Author: POETS LIVE

27. 8. 2017 John High, Hélène Cardona and Antonia Alexandra Klimenko will read new works from their new poetry books. Reading will begin 19hr at The Tennessee Bar

A recipient of four Fulbright Fellowships, John High has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (fiction and translation), the Witter Bynner Foundation, and Arts International. He is a former member of the Moscow Club Poetry and a founding editor of Five Fingers Review. Poet, translator, Zen monk—he has written ten books, including the novel, The Desire Notebooks. vanishing acts is the fourth volume in the interconnected series of poetry collections following here, a book of unknowing, and you are everything you are not. His translations of contemporary Russian poetry include books by Nina Iskrenko, Ivan Zhdanov, and Aleksei Parshchikov; he is the chief editor for Crossing Centuries—The New Generation in Russian Poetry. His translations of Osip Mandelstam have appeared in The Nation, Fulcrum, Denver Quarterly, Pen America, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Poetry. Recent readings include Istanbul, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, Hangzhou, Venice, and New York. Recent work has appeared in Verse, New American Writing, The Brooklyn Rail, Ugly Duckling Presse (6×6), Brooklyn Paramount, Poems by Sunday, Visceral Brooklyn, Conjunctions, Poetry Northwest, and Paris Lit Up. Poems from this four-book series have been translated into French and Russian for the Paris Ivy Series and The St. Petersburg literary journal, Kreshchatik. He has taught creative writing and literature in Moscow, Istanbul, Hangzhou, and San Francisco, and currently directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at LIU Brooklyn.

​​​​​​(Day 25. “Chao Chao Asks About Death,” ​​​​​​​Book of Serenity, Koan#63)

The boy stumbled over the words catching himself in weeds as sounds of laughter flew up from the circus & onto hills & into sentences & over soda pops & all about these vanishing acts into a feeling of you just you, not so easy—go easy, go easy man because syllables get stuck in places of beginning & ending & movies she gestures forth—go forth go forth—& all this while eyeing a horse & a saddle & a clock by the tents & jugglers, painted faces, fire swillers swallowers star gazers & what a carnival, what a night, right, & what, just what are these things these 10,000 things these blurrings & visitations of things seen in an eye of a blind artist or if not in each turning & churning & birding of clowns & merry go rounds & fleeting moments fleeting language itself not so unfullfilled yet hesitant, you touch the handles of her bicycle—hesitant & why hesitant when this wala wala boom boom hooray you say can hour the clock & clean the sock, hour the wow & heal the cow, hour the freedom & green or yellow or fusia balloons going up up up & balls in the air, all up in the air yes all up in the air & meaning—there you have it—shooting out of all these magic rabbits & hankies you pull from a hat 

http://johnhighpoet.tumblr.com/about

https://m.facebook.com/johnhighpoet/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/03/everything-for-me-is-translation-an-interview-with-john-high

27. 8. 2017 Hélène Cardona, John High, and Antonia Alexandra Klimenko will read new works from their new poetry books. Reading will begin 19hr at The Tennessee Bar

Hélène Cardona was born in Paris and raised all over Europe before settling in the US. She earned her MA in American literature from the Sorbonne, where she wrote her thesis on Henry James. She is the author of 6 books, more recently the bilingual collections Life in Suspension, called “a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse” by John Ashbery, and Dreaming My Animal Selves, described by David Mason as “liminal, mystical and other-worldly.” Cardona’s luminous poetry, hailed as visionary by Richard Wilbur, explores consciousness, the power of place, and ancestral roots. It is poetry of alchemy and healing, a gateway to the unconscious and the dream world.

Her translations include Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), winner of a Hemingway Grant; Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux); Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb, and Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona).

Acting credits include Chocolat, Jurassic World, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Hundred-Foot Journey, etc. For Serendipity, she co-wrote with Peter Chelsom & Alan Silvestri the song Lucienne, which she also sang.

To Kitty, Who Loved the Sea and Somerset Maugham
                                For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
                                It’s always ourselves we find in the sea 
                                                                      ―E.E. Cummings

The angel who smells of my childhood
My mother, piano and oboe
Whose face the icon reflects
Auburn hair like a Modigliani
Eyes the color of rain
Light caught by surprise
Whose presence the absence reveals
Whose laughter burns snow
Whose warm breath I breathed
This morning as I woke
The scent of gardenias whispering
I never left you
From Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry, 2016)
First published in Poems Dead and Undead (Everyman’s Library)

À Kitty, qui aimait la mer et Somerset Maugham
                                      Car quoi qu’on perde (comme un toi ou un moi)
                                      C’est toujours soi que dans la mer on retrouvera
                                                                         ―E.E. Cummings
L’ange aux senteurs de mon enfance
Ma mère, piano et hautbois
Dont le visage se reflète sur l’icône
Cheveux auburn, tel un Modigliani
Les yeux couleur de pluie
Volée par la lumière
Et son absence qui ravive sa présence
Son rire qui enflamme la neige
Son souffle chaud que je respire encore
Et ce matin au réveil
Le parfum des gardénias qui murmurent
Je ne t’ai jamais quittée
De La Vie Suspendue (Salmon Poetry, 2016)

27. 8. 2017 Hélène Cardona, John High, and Antonia Alexandra Klimenko will read from their new poetry books. Reading will begin 19hr at The Tennessee Bar

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary Tambimuttu of Poetry London–-publisher of T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. After his death, it was his friend the late great Kathleen Raine who took an interest in her writing and encouraged her to publish. Although her manuscript was orphaned upon “Tambi” s passing, her poems and correspondence have been included in his Special Collections at Northwestern University. A former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, Klimenko is widely published. Her work has appeared in (among others) XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) The Poet”s Quest for God Anthology, CounterPunch, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology,  The Rumpus, Levure Litteraire, Paris Lit Up, Knot Magazine, Big Bridge, The Opiate, Writing for Peace, Strangers in Paris—New Writing Inspired by the City of Light, Occupy Poets’ Anthology (in which she is distinguished as an American Poet), and Maintenant : Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the Writer/Poet in Residence for SpokenWord Paris.

Beautiful Lies

Don’t be a stranger !
you said
Just come as you are
if I’m still around
that is
and if you’re not
well then
come as you aren’t

but come nonetheless
ready to peel paint
and poems off every wall
to bid proper adieu
to this tortured chamber
with its weeping window
with its hardwood soul
with its wounded lilies
still licking salt from their pointy spears

Come join me
you said
for
a last little Nothing
before
we leave
all this
behind

Oh
and
if by chance
you just happen
to pass a loaf of bread
disguised as a sandwich
or a bottle of water
impersonating Merlot
Hmmm Swiss cheese could be nice
Yes Swiss is neutral territory
but without the bulletholes this time
or just some raw flesh
with a charming garnish
you know
bring her along too

We’ll make a night of it–
a fright of it–
and the rockets’ red glare
the bombs bursting in air
Blonde Bombshells
brunettes redheads deadheads

if they’re still around that is
(you fired your machine gun laugh)
A real party–
a Socialist Party
with red herrings
and my pasta ala pesto
Green Party manifesto
(Not to forget onion soup
sniff sniff
I blubbered)

And
we’ll stay up late
only to fade
into the suncontrollable light
Up
so we can make Art
and Love
and wordless words
like ooh lala and lahdeedah
And
tell each other
beautiful lies    like
we’ll meet again
but always in the next life

And if
we should pass one another
on the edge of the Unknown–
the brink of unbearable being
we’ll promise to nod
and look the other way
you said you said
with your one arm missing–
your eyes– two flashing fish
swimming in pools of blood–
to look the other way

And
if by chance
I said
you plunge your salty spear
into the random dictionary of my grief–
this life I live by rumor–
if by chance
I
should shuffling one day
find you
on a blind alley in Paris
in the urinal of Forget
the fountainhead of Remember
or

pissing under
some other melting definition–
a bridge of conjoined parentheses–
the footnote’s crucifix of stars

please
pretend you don’t know me
that I may recognize you at once
for the stranger that I am

know you
by your ordinary ready-made smile
the one that bleeds offstage
in the unsung cacophony
of your cabaret heart

know you
for your violation of syntax
for your wanton obscurity
looking for a cafe noir identity
to call its own
No one not even
our literary movement
nor the crystal unconscious secondhand emotion
of the astral ticking clock
can claim the iconic Nothingness of you
shattering every mirrored reflection
that has gone and come before you
Everybody is Nobody to Somebody
I sighed
(disguised as myself)
So
if by chance
we should meet–
my friend–
in the middle                                                                                                                                                                     of this sentence–
surely a life sentence sans paroles—
or between the bloodied wine-stained sheets
on some other crumpled page    in time
remember
please

just
come as you aren’t
but come

https://spokenwordparis.org/about-us/antonia-alexandra-klimenko/

Merci Beaucoup to all the poets that joined us this season. Merci, merci, merci beaucoup to the venues that hosted us Berkeley Books Of Paris, L’Openbach and Tennessee Bar. It’s been an inspiring season. Poets Live is now on vacation until Septembre 2017. Off to indulge in ancient writers yoga until then.
((((((( Have An Inspiring Summer )))))))

25.6/2017 Lara Stapleton, Bruce Edward Sherfield, Ana Seferović & Kirsty Allison will be reading @ Tennessee – Paris 12, rue André Mazet 75006 Paris (France)

Lara Stapleton is the author of The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing, a Pen Open Book Committee Selection and an Independent Booksellers’ Selection. Her poetry, essays, and stories have been published in dozens of periodical, including the LA Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, and Glimmer Train. She co-edited two anthologies, Thirdest World (Factory School) and 25 Very Good Stories (Soft Skull Press). She is now at work on a television project about antebellum New Orleans. Born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan to a Filipino and Irish-American family, New York City is now her home.

Excerpt from new work:

“My friends have become brilliant with insult. They speak of his hands and his urine stream. They call him demoralizer-in-chief, cretinous. They are finding obscure terms from the Norman rule of England, these are writers, after all. They call him the Performance Artist, they pun with words for ass and bowels. They mock his hair and his orange tan and his butt-mouth and his penis. 19-kinds of stupid, and bad smelling. They notice he’s made his daughter first lady (an abuser never wants to honor his wife). They mock his small vocabulary. We are appalled, indignant. We are more of a we…everyone on my social media says “we” meaning all of us who think this is wrong, every shade of us. We like the CIA better than we used to. We think Nike and Coke, those flesh-eating monsters, with their multi-culti commercials, are on our side. Alliances in a game of thrones are anything but noble, they are only cunning.”

https://www.amazon.com/Lowest-Blue-Flame-Before-Nothing/dp/1879960540

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-879960-54-1

25.6/2017 Bruce Edward Sherfield , Ana Seferović & Kirsty Allison will be reading @ Tennessee – Paris 12, rue André Mazet 75006 Paris (France)

I’ve always been an UFA, an unidentified flying artist, dividing my career between dance, acting, songwriting, rap, composing, collage, voiceover, and his biggest passion: the written word.

I have a BFA(Biggest Fluke of ALL?) from the University of FLorida in collage, painting and performance.

I’ve done the music thing with bands like Spontane, Versus and Sophia Lorenians, at many festivals like Rock-en-Seine, GaroRock, even the TV show One Shot Not. Too many albums to count right now…

3-time co-editor/designer of the Bastille Lit Magazine of SpokenWord Paris, and co-host of a weekly writing workshop at Shakespeare & Co. since 2011.

In 2014, I gave my voice to the documentary, ìVoyage en Barbarieî which won numerous international awards, including the Albert Londres.

In 2015, I taught poetry/slam/hip-hop to young writers for the US Embassies in the Congo, Senegal and Niger.

In 2016, he was invited to Conques to give an art-therapy workshop against the trauma of torture.

He collects typewriters and donates them to kids and writers and his first sci-fi novel is almost dans la boite!

….

One Soldier’s Logistics of Trenches

(counts his breaths)
“One day,” a soldier says to his mates, “a man invented this soap but it didn’t work so well. After you washed your hands, the blood was still there. So this man invented a special shampoo that made lots of suds. It smelled so nice as it seeped through your skull, as it cleaned out the mind and whatever happened to be on that mind at the time. It seemed to make a difference.”

(Shovels and bowls are passed out)
“A real difference,” he continued. “It washed away the sound of bones opening, the far cast on bloated faces, the loss of undergarments, and remember I told you that nice aroma the shampoo had? Well, that aroma also could dry up a trickle of bile, calm a heaving stomach, or deafen the spray of cholera hitting the bucket.”

(Crouches. Finds a man’s billfold.)
“One could lose count of the bodies, strewn like wet leaves in a park, half-frozen neighbors no longer of any concern. This shampoo was more than fantastic. It worked like a miracle—lack of recognition of a friend, Ah! This is the baker, who’d put warm bread in everyone’s hand. It’s funny. That same bread is now in some corporal’s belly. You see, I can’t recall the baker’s name, but I still smell the dough, though. Tell me if you find his arms.”

(pats down a mound)
(rinses face in ice-cold cistern)
(Shares towel with the others)

“Use it in the day, but sparingly,” he said. “Share the magic! We dig and burn again tonight.”