Category: poetry

Rooftop Poets party tonight, 8 p.m.

View of Asheville from the Roof Garden

The sun is setting. The full moon is rising. The room is set up for tonight’s poetry reading and jazz show. The dark mocha stout cupcakes with Bailey’s frosting look tasty. The supremo chocolate rum balls look like they could break several Prohibition-era laws. Time to get ready for the show.

The doors open at 7:30PM and the event begins at 8PM. Tickets are $10 each. Guests arriving at the Battery Park Hotel will be let in by a doorman who will have your name on a guest list.

See you all in less than two hours!

Poetry at the Roof Garden

Roof Garden Ballroom

Time to set up the Roof Garden of the Battery Park Hotel for tonight’s Prohibition-era poetry reading and jazz show.

More event details are here: link.

Poetry and Jazz at the Roof Garden

Battery Park Hotel: Roof Garden

In September an idea was born to hold a poetry reading under a full moon at the Roof Garden of the Battery Park Hotel. Tonight is the culmination of that idea.

Few people have access to the Roof Garden. Join the Rooftop Poets for a fine evening of poems, songs and full-moon revelry. Doors open at 7:30PM and the event begins at 8PM. Tickets are $10 each. Guests arriving at the Battery Park Hotel will be let in by a doorman who will have your name on a guest list. If you’re not on the guest list, you have to ask yourself, why not?

Tonight’s Rooftop Poets

Historic Battery Park Hotel

After some homemade latte and a walk through Asheville’s autumn splendor, I’ll wrap a couple last minute details and then head downtown to the Battery Park Hotel.

For tonight’s event, the doors open at 7:30PM and the event begins at 8PM. Tickets are $10 each. Guests arriving at the Battery Park Hotel will be let in by a doorman who will have your name on a guest list.

Tonight: Rooftop Poets: with music by Vendetta Creme and Aaron Price

Listen to music samples of Vendetta Creme, the featured musical guests for the Roof Garden event. The doors open and the band starts playing at 7:30 p.m. The poetry reading begins at 8 p.m.

A poetry reading and jazz show on the Roof Garden of the Battery Park Hotel

Rooftop Poets
Barbara Gravelle, Matthew Mulder, Brian Sneeden
with music by Vendetta Creme & Aaron Price
1 Battle Square, Asheville, North Carolina
Friday, October 22 · 8:00pm – until
doors open at 7:30pm — event begins at 8:00pm

In celebration of the publication of Barbara Gravelle’s latest book, Poet on the Roof of the World, join the Rooftop Poets under a full moon on the Roof Garden of the Battery Park Hotel for a Prohibition-era poetry reading, book-signing and jazz show.

Local poets Barbara Gravelle, Matthew Mulder and Brian Sneeden will perform alongside the French jazz music sensations Vendetta Creme and Aaron Price at the Roof Garden of the illustrious Battery Park Hotel.

Tickets are $10 and include a signed and numbered, limited-edition, 64-page book of poems featuring the work of all three poets, as well as complimentary light refreshments and hors d’oeuvres.

Few people have access to the Battery Park Hotel’s Roof Garden. Join us for a fine evening of poems, songs and full-moon revelry.

Space is limited. Reserve your tickets today by emailing: info@coffeehousejunkie.com

The evening’s cast of characters include:

Barbara Gravelle, author of several poetry books including, Keepsake, Dancing the Naked Dance of Love, and her latest collection of poems, Poet on the Roof of the World.

Matthew Mulder, one of the original members of the Traveling Bonfires, his poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Small Press Review, The Indie, H_NGM_N, and other publications.

Brian Sneeden has produced, designed or written for more than a hundred theatrical performances. He is the current director and MC of Asheville Vaudeville.

Cabaret singer Vendetta Creme (aka Kelly Barrow) and Aaron Price (piano, guitar) perform lesser-known songs from yesteryear. This duo scour the globe for their songs including material from five continents weaved into a seamless, unforgettable show.

Confessions : 09

00. It has been many moons since my last confession.

01. I awoke at 5 a.m.

02. A few years ago Janely (janely.blogspot.com) inspired me to write confession posts.

03. My blogging has been on autopilot (thanks to scheduling features on WordPress and Tumblr) during the last couple months…

04. due to a change in policy at the office that restricts access to social media sites (like Twitter) and webstreaming sites (like Youtube).

