
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Metro Rhythm Reading III

Join us once again at Blue Angel Wines in Brooklyn for another night of readings and drunken revelry. The reading will begin at 7:30 PM and last until all hours of the night.
Blue Angel Wines
638 Grand St
(between Leonard St & Manhattan Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Neighborhood: Williamsburg - South Side
This time our readers will include:
Monica Ferrell
Bianca Stone
Ben Pease
Anwyn Crawford
Admission is FREE, and since this event is at a wine SHOP rather than BAR, you can just buy a bottle of wine for $10 instead of paying $8 for a glass.
After-party chez Bianca Stone.
Become a fan on our facebook page.
Friday, April 16, 2010
May Reading
Monday, March 1, 2010
Metro Rhythm & Ugly Duckling Presse

Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Metro Rhythm Still On
Friday, January 29, 2010
J.D. Salinger
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Mark Bibbins & Meghan O'Rourke @ Metro Rhtyhm 02.12.10


Meghan O'Rourke *
Christie Ann Reynolds *
and also
a ton of wine and PBR.
Ps. it is also my b day, so there will be an after party in my apartment like last time!
Please bring friends, and boy friends and girl friends, moms and dads and siblings are fine too.
The venue is right off the L train, a few blocks from the Lorimer stop. Come down to Brooklyn and nestle in our cozy wine shop for some poems, then expect a lot of dancing in my kitchen.
Hope to see you there
♥
Keegan and John
RSVP
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Metro Rhythm Reading 02.12.10
Sunday, January 17, 2010
John James @ Cornelia Street Cafe 01.26.10

I realize that I am also reading at Earshot this coming Friday, January 22nd, so I'll try to read a different set. I would love it if my awesome friends could come to both!!!
Please come out and support me...
and enjoy some poems! ♥
Cornelia Street Cafe
6:00 PM
Tuesday, Jan. 22nd
29 Cornelia Street
Greenwich Village
New York, NY 10014
Cafe: (212) 989-9319
Me: (502) 751-3502
http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com/home.asp
For the Black Widow Spiders of Southern California
Because we go without a trace,
& there is sweetness in the mimicry
of transubstantiation, when I saw
a black widow dangling in the nursery dark,
her black belly, fat & red with the swivel
of an hourglass, reminded me of warm blood.
Someone called the teacher & she came
with a plastic shovel, scooped the spider
from the playhouse rafters
& stamped its lights out with her shoe.
At the chemical plant in L.A.
where my father worked maintenance,
he saw the spiders too. They bred in the hot dark –
The male mounted the female from behind,
then lent his body to thrashing.
Once he was dead, the female would gorge herself,
nourishing the children with their father’s remains.
Finished, she would spin a sac of web,
plant the nest beneath the boiler
or behind the tool chest
in the maintenance closet.
There they would lie, incubating.
It is best to remain calm if bit.
When excited, the heart’s palpitations
distribute venom more quickly
through the bloodstream.
Soon the symptoms settle in –
Fever of 104°, violent twitching,
tightening of the jaw. I can almost hear
the molars grinding in the back row.
The last time I saw a black widow
was a hot day in Kentucky.
She had spun her web in the transom space
above the back door to our school.
Her legs were long & slender, & her abdomen thin,
not like the one years before whose thick bulb
of a belly appeared in the dark
as if she may have been pregnant.
I moved beneath her, scanning her under-belly
for a blood-lit patch of red.
But summers grow humid in Louisville,
& the spiders, they like a dry heat –
They fashion their threading in the San Fernando,
where the air is always hot, & the wind is arid.
Where smog grows thick, & the city spans for miles
beneath the missing & innumerable stars.
Columbia Gallery Reading 01.21.10
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
John James (Me) Reading @ Earshot! 01.22.10

EARSHOT!
Friday, January 22nd @ 7:30 PM
@ Rose Live Music
Special Guest Host: Gregory Crosby
$5 + one free drink
Featuring:
Rachel Levitsky (Neighbor and Under the Sun)
Andrew Lundwall (klang and honorable mention)
John James (Columbia University)
Ryan Doyle May (The New School)
Jenna Telesca (Queens College)
Rose Live Music is located at 345 Grand Street in Brooklyn, between Havemeyer and Marcy. Visit their website for directions: http://roselivemusic.com.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Blog on Hiatus
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Copper Nickel

