Images From East Liberty Pop Up Bookstore, Fleeting Pages

Checked out Fleeting Pages yesterday and got some shots of their unique inventory of Books, comics, zines and all kinds of things book and print related.

Right now the selection of several hundred books and magazines trends towards poetry, short stories, off beat fiction,Horror, political non fiction, travel and wonderfully strange and beautiful comics and zines. Also, there's a growing selection of books written by local authors exploring many aspects of local lore, you may not know about.

The inventory is still growing and being put out--You can still bring your stuff over--till May 13! Also, Fleetingpages is still open to ideas for lectures, readings, workshops, film screenings and performance events. Where's Tom Sarver?

Got a screed, a rant, a new set of lovely recipes or tips on growing arugula-bring it over. Also, they are open to a bigger selection of art.

More Small Press Tourism in Pittsburgh

As seen on the Short List in City Paper:
LITERARY READING:
Mike Faloon (stories) and James Jay (poetry)
with ArtNoose (zinester)
Monday, July 12th
7:00pm
Cyberpunk Apocalypse House
5431 Carnegie St
Upper Lawrenceville
Pittsburgh
Free/Donations Appreciated

I'm very excited to welcome writer and editor, Mike Faloon to Pittsburgh tomorrow, Monday, July 12 at the wonderful Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer's House. Mike will be reading from his new book of stories out on Gorsky Press, THE HANGING GARDENS OF SPLIT ROCK. He is touring with the poet James Jay, whose new book THE JOURNEYMEN, is also on Gorsky, a small press based in LA.

I have had the privilege of working with Mike through his truly great punk zine, GO METRIC, and I can attest to the fact that he's a hilarious storyteller. He also contributed to the Richard Leck Memorial Reading, and although he was not able to attend, you can see Tom Hendrickson reading Mike's very funny tribute to Richard on Youtube.


Do come out to the reading on Monday and support Small Press Tourism in Pittsburgh (Mike and James are on a reading tour from New York and Arizona respectively), the great venue Cyberpunk Apocalypse in Upper Lawrenceville, and three great readers: Cyberpunk resident Artnoose will represent as the local writer. And I can't promise, but there are often vegan treats at Cyberpunk events.

Read more about the books here.

Literary Pittsburgh: Readings Galore This Weekend

The next few days are packed with great readings: I’m exhausted just thinking about it!

Saturday afternoon, August 29th, 1:30pm: Autumn House at the Pump House. Pittsburgh’s own Autumn House Press will host one novelist and one poet at the historic
Pump House in Homestead: There’s a nice review of John Hoerr’s novel Monogahela Dusk in the City Paper this week; Hoerr is actually a long-time labor journalist, and this is his first work of fiction. I’m a big fan of Robert Gibb’s poetry, especially his Homestead Trilogy. Gibb will read at the Pump House from a new Autumn House volume of his work, What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979-1993.

Saturday night, August 29th: East End avant-garde publisher Six Gallery Press is holding their periodic Showcase (this one is called Hot August Night) with 14 readers from the Pittsburgh poetry underground. Digging Pitt blogger, videographer extraordinaire, talented poet, and charismatic reader Jessica Fenlon (pictured) will read from her new book of poetry, Spiritual Side Effects. Guest author Kevin Finn will read from his new chapbook, Exit Wounds (Ohio: Amsterdam Press), Six Galllery poet Michael S. Begnal is visiting from North Carolina, and all will share the stage with many other local talents: Renee Alberts, Nikki Allen, Jerome Crooks, Davka, Che Elias, Bill Hughes, Jonathan Loucks, Alexi Morrissey, Scott Silsbe, Ed Steck, Billie Steigerwald, Matt Wellins, and Don Wentworth of Lilliput Review fame. Local rock stars Colin Baxter and Julie Sokolow will provide the musical entertainment. ModernFormations at 4919 Penn Avenue, $5 at the door, 8:00pm, BYOB.