05. The transition from audio production to graphic design and back is more challenging than I anticipated.

06. I have yet to turn on the home’s heating system despite the fact that outside nightly temperatures have dipped into the low 40s.

07. I finished designing a poetry anthology book…

08. and sent it to the printing press yesterday.

09. I’m listening to the The Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast.

10. I’m currently reading The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter as well as a dozen other book titles.

Previous confessions: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

Poetry at the Pulp presents feature poet Landon Godfrey

About a month ago I visited the Orange Peel’s private club PULP for an open mic event. The event featured Keith Flynn and the Holy Men followed by an open mic. This weekend I read on the Asheville Poetry Review Facebook page:

POETRY AT THE PULP open mic night on Wednesday, October 6 at 7pm. Sponsored by Wordfest and The Asheville Poetry Review. Feature poet: Landon Godfrey, whose book of poems, “Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown,” selected by David St. John for the Cider Press book award, will be published February 2011. Come join us and share your work with one of the best crowds in Asheville. The Pulp is located underneath The Orange Peel on Biltmore Avenue. See you there!

If you are unfamiliar with Landon’s work, I recorded on of her readings at the Flood Reading Series, Sunday March 29, 2009. Should be another fine evening at PULP tomorrow night. I look forward to seeing you there.

Poem: Reading “My American Body” by W. K. Buckley

Reading “My American Body” by W. K. Buckley


Fireflies sparkle
Outside. I see them through the
Living room window.
It’s the time between
Times as I
Examine a new hole in
My jeans and consider
“Picking up their shreds
To the tangled light.”
Condensation rolls down
St. Pauli Girl who
Makes me sparkle
Inside.

(c) Matthew Mulder. All rights reserved.

Originally published in Rapid River Art Magazine, October 2005

What will you spend your minutes doing?

I love these lines from Rachel Zucker’s poem:

With my minutes, I chip away at the idiom,
an unmarked pebble in a fast current.

Link: “After Baby After Baby” by Rachel Zucker

30 poems in 30 days challenge: update two

30 poems in 30 days: days 3 & 4
pages of poems for days three and four

Deborah offered a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. I took up the challenge and so far I’m on schedule with one poem a day. Maybe after the challenge I’ll translate the poems from handwritten form to digital, but for me the urgency is to get it all down first. It’s kind of like catching butterflies or lightening bugs.

One interesting item is that the poems have developed a theme. When I accepted the challenge I wasn’t planning on writing 30 theme-based poems, but somewhere under the surface it appears in each page of the poems I’m composing. I guess I’ll find out if it changes course by the end of the challenge.

Poem: Inland

I could swim in these lines from “Inland” by Chase Twichell for days:

Above the blond prairies,
the sky is all color and water.

It’s as if the poet read the pages of my mind and wrote a poem based on the reading.

I love painting more than poetry.

The spare details used created such enduring images that’s hard for me to let go of the poem.

love is folded away in a drawer
like something newly washed

30 poems in 30 days challenge: update

30 poems in 30 days: day 1 & 2
Poems of days one and two

In spite of a very crazy week I’m still on track with the 30 poems in 30 days challenge. The rain delays on Monday afforded me time to compose a page-length poem. It’s no where near the ideal of composing 75 lines of poetry per day, but it’s a much needed discipline just to fill a page in my moleskine notebook.

Poem: Beginning with Two Lines from Rexroth

Ray Gonzalez’s prose poem “Beginning with Two Lines from Rexroth” begins with the opening line:

I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments, the unpainted pictures, the interrupted lives, a staircase leading to a guarantee, the glowing frame of wisdom protecting me from harm after I escape the questions of a lifetime.

There’s an urgency to these lines that remind me of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Also, there is a strong collision of abstract ideas and images as in the following line:

There is no agony and waste, only the steps into the frontier where it is easy to hide.

There’s an interview with Ray Gonzalez on Bombsite where he discussed who he crafts line and prose poems.

Poem: If My Voice Is Not Reaching You

If my voice is not reaching you
add to it the echo—
echo of ancient epics

Afzal Ahmed Syed‘s poem “If My Voice Is Not Reaching You” offers such a great opening stanza. A poet can go almost anywhere with those opening lines and a reader will follow with intrigue.

30 poems in 30 days challenge

Deborah (of 32 Poems) invites interested persons to write a poem a day for the next 30 days. The invite was sent out on Sunday (and I didn’t read it until today… so, I’m a bit late), but I think I’m up for the challenge. Anyone else?

