All-Star Poetry Line-Up September 27 at Midtown Scholar!

Christine O’Leary-Rockey, John Destalo, Julia Tilley Featured at Midtown Scholar 

Christine O’Leary-Rockey, John Destalo, Julia Tilley star September 27 at Midtown Scholar’s Poetry Thursdays.

The Midtown Scholar is located smack-dab in the center of Harrisburg’s vibrant Midtown "cultural corridor" at 1302 North Third Street.

This all-star literary event is hosted by the Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel. A brief open reading, which begins at 7pm, will precede the feature presentation.

Bios & Pix for the features:

Julia Tilley hosted the Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel’s Poetry Thursdays for several years, was poetry editor of Steel Point Quarterly, and served as part of an editing group for the Harrisburg Review. She currently edits Treasure Trove Poetry Project, a poetry vending machine journal, and is currently a writer in residence for Megan’s Closet, an online poetry journal. She was co-founder, with Maria Thiaw, of T&T Press.

Tilley was Creative Director for A Poets’ Tour of Harrisburg (Good Sport Press, 2006), a print and spoken word CD anthology of poems inspired by Harrisburg, PA. Tilley was art editor for Hard Reality, a Paco-book by Marty Esworthy. She edited the anthology, Herstory, 2003, sponsored by the Center for Women’s Creative Expression in Harrisburg.

Anticipating You (Crosstown Press) her first chapbook, debuted in February 2003. Her work has been published in Shirazad, Magera, Haggard and Hallo, the People’s Poet, City Beat, Experimental Forest, Tarnhelm, Beauty for Ashes, Harrisburg Review, The Sunday Suitor, Tucumcari, Steel Point Quarterly, and other journals.

John Destalo lives in Harrisburg but is originally from Pennsburg, PA a small town in Montgomery County. It was an industrial community with railroad tracks running right through the community, but when John was growing up the tracks weren’t used very much so he spent many hours wondering along the tracks thinking to himself, dreaming of being either Socrates or a hobo.

He first started writing his thoughts down about ten years ago using simple words to explore complex ideas, creating what he calls his expressions. He began this exploration as a conversation with himself and then eventually started sharing his conversation with others through the Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel Open Readings and has become a regular participant.

He then expanded his interests in writing to creating ways of displaying his work through postcards, bookmarks, brochures, and booklets. He has self-published a few booklets including I want to be a star, Being Human, and Afterbirth which are available through Lulu.com and recently published his first book through PostDada Press titled Raw: Exposing the Untamed Mind which is available at The Midtown Scholar Bookstore on the bottom shelf of the local authors where they place their most dangerous and disturbed minds.

Christine O’Leary-Rockey is a poet, philosopher and a professor and with a tendency to lose things and incur student loans for frivolous subjects. Greatly influenced by W.B. Yeats, e.e. cummings and mystics such as Julian of Norwich, St. Francis of Assisi and Shel Silverstein, she has failed to come to terms with any real religious identity and is open to suggestions…. She’s been published in a variety of state and local publications, including The Fledgling Rag, The Experimental Forest, Steel Pointe Quarterly, Harrisburg Magazine, and Megaera.

Christine is a charter member of Harrisburg’s infamous (almost) Uptown Poetry Cartel and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in November 2007 by Iris G. Press.

You can read her poetry in The Fox Chase Review at this link: http://www.foxchasereview.org/11June/ChristineOLeary-Rockey.html

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Everyone was signing la cucaracha within the lines!

Flattening & layering. At close range the lines simply do not reveal themselves. It is only by positioning oneself

within a line so that it stretches away to the right that it has any clarity.

Denise Levertov's idea of organic form, as opposed to blank verse, is a way to begin an aesthetics of modernist
poetry. By blank verse is meant a recording each line as thought or unit or entity. By organic form: the poem as
a whole entity, a cross-section of time and place, a constellation that captures a particular experience, a
particular-in-time. In Coolidge, the experience captured is the one set down, internal to the individual poem, to
its compositional integrity, its limits. Internal to the poem is the experience it is about: the "inscape" of it.

interval

So
not the recording of a reality outside the poem but the reality of the experience in it-or perhaps-during it. What
this process reveals is that which is intended-designed, chosen, picked, arranged, programmed, judged,
manipulated, decided –aesthetical or ethical or moral or political-in other words, that which is human and
which is particular of each human.
Which says nothing of the reference of any phrase or image or element. But the individual reference is
surrendered to the overall reductionista.

