heads a-buzz with the day's barrage of media, we fall asleep at last.

Whether that describes your life or not, you know you're caught up. It's 2008. If poetry isn't on your iPod, TV, or the web it probably isn't gonna happen for you. That's why it's important for 21st century poets to participate in the blogosphere and (and!) get on Facebook, MySpace, or both.

Social networking has a lot of us addicted to clicking around, checking out pics and profiles, and such. Poetry needs to be there too if it's going to be read.

Hence my (maybe not original) idea to supplement blog-publishing with Gmail webclips---which feed info to the little ticker of links that appears at the top of your Gmail console (if you use Gmail), right alongside "sponsored links" and news headlines. Gmail comes pre-set with a number of webclips that the Gmail guys think you'll like.

But what if you don't?

Go to your "settings" (upper right hand corner), click on "web clips" and start deleting the ones you don't want. Then, ADD a few. POETRY links. Like mine, belz.wordpress.com---a new poem title every day or two will appear in the mix of sponsored links and other noise in that little ticker at the top.

It's really just RSS feeds on steroids for the Gmail generation. I called it the "poetics of distraction," and Janet liked that, so here you go. Try it out! If not with my blog, with Janet's or someone else's you like. Might as well sprinkle some good stuff into the other junk that appears on your screen.

Myself, I don't really use Gmail, so I'm looking for other ways to RSS feed myself some good new literature while I'm doing my daily correspondence. AIM needs something like this. Maybe iChat does, too. Whatever the case, it's encouraging that users have some control over what they happen to read, and what they accidentally look at between emails. We can adjust the settings and make life more bearable.

William Carlos Williams' poem "To Elsie" ends with the famous lines, "No one/ to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car."

Williams' lines are prescient. But now that information technology is helping us confront one of the inherent problems of modern life, let's take advantage of it.

To your Gmail!