Late-night on August 29th (hey, you could make it to all 3 of Saturday's readings if you wanted to): KINETIX! (formerly Poetry…Yes!) is a new late-night poetry series that happens once a month and runs from 11:00pm-1:00am in the theater lobby at The New Hazlett Theater on the Northside. Featured Pittsburgh poets are followed by an Open Mic. $5 door charge; doors open at 10:30pm. (N.b.: the last 54C bus leaves Allegheny Center at 1:12 AM.)

Sunday August 30th at 2:00pm: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (Main library in Oakland) holds its weekly Sunday Poetry and Reading Series, featuring Chuck Lanigan’s presentation of fiction and oral history: To Be of Use: Stories of Labor and Identity in Southwestern PA. Free.

Sunday night, August 30th: The fabulous Typewriter Girls Cabaret will feature the fabulous Gist Street hosts as readers: poet Nancy Krygowski and fictionist Sherrie Flick with her new novel, Reconsidering Happiness. Poet Sandra Beasley, musician Steve Pellegrino, burlesque act The Bridge City Bombshells, and much more will round out the show. Howler’s Café in Bloomfield. Doors at 7:00pm, show at 8:00pm, $5.00 cover. See more info here.

Tuesday evening, September 1st: Outrageous blogger Maddox will be in town signing his book of “fratire,” called The Alphabet of Manliness. 6:00pm at Borders Eastside on Centre Avenue near Highland (aka Penn Circle South).

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.

Is This How We Treat Our Poets? Is This How We Treat Our Vets?

Richard Leck (1933-2008)

Words Like Kudzu Press poet, Richard Leck died in New York on December 19, and the Pittsburgh-based small press has been working non-stop to try to get him buried. He was a vet, a poet, a storyteller, an artist, an actor, a Greenwich Village cafe habitue, and a sanguine soul, but he died with no next of kin; his body is still in the New York morgue; WLK has been appalled at the amount of red tape involved and at the callousness of Veterans Affairs.

The Village Voice ran a great story yesterday and it got some attention from the NYC Mayor's Office of Veterans Affairs. If all goes well, the city may pay for a proper military burial after all. But they are waiting to hear whether the VA cares to approve this burial, which may put the process back to square one.

Richard was drafted and served in the US Army during peacetime between Korea and Vietnam. He saw young men die in combat training at Fort Dix, and served at the first Nike anti-aircraft missile base in New York. He wanted and deserves a dignified military burial in a national cemetery. The VA has been a stone wall: "This person is out of luck," is what one VA official told Richard's friend, Ms. Winn, when asking for the VA's help.

Digging Pitt implores our Pennsylvania readers to write a short note to Senator Arlen Specter, who sits on the Veterans Affairs Committee in the senate. We implore our New York readers to write to the Mayor's Office for Veterans Affairs. The politicians need to know that the bad press is indeed getting out: The Veterans Administration lets its vets fall through the cracks in life and in death.

Links for both Pennsylvania and NYC and suggested message are as below:

Pennsylvanians: For Arlen Specter's contact form click here.

New York City voters: For the Mayor's Office for Veterans Affairs contact form, click here.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A suggested message you can cut and paste is here:
[Issue: Veterans; or Subject: US Vet languishes in city morgue]


I read an article in this week's Village Voice online about recently
deceased US Army Veteran, Richard Leck. It's shameful to hear about
any of our vets enduring homelessness, and I hated to hear that Mr.
Leck may go to Potter's Field, or that his burial may be delayed any
further. Is this how we treat our vets? I hope you will see to it that
the VA gives him a proper burial.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Words Like Kudzu Press thanks you.

Summer Reading Series Includes Open Mic

I was really happy to find out that summer Tuesdays, Hemingway's "Cafe" and Jim Cvetic will host poetry readings by various Pittsburgh poetry ensembles, with open mic afterwards. They'll be at 8:00pm, with Free admission, in the Back Room of this Oakland bar. Personally, I've always wished that there were more non-University events going on in Oakland, which seems centrally located and bus-served enough to warrant it. But it seems a lot of the best hangout places were driven out of business, or just out of Oakland, before I got here.

