POG & CHAX PRESS & THE CUSHING STREET BAR & RESTAURANT
present
A POETRY READING:

LAYNIE BROWNE
STEPHEN VINCENT
ROBERTO BEDOYA

Tuesday, November 13, 8pm
Cushing St. Bar & Restaurant
198 W. Cushing St. (1 block east of Main, just south of the Tucson Convention Center)

part of an ongoing "second Tuesday of the month" series (last reading before a winter break)


Laynie Browne is the recipient of the 2007 National Poetry Series award (chosen by Alice Notley) for The Scented Fox (Wave Books) and the author of several other books of poetry. Most recent are Original Presence (Shivistan Books, 2006), Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (2005, University of Georgia Press, winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series), and Mermaid's Purse (Spuytenduyvil, 2005). Her other collections are Pollen Memory (2003, Tender Buttons), The Agency of Wind (Avec Books, 1999), and Rebecca Letters  (Kelsey Street, 1996). She is also the author of a novel, Acts of Levitation (Spuytenduyvil, 2002), and of several chapbooks. She moved to Tucson in early 2007.


San Francisco poet, artist and essayist, Stephen Vincent, is author of several books, most recently Walking Theory (Junction Press) of which Ron Silliman has written: "... these are the poems Stephen Vincent has been preparing to write his entire life. They definitely pass the take the top of your head off test. I went cover to cover without even sitting up..." Vincent's popular blog may be found at http://stephenvincent.net/blog/


Roberto Bedoya is the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council.  He is the author of U.S. Cultural Policy: Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential (www.npnweb.org ) and Deliberative Cultural Policy Practices. His creative writing has appeared in numerous publications including CMYK, the Hungry Mind Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Movement Research Performance Journal, Five Fingers Review and ZZYZVA.  He is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO) a national arts service organization for individual artists and artist-centered organizations, primarily visual and interdisciplinary organizations.


Love Sonnet to Light, by Laynie Browne  (from Daily Sonnets)

I write myself this nightly
Gesture of the turning
This should remind me to blink
And waken to your proximity
Which is continually present to the
Extent that nothing is not of you
Inhale a curve of dark foliage
Look to your shadow made by the moon
Drink a preposition
Which brings me nearer
To my present location
If words were put to that
Sentiment the sentence
Would read-




from ELEGY IN RED, by Stephen Vincent (from Walking Theory)

6
For whom the bells?
For whom the chills?
The basketball net turns ashen,
twists to slant barely.
The slow, gray wind.

The more things die
the more they remain the ame.
                 Someone said that.
What do we do
in a period of multiple griefs?
                 Someone asked that.

On the desert floor
where the lake turns white,
a grain of salt will split a rock,
a stone, then two or three,
and then a whole field.
Each stone divided by
multiple cracks:
each division a slender
or thick petal,
jade, gray and pink,
stone flowers
everywhere.



The strength of the body, by Roberto Bedoya

Sharpening
the strange beast of belonging
to a
 
loose sovereignty

- as if
a weave
 
of kindness, generosity, justice
 
can claim
 
Sunday assurance
 
to ways
porous
of the many wants and
misses
inside the grip of amens, long a

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for more information call chax press at 520-620-1626

Chax Press & POG events are made possible in part by contributions from the Tucson Pima Arts Council and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, with funding from the State of Arizona and the National Endowment for the Arts.