What happened at the poetry reading?

• Poetry reading? History's 20 most influential poets (6/19)
• Let's talk about sex: poetry (June 19th)

Third Thursdays at SPARC

One of the sexy readers today just happened to be one of next month's features, Joseph Nicks, a man after the biological and whimsical, the terrestrial and environmental.*

He is currently working on a dictionary of Nickisms, his invented contributions to the English lexicon, like the term chronicide.**

Ron Koertge

Life is but a poem...or novel. (Ron Koertge)

(Poetry Foundation) South Pasadena Poet Laureate Ron Koertge, former PCC professor and current bestselling YA author, then schooled us all on how to present life in the Midwest roundabout the Fifties.

() Poet and young-adult novelist Ron Koertge grew up in rural Olney, Illinois, and received a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from the University of Arizona.

Is no topic verboten in poetry?

Comfortable in both free verse and received form, Koertge writes poetry marked by irreverent yet compassionate humor and a range of personas and voices. He has published numerous collections of poetry. His novels and novels-in-verse for young readers include the popular Stoner & Spaz.

Koertge’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a California Arts Council grant, and inclusion in numerous anthologies such as Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column.

Koertge’s young-adult fiction has won awards from the American Library Association and PEN America. For many years, Koertge taught in the MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He lives with his wife in South Pasadena, California. More: Poetry Foundation

In the crowd

Other readers were in the house: GT Foster was reading from Warped by War his new collection of poems about being in Thailand during the US War on Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos), derived from his novel The Boys Are Not Refined (Butt Naked Press). Helena and other Quakers, Toti O'Brien, Barbs Bagwell, and British poet Martin Jago.

She was the Poo

Kahnstallations by Mand Kahn ( Los Angeles) | The Poetry Foundation

.

Perhaps the highlight of the night was when Mandy Kahn hit below the belt and delivered an exquisite work of poetic art she dubbed "Poo." The audience thought they might have heard "Pooh." But no. It was poo. It was the most provocative of topics covered due not to its candor but its seriousness. To mimic it as to suggest what it was like would be difficult butt not impossible:

.

It was the Poo

Everyone does what? (Etsy)

with such intimacy have i known food

passing through without clinging i let go

what was once a part of me i part with

and so unstuck unplugged without

consternation do what is due with my dew

for all i have been of drink and stool

of toad and such delicacies sautéed

or stewed garlic umami and kosher salt

and for all i know all that fixes me to the

ground sending samples of soil

to the earth below

[Oh, Pooh and Eeyore, too, we all do; even

the dull Dodo and the Duke their dookie do

unblemished Dove and Duchess untouched

by soot do do their doo, too. Everyone Poo's.]

Mandy Kahn

Peace Piece: Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn

(Poetry Foundation) ...in true LA form, enthusiastically live-tweeted by audience member Jenna Elfman, Mandy Kahn has been developing more ideas for poetry installations — an active syllable conservationist; she's now dubbed them "Kahnstallations." She says:

Mandy Kahn, live at the Getty Museum, LA

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to inject some energy into the poetry reading format. Slam poets have found a way to make their readings extremely appealing to wide audiences, as have the spoken word poets, and the avant poetry world seems to be doing lots of format experimentation, too. But I’d like to see mainstream poets find that same wider audience — that audience of fans who aren’t writers themselves. So I’m experimenting. Tonight I’ll be trying out four installations, and at the end of the night I’ll pass out comment cards so audience members can let me know which installations worked best for them. And I’ll keep writing new installations — keep honing — until I find a few that audiences seem to respond to. More

What is "slam" poetry?

SLAM: (Youth Speaks) "Somewhere in America" by Los Angeles Team

• Poetry slam is a competitive art event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges.

"Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?"

By Ron Koertge

Featured poet Ron Koertge, MFA

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave

your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap

one is best, with pages the color of weak tea

and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than

three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware

any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks

across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.

And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle

where a child a year or two old is playing as his

mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.

