Juniper Bends this Friday, Downtown Books and News

Both Julian Vorus and Lucy Tobin have now written me about Juniper Bends, a new reading series hosted at Downtown Books and News. As Julian writes:

Luckily, we have such a vibrant music scene here in Asheville, but we would like to see a parallel development of a solid underground writing scene as well. Diversity, as well as opportunity helps strengthen such objectives.

The series this week features six poets: Jaye Bartell, Jennifer Callahan, Ingrid Carson, Chall Gray, Lucy Tobin, and Julian himself. They're sharp, intelligent writers, so I'll certainly be headed over to check them out.

Downtown Books and News is at 67 North Lexington Avenue in downtown Asheville. The reading gets under way at 7:00 PM, and is free. Hope to cross paths there.

Coming soon: Lucifer invades Asheville

The Lucifer Poetics Group, that is – and who else would invite them but the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. If there’s something devilish to be done in the world of poetry, look for the Center to do it.

The Lucifer Poetics Group is a group of loosely affiliated experimental poets based in the Research Triangle; their main point of affiliation, other than geography, may be that they all subscribe to the Lucipo listserve, where discussions of poetry and poetics flourish day by day, and even in the dark of night. The Internet has begun to change radically – as it has changed so many things - the way poets get together, hang out, and learn from one another.

The geography, though, the fact that they run into each other at readings, bars, grocery stores, on the street, is also, in the mind of Ken Rumble, founder of the list, important. As he wrote last year in a post on poet Ron Silliman’s weblog :

I think that the quality of the discussion on Lucipo is directly related to the fact that the original members of the group and many of the people that have since joined all live in fairly close proximity to one another. Our meetings are sporadic (as they've always been), but whether it is at readings, meetings, or just the bar, we see each other around. There is a flesh avatar for the virtual personalities we experience via the list.

So a shared physical community informs the list’s back and forth, and gives it the neighborly tone that anyone who’s been on a more contentious listserv (and even the world of poetry has them) might find positively striking.

Why Lucifer, you might ask? Soon after the list was formed, Rumble asked members to propose names for the group:

Among the almost-weres are the Adz Murderers, Boomslang, Fat-head Sillyface, Workshop for 'Liscious Poetry (WoLiPo), Party Pitch Poetics.

Argh. Fortunately, Joseph Donahue, an early member, remembered the lines in the first of the Pisan Cantos of the great Modernist poet Ezra Pound in which he addresses

You who have passed the pillars and outward from Herakles
when Lucifer fell in N. Carolina.

The standard gloss on the passage is that Pound referred here to a meteor shower that appeared from his vantage point, the literal cage in Pisa within which he was confined at the end of World War II, to be headed down the western sky toward our state, falling angels. The group had a name.

As with any such group, every now and then even the members of the Lucipo list ask themselves what the group, after all, is. Chris Vitiello, an early member of the group, had this take on it in 2005:

The answer would probably be something like "Lucipo isn't a single ideology or style or idea. It's a name for a community that draws its strength from a mutual interest in contemporary poetry with an emphasis on avant-garde, post-avant, innovative, and experimental poetry. And this interest is sincerely non-competitive." That certainly sounds like an answer.

But really we're all too busy asking and answering the question by getting together to read and talk late into the night.

Collaboration seems to be one of the hallmarks of Lucipo’s experimentalism. It’s not unusual for a member of the group to post, say, the first four lines of a poem and invite the other members of the group to help him or her complete it; days later the poem’s scores of lines long, and has traveled through many counties the initial proposition didn’t, in all likelihood, dream of exploring. It’s often (I confess, I’m a member of the list myself) great fun.

None of the Lucipo folk mention this, but Lucifer is also an ancient designation for the planet Venus when it appears as the morning star, and Lucifer in that case stands revealed in its literal signification, “light-bearer”, acting as it does as the herald of the Sun. So the very name of the group, like so many words in poetry, is rich in possibilities for meaning. That seems appropriate for a group of poets who want to carry on – and extend - the experimental approach to writing that Pound’s work helped define early in the last century.

They’ve read in Philadelphia and DC, and now Rumble will be bringing the howling denizens of Lucifer Poetics to Asheville for their first event in the mountains. He’s suggested online that they form collaborative cells for their performance here, and groups have been hashing out their plans for the reading on the list – and, no doubt, off it as well. No telling what they might come up with, but it’s bound to be mighty interesting. Most likely mind-bending. And perhaps insidious.

The horde of Luciferians who plan to be here, aside from Mr. Rumble, includes the aforementioned Chris Vitiello, Todd Sandvik, Jenny Maness, Brian Howe, David Need, Randall Williams, Lori Reese, Ted Pope, and perhaps another tormented soul or two. They’ll be joined by local Lucipo poets Tim Earley, Jonathan Fisher, and Chall Gray.

