Featuring Frank Sherlock, author of Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated, Rick Mullin, author of Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, and Elizabeth Scanlon, author of Odd Regard, hosted by Ernest Hilbert.

Open microphone session hosted by Paul Siegell to follow featured readers.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015, 7PM

Brandwine Workshop
730 S Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19146
(215) 546-3675

FREE!

Check out the Facebook Event Page for Updates

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Frank Sherlock is the Poet Laureate of the City of Philadelphia, and was a Pew Fellow in the Arts for 2013. His books include Over Here; The City Real and Imagined; and Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated. His current project is “Write Your Block,” which encourages Philadelphians to write about their neighborhoods. Fred Moten has written “I think I understand what Frank is saying: We are the form! We are the form of love! We wait for one another as the form of love! Frank Sherlock is a great poet.”

Excerpt from It’s Time by Frank Sherlock

A triumph

of life

unfinished

is dramatic

& short &

you are

the drag

king I love

This is

blaspheme

tested

& so so

lit beyond

my naked

vision

Direct action

afterglow be

comes fog then

dazzle from

fugitive

rays of

may day’s

jaguar sun

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Rick Mullin is a journalist and painter whose three latest books of poetry have been published by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, OH: the book-length poem Soutine, on the painter Chaïm Soutine (2012), the collection Coelacanth (2013), and, most recently, Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle (Fall 2014). He is also the author of the book-length poem Huncke, published by Seven Towers, Dublin, Ireland (2010), and two chapbooks, Aquinas Flinched (Exot Books, New York, 2008) and The Stones Jones Canzones (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY, 2012).

“Inside Paul Muldoon” by Rick Mullin

Princeton, NJ, 2014

—I was wrestling with an angel
You were working on a sonnet—

It’s 1997. Paul Muldoon
is crooning on a drunk with Warren Zevon
(luna bass, profondo y bassoon).
They’re contemplating driving north to Levon
Helm’s and shouldn’t do it. Experimenting
with a vintage Danelectro ax,
Muldoon and Zevon fade to black while venting
through poetic corollaries. Lax,
laid back, they ply impromptu rondolet.
It’s getting late and later than they think.
At length they call a cab for Saturday
and throw a little party in the sink.
To Woodstock on a Bodhi-gonzo head!
But Levon’s dead. And Warren’s really dead.

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Elizabeth Scanlon is the Editor of The American Poetry Review and teaches at The University of the Arts. Her chapbook Odd Regard was published by ixnay press in 2013, and her poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Boston Review, Colorado Review, MiPoesias, and Ploughshares.

“In Retrospect” by Elizabeth Scanlon

When all my efforts began to feel like a stakeout
of a ranch house that intel had reported was the site
of a cult compound, but there’d been no sign
of togas or bonfires, goats, chants, or suspiciously bouffant hairdos
at all during all the time I’d been sitting in the car
subsisting on donuts and Wawa coffee,
counting the number of times Journey’s “Don’t Stop
Believin’” recurs on MIX 106 radio while keeping
meticulous notes on the comings and goings
of dogwalkers, UPS delivery vans, and Range Rovers,
monitoring the lines, which have all been bugged
to no avail, and the re-routed email, my wrist
growing carpal-tunnely from the heft of the useless
telephoto lens kept at the ready lest any hint of movement
occured in the shadows that riffled across the drapes, when
the last known address of the elusive leader turned out to be
a laundromat where the dryers were so aged they’re heated
by gas flames you could see leaping through the grate
and that is more action than you’d seen in a month,
and it was time to chart an inconspicuous relocation
before the sun rose on day number blank of suspect surveillance,
it was then I thought, this is no way to love.

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Host Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets (2009), All of You on the Good Earth (2013), and Caligulan, which will appear in hardcover in September 2015.

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Open-mic host Paul Siegell is a senior editor at the Painted Bride Quarterly and author of the poetry collections wild life rifle fire (Otoliths Books, 2010), jambandbootleg (A-Head Publishing, 2009) and Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books, 2008).