Listen to Ladan Osman, with Amira Hanafi, read for the Chicago Poetry Center:
I can’t tell why I think the dried corncobs
in the gravel and the mattress under the tree
were not put here by children who bite so fast
they leave rows of kernels.
In this mouth I gather darkness, an aria,
rosewater tongue, tympanic bone,
a poem more quiet than quietness,
a bronze song, something undone, salvia,
a crushed butterfly.
– Simone Muench, “Elegy for the Unsaid”
Broadside of “Elegy for the Unsaid” by Simone Muench, “Try” by Jennifer Grotz, and “burdens” by Quraysh Ali Lansana
Roger Reeves, Simone Muench, and Jason Koo at the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series, August 29, 2014.
More & more I see the human form, a nothingness which longs to be the sea. Lives infinitely repeated down to atomic thinness like footfalls in a strange house.
The Operature is a durational live performance, installation and augmented reality poem that engages histories of forensics and anatomical science and spectacle.
Read an interview with Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley:
I sense the trees’ light filtering the room–
knowing nothing about the tulip tree
canoe flipped so its stomach slopes up,
scuffed by quartz tumbled in the shallow drag.
I’ve walked here in the wetness holding rain,
endangered lady slippers dipping petal shoes,
dashes of pink in mud–and you’re not here.
Listen to Tyler Mills read for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series, with Larry Sawyer and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas:
Tyler Mills begins at 2:27 minutes.
You look like a monster, one woman said to another.
The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws
twisted into a wall. One bus is sent on its route minutes before
the other. This is the first. Thousands of soldiers were lowering
their faces to the grass, as though an exercise
can will an effect.
An Interview with Tyler Mills Interview conducted by Karl Zuehlke Karl Zuehlke (KZ): When I read your poems in Tongue Lyre, I find myself constantly intrigued in the most enjoyable way by how you negotiate your subject matter. Greek myth, classical music, writers and visual artists often offer you the opportunity to write from a persona or…
Psychosomatic Netflix binges, off-notification sexting on Signal, ranking Grubhub delivery options by how likely or not will be your engagement with humanity, or clicking “Report” on the trust-fund-enabled sponsored content behind a cyborg-influencer’s Instagram post about detox tummy tone wraps, are all such immaterial allusions as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep (or, as well like to call it, Suspend to RAM mode).
Just popped the collar of my robe in this motherfucker,
I.e. kitchen, as I make some sweet-ass hash browns.
Is that the start of a poem? It’s barely the start of breakfast.
Roger Reeves, Simone Muench, and Jason Koo at the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series, August 29, 2014.
Today I’m thinking of all the people not in love: I’m with you! I’d like to say, though one of the conditions Of not being in love is that you can’t hear other people not in love.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
For me, writing and talking are tied to reading—so much that it almost seems that reading is ontologically prior except that it isn’t, rather the three form a field that I must move in and, in this field, I am usually reading.
Bad at Sports would like to welcome Devin King as our latest guest blogger. “Devin King lives and works in Chicago. His first book of poetry, CLOPS, is out from the Green Lantern Press and the newest production of his serial opera, Dancing Young Men From High Windows, was part of the 2010 Rhino Theater Festival.”
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
with Aricka Foreman
City Lit Books
you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled
and calmed, wating for his skin like a shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit him
stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.
Listen to Tyehimba Jess’ 2007 reading with A. Van Jordan at the Poetry Center of Chicago:
Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.
I sing this body ad libitum, Europe scraped raw between my teeth until, presto, “Ave Maria” floats to the surface from a Tituba tributary of “Swanee.” Until I’m a legatodarkling whole note, my voice shimmering up from the Atlantic’s hold; until I’m a coda of sail song whipped in salted wind…
Jess, a Detroit first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”
Watch Tyehimba Jess read for the Chicago Poetry Center, with Aricka Foreman:
Poets Tyehimba Jess and Aricka Foreman are featured in an event hosted by the Poetry Center of Chicago and curated by Natasha Mijares. This program was recorded by Chicago Access Network (CAN TV).
