Poets Live next Tuesday: David Barnes, Nicole Peyrafitte & William Walrond

19h15

12th April

Bar Long Island

47 rue Washington

Metro George V (line 1)

Obviously, I'm looking forward to it as I'll be reading! ;-)

David Barnes

Dylan of Poets Live writes:

Nicole Peyrafitte is a performance artist born and raised in the French Pyrenees. She considers herself a Gasco-Rican (1/2 Gascon, 1/2 American) & citizen of Brooklyn. Peyrafitte pursues related multi-cultural and multi-media investigations that integrate her voice, texts, visuals and also cooking. She has two CDs out: The Bi-Continental Chowder /La Garbure Transcontinentale 2006 & Whisk! Don’t Churn! 2009. Visit her website for blog/videos and more: www.nicolepeyrafitte.com.

William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Brofus, New Jersey, where he went to Rutgers University, starting out as a classics major, changing to musicology and finishing with an abnormal psychology, all of which he declined to follow up or to practice. He has worked in many different fields of endeavor,
including amusement parks, banks, book stores, cinema, door-to-door sales, restaurants, retail sales, taxi driving, telephone sales, warehouses and as a tour guide and was also co-editor of Upstairs at Duroc, a literary review, blowing his chances at working-class hero status. A thirty-four-year resident of Paris, he now earns his living as an English language trainer and translator.
He is the author of several volumes of poetry (all slim), his other principal interests being various forms of boxing, bull fighting and old music. He is Archon of Paris for the Moorish Orthodox Church and a member of various other organizations embracing a few essential beliefs and having
even fewer doctrines. He has two young daughters and is thus in touch with the needs, desires and tendencies of today's teens and pre-teens.
He has read all over Paris over the years, including every year with the original incarnation of this series. His main influences are science fiction, doo-wop music and a mis-spent youth, along with the usual Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Poe, Catullus, Larkin, Elroy, Doctor Seuss, Beaudelaire and also Emmylou Harris, Roy Jones Jr., Leonard Cohen, Fedor Emilianenko, Bartok and Roy Orbison.
His motto this year is, “All dust is gold,” but sometimes he forgets.

David Barnes grew up in the Thames Valley in England in the 70s and 80s. He escaped to Manchester University where he successfully ignored any desire to write for 6 years. He started writing poetry as an adult in the mid 90s and started writing short stories a few years before settling in Paris in 2003, where he created and runs The Other Writers' Group at Shakespeare and Company and SpokenWord, a weekly open mic poetry series. He won Shakespeare
& Company's Travel in Words prize in 2006 with a short story and has published short stories in 34th Parallel Magazine and Spot Lit Magazine. He has a poem in the current issue of Upstairs at Duroc and edited Strangers in Paris: An Anthology of New Writing inspired by the City of Light, which will be out in the summer. He is also an editor with issue.ZERO magazine
which brought out an issue this winter. He currently divides his time between a Masters in psychotherapy, writing short stories and poetry and a day job teaching English and creative writing so that he has enough money to feed himself and his cat and do everything else.

Sample poems
There are sample poems linked from the bios of each poet at
http://poets-live.com/ .

I’ve posted recordings of the March 15th reading online at
http://poets-live.com/ under Recordings.

March 28 in Belleville

Alberto writes...

Spoken Word starts early now, cause we are so many and so wild. As happened before, we open with Lady Marie Claire Calmus, an old school performer who sings french songs twice a month at Culture Rapide. Then Jennifer who’s French and performs for the first time in English:

“There 's no way to define death!

because when you reaaaaaally think about it

you might loose your own head”

Moe Seager, Emilie, sick of singing love songs, sang a song that called “this is a song about nothing at all”. Adèle for the first time on our stage:

"I have this memory

of the adult and the child

who have the same, wheat-field hair

He..

He..

He..

But I can't find the verb

Or anything in between

There's just the father and the child

with the same, wheat-field hair."

