Media Information - English Department FSU

Amber Coady reads "The Making of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog" by Mark Leyner.
-- Ali Baba, July 28, 2006. Download Mp3

Becky Pennell reads several short stories by Dave Eggers.
-- Ali Baba, July 28, 2006. Download Mp3

Matt Hobson reads "Bigfoot Stole My Wife" and "I am Bigfoot" by Ron Carlson.
-- Ali Baba, July 28, 2006. Download Mp3

Roger Turnau reads from his novel in progress The Avenue of the World, and Dara Green performs her special brand of spoken word poetry.
-- Warehouse, August 1, 2006. Download Mp3

Stephen Mills is one of the founders of the Black Tarp movement in poetry and his fans call him "General Mills." He reads about the complexities of family, the goofiness of life, and sex. Leslie Whatley reads from a novel about revenge called Anonymity.
-- Warehouse, July 25, 2006. Download Mp3

Debra Woolley reads her poetry about Jamaica with a lilt that makes one feel as if he is on the beach at Negril, and Zac Hanson reads his Metal Poetry along with works that aren't so metal.
-- Warehouse, July 18, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Joann Gardner, Sara Pennington, Dominika Wrozynski, Carissa Neff and Monica Magnan. Since 1991, Runaway with Words has offered poetry workshops to at-risk youth and other underserved groups, locally and across the country. Graduate and undergraduate students can apply to intern with this program, filling a variety of roles—from website work to grant writing to participating in onsite workshops. Runaway with Words teachers are trained in Runaway with Words methodology. They oversee workshops and are given important experience in Creative Writing instruction. Interns assist head teachers.
-- Ali Baba, April 26, 2006. Download Mp3

Reader: Lisa Tucker. "This should be catnip for book clubs, whether they devour it as a page-turner about parenting and family or discuss its subtle meditations on fate and coincidence, wealth and poverty, freedom and safety, fairy tales and American dreams." I don’t know what it means to have Publisher’s Weekly compare your latest book to catnip (though it was meant as a compliment and if my cat were a reviewer he’d undoubtedly agree), but from the start, Once Upon a Day does seem like a page-turner that brings to light the prismatic complexity of the concept relationship.
-- Warehouse, April 18, 2006. Download Mp3

Reader: Yusef Komunyakkaa.
-- Warehouse, April 11, 2006. Download Mp3

Reader: Joseph McElroy. “He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself, but he felt it was more.” These two lines are the beginning of Joseph McElroy’s, Plus, a book that opens and closes—fanlike, as one tries to grasp all of its implications. It’s a book that a number of us have read in Ralph Berry’s avant-garde lit class and like all books this semester, it has erased and revealed and multiplied the criteria by which we “know” a poem or a piece of prose. Not only were we lucky enough to have Joseph McElroy discuss his book with us, last night we got the pleasure of hearing him read from his latest book, Cannonball.
-- Warehouse, April 11, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Steve Tomasula and Diane Glancy. As part of his introduction, Ralph Berry called our attention not simply to the writer (not his biography or his writing history), nor to the physical pages of the book itself, but as he said, “to its very existence.” Tomasula’s work isn’t merely about finding the right word for the right expression, but instead (and perhaps more interestingly), an order for that word and the next (i.e., a design) so that the writing isn’t given the chance to disappear into itself. Tomasula is interested in the history of representation from invention of the alphabet to the present. The chapters of his book are designed to be in the form of their subject (e.g., the chapter dealing with cuneiform appears to be written in sand while the chapter on psychoanalysis takes the form of an analyst’s notes). One of his interests is to reveal not only how we “represent ourselves to ourselves, but how we represent others to ourselves.” He refers to words as objects in the world, “as real as bricks and mortar.” What becomes especially clear is the notion that all things are interrelated as the following and final questions of his reading ask, “Was something like that happening to her? Happening to everyone?”

