Monday, June 8, 2009

Don't Miss David Meltzer, Michael Rothenberg & Spider Trio at Hideout, Nov. 19



Long-time west coast denizen David Meltzer will be traveling to Chicago with Michael Rothenberg for a show I coordinated with the Hideout here in Chicago. The Hideout is one of my favorite music locales and the perfect home for this word and jazz salad that promises to be high on the excitement scale. Dan McNaughton's Spider Trio will perform as well as Bob Malone and Dan Godston's band. Don't miss it. Meltzer, who is a poet, editor, and musician, has edited many an anthology including "Reading Jazz," which features contributions by Robert Creeley, Igor Stravinsky, William Carlos Williams, Norman Mailer, Mina Loy and many other luminaries.


Thursday, Nov. 19

Rockpile (David Meltzer, Michael Rothenberg & Spider Trio) with special guests including Terri Carrion, Art Lange, Dan Godston, Francesco Levato, Larry Sawyer, Ed Roberson & Bob Malone.


@ The Hideout
1354 W. Wabansia, Chicago
8:00 to 11:30 pm
Phone: 773.227.4433

The Poetry Center of Chicago & Milk Magazine present:


ROCKPILE (featuring David Meltzer, Michael Rothenberg, Terri Carrion & Spider Trio)

A leading poet of the Beat Movement, David MELTZER was raised in Brooklyn during the War years; performed on radio & early TV on the Horn & Hardart Children's Hour. Was exiled to L.A. at 16 & at 17 enrolled in an ongoing academy w/ artists Wallace Berman, George Herms, Robert Alexander, Cameron; migrated to San Francisco in 1957 for higher education w/ peers & maestros like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Jack Hirschman, and a cast of thousands all living extraordinary ordinary lives. Beat Thing [La Alameda Press, 2004] won the Josephine Miles PEN Award, 2005. Was editor and interviewer for San Francisco Beat: Talking With The Poets [City Lights, 2001]. With Steve Dickison, co-edits Shuffle Boil, a magazine devoted to music in all its appearances & disappearances. 2005 saw the publication of David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer by Viking/Penguin, a collection spanning over forty years of work that paints a vivid portrait of Meltzer's life as a poet through poems taken from thirty of his previous books of poetry. With a versatile style and playful tone, Meltzer offers his unique vision of civilization with a range of juxtapositions from Jewish mysticism and everyday life to jazz and pop culture.

Michael ROTHENBERG is a poet, songwriter, and the editor of Big Bridge magazine online at www.bigbridge.org. His poetry books include Man/Woman, a collaboration with Joanne Kyger, The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), and Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press). His poems have been published widely in small press publications including, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, First Intensity, Fish Drum, Fulcrum, Golden Handcuffs Review, House Organ, Prague Literary Review, Tricycle, Van Gogh's Ear, Vanitas, Zyzzyva, JACK, milk, and Jacket. He is also author of the novel Punk Rockwell. Rothenberg's 2005 CD collaboration with singer Elya Finn, was praised by poet David Meltzer as "fabulous-all [the] songs sound like Weimar Lenya & postwar Nico, lushly affirmative at the same time being edged w/ cosmic weltschmertz. An immensely tasty production." He is also editor for the Penguin Poet series, which includes selected works of Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer, and Ed Dorn. He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Philip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press.

Terri CARRION was conceived in Venezuela and born in New York to a Galician mother and Cuban father. She grew up in Los Angeles where she spent her youth skateboarding and slam-dancing. Terri Carrion earned her MFA at Florida International University in Miami, where she taught Freshman English and Creative Writing, edited and designed the graduate literary magazine Gulfstream, taught poetry to High School docents at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and started a reading series at the local Luna Star Café. In her final semester at FIU, she was Program Director for the Study Abroad Program, Creative Writing in Dublin, Ireland. Her poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography has been published in many print magazines as well as online, including The Cream City Review, Hanging Loose, Pearl, Penumbra, Exquisite Corpse, Mangrove, Kick Ass Review, Exquisite Corpse, Jack, Mipoesia, Dead Drunk Dublin, and Physik Garden among others. Her collaborative poem with Michael Rothenberg, "Cartographic Anomaly" was published in the anthology, Saints of Hysteria, A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry and her chapbook "Lazy Tongue" was published by D Press in the summer of 2007. Currently, she is collaborating on the translation of a Galician Anthology from Galician to Spanish to English, to appear in all three languages, in February of 2009, on BigBridge.org, for which she is assistant editor and art designer.


About SPIDER TRIO: Earle Brown, tenor saxophone; Joe Williams, drums; Dan McNaughton, bass and leader. Dan formed Spider Trio in 1997 in New Orleans, in order to perform his jazz compositions which express his love for a wide range of music, from funk to modern classical. The band is now based in Chicago, and the current lineup consists of Dan, Bryan Pardo on reeds, and Tim Keenan on drums. Another recent project of Dan's is the modern klezmer band Into The Freylakh, led by Bryan, whose self-titled first cd is also available through CD Baby. Into The Freylakh's repertoire ranges from traditional songs to original compositions, among them Dan's "Lenox Road." The second SPIDER TRIO cd, Presences, with Bryan and Tim, is out and for sale at CD Baby .