 

 At first, stretching the poems in SPACE, a particular phrase sounds right seems well placed, and I attend to a
variety of elements-internal balance, non-syntactic juxtaposition, pun & rhyme & allusion, assonance,
dissonance, alliteration. But a nagging emerges: Is this all there is to it? A glistening surface? A dazzling facade?
Are these only automatons, patterns, mere programmes—with nothing intended about them, nothing of
human meaning? Just intellectual designs? -I feel I need a meaning to accompany this surface of words, to
reassure me that they are about something, mean something. I want a way of reading these words, a way of
interpreting them, that yields a fact, story, statement to accompany this surface. —Here the meaning seems to
lie in the surface. The (outer) surface has collapsed onto-become-the (inner) meaning: so that meaning does not
accompany the surface of words but is simultaneous with it.
Take a line. What is it about? What is it referring to? What picture can I think of to replace it?
It is as if it doesn't care about me but just stares. (He, She, ---.) (Trees, Rocks, Planets, Stars.) Still, I am inside
it as much as under or across. I stare back at myself.

 

 In Coolidge, a poetry of elimination: stripping away any thing that distances, a reducing to bare form, aesthetic,
way of seeing, pure judgement (within the limits of time and place alone).
Because of the multiplicity of ways any of the poems can be interpreted, a critical reading gets bogged down
into diversions and limitations. It is possible to point to directions or ways of meaning, as well as certain textual
qualities, but the poems themselves seem to show these up as incompetent.
For instance, here are some textual remarks on "Calypso" "is et clastic": existential assertion of the type of thing
it (the poem, the experience in the poem, the experience of the poem) is, "clastic", its density plastic (words as
shape) and classic (poetically classical in its use of assonance, alliteration, etc.). "bill & wide": its dimensions, as
also "two wide" and "mixed matted". "Trad stone dumb"-descriptive of what it is, as traditionally stone dumb,
i.e., brute silent presence, dumbly speaking this thing, stoneness. "links": what it does. Single words filling a
line I read as verbs, assertions about it-that which is, becomes, here, the subject-i.e., it links, it keel, it dimes, it
ponds-files, reels, says-it ultimately language, which does all these things, it says and shows what saying is, a
link, mixed, matted, keeling-making tropes that gab.
Throughout his work, Coolidge uses phrases-word clusters-that have a gooeyness and gumminess, a thickness of
texture, hard, ungiving and indigestible-"clump bends trill a jam" "mid punt egg zero" "copra stewage"
"globule" making the poems dense and heavy, filling their space with a high specific gravity that weighs them
down to earth, keeps them resistant to easy assimilation, lets them hold their particular space through time.

The terms of a statement are not assumed. Words are placed. A test (Zukofsky's Test) is that writing

abstracted, subjected to external procedure, still maintains itself. Start anywhere. Later, every word, every part

of the whole, has the same structural weight. "As if words themselves had been questioned and forced to give up

their hidden meanings." Can writing be taken apart with no loss? An "objective" pressure is applied to

language. "A kind of allover structure," structure at points all the same. A writer is by vocation lost in time.

Anything can be by nature proposed. The growing layers of clouds might scour one's brains of worldly

thoughts. Words subjected to a radical procedure. The entire work brought back in on itself every time.

Reading against background noise, dimensionless in character. To follow those returning birds would strain my

eyes. There is no clear line.

The counter-clockwise motion of most sounds in the head. I can convincingly absent myself from any

situation. I was there. Industrious silence-ever a word source. The will is likely to be named. The past

contributes. I can move forward in a straight line. A sentence is a completed thought. I to further what I say. So

a long work will provide a power in its own right. I speak from the point of initial response. Lost in time.

Flattening & layering. At close range the lines simply do not reveal themselves. It is only by positioning oneself

within a line so that it stretches away to the right that it has any clarity. And the definition or emergence of

distinct figures occurs as the distance resolves. A long-range view by the effect of perspective compresses the

length and foreshortening reinforces the edges.

You are not I. No one but me could possibly be. I know that, and I know where I have been and what I

have done ever since yesterday

when I walked out the gate during the train wreck. Everyone was signing la cucaracha! Saved their voices. Better visuals.

Gloriosky flattening & layering.

    

Michèle Métail

Michèle Métail studied German and Chinese. Since 1973, the year of her first public performance, Métail has been broadcasting her work in so-called publications orales, in particular ‘Poème Infini – Compléments de Noms’, which is a single long modulation through a variety of languages and dialects. In the author’s view, the projection of words into space is “the ultimate stage of writing”, the affirmation of presence within language.

Characterized by a rhythmical and musical approach of the text, and sometimes accompanied by slideshows, musicians or taped sound, oral publications can take anything from ten minutes up to several hours. A public-address system is always used, in which the microphone serves as a musical instrument which enables bodily sounds to be associated with the actual vocal emissions: the sounds made by the mouth, breath, tongue clicking. It also enables subtle use to be made of pianissimo nuances. The voice’s parameters – nuances, intensity, speed and character – are organised according to predetermined configurations, which may be related to the physical location of the reading.

 

Michèle Métail wird 1950 in Paris geboren. Sie studiert zunächst Germanistik, anschließend Sinologie. Ihre Doktorarbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Formenvielfalt der chinesischen Poesie.

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