The title, the author's name, the brooding photo

on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray

book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher

it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower

falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody

in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

• "Do You Have Any Advice…" | The Poetry Foundation

*Joseph Nicks, The Horizontal Forest

The Horizontal Forest as seen and lamented from the ground (treejourney.com)

.

Terrestrial Anthr-apology

long after this unsustainable

infrastructure collapses

beneath the burden

of fecundity and affluence

and digital instability

the oozing oilfields,

damned-up rivers,

dried-out aquifers

the bird-and-bat-bashing windmills,

battery-burgeoning e-wasted landfills

the acres of solar panels

supplanting the plants,

impeding the photosynthetic necessity

the combusted troposphere,

de-ozonified stratosphere

the phosphorescent coastal dead zones,

deforested/defrosted Amazonia/Antartica

the vanished worldwide megafauna

all will stand as silent testaments

to the ephemeral hyper-potency

of runaway hominism

whose viral expansion

from Pleistocene to Plastocene

left the far and wide terrestrium

styrofoaming at the seas

we could've lived less largely

but that's not the way we roll

of course it's going to take some healing, but

it certainly won't be a first for the Earth

to have survived a mass extinction,

though never one of such intelligent design...

the eons will season

themselves again

and life will re-diversify

with no remembrance of those

naked, tailless, erectile monkeys

run amok for that horrible fortnight

so many ice ages ago

the grasses will

give it no glossing

and the worms won't

wonder who won

and in the understory

become the prologue

of stories yet to unfold,

a prideless proliferation

of unapologetic anthropods

will go on about their business

as they've been doing for

four hundred million years

Unclenched: a passive fist's manifesto 

By Joseph Nicks

Unclenched: a passive fist's

The hominid hand. Its prehensile qualities (due largely to that remarkable opposable thumb) are legendary. It is perhaps the only anatomically advantageous structure this animal possesses. That oft-touted capacious cerebrum seems as often as not to allow itself to swell with a meaningless steam that marginalizes whatever intellectual potential it had in the first place. And with that pushed-in rostrum tucked up under the cranium and bent into an L-shaped labiolingual-laryngeal mess that imparts to this animal the power of speech, well that ability seems rarely to be put to good use.

No, it is the manus hominis that has allowed this species to be so constructive. Of course, as with those other two aforementioned structures, it can be just as adept at wielding weapons as it can tools. And when it is clenched into a fist, it is pretty much useless for anything other than fucking things up.

Though some of them may be infused with a certain degree of anger, none of the poems in this book, for example, could have been written had these fists not managed to come occasionally unclenched. More

**Chronicide

The God Chronos: "Time Clipping Cupid's Wings" (1694) by Pierre Mignard (1610-1695)

Seven (art by Lorna Alkana)

I stepped before the judge, penitent

eyes downcast, shoulders slumped

He passed sentence as I mumble-prayed

in a dead language within the echo chamber

between the ears of years, lips aquiver.

"Have you anything to say for yourself?" he asked,

having so heavily handed down the court's

sentence. "Guilty as charged" was all I could

think to say. If one is going to be honest, this is

probably not the time to start. But my jury of peers

had me dead to rights. What was there to deny with

all the evidence stacked before me? I'll take the plea

had it been on offer, I could see in hindsight.

The Butterfly Papillon realized the same thing.

Of all crimes, this the inexcusable

Of all sentences, this the unretractable

"What did you call it?" I asked the judge in one last stand.

"Chronicide," he gurgled in disgust, "killing time."*

What's next?

Belly Laughs Comedy & Food Festival | Nederlander Concerts

Dronepreneur Workshop - Free Online Workshop

• OPEN MIC NIGHT (free) at the Altadena Library, Monday, July 7, 6:00-7:30 pm Altadena — Altadena Library District
• *Killing a Homo (as in a Homo sapiens or "Man thinking") is homicide so, naturally, killing time is Chronicide (a Nickism by Joseph Nicks).
• Ron Koertge, Mandy Kahn, Joseph Nicks, Steve McQueen (Papillion, 1973); all uncredited poetry by Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation) (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly