Poetry at Robin's: Philadelphia: 5/26/09

Tuesday, May 26, 7PM: At Robin's Bookstore, 108 S 13th St in Philadelphia, S (Samantha Barrow) & M (Monica McIntyre) present ABUNDANCE -

featuring Katonya Mosely, Shayna Israel, Aaren Yates Perry and Charan Morris.

Philadelphia Poets Magazine Reading: 5/19/09

Tuesday, May 19, 8 PM: Poets & Prophets presents the 2009 Philadelphia Poets Magazine Reading. Featured readers include Mel Brake, Ashini J. Desai, Joseph Dorazio, and Ruth Rouff. Coordinated by Rosemary Cappello.

For more information: www.poetsandprophets.com

Joel Chace & Ron Silliman: 5/19/09: Philadelphia

Tuesday, May 19, 7PM: Robin's Bookstore, 108 S 13th St in Philadelphia, presents a reading by Joel Chace and Ron Silliman.

Joel Chace has published poetry and prose poetry in print and electronic magazines such as 6ix, Tomorrow, Lost and Found Times, Coracle, xStream, Three Candles, 2River View, Joey & the Black Boots, Recursive Angel, and Veer. He has published more than a dozen print and electronic collections. Recently out from BlazeVox Books is Cleaning the Mirror: New & Selected Poems, and from Paper Kite Press is Matter No Matter, another full-length collection. Two new chapbooks have also appeared: Scaffold, from Country Valley Press; and (b)its, from Meritage Press. For many years, Chace has been Poetry Editor for the experimental electronic magazine 5_Trope.

Ron Silliman has written and edited over 30 books to date, most recently The Alphabet... Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. He is a member of The Grand Piano collective.

Center City Poets Reading: 5/16/09: Philadelphia

Saturday, May 16, 2 PM: The Fox Chase Review presents The Center City Poets 2nd Annual Reading.

Featured Readers: Eileen Moeller, Rafi Lev Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, Cheryl Grady Mercier,
Elizabeth Quigley, Walt Feldman and Paul Selbst.

May 16th at 2pm ~ 3 Sisters Corner Cafe, corner of Barnes and Loney Streets ~ Fox Chase Section ~ Philadelphia, Pa. 19111.

http://foxchasereview.wordpress.com/

MPWA Poetry Contest - Deadline extended

Poetry Contest Deadline Extended:
Mulberry Poets & Writers Association (MPWA) has announced an extension of the deadline for the Eighth Annual Regional Poetry Contest. The new deadline for entries is May 15. (The previous date was March 30.)

The contest carries a top prize of $100, with $50 given to second place and $25 going to the third. Several will be recognized with an Honorable Mention. The winners will be invited to present their poetry at a public reading in Scranton in July, and winning poems will be published in the 2009 online edition of The MPWA Journal. The contest will be judged by Tara Shoemaker Holdren, Dr. David Elliott, and Susan Luckstone Jaffer. For further information, contact the contest coordinator, Richard Aston, at (570) 829-3163 or by e-mail at astonrj@yahoo.com.

Contest Rules:

· The contest is open to former and current residents of Northeastern Pennsylvania, except MPWA Board members and previous first-place winners.
· Each entrant is limited to a maximum of three poems.
· The entry fee is $2 for each poem submitted.
· An individual may win in only one of the first, second, or third place categories. If more than one of his or her poems rank in a winning category, only the highest will be counted for that person.
· Each poem must be original and unpublished.
· Each poem should be typed on a 8½ x 11" paper, single spaced, except for intentional spacing.
· Each new poem should start on a new sheet of paper. If it exceeds one page, please staple the pages together. Each poem should take a maximum of three pages.
· List the title(s) of your poem(s) in a cover letter including your name address, email, and phone. If a poem is untitled, use the first few words.
· Do not put your name on the poem.
· Keep a copy of your poem. Submitted poems will not be returned.

Send submissions to: MPWA Poetry Contest, P.O. Box 468, Scranton, PA 18501. Entries must be postmarked by May 15, 2009. Winners will be notified before July 1, 2009.

Julia Kasdorf & Katie Bode-Lang: Bellefonte: 5/13

Wednesday, May 13th, 6:30 PM:

Join Julia Kasdorf and Katie Bode-Lang, award-winning poets and Bellefonte residents, as they share and discuss their work with each other and their audience. Copies of their books will be available for purchase and signing.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf's poetry collections include Sleeping Preacher (1992) and Eve's Striptease (1998), both from the university of Pittsburgh Press.

Katie Bode-Lang's first chapbook, Spring Melt, was selected by G.C. Waldrep as the runner-up for the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in May from Seven Kitchens Press.

Call 814-355-1516 for more information.
Location: Centre County Library Historical Museum, 203 N. Allegheny Street, Bellefonte, PA.

Ted Mathys, Chris Martin: 5/12/09: Philadelphia

Tuesday, May 12, 7 PM: Poets Ted Mathys and Chris Martin will read at Moonstone Arts Center, 110A S. 13th Street, Philadelphia.

Ted Mathys is author of The Spoils ($16, Coffee House Press).

"[Mathys] is a bit like the mid-century poets of the New York School of poetry (which counts John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara among its members), only with the whimsy replaced by a menacing sense of claustrophobia. You find he can go from high culture to low in one stomach-churning swoop... wonderfully, disturbingly, upsettingly real. Reading Mathys, one remembers that poetry isn't a dalliance, but a way of sorting through life-or-death situations." - Los Angeles Times

Chris Martin is author of American Music ($15, Copper Canyon Press), recipient of the Hayden Carruth Award; he is the editor of Puppy Flowers.

Fox Chase Open Mic: 5/12/09: Philadelphia

Tuesday, May 12th, 7 - 9 PM: The Fox Chase Review and The Blue Ox Bistro Present 2nd Tuesdays Poetry Open Mic. Host: Diane Sahms-Guarnieri.

Please join us for the “2nd Tuesdays Poetry Open Mic” at The Blue Ox Bistro located at Rhawn St. and Oxford Ave in the Fox Chase Section of Philadelphia. Come early to sign up and enjoy the great atmosphere of The Blue Ox Bistro, excellent menu and ten rotating drafts on tap. Sign up early for the open mic by emailing foxchasereadingseries@yahoo.com.

Keystone Chapbook Series: Number 3: Lisa Sewell

Long Corridor: poems by Lisa Sewell. Number Three in the Keystone Chapbook Series from Seven Kitchens Press; winner of the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Prize. Selected by G.C. Waldrep:

"Some selves present as halls of mirrors, but for Lisa Sewell, the poetic self--the lyric self, the speaking I--inhabits a hall ofo texts, a palace of moments in which personal experience resonates literally with someone else's story. From Murder on the Orient Express to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Little House in the Big Woods to The Corrections, texts become sites against which a speaking self fragments, then constellates again as a sort of negative image through which the exigencies of our historical moment come into sharp focus. In these poems, King Lear and Ellis Island are joined at the spine, Iraq and Wharton's House of Mirth, New Orleans and Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. These lyrics suggest that in the end it may not be literature that haunts our lives, but our lives that haunt the longer, stranger, more oblique life of Literature."

$7.00

42 pages, 5.125 x 7.875 inches

ISBN-13: 978-0-9820372-4-9

Available May 1, 2009

LISA SEWELL is the author of two books of poems: The Way Out (Alice James Books, 1998) and Name Withheld (Four Way Books, 2006). She is also co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007). She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Recent work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, New Letters, Tampa Review, Laurel Review, The Journal and Colorado Review. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the English department at Villanova University.

Murder on the Orient Express (1976)

O summon me

first to the porter's compartment

to question in private my whereabouts,

my wardrobe, sleeping habits and origins

then with the governess and elder statesman

the small dark man with a womanish voice

to the velvet curtained rail car

scene of crimes

and in the voice of reason, tone that holds its own

but withholds judgment and hoards

its shocking revelations until the end

tell what we have done.

Be diminutive and mild, pink-cheeked

or darkly French with waxed mustaches

but choose an English and an explanation

each of us can believe, as pieces fall

as you expose what we never meant to show

through choice of adjectives, the way we mixed up

chicken pox with whooping cough or German measles,

by what we stole or secreted out of greed or curiosity

for lust or private gain or to protect, we tell ourselves,

the loved or unloved ones whose life and livelihood

we stepped back or out of the way of and let begin

its fall and steep climb from the mountaintop.

Show me the knife, my fingerprints

on the cabinet door, the terraced rice field

burned village nightly body count full terrain

of my part and my complicity

now that I am no longer young and no longer free

to point a knowing finger or to vanish

with the fuchsia kimono down the long corridor of history.

:: Lisa Sewell, Long Corridor