Literary Pittsburgh--Get Your Readings Here

There's lots for the literary audience to love this month. The following are only SOME of what's out there in Steel City in the next few weeks:

The ever-popular Gist Street readings happen tonight in Uptown. Emily Mitchell (who teaches writing at nearby WVU) is the featured fiction reader, and Jeffrey McDaniel (who has published on Manic D Press and University of Pittsburgh Press) will read from his poetry. The Gist Street readings start at 8:00 but doors close when the place hits capacity--go early to ensure your seat! Door charge, $5.00, held at James Simon’s sculpture studio, 305 Gist Street. For more info and directions: giststreet.org

On the other side of town, at the lovely Kelly Strayhorn Theatre in East Liberty (5941 Penn Ave on Penn Circle), you can see spoken word and music with performers like Human Nature hosts, Yah Lioness and Gene Stovall, Human Nature house musician Hambone Jenkins, DJ Omar Abdul in the front lobby, and more. The event is called KST Live, costs $5.00 and starts at 7:00pm.



Tomorrow, Saturday February 7th, there's a great lineup at Most Wanted Fine Art Gallery at 5015 Penn Avenue. Calling themselves the Six Degree Reading, emerging poets Renée Alberts, Sophie Klahr, Holly Coleman, Michelle Stoner, Jerome Crooks, Nikki Allen, and Jason Kirin will read starting at 7:00pm, also for $5.00.

Mid-month, the New Yinzer's reading series, TNY Presents, features Gist Street host Sherrie Flick with fiction, Patti Emory with poetry, and indie rocker and dramatist, Julie Sokolow with fiction. February 18th at ModernFormations, 8:00pm, $5.00.

Pittsburgh's own poetry powerhouse, Autumn House Press will host two readings for their anthology, When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women edited by Andrea Hollander Budy. A book launch will be held at Chatham University on Tuesday, February 24 at 8:00 p.m. in the James Laughlin Music Hall (Welker Room). Featured readers will be Andrea Hollander Budy, Toi Derricotte, Sheryl St. Germain, and Judith Vollmer. Then on Friday, February 27 from noon to 2:00 p.m., there will be a "Reading & Conversation" for the book at the YWCA Greater Pittsburgh at 305 Wood Street, Downtown. There will be readings by Andrea Hollander Budy and two residential clients of the YWCA. Both Autumn House events are free.



Six Gallery Press is running a showcase reading of their authors later in the month, called The Big Dig. Saturday, February 28th at ModernFormations Gallery on Penn Avenue, join Renée Alberts, Jessica Fenlon, Dana Killmeyer, Jerome Crooks, Nikki Allen, Karen Lillis, Che Elias, Jonathan Loucks, Kristofer Collins, John Thomas Menesini, Scott McClanahan up from West Virginia (he was a show-stealer last time), Alexi Morrissey, Scott Silsbe, Bill Hughes, and the inimitable Ed Steck for a combination of poetry and fiction.

Also, Pittsburgh press, Words Like Kudzu, thanks all who emailed and called on behalf of their poet, Richard Leck. He was buried with dignity in a modest military ceremony at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island on January 23, 2009, and the New York City Mayor's Office paid for it. You can read the follow up Village Voice article here.

ADA LIMÓN WILL READ FRIDAY NIGHT 11/3/06 AT GIST STREET

Author of a new Autumn House poetry book, Lucky Wreck, reads Pittsburgh

Thursday, November 2nd: Ada Limón and Ellen McGrath Smith read to a modest-sized but alive and attentive crowd, at lunchtime in University of Pittsburgh’s Book Center. Limón was (is) visiting from Brooklyn and Smith is a local writer; the poets were hosted by the South Sidepublisher, Autumn House Press.

Each poet had a talent for marrying outer observations with an inner life both lived and image-ined, and translating the resulting fusion into writing that wants to be read and heard. In each writer I enjoyed witnessing a similar struggle-—the struggle to illuminate the (necessarily-dark) inner world, and the struggle to articulate the negotiations of moving through the world in a (dynamic, fragile, female, thinking, feeling) body.

Smith made me laugh out loud when she read a poem about the 1960s, when (she claims) everyone but everyone smoked cigarettes. She gave us a list of smoking types, the usual suspects and the unlikely (like dancers), and read it in a sort of jaded, motherly, what-we-didn’t-know-then way, but after she ended the poem commented, “I still haven’t quit.”

In another set of poems she read (these will be included in an Autumn House anthology on poetry and prayer), “I wrote about [yoga] positions that reminded me of different alcoholic beverages,” she said. She took both of these themes to another place entirely, combining in one work the images of Rolling Rock’s brew-factory in (nearby) Ligonier, drinkers imbibing the green pastures of Western Pennsylvania, and her body’s position releasing her energy like a stampede of wild horses inside her.

Some other lines of Smith’s I particluarly liked: “Crush the weak/ The Hum-Vee’s on the street declare.” Speaking to a stranger (“like Jesus, he didn’t look respectable”) who would help her after her car died (“a white corpse on the side of the road”), she asks, “Can I trust you?” While they drove, “He told me August Wilson’s real name.”

Limón was a warm and generous reader, who started by thanking Smith and expressing her delight in discovering her as a writer, and in being in Pittsburgh for the first time.

Limón’s poems often circled back on themselves with a drunken, dream kind of logic. (Indeed, one set of poems actually was a set of sonnets linked by the first and last lines, a seven sonnet “crown.”)

In one work, she “dreamt the word ‘Philadelphia,’ ” and she wonders aloud what that dream-word could mean. “...you want to cry or pray but because you’re no good at either, you tell everyone to leave you alone...., maybe she could call that feeling, ‘Philadelphia.’ ”

In a poem to her lover: “I want to know some things for certain, and other things for vague.” She tells him that she doesn’t want to know his zip code, his state bird, or anything that could helpher pinpoint his whereabouts, because when she finds him, she knows “for certain” what she’ll want to do with him.

Yet another poem spoke of the pleasures of longing to be somewhere else vs. the luxury of wanting to be where you are, which she did once when swimming in a particular river: “But how do you hold a river in your head/ before it turns straight and black/ like some mean road rolled out before you.”

You should keep your eye out for Ellen McGrath Smith, who’s sure to read in town again, and you should go see Ada Limón, who is “unsure if I am jealous of the web or the fly,” read tonight at Gist Street. And if you go, you should go early. I’ve heard this reading series is getting so popular that they sometimes have to lock the doors a half an hour before start time.

Ada Limón reads with Richard Jackson: 8pm Friday, November 3rd, at the Gist Street Reading Series, 305 Gist Street, Uptown, http://www.giststreet.org/