Trelys Duprè, Claire about Belleville:

“Art boils and is thrown into the gutter, oil spills rainbows around the island of a dropped glove”

And Erica, attention please: her first album True Love and Water is out now!

http://ericabuettner.bandcamp.com/

Part II:

Sue, Condor, Tramaine, Roy,

Alberto reminded the night in which publishers came in Culture Rapide…

http://tightropebooks.com/strangers-in-paris-new-writing-inspired-by-the-city-of-light/

The Maxx, The Newens: Ashley, Al and Maxim,

Beth, then Tyler

closing with:

“the innocent privilege in seeing you as midnight does,

your tiptoed march along the hard wood lingering

like the suspension of breath upon glass.”

Part III

Zach, Fanny, Georgina: how sms become a spoken word masterpiece,

Amy, Helen, Bubu, Hamed, Suzanne, Brittany, Guillermo,

Natasha explaining why russians killed Poland’s President and other little things.

Rufo, Moe, The Maxx. Goodnight.

Funny lonely vicious

With SpokenWord at maximum capacity, 3 rounds of poetry/stories/songs/stand up and the Culture Rapide packed out... With the BBC and Lonely Planet writing about us... With Xander and Sophie and Naomi's books coming out... With the Strangers in Paris anthology that me and Mgean edited coming out this summer... With Alberto documenting the scene with his "Where will you bohemians be in 10 years?" project... it's clear that something is happening here, some critical mass of creativity that is snowballing...

And here is the latest addition to that scene:

▬▬▬▬▬▬ FUNNY, LONELY & VICIOUS ▬▬▬▬▬▬

The new weekly stand-up comedy night in English!

EVERY SUNDAY @ 8PM!

Launch night is this Sunday, the 27th of March.

With your host, JULIAN FIELD.

This is the launch night, so invite your friends!

FOOD! DRINKS! LAUGHS!

▬▬▬ This Week's Guest ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

◆ IVO GRAHAM

Young British comedy genius, winner of "So You Think You’re Funny" Award for 2009, and regular at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival.

▬▬▬ Practical Info ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

◆ STARTS AT 8PM SHARP! Come early to make sure to get a table.

◆ FREE! (We will ask for donations after the show)

◆ VENUE: Patrick's - Le Ballon Vert

33 rue de Montreuil, 75011 Paris

◆ METRO: Faidherbe-Chaligny

Patrick's has a wonderful menu, including it's famous hamburger!

MORE INFO / JULIAN FIELD'S SITE: www.imjulianfield.com

The new wave of Parisian literature

BBC & Lonely Planet mention of the SpokenWord scene in Paris, with photo of SpokenWord at Culture Rapide.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20110303-the-new-wave-of-parisian-literature

Alberto's boxer monologue

Dedicated to my boxers in Writers get Violent, who really beat the shit out of each other:

To you the boxers,

to whom the gong sounds always unexpectedly, to whom the stool slides out from under your ass, unexpectedly, like a fart. And you find yourself there, legs bent, facing this ring, a space that seems infinite and yet limited, metaphor of the human condition.

When you hear it, don’t ask yourself for whom the gong tolls, it tolls for thee.

Which means you.

YOU the winner

or precisely

you who will win JUST tonight,

this is a sport where it is better to put aside any Cartesian doubt, where the only certainty that counts is that of a big clout right on the nose. There is no point to wonder why. There is no point to pursue the search for truth, when the only truth that counts is that of the winners. That goes for war, sadly, and for the smallest type of conflict.

So, don’t think about it, just knock him down and enjoy the natural spectacle of seeing a boxer slowly fall backward, straight as a shaft, following the trajectory of a toppled oak, of hearing him crash to earth and the numerical tick-tocking of a grown child that has become a man,

but who still hasn’t stopped counting to ten

to give some meaning to this game.