Her writing is so lyrical that one could almost mistake her stories for a series of poems. Her first story, “Aunt Panetta’s Electric Blisters,” uses a broken refrigerator at its center. It’s not that the refrigerator is twenty years old or that its coils are described like intestines. And it’s not that Aunt Panetta’s husband, Filo declared it dead by shooting a hole in it—no, it was the fact that it was a “white box,” “white patent leather” and “the white boar that would tear her apart.” All this calls attention to the white stars and the white sheets in the yard, which are later the white sheets on the bed that keep Aunt Panetta company through the night. There is an abundance of description that calls to mind coolness, blankness, something unwritten, something unfilled, something white in the story that becomes, as various things do, a problematic part of Panetta herself. We learn that she can’t sleep with the sounds of the new fridge. At one point it gets so bad that she spends the night in a teepee in the yard. When Filo asks her about it she says, “I told you” to which he replies “Why didn’t you tell me so I know what you said.” Sometimes, though, it’s just not that plain or that easy. Her second piece, though much different (there’s fire and brimstone and motorcycles!), is just as poetic and plaintive, focusing largely on one girl’s complex relationship with her immediate family and her ancestry, which leaves her at a loss for an identifiable clan. The lines are beautiful and the personifications work to reveal so much about the state of our speaker as in this line, “I heard the call of gulls for someone to take them away.”
-- Warehouse, March 28, 2006. Download Mp3

Reader: Elizabeth Dewberry. Although the protagonist in His Lovely Wife insists she isn't a poet, the same assertion can't be made by Elizabeth Dewberry. Like all good poets, she has an ear for music. Her keenly observing eye translates into prose that which is wry and funny and exactly right. We all know what it's like to be caught in the undertow of an uncomfortable social outing and, worse, we know what it's like to drink a little too much and hash it out with one's beloved just after. From here on I was reminded of a cartoon The New Yorker ran a few weeks ago with a woman smoking a cigarette in bed next to a huge snow globe.
-- Warehouse, March 14, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Michael Garriga and Sara Pennington. If you go to Tutwiler Mississippi, you’ll find a grocery store, and old blue gas station (long unused). It might take a few minutes to walk the whole town so you can’t miss the brick wall with “Map of Grave Site” painted on it and a map to the grave of bluesman, Sonny Boy Williamson II. You might have to drive back to this map several times to get a handle on where the grave is actually located because it’s just sort of off a dirt road all by its lonesome. Sonny Boy recorded for the King Biscuit radio show, taught his brother-in-law, Howlin’ Wolf how to play harmonica, wrote songs covered by British bands and drank a lot of whiskey. This neck of the woods is the Delta and it’s here where “southern cross the dog. “ The southern being a train running out of Louisiana, and when I hear the work of Michael Garriga, I think of all this. He creates a deep south where gutted fish hang from a line and cats work over their tossed heads. Where one can hear a tin lid trying to rethread a jar of whisky and one can see how strong that whiskey is when one man in the story takes a sip and puffs up his cheeks like a child waiting to blow candles off a cake. He not only gets the descriptions across with lyricism, he has an finely tuned ear for various southern vernaculars. I wouldn’t be surprised if this Louisiana boy becomes a legend himself.

For our second reading we travel north to West Virginia, and though I never thought I’d say this, I didn’t want to leave. Now if you’ll follow out my earlier story on Sonny Boy, Sara Pennington has discovered the grave while many of us are still looking the map square in the eye and scratching our heads. And she might agree that the grave is apt because of the size of six of her ABECEDARIAN poems (twenty more to come!), which, among other things, look like small resting places. And what I’m trying to get at when I say that lots of us are looking at the map, is that it may take us years to find the precise form for a particular work. And some people never find it. In these recent poems, she’s uncovered the ideal way to articulate a colorful family history. One wouldn’t say that these poems write themselves, but in a way the might because Sara has figured out just how to listen to the past. The language, imagery, speech and Godliness are just exactly right. In all sincerity, I can’t wait for more and I’ll be the first in line (not like Stephen King when I was about the 759th) to get my book signed.
-- Warehouse, February 28, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Brandy Wilson and Dominika Wrozynski. Their Similarities: they are both talented writers, PhD candidates, warm and wonderful human beings. Their differences: Brandy is soft spoken and soothing, a writer of fiction, who hails from Paris, Texas. Dominika is enthusiastic and energetic, a poet, who was born in Poland. Together they provided us with an entertaining and pleasurable evening.
-- Warehouse, February 14, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Brigitte Byrd and Tony Morris. To encounter Brigitte Byrd’s poems from Fence Above the Sea for the first time, read by the author, is to encounter the experience of reading itself. Because she is beautifully French, and because she reads with a beautifully French accent, I found that at times I misunderstood words; that is, until she read to the end of the line and I realized my mistake. I heard, “isolated” when I should be hearing “insulated” as in, “their house is not insulted, it is cold.” What happens in these small slips is that I become keenly aware of how these words, and the ghost of a conjured image, change when in contact with other words. The same thing happens when words and phrases in French appear and I must enjoy the sound as opposed to the meaning, which, as Gertrude Stein, another French(ish) woman talked about in “Composition as Explanation,” reveals itself as one way to articulate a continuous present. To back me up (or maybe to give credit to the teacher who helped me articulate this idea), I’ll quote from Ralph Berry, “I know of few books that undergo their words as utterly. Fence Above the Sea is a primer of presentness, that unimaginable task, this being here now.”