Read more details about the challenge here: 30 Poems in 30 Days.

Poetry fisticuff

In one corner Billy Collins. In the other corner CA Conrad for a dispute over Emily Dickinson’s sexual preference. This should be a great fisticuff battle… except it’s taking place in the American poetry scene which will be mostly ignored by the general public.

5 notes from the lecture “The Excess of Poetry”

James Longenbach presented a lecture titled “The Excess of Poetry” at the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers this morning. Here’s a few of the notes I wrote:

  1. The act of writing is itself an excess.
  2. What matters in the Pisan Cantos is not the information provided but the tone.
  3. Our minds are strategically selective. We manage excess by focusing on some things while ignoring others.
  4. The Pisan Cantos are organized by tone: elegiac, colloquial, haranguing and reverence.
  5. What writer does not compose him/herself out of nothing?

There are more notes I wrote, but they are a bit scramble. Longenbach presented poems by Keats, Dickinson and Pound as way to explore the “fine excess” of poetry.

A grasshopper as philosopher (or how to unfold a poem)

GermanHeit is an excellent resource for those interested in learning to read German (or learn in better) or those desiring to know more about life in contemporary Germany. Recently, GermanHeit published a post about the German author Herta Müller — winner of the Nobel Prize for literature — regarding her novel “Atemschaukel” (link: GermanHeit). I inquired if there is a reliable bilingual or an English edition and GermanHeit replied with a link to an excerpt (link: “Everything I Own I Carry With Me” – an excerpt). A link to zeitgenössische Dichter (link: Die Deutsche Gedichte-Bibliothek) was also provided after I mentioned I enjoyed reading Durs Grunbein’s poetry. In one of his collections, Grunbein portrays a grasshopper as a Stoic philosopher in the poem “In der Provinz 3.” One of the qualities of Grunbein’s poetry I enjoy is the way he unfolds a poem and an image or thought is revealed in an arresting manner that catches the reader slightly off balance.

Poetry; “the passionate pursuit of the Real”

Czeslaw Milosz’s birthday is today. Just in case you wanted to know.

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

“Last Night at the New French Bar” to be published

My poem “Last Night at the New French Bar” has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of Crab Creek Review — a distinguished literary publication from the Northwest.

A good poem is like a good film — haunting

The past few weeks I’ve returned to a few poems that capture my imagination and thoughts. I tend to read poems the way some people view great film dramas — something like Big Night— enjoying all the subtle nuances, characters and texture. One such poem is from Vera Pavlova, titled “If There Is Something to Desire, 9, 17, 18”. Here’s a few lines:

Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it…

(Link: If There Is Something to Desire, 9, 17, 18)

Khaled Mattawa poem “Ecclesiastes” needs to be read a couple times to enjoy it. I particularly enjoy this stanza:

The rule is everyone is a gypsy now.
Everyone is searching for his tribe.

(Link: Ecclesiastes)

And final, from an English Romantic poet John Keats, a few lines from “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”:

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees…

(Link: On the Grasshopper and the Cricket)

Video: Traveling Bonfires poetry reading at Malaprop’s

Here’s a video of Pasckie Pascua from last week’s Traveling Bonfires poetry reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café.

Always be prepared to read your poems

When I mentioned earlier today that you should join the Traveling Bonfires tonight at Malaprop’s, you really were invited to join the reading. Two of the three poets were unable to show up for tonight’s reading. The emcee of the poetry reading and founder of the Traveling Bonfires invited anyone in the audience to read poems. He asked me to read my poems as well.

I wasn’t prepared to read; only to listen. But no one else came prepared to read. So, I frantically dug into my old messenger bag and found two poetry chapbook manuscripts by other poets. For a brief moment I thought I would read from their manuscripts, but I didn’t want to read poems that weren’t ready for the public. Sandwiched between loose papers and a copy of Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound and Narrow Road to the Interior was my red notebook containing poem sketches and revisions. I had half of a thought to read selections from Pound and Basho, but in my notebook I found six poem sketches and revisions to test in front of an audience.

The moral of the story is this: always be prepared to read your poems and if you’re a poet in the Asheville area (or if you’re a poet traveling near the Asheville area) contact me or the Traveling Bonfires (travelingbonfires@yahoo.com) and we’ll find a space and a mic and a crowd of listeners.