Sarah Arvio, author of Night Thoughts (2013), with Jenn McCreary, author of & Now My Feet Are Maps (2013), and H.R. Stoneback, author of Hurricane Hymn (2009), hosted by Ernest Hilbert
Open microphone session hosted by Paul Siegell to follow featured readers

March 19th, 2013, 7PM
Upstairs at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, 215-928-8118

FREE!

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March 19th, 2013, 7PM
Upstairs at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, 215-928-8118

FREE AT THE DOOR!

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Sarah Arvio’s latest book is Night Thoughts: 70 Dream Poems & Notes from an Analysis, a hybrid work made up of poetry, essay, and memoir, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her earlier books of poems are Visits from the Seventh and Sono: Cantos, also published by Knopf. She has won the Rome Prize and received Bogliasco and Guggenheim fellowships. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton. She now lives in Maryland, by the Chesapeake Bay.

“oh hell” by Sarah Arvio

there are still the bad dreams I have to say
a dram in the thought of a bad bad night
a bad potion potent with impotence
& pain that dream in which you say I
am ruined with you I am no more &
the taxi leaves me standing in the street
& the streetlamp goes out there is this sort
of dream that leaves me without a heart or
more like with a hole in my selfheart
heartself that hellhole of a dream
oh hole oh hell the inside of my mind
damning me with bad portents & potions
you said to come I came & you killed me
this kind of killing that kills me again

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Jenn McCreary’s new full-length collection, & now my feet are maps, is now available from Dusie Press. Other works include The Dark Mouth of Living (Horse Less Press), :ab ovo: (Dusie Press), a doctrine of signatures (Singing Horse Press), & Odyssey & Oracle (Least Weasel Press). worrywort, a collaboration with Pattie McCarthy, will be published by Little Red Leaves Textile Editions in 2014. She lives in Philadelphia with her family, where she co-edits ixnay press with Chris McCreary and was recently named a 2013 Pew Fellow in the Arts for poetry.

“Believe What I Tell” by Jenn McCreary

She lives in a cave haunted
by the ghost of a giant
fox. She answers
questions in cryptic
verse & her answers
are always true:
Feathers, flowers,
sticks & stones. You can
grab my skin but
you’ll never get
my bones.

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H. R. (“Stoney”) Stoneback, Distinguished Professor of English of the State University of New York (New Paltz), is the author or editor of 35 books of poetry and literary criticism. As an itinerant musician in the early 1960s, he collaborated with Jerry Jeff Walker (a period immortalized in Walker’s song “Stoney”; Walker is best known for his song “Mr. Bojangles”) and performed with Bob Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City shortly after the Dylan’s arrival in New York. Stoneback’s recent books include Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders, Voices of Women Singing, Hurricane Hymn & Other Poems, Amazing-Grace-Wheelchair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-Poems, Homage: A Letter to Robert Penn Warren, and Hemingway’s Paris: Our Paris? Forthcoming books include two volumes of mainly Philadelphia/South Jersey poems and a novel—perhaps a trilogy—set in Philadelphia and Camden between 1955 and 1965.

“Outside Death Spiral: On Watching the Favorite TV Programs of a Lost Loved One” by H.R. Stoneback

It took almost four years before I could
watch her favorite drama—Law and Order—
dry-eyed. I don’t watch much TV but with her
I sometimes did. For three years if I heard
in passing that theme tune it was a sudden
knife and the wetness started and I changed
the channel quick. Now that’s all rearranged
and when I hear that duh-duh-duh-duh-dun
I watch and she is in the room with me:
Order restored by magic of TV.

Her other favorite, figure skating—
summer is safe, winter another thing.
Looking for a football game the other night,
I passed the ice-skaters, paused, saw ice-light,
heard that music, watched those moves, then the melt
started and she who hated cold and snow
was next to me in TV’s sacral glow—
calling the moves, holding her breath, then yelling
at the judges’ scores. During one Winter Games
she called all the skaters by their names

then said so-and-so knows how to love the ice
her double-axels triple-toe loops—real grace 
and nothing touches her outside death spiral.
She loved the gravity and grace, the fire,
the dance of law and order on the ice,
the disciplined transformation that sufficed
to get her through the hardest longest winters.
Wet-eyed with loss, I’m just a beginner.
But maybe by the next Winter Olympics
I’ll grasp and drink from her spiral-alembic.

We never skated but we did it all with fire
backward forward inside outside death spiral

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Ernest Hilbert hosts a biannual reading series in Philadelphia on or around the spring and autumn equinoxes. Originally held at Robin’s Books, which closed at the end of 2012, the series continues upstairs at Fergie’s Pub on Sansom Street between 12th and 13th Streets. The series has featured Matthew Zapruder, Daisy Fried, Jericho Brown, Timothy Donnelly, Michael Dickman, Catie Rosemurgy, Thomas Devaney, Jehanne Dubrow, Bojan Louis, George Green, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Yezzi, Daniel Nester, Elizabeth Gold, Kim Bridgford, and Laynie Browne. Hilbert is the author of two collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets (2009) and All of You on the Good Earth (2009), as well as a spoken word album recorded with rock band and orchestra, Elegies & Laments (2013), available from Pub Can Records. He hosts the popular blog E-Verse (www.everseradio.com). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review as well as in a number of anthologies, including The Incredible Sestina Anthology (2013), The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He works at Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife Lynn Makowsky, the Keeper of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Paul Siegell is the author of three books of poetry: wild life rifle fire (2010), jambandbootleg (2009), and Poemergency Room (2008). He has contributed to American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Coconut, Rattle, and many other fine journals. Born on Long Island, educated in Pittsburgh, employed in Orlando, Atlanta and now Philadelphia, Paul is a copywriter by day and a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly by choice. Kindly find more of Paul’s work–and concrete poetry t-shirts–at “ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL” (http://paulsiegell.blogspot.com).