Tony Morris is an ambassador to (or from?) the natural world. His poems are lush, verdant, out-of-doors and harrowing. Lines that seem simple expressions of Appalachia or Florida or life on the farm, in the woods, in the three-seater outhouse are like gorgeous little wings with dark undersides. Take for instance this line, “dogs that run the woods at night” which in addition to its first meaning: dogs running in the dark, also suggest the hierarchy of a particular patch of forest where dogs run the show. Then there’s the list of beautiful field and stream stuff that makes its way into many of his poems: barred owls, bottlebrush grass, copper birds, buzzards, porch lights and wings that shimmer gold. In the poem about the barred owl, Tony Morris describes the activity of this night animal which, if applied to poets, is the greatest description I’ve come across, “conspicuous behavior for a conspicuously strange breed.”

It’s nice to know that this program has graduated such variously talented writers.
-- Warehouse, February 7, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Jay Snodgrass and Sandra Simonds. Jay Snodgrass and I were in the same workshop last fall. I only got to see a few of his poems which wasn’t enough to really get a sense of him. And when his poems did come around, as with all of us, there was such a serious logjam that we buzzed through work at top speed. A shame really given how much I enjoyed his reading. From his birth among the loblolly’s of Florida (or palms or crocodiles), to the Tokyo of Godzilla(!) where he grew up, we come to learn that this poet has lived diversely. His first book, Monster Zero, from which he read a number of poems is clever and humorous and to borrow an earlier verb: buzzing. Many of the poems contain Godzilla which becomes synonymous with his childhood, or they contain some sense of childish verge-of-discovery (which paradoxically and simultaneously is the verge-of-loss). This occurs beautifully in “Seventh Confession” when the poet wonders what happened to Christine Inoue, “…She was the first time/ I fell in love…” By the end of the speaker asks, “…Where did she go?/ Stray freckles on her thigh,/ High up under her skirt,/ Under the steel desk?” And further along we all wonder how “Godzilla Sits Down to Watch Cable” or why “Godzilla Leafs Through a Crate & Barrel Catalogue” and how we come to care so much about him. A compelling and terrific start to the evening…

Which brings me to Sandra Simonds who, along with (as in: just as) Jay, has been widely published and although on the surface they couldn’t seem more different (when Sandra took the stage she emphatically warned us, “My poems are not funny”), they were just different by degrees. That is, how they presented themselves was different, but at heart all good poems are sheep and wolves in each other’s clothing. And she was right: her poems weren’t funny. In fact, they were so textured, so sonically rich and intellectual, and precisely in control of the line, the break, the page; that I was dying to see the poems in print. Not only did I want to examine them, but I wanted to speak them to myself again. To rediscover images like, “honeydew light in March,” “when the dusk hawk stares the ocean down” and “forget-me-nots dunked into steam soup.” To look again into the poem “Vivre” which has a figure both in and alongside its life staring it down like a lesser animal. It was a reading that by the end definitely made me feel like the lesser animal. Brava!
-- Warehouse, January 31, 2006. Download Mp3

Reader: Jean Valentine. My MFA thesis was called A Human Animal (which I might use again so don’t get any ideas!), because there are lots of animals, most noticeably a figure named Bunny who has, at times, fur, at times a purse with vodka in it; who speaks like my mom and then me and like, well, a rabbit. At my thesis defense it was suggested that I read Jean Valentine, as in, “You could really learn something.”