Tonight's reading will feature writers from the SQUIRREL HILL POETRY WORKSHOP: Marilyn Bates, Nancy Esther James, Marc Jampole,Pam O'Brien, Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, Joanne Samraney "and maybe more."

Next Tuesday, May 29th, Jan Beatty's infamous MADWOMEN IN THE ATTIC will read--Beatty plus several other women writers TBA. Beatty, pictured above, is an amazing poet, a native of the Burgh, the host of a local poetry radio show, and has a strong following here—no doubt in part because she does readings with frequency. Many of us, myself included, would like to get recognition without leaving our attic, but alas. It helps to put the body out there.

See Pittsburgh poetry listings (and more info on Jan Beatty's radio show) here: www.tpqonline.org

Tuesdays through July 31st
Various Poetry Readings with Open Mic
Hemingway’s Café
3911 Forbes Avenue
Oakland/Pittsburgh
8:00pm, Free
412.431.POEM

If the Brillobox Were a Chapbook, This Might Be It

A Taste of River Water: An Anthology of Pittsburgh Poets is now available exclusively at Caliban Books on South Craig Street in Oakland. Contributors include Claire Donato, Jessica Fenlon, Kristofer Collins, Andy Mulkerin, anthology editor Ed Steck, Scott Silsbe (pictured above reading at the Six Gallery Press event at Mac’s Paperbacks in Cleveland), and numerous others from “the new Pittsburgh poetry.”

For only three bucks, check it out and see what you think.

WHAT UP, PITTSBURGH? Poet of the People, Martin Espada, read to a room full of history scholars, 4/14/07

Frankly, I was embarrassed. A Puerto Rican poetry student traveled here from Erie to see Martin Espada, one of his very favorite poets, read on Saturday April 14th at Posvar Hall, but almost no one from Pittsburgh’s literary community came. As far as I could tell no one outside of University of Pittsburgh (and some visiting University of Toronto history scholars) attended, and even then the audience was almost exclusively comprised of people who were involved in a History Department symposium to which the poetry reading was connected.

The reading was not sanctioned by the Cultural Trust or the Thomas Merton Center; it did not take place at the Shadow Lounge, or at the Brillobox, or at a Union meeting. But each of those audiences should have been there, and then some. Martin Espada is a poet who looks at history and its lessons (learned and unlearned), who has served as a lawyer for tenants’ right and immigrants’ rights and bilingual education, who grew up poor in a wretched neighborhood in Brooklyn, who has never stopped working for a living, and who writes to include working-class men and women--their resistance and their creativity and their humanity--in the annals of an American history which seeks to exclude them. “Most people are not aware that poetry in this country used to be closely tied to resistance and to a political and working-class spirit, especially in the 30s and 40s,” Espada told us. “That history was suppressed by something called McCarthyism. We are only now beginning to bring those writers and that history out of obscurity.” He marveled at the fact that “the Republican states--the people in power, using language for power--are referring to themselves as Red. It wasn’t so long ago that you could ruin a person’s life by calling him Red. Red was always our side, the color of revolution.”

Espada spoke with some disdain about the poetry that is most lauded today, which is “hip, cynical, detached, or worse, obscure in its meaning.” When asked about his own writing process, he made sure to warn of “anyone who tells you that ‘If you don’t write every day, you’re not a writer.’ If they claim that they get up at 5am every day and write for several hours, they are not telling you the whole story, which is that someone else is cooking for them, cleaning for them, doing their grocery shopping, someone is taking care of them. The vast majority of us will never have that luxury. Most of us, are, in fact, caretakers.” He went on to say that he usually writes on trains and planes, and in the terminals of those trains and planes. “I make a living, not from poetry royalties, but from running workshops and doing readings. That means I’m often traveling.” He said that “being a poet is the art of being a time bandit. This is a mercantile society. But I don’t get paid to write a poem. So I have to steal time from my life to write a poem. I steal time everywhere I can.”