WITH GUESTS INCLUDING: Art Lange, Dan Godston, Larry Sawyer, Francesco Levato, Bob Malone, & Ed Roberson

Born in Chicago in 1952, Art LANGE is the author of hundreds of essays, reviews, articles, and interviews on music and poetry. His work has been published in publications as diverse as the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and the Village Voice, New American Writing and the Partisan Review, and he has written program notes for over 200 jazz and classical recordings. He also published and edited Brilliant Corners: a magazine of the arts, from 1975-77. He is the co-editor (with Nathaniel Mackey) of Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993: Coffee House Press), and is the author of five books of poetry, including Needles at Midnight (Z Press), Evidence (Yellow Press), and The Monk Poems (Frontward Books). Lange was editor of Down Beat magazine from 1984-88 and currently he teaches at Columbia College, Chicago.

Dan GODSTON teaches poetry and other art forms to young people and adults in the Chicago area. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Chase Park, Versal, 580 Split, Kyoto Journal, California Quarterly, after hours, Edgz, Kyunghyang Shinmun, and other publications, while his articles have appeared in Teaching Artist Journal, among other publications. Godston also co-curates the interdisciplinary arts series, Chicago Calling.

Larry SAWYER curates the Myopic Books Poetry Series in Wicker Park, Chicago. His chapbook Tyrannosaurus Ant (mother's milk press) was recently included in the Yale Collection of American Literature. His blog is Me tronome. His work was also recently included in A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration (anthology, DePaul Humanities Center Press, 2009). Larry also edits milkmag.org (since 1998). His publications include the Chicago Tribune, Babel Fruit, Vanitas, Jacket, MiPoesias, The Prague Literary Review, Coconut, 88, Hunger, Skanky Possum, Exquisite Corpse, Court Green, Shampoo, Van Gogh's Ear, and elsewhere.

Poet, translator, and new media artist Francesco LEVATO is the executive director of The Poetry Center of Chicago and the author of Marginal State (Fractal Edge Press, 2006) and is a contributor to Witness: Anthology of Poetry (Serengeti Press, 2004). His poetry has been published internationally in journals and anthologies, both in print and online, including The Progressive, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Versal, and many others. His awards include two consecutive poetry fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center. His poetry-based video artwork has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

Bob MALONE grew up in the wilds of New Jersey, where he started piano lessons at nine – within a year he could play anything put in front of him – and dreamed of being a classical musician. For years he listened only to classical music, but hearing Billy Joel in a Sears store was a revelation for him, and within a few years he was writing his own songs, and playing with rock bands. He studied music at Berklee in Boston (though he was already gigging regularly both solo and with bands, as he has ever since), after which he moved to Hollywood and embarked on an endless tour, playing an average of 100 shows a year. “Blazing and beautiful. Burning and elegant. Subtle and expansive. Unique and timeless. Malone contains multitudes of rhythm, soul, jazz, blues, smoke and magic.” — American Songwriter Magazine. For more information see BobMalone.com.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Ed ROBERSON studied painting in his youth and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh. His extensive travels inform his work,which is also influenced by spirituals and the blues, and by visual art, such as the mixed-media collages of Romare Beardon. Poet and critic Michael Palmer has called Roberson “one of the most deeply innovative and critically acute voices of our time.” Roberson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including City Eclogue (2006), Atmosphere Conditions (1999), which was chosen by Nathaniel Mackey for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award, and Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (1995), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Words and phrases in Roberson’s experimental poetry actively resist parsing, using instead what Mackey has called “double-jointed syntax” to explore and bend themes of race, history, and culture. “I’m not creating a new language. I’m just trying to un-White-Out the one we’ve got,” said Roberson in a 2006 interview with Chicago Postmodern Poetry. Roberson’s honors include the Lila Wallace Writers’ Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award. His work has been included in Best American Poetry. Roberson lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern University.

____________________________

ROCKPILE @ HIDEOUT: A CELEBRATION OF THE TRADITION OF POETRY & JAZZ IN THE CITY OF CHICAGO. FROM THE FIRST STORIES OF KENNETH REXROTH READING HIS WORK WITH MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT BY JELLY ROLL MORTON, JAZZ & POETRY HAVE ENJOYED A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP. THIS NIGHT OF POETRY & JAZZ WITH DAVID MELTZER, MICHAEL ROTHENBERG, SPIDER TRIO & SPECIAL GUESTS WILL CERTAINLY BE A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. HIDEOUT INCLUDES A FULL BAR AND HEMP CANDY BARS WILL SERVED. DOORS OPEN AT 7:30. $8 COVER.

FOR THE FULL SCHEDULE CHECK Hideoutchicago.com .

Tuesday, March 17, 2009



Do I ever get tired of watching old jazz clips? A final ruling on this is expected this summer.