This from the second poem she read this evening,“Listening”:
My whole life I was swimming listening
Beside the daylight world like a dolphin beside a boat

These two lines, which begin the poem, limn what it is she does—what we all do when we really go about the business of being writers. She is a careful listener, and crafts such small, finely-wrought poems that Pound’s lines to Whitman come to mind, “It was you that broke the new wood,/ Now is a time for carving.” In Jean Valentine’s case she carves until the essence of what’s being described comes to light. She’s a master carpenter. A Giacometti. She is, in the end, a poet with such a fine ear that one can learn quite a lot.
-- Warehouse, January 24, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Rick Campbell and Paul Shepherd. I walked into Rick Campbell’s reading a little late, but in his case that’s just fine. It’s not as though he stacks all the good poems in the beginning and the whole thing goes down from there because they’re all good. And I can say with certainty that I never walked in on story about a Thanksgiving bonfire which used, as fuel, Anhinga Press contest entries. And the general commentary about burning being the greatest pleasure these manuscripts gave him! But he used his same dry sense of humor to talk about himself such as his battle with cancer and, as he said, that was surely worth a few poems. It was a wonderful reading full of the kind of living and surviving and near dying that preoccupies all of us poets. His humorous chatter off the page, which was always entertaining, belied the real tenderness of his poems.

If you go in search of Paul Shepherd’s book, More Like Not Running Away, you’ll also discover that he has a big fan club. Of his book, Bob Shacochis said this, “Shepherd is a master craftsman, and the subtlety of his art, the unassuming elegance of its architecture, rendered me spellbound and finally grateful. I don't think I shall ever forget this fine book, its honest, guileless voice leading me along into the fire.” At the reading we learned from Janet Burroway (she introduced him), that Shepherd himself came from a rough background and there’s something both rugged and disarming about his prose whether he’s talking about the relationship the protagonist (Levi) has with his father, or how his father relates to the men at the bank. Shepherd is able to order language so that sentences seem like lines of poetry. In the beginning Levi tells us that his dad loves cantilevers. Since the story is about getting a loan to build a house, this sort of detail becomes important. Especially (and here’s the part about poetry) when a line like this line comes along, “It [the cantilever] defied everything that tried to pull the building down” and you know it could serve as an epigraph for the whole chapter. It’s this sort of lapidary writing that made for such a good reading.
-- Warehouse, January 17, 2006. Download Mp3

Readers: Doug Cox and Jennifer Perrine. Just before the end of the semester we had our last Warehouse reading. And it’s safe to say that it blew some others out of the water.

Doug Cox, having just trimmed the hair that inspired young men all around (even Brad Pitt once cited him as his own hirsute inspiration), took the stage first. Of many terrific poems, which articulate not just what’s going on inside, but what lie around us (e.g. the environment, music, politics), I think my favorites was, "Punching the Poets who Punch Right Back" which addresses a pantheon of poets: "You ain’t got it today do you Bishop?" Or "You call that a fucking line break, Hass?" And later these lines, "Sure as shit he’ll unleash it…O so sensitive." Which says as much about Doug as it does about the writers he admires.

Jennifer Perrine isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. Case in point: she started off her reading with an anecdote that immediately threw the train off the track until we could all agree that we were on board. That we were listening, not just to an astounding poet reconvene unusual events and sensory details from her childhood (how her mother ate dirt when she was pregnant; how her brother was born with his thumb and index finger conjoined, how Jennifer herself ate bugs; how she was riveted by the tattoos and the frank sexiness of her neighbor, Robin, who she named “my first stripper,” given the adjective by her mother). The anecdote she told was about this same mother “knocking over” a convenience store. I think that we all took the euphemism as some Atlas-style truth because who could conceive of mom-as-robber? This is the sort of upsetting of the apple cart that Jennifer is so good at, not for the pleasure of the act, but the pleasure of what comes after: the soft, red bruises of so much gleaming fruit.

So by way of the end, I’ll put a few lyrics here that Doug delivered from the song, “Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call”:

Oh, protect our secret handshake
once more with feeling.
Let the toast to absent members
push through the ceiling .
Before we say goodnight.
-- Warehouse, December 6, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Michael Mejia and Noy Holland. A native of Sacramento, California, Michael Mejia studied English at the University of Southern California and the University of Sussex, and Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. Currently he lives in Rome, Georgia, where he teaches creative writing at Berry College.