To YOU the loser,

or is better to say you who’ll lose JUST this time,

when you’ll be there lying down,

your cheek stuck on the ground,

don’t ask yourself why YOU got it, YOU got it for everyone of us, the cowards,

your face got it for all these faces, your eyes saw it for all these eyes,

like a diamond that refracts everything around it into a thousand brilliant slivers and glares,

like a lake that is mirrored in every raindrop when it rains,

a limpid silvery lake that reflects every face, you absorbed every punch and every mirrored feeling, connected with those punches, we felt. You’ve been battered from our fears, sorrows, greed, wonder, like a human god listening to everyone’s prayer at the same time, you’ve been worn out by OUR emotion, you’ve been defeated by YOUR empathy.

When you gonna be here, laying down, don’t ask yourself if you are dead, you’re not dead.

You’re too alive.

Alberto Rigettini

Kathleen Spivack reading 15th March

I've been working with Kathleen Spivack as my writing coach for 5 years. She's great, and won the Allen Ginsberg Memorial Poetry Prize last year. Blurb below from Village Voice bookshop's website.

KATHLEEN SPIVACK
A History of Yearning
Tuesday, March 15th at 7pm

The Village Voice Bookshop is proud to invite you to meet Kathleen Spivack who will read from and discuss her new collection of poems, A History of Yearning.

Kathleen Spivack is the author of a number of previous volumes of poetry including Flying Inland,The Jane Poems and Moments of Past Happiness as well as a novel, Unspeakable Things. Her writing has been featured in such publications as The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She has also written about her friend, Robert Lowell, and other poets of his time such as Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. She teaches American Literature and Creative Writing in both Paris and Boston.

Most of the poems in A History of Yearning begin with paintings and photographs, and rise from them as fragrance rises from spring flowers after a hard winter, a gift to us from language that survives and blooms and brings us pleasures we hardly know how to name. Kathleen Spivack has created another in her series of award-winning books, a crowning achievement that lifts darkness and light and mixes them with consummate skill, passion, and the wide experience of a docent in the living museum of our time.

A History of Yearning won the 2010 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook Award, and the London Book Festival Poetry First Prize and Allen Ginsberg Memorial Poetry Award in 2011.

SPOKEN WORD 28 FEBRUARY REPORT & Video footage from Writers Get Violent

by Alberto

Crowded Spoken Word, we are starting earlier but we always finish at Midnight!

Igor Limansky, first time on our stage, opens it:

“We are drunk and naked, dancing

by the light of non-decision

in shoes made perfect by the moon.”

Marie Claire Calmus, Trelys Duprè,

J.D. reading about the Saintsimonians for the last time before going back to the coldest Alaska we can imagine, Moe Seager, Arash, Troy, Clain, Alberto introducing the first fight of “Writers Get Violent”:

Chris The Vicious Newens VS the No Meat Eater Peter Cow Killer Brown,

who read a remix of the notorious Cassius Clay’s poem “I’m The Greatest”:

Yes, I’m the man this poem is about, I’ll be Champ of the world,

there isn’t a doubt.

Here I predict Mr. Newens dismemberment

I’ll hit him so hard, he’ll wonder where Mars and April went.

If you want to see some poetry in motion, three days later:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXDzK2fAWvw

Britney closed part I with

“you were satisfying like peanutbutter

sweet like agave limbs unfurling into wafts of coriander

(manna my dear)”.

Part II

Started with Susie, followed by Kyle. If you want to taste his songwriting:

http://www.myspace.com/kyleavallone

Robert Cole, Chris Newen’s short play featuring Jess Sleazy Martinez Granatt and Kevin the Cow, Betty without the Box. Mimi kicked asses.

She’s her speciality indeed:

http://kickingitwithmimi.blogspot.com/2011/02/glico-man.html

If you want to laugh more and more info, go on her facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/mimiredlips

Amy, and then the Press Conference for thursday’s second fight: Kirsten Johnny Bastard Foster VS Beth Poisonous Peacock Jervis. Troy with his famous love poem: “Sweet Tender Buttfinger”, Moe , Julian craving for “Money”, Rufo Quintavalle, Arash. Final French Poetry Lessons by Bastien, by Bubu. It’s midnight. Poetry homeless go home. Come back next monday.

In Belleville, at Culture Rapide.