The beachhead of their invasion will be (where else?) the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 56 Broadway, in downtown Asheville. It’s scheduled for Saturday, February 24^th; the reading, or performance, or … whatever will kick off at 8:00 PM. There or square. Word. The last thing you’d want to do, after all, is tick off the King of the Underworld.

For more information, see www.blackmountaincollege.org, or call 828-350-8484.

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This post appeared in different form in the February, 2007 issue of Rapid River.

2/10/2007: Updated with an additional link.

Dizzy at 35 Below

The production of four one-act plays I mentioned a few posts ago ( here) is now officially titled "Dizzy." If you see or hear references to "Dizzy" in arts calendars, etc., that's it.

Also, the Rapid River print version of the story mentioned that it was at "35 Below on Wall Street," an error neither I nor my editors caught before the magazine went to print. 35 Below is part of the ACT complex at the intersection of Market and Walnut streets, a few blocks east of Wall Street. My apologies to anyone who might have tried to find it on Wall Street.

The Play's the Thing

Poets have been tempted by the theater ever since Thespis, Greek singer of dithyrambs, donned his masks and dared to portray, as an actor, characters outside the chorus, thus, the determining legend has it, creating drama. The story is no doubt more complex; neolithic shamans portrayed animal spirits and wore masks, and ancient religions involved the elements of what we would call dramatic performance. But there’s no doubt that since his era, some 534 years BCE, some of the best of the west’s poets have felt the pull of the stage, the power of language in character, and the mask it provides.

This month two of Asheville’s most interesting young writers, Chall Gray and Devin Walsh, continue that long procession and make their leap to the stage: July 14 they open four original one act plays at 35 Below. Two of the plays are theirs, and the other two are by local poets; David Hopes penned one and Jaye Bartell the other. Gray says his and Walsh’s goal is to create a theater company different from others in the area, many of which provide fine performances, and to “show people that there’s also great playwriting” in town.

Gray and Walsh got to know one another at a meeting of the Asheville chapter of Toastmasters International, the non-profit that helps people of all backgrounds become, as they say, better and more confident speakers. Walsh’s dad had been a member for twenty-five years, so he’d grown up with the organization, and found for himself that its practice helped when he had to address the public. He and Gray were both writers and both active in creating literary publications, Metabolism for Walsh, an online and published “literary salon for the intellectually curious,” funded by UNCA, and Blue Elephant, which Gray helped create at AB Tech. While Walsh had published fiction and flash fiction (he and Gray both have had work up at the Flasheville site, he felt stymied when it came to playwriting. “Then”, he says, “Chall stepped in.” By last spring they had created Metabolism Productions and undertaken the development of the project that hits the boards on the 14th.

The plays … well, don’t be thinking Tennessee Williams, be thinking more along the lines of Samuel Beckett, but (if the work of Walsh’s that I’ve heard is any guide) funnier. His “Rochester and Pennyboil” has two middle-aged playwrights drinking and bemoaning their failures, with “vocabularies unleashed and lots of elevated wordplay”. Gray’s “Love from A to Z” is a love story in, of course, twenty-six parts. Hopes’ “Piss”, a “quirky, funny play,” Walsh says, features five characters “extensively versed in art history” in conversation. Jaye Bartell’s “Recalling Paradise” features a man who videotapes himself when he’s sleeping just to make sure he still exists in that state, and the dreams he has as he sleeps of two women without mirrors trying to convey to one another what they look like.

All the plays are fully cast, but as of a week ago Gray and Walsh were still interested in hearing from folks with theater experience, especially on the technical side; you can write them at metabolismproductions@gmail.com.

Metabolism plans to stage three productions a year; their second offering, now in the planning stage, should hit the boards in early November. It will feature plays by women playwrights.

Time will tell if these works catch the conscience of the king, or of the age, but I’ll wish all involved a good “break a leg” (that’s a way to appease the spirit of Thespis, who still lurks behind the scenes, they say, creating mischief), and see them on the stage.


When: July 14, 15, 8 pm, July 16 2:00 pm. July 20, 21, 22 8 pm, July 23, 2:00 pm.

Tickets can be prepurchased at ACT Box Office, Malaprops, and The Reader's Corner beginning Monday, July 3. Chall says "Seating is limited so we recommend that people get tickets early."

Admission: $5 for students, $10 for the public otherwise.

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Updated with corrected show times. And I made Devin a poet; he claims not to be one.
Updated also to fix the link to Metabolism.

This post appeared in somewhat different form in Rapid River Magazine's July issue.