Noy Holland is the author of The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf), which was nominated for a National Book Award. She is an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Writers and Poets at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she directs the Writers in the Schools Project.
-- Warehouse, November 29, 2005. Download Mp3

Reader: Rick Moody. Rick Moody is the author of The Diviners, Demonology, The Black Veil, The Ice Storm (also a motion picture directed by Ang Lee), Purple America, Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award, and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most major publications and has been widely anthologized. He lives in New York.
-- Writers Harvest, November 21, 2005. Download Mp3

Reader: Reginald Shepherd. Reginald Shepherd received his B.A. from Bennington College in 1988 and M.F.A. degrees from Brown University and University of Iowa. He is the author of Otherhood: Poems (2003); Wrong(1999); Angel, Interrupted(1996); Some Are Drowning and was the winner of the 1993 AWP Award Series in Poetry.
-- Writers Harvest, November 21, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Betsy Carter and Tom Miller. Tom Miller started his reading with a quote from John Gardner who said that all books can be boiled down to two plots, “Either you go on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” If you didn’t find yourself at the Warehouse on Tuesday, you missed both the journey and the edifying strangers, but you can listen to the podcasts.

Betsy Carter, who kindly took questions, fielded one about writing fiction v. memoir, "Which is better?" Her answer came easily and almost with visible relief: "Fiction." And with that, I’ll quote what Inkwood Books has to say about, The Orange Blossom Special. "This debut novel is a graceful and compassionate story of a widowed mother and her adolescent daughter starting over in 1950’s Gainesville, with the true-to-life characters who enter their lives. Tender and achingly authentic life lessons about grief, racism, and love ­both young and mature - make a memorable contribution to Florida literature. Carter, acclaimed journalist and magazine editor, is also author of the best-selling memoir Nothing to Fall Back On.

Tom Miller reads with one prop: A Panama hat, which he soon lets us all know is somewhat of a sham. A sham? It turns out that Panama not only gets its canal and its rich little perch, but this allows it to have its name associated with many Latin American exports. For instance, the Ecuadorian chapeau that Panama takes credit for.

As a travel writer, Miller has made lots of discoveries--especially in places that constitute borders. Like the land between the States and Mexico and the great watery and political border that makes travel to Cuba all but impossible. He likes to spend enough time in the places he visits so he can get an authentic sense of its architecture--human and natural. The writing is rich and textured and because of his genuine love for what he does--it's a pleasure to hear.
-- Warehouse, November 8, 2005. Download Mp3

Reader: Ann Patchett. Taking the stage in cowboy boots and an attractive, unconcerned outfit, Ann Patchett looked cool. And I only mention this because I always size up the aesthetic choices of the readers, and because so much of what she would talk about had to do with, well, appearance. There was an ease about the way in which she illuminated her friendship with Lucy Grealy who is the subject of her memoir, Truth and Beauty. For those of you who don’t know, Lucy Grealy died a few years ago after suffering from cancer of the jaw which she was diagnosed with when she was nine. They met at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and completely redefined, as Patchett told us, the meaning of love. And if redefined seems hyperbolic—that may be true, but theirs was a friendship so full of mutuality, love, tenderness—it wasn’t always easy for others to understand. Not surprising when Lucy spent much of her life devastated by the reaction of others to her. As she says in her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, “I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I’ve spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.”

She didn’t go to Iowa for nothing. It’s lovely. Tune in.
-- Warehouse, November 1, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Josh Bell and Peter Quinn. Josh Bell, author of No Planets Strike, was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and received his B.A. from Indiana State University; his M.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and Paul Engle Fellow. His poems have appeared in such magazines as Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Fence, Hotel Amerika, Verse, and Volt.

Peter Quinn is a novelist and essayist, and a chronicler of Irish-America. A third-generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland, Quinn is the author of Banished Children of Eve, which won the American Book Award. An historical novel set amid the New York City draft riots during the Civil War, the novel combines Quinn's lifelong interests in New York City, Irish history and immigration, and the Civil War. Since 1979, Quinn has been a speech writer, first for New York Governor Hugh Carey, until he left office in 1982, and then for Governor Mario Cuomo from 1983 to 1985. He is the chief speech writer for Time Warner.
-- Warehouse, October 25, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Sean Millerick, Amber Coady, Zachary Hanson, Dustin Anderson, Andrew V. McFeaters, Kevin Derryberry, Stacey A. Suver, Marie Pecorari, Mariann Grantham, Allison McEntire. These weekly readings are part of a larger (proposed) 14 year study that Dr S.E. Gontarski has been running on James Joyce's momumental 20th century work: Finnegans Wake. This group, in its various premutations has featured a large number of MA & PhD students, a few faculty and visiting scholars, as well as a group of ambitious undergraduates. While critical discussion plays a considerable role in this group, it also provides us with what we want to present you with here: a chance to hear the language-formed music in Joyce's novel.