Espada read us beautiful, lyrical, and impassioned poems, poems that held both outrage at injustices and a deep faith in human resilience, in vitality. Espada was a talented performer of his own poems, which often almost-literally sang off the page in his baritone English and Spanish. He read to us of his father, arrested in 1950s Mississippi for not moving to the back of the bus; he read to us of the Vietnam veteran-poets whose warnings about the nature of war were not heeded;he read to us of “Local 100,” the 43 union members who died working at Windows on the World, the World Trade Center, on 9/11; he read of the little-known Palm Sunday Massacre in Ponce, Puerto Rico; of the first 9/11, in 1973--the murdering, torturing, Nixon-sanctioned coup in Chile; of digging latrines in Nicaragua and watching a woman wash her dress and herself at the same time, for scarcity of running water. He spoke of the importance of bearing witness, the importance of not forgetting what came before, and the importance in his writing of combining memory and experience with analysis and meaning-making. “I have seen people live through powerful experiences, and not grasp what they mean, not understand where they fit into the scheme of things.”

When asked if he ever gets in trouble for the strong political stance he takes in his writing, Espada said no, that he “enjoys the freedom” of saying what he wants because no one is much threatened by poetry in America anymore. “The best place to hide a poem is between the pages of a book.”

On the other hand, Espada was once commissioned to write a poem for NPR. The finished work was written about an unnamed prostitute who was then the latest witness to come forward in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s innocence. The poem was banned from airplay.

Espada further spoke of the many people who had told him at his readings, “Poetry saved my life.” “And they mean it quite literally. People who were living as alcoholics, as addicts, people in prison, people living self-destructively, people living in hell and headed, literally, to an early grave, have told me that they discovered poetry, and that wanting to read it, and write it, and share it with other people, turned their life around. It made them want to live.” He shared a story of a poetry reading he gave in L.A., “A large man came up to me, a Puerto Rican covered in tattoos. He was intimidating--he was bigger than me! Then he told me, ‘Your poetry saved my life.’ He told me that he had been in prison, and he found one of my books. He said it gave him hope, and turned him around. Now he was studying poetry in college and planning to teach it in prisons and elsewhere. But the different thing in this story is that, he started to thank me, and then he began to cry. He broke down in deep, loud, racking sobs, in the middle of a crowded room! I took him aside where we could talk more privately, and he apologized for crying. I told him, ‘No, I am a poet. To a poet, tears are coins of gold! I’ve hit the slot machine right now.’ ” Espada continued, “There are people who are invisible in our history, who desperately need a mirror held up to them. I try in my poems to be the mirror that shows them that what they are doing, these working people all over the world, has creativity and dignity.”

So, Pittsburgh artists, event organizers, writers and poetry audiences—-was this low turn-out (among the non-history majors) a result of target marketing, or a ghettoized attendance? Was it too much to cross a bridge or a mountain, or just too much to cross the threshhold of perceived sub-divisions? Is Pittsburgh just big enough for its writers and audience of literature to be this complacent when such a relevant voice, in the prime of his creativity, comes through to speak and read? Is it some lack of communal forum, that there is not really a BUZZ off campus? I must admit, I’m truly baffled.

Don't Miss This Poetry Reading

Attention poets, writers, readers, spoken word artists, lyricists, afficianados of cross-culture, audiences who believe in supporting out-of-towners, Union members, New Yorker subscribers, literature lovers, star fuckers, and ex-pat Brooklynites!! Martin Espada, one of the most passionate and articulate living poets, will be in Pittsburgh to read this Saturday on Pitt’s Oakland campus, for free!

Born in Brooklyn in 1957, much of Espada’s work is drawn from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, which range from bouncer to tenant lawyer.

Find a selection of his poems here: martinespada.net

Martin Espada Reading: Saturday, April 14th, 5:30-7:00 pm, 2500 Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Oakland. Free and open to the public. Contact Professor Marcus Rediker for more details: marcusrediker@yahoo.com