In his seminal work, ReJoyce, Anthony Burgess warns against over-explaining Finnegans Wake: "Let us not be too much tempted to drag the big dream up towards the light: shadowiness, confusion, the melting
of one personage into another, of youth into age, friend into enemy--these are the essence of the dream."

However, against that advice, it might be helpful to know a bit about what is going on in this reading--we are starting about halfway through the 13th chapter (or Book III, chapter I) on page 414. Here we begin with the fable of the Ondt and Gracehopper (or the Ant & the Grasshopper), move through an arguement between brothers Shem & Shaun over their respective writing abilities, the trip of Shaun downstream in a Guinness barrel, and end with a fond-farewell from a sister (Issy) to her brother Shaun on page 428.
-- Download Mp3

Readers: Nikki Louis and Steve Kistulentz. Last night: A grad student reading. I just have a few things to say:
1. About time
2. What a terrific night

To borrow from John Ashberry: “Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale, like a dozing whale upon the sea bottom…” Nikki Louis and Steve Kistulentz, Ph.D. candidates in fiction, are waiting—not for themselves to wake, but for the dozing world to wake around (and to) them.

Brava. Bravo.
-- Warehouse, October 18, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Joyelle McSweeney and Ann Fisher-Wirth. Apart from the fact that I had too much wine after the reading at Celia Daileader’s party. And other than the fact that Robin Goodman had to drive me home and god knows what I revealed from the passenger seat…I had a terrific time last night. Joyelle McSweeney and Ann Fisher-Wirth, though very different readers, were both charming, charismatic, and—what goes without saying—terrific poets.

In Joyelle McSweeney’s poem, “The Gray Pony,” we are introduced to lines like, “the fire rearranged itself with a pointed sigh” which is so exactly right, I begin to think that all fires have been waiting, until now, for someone to truly understand them. And so many of her renderings (“the ground is chapped”) seem just this way. When she utters, “I built this mechanism/jumped into its arms” I think that I might take up needlepoint just to copy these words into a sampler.

Ann Fisher-Wirth who has five children between the ages of 22-32 (I mention this because while she was on stage I thought of her kids reading her work and the impossible length of a day and how a life so full can find writing time), who is a teacher and an environmentalist and, if you don’t already feel a bit under-accomplished, does yoga on the lawn of William Faulkner’s former house. Jeez. And I’m just getting started. She thinks of all her poems as love poems of some sort so when such a simply gorgeous line like “I am yours, I am here” occupies the air, I think: this could be stitched into a sampler for my boyfriend. And I could blather on about myself and how many of her poems about her daughters, marriage, friendship I loved, but it’s not—I know—always about me. So let me just transcribe a few lines of her poetry here (disclaimer: unlike some of the lines I quoted above from both poets, I know that the following is exactly right):

Out of silence, the brimming lake, spills the waterfall.
Behind mountain, other mountains fade
until we cannot tell
what’s stone, what’s cloud,
and what the mark of time upon silk.
-- Warehouse, October 11, 2005. Download Mp3

Reader: Quang X. Pham. In April of 1975, Quang Pham was ten-and-a-half years old. He'd just finished the fifth grade in South Vietnam. His dad, working as a fighter pilot in the small country (Vietnam is about 1,000 miles long), returned each night for dinner with his family.

That night he returned in his usual flight suit and black boots and gathered his wife, son and daughters--six in total--onto the family's motor scooter, and began what would be their flight from Saigon. Quang describes the scent lifting from the family's green mango tree; the familiar-looking homemade bomb shelter and finally their poodle (the only dog the GIs didn't steal), lost in the dust kicked up by the retreating scooter. The family, he told us,
abandoned the dog just as the United States would come to abandon the South
Vietnamese.

This is a rendering of just a few paragraphs from A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey by Quang X. Pham. A book about the "scimitar-shaped" island, and his city, Saigon, which, as Quang describes, "is gone, but then again it isn't."

It's also a book about his father who spent twelve years in a prison camp before immigrating to California to be with his family, and Quang who joined the US Marines.

And this only begins to reveal what the book has to say, which has so much to do with recovering what is gone, and what is inextricably present in one's memories.
-- Warehouse, October 4, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Ilya Kaminsky and Jill Ciment.

Ilya Kaminsky

Sometimes the best way to describe a poetry reading is to let the poet speak for himself. This copy comes from Ilya Kaminsky’s website and contains what can be found in each of his poems: an imagination that seems to confess insights that get—exactly right—what it means to be human. That is, he sees extraordinary things in the quotidian, as though the possibilities offered by quantum physics are always visible to him.

"In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows: doves covered the main district and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbor's backyard producing a four-digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to whomever was on the line.

My secret: at the age of four I became deaf. When I lost hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolley, a one armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country..."

At the reading Kaminsky handed out his book, Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), so that we could follow along. I urge you to do the same! In fact, it’s a book that you’d be grateful to own since it won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2005 by ForeWord Magazine. It is marvelous.

Jill Ciment

We are taken to an island in the South Seas. A couple, Sara and Philip, disembark from the ship they’ve booked passage on to investigate Ta’un’uu, an island revered for masks and tattooing. What happens in the course of this chapter from Jill Ciment’s newest book, The Tattoo Artist, is harrowing. As Sara tries desperately and then vainly to get the attention of their ship, she comes to realize that at a distance they can’t distinguish her from the islanders and steer a course away from Ta’un’uu. Ciment’s prose is sharp and by the end of this chapter, one can’t help but feel a little desperate and utterly compelled by the protagonists.

Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. Her books include The Tattoo Artist, Teeth of the Dog and The Law of Falling Bodies; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life. She has been awarded two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
-- Warehouse, September 27, 2005. Download Mp3

Hurricane Katrina Benefit. Readers: James Kimbrell, Ken Foster, Elizabeth Dewberry, Virgil Suarez, Janet Burroway, David Kirby, Robert Olen Butler. The reading space is called the Warehouse because it once was just that. It’s a sprawling room that reaches as far back as it does up. Last night there wasn’t a single unoccupied space. People were standing/sitting/leaning wherever they could gain a purchase. With all those bodies, the room felt like mid-afternoon in Florida: damn hot.

Which made Ken Foster’s reading that much more moving. He wrote about evacuating New Orleans. He left with three dogs, three dog crates, on bag of dog food, one change of clothes and two bottles of wine—enough to last the night or two he expected to be away. As he read he had to repeatedly stop to catch his breath and the room, which had settled down to listen, came to a complete stop. Nobody coughed. Nobody shifted in their seat. The silence of so many people was as moving a tribute to what happened as the reading itself.
-- Warehouse, September 20, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Kirby Gann and Don Morrill One of my favorite lines from Kirby Gann’s reading comes in the following passage from his book Napoleon in Rags:

The nights at the Don Quixote – that sumptuous dive – held darker than nights elsewhere, even if the club sat huddled within the smacked heart of the city. As in the rest of America (and for most Americans), this heart rarely became an object of attention and care, more fretted over than attended to, arteries hardening without complaint, a condition forming without the host’s knowledge. Like the biological heart, one remained aware but avoided the subject. One leaves the heart alone and hopes for the best.

His prose is tough and revealing, like a drunk snuggling up to the bar, which also does double duty to describe the story itself. The line I love, “more fretted over than attended” refers to a heart, and to the Don Q, and the protagonist, Keebler Haycraft, who, along with the bar’s outcast and bohemian set, is less than attended to.

Don Morrill’s poetry is imaginative and surprising. Lines such as, “All the bereavements in you” (when talking to a pencil), “Scramble the midnight eggs” or “the Lord of night breezes” are ones I wish I’d written myself. And not only is the language rendered in a you’ve-totally-been-won-over kind of way, it manages to do so among love and heartbreak poems. At the reading, he revealed that his wife suggested he write a humorous poem. The closest he could produce was, as he put it, a curse poem; which, for the record, ends on the word inconsolable. He’s my kind of guy.
-- Warehouse, September 13, 2005. Download Mp3

Readers: Juan Carlos Galeano and Sheila Curran Juan Carlos Galeano is a poet, translator, and essayist whose work has appeared in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and Partisan Review. His collections include Baraja Inicial and Amazonia. He teaches at FSU in the Division of Spanish and Portuguese and tonight he is reading his poems in Spanish, while Ph.D. student, Nick Allin reads the English translations. Dr. James Kimbrell, Director of Creative Writing, provides the introductory remarks.

The second reader, Sheila Curran, introduced by FSU faculty member, Julianna Baggot, now lives in Tallahassee. She received a master's degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and is the author of the novel Diana Lively Is Falling Down, described as "Brilliant, touching, and funny as hell."
-- Warehouse, September 6, 2005. Download Mp3