Friday, December 11, 2009
Mark Bibbins & Mary Jo Bang @ KGB Bar 12.14.09
KGB Poetry: Mark Bibbins & Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she teaches in the writing program at Washington University.
Mark Bibbins is the author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon Press). His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry and the Yale Review. He teaches at Columbia University and The New School.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Columbia Journal Panel Discussion Tomorrow

Hang Together or Hang Apart?
Sculptor, photographer, and mixed-media artist Jon Kessler combines centuries-old craft with digital and video technology to create “kinetic sculptures” that explore consumerist, fearful, post-utopian society. With sprawling pieces such as The Palace at 4 A.M. he has won acclaim over three decades and been featured at the Whitney Biennial, Carnegie Institute, Deitch Projects, P.S.1, and MOMA.
A renowned poet, painter, and art critic, Marjorie Welish has published eight volumes of poetry, exhibits her paintings at the Baumgartner Gallery and Bjorn Ressle Fine Art, and has received numerous awards in both fields, including fellowships from the Gottlieb and Djerassi Foundations. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry series and in many anthologies, and her work was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at the University of Pennsylvania.
A wildly diverse filmmaker and writer, Michael Almereyda directed the film Hamletstarring Ethan Hawke, wrote and directed documentaries on photographer William Eggleston and playwright Sam Shepard, and has published many essays and criticism on film. One of his most recent films is the post-Katrina love story, New Orleans, Mon Amour. Among other awards, he has been decorated for “expanding the possibilities of experimental film.”
A prolific novelist, poet, translator, and documentary filmmaker, Terese Svoboda has published a dozen books, exhibited her films on PBS and at MOMA, and debuted her opera WET at the Disney Theater in Los Angeles. She has won numerous awards, including an O. Henry, a Pushcart, a Jerome Foundation Grant in video, a John Golden Award in playwriting, and the Iowa Prize in poetry.
An exhilarating young voice, Alix Ohlin has received acclaim for her debut novel The Missing Person and debut collection Babylon and Other Stories. She has often commented on the relationship between music and fiction, and her work has appeared in the Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories series.
A dramaturg, artistic director, and writer, Gideon Lester was until recently Acting Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre. His translations include plays by Brecht, Buchner, and Marivaux, and his stage adaptations include Kafka's Amerika and Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. He teaches courses on theater, adaptation, and interdisciplinary collaboration in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Metro Rhythm Facebook Fan Page
Thursday, December 3, 2009
A Public Space Issue Release Party 12.10.09

December 10: Issue 9 Launch Party!
We hope you can join us at BookCourt to celebrate the launch of Issue 9. Drinks, merriment, and readings by contributors Brian T. Edwards and Idra Novey. There will be issues and totes for sale, plus subscription discounts!
163 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 PM
If you don't know about A Public Space, it's a really great magazine based in Brooklyn. Check out their website here:
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Mark Bibbins & Keegan Lester @ Earshot this Friday! 12.04.09

Mark Bibbins, Christopher Martin
Keegan Lester, David King, Taryn Andrews
345 Grand Street (b/w Havemeyer & Marcy)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 599-0069
John Ashbery at NYU 12.03.09

Saturday, November 21, 2009
Cornelia Street Graduate Poetry Series 11/24/09

Come listen to four amazing emerging poets in MFA programs in NYC.
Ben Pease is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University where he once leapt with joy upon finding a library book he thought he had lost and and would have had to pay a $100 late fee on top of the cost of the book. A couple weeks ago, in the midst of being lost on his bike en route to a reading, Pease was flagged down by an old Hasdic man who begged him to enter his house and turn on his air conditioner. Pease complied. He has most recently been commissioned by a team of sage editors (who wish to remain anonymous) to pen a living mythology of the Wichman, an ordinary man with a big heart who wished his name in the record books with an asterisk beside it.
In December, Janlori Goldman will receive an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. For a zillion years, she's worked as a civil rights and privacy advocate in Washington D.C. and New York, and has a lucky job teaching at Columbia University. She lives in New York City with her teenage daughter, and is laboring with joy on her first book of poems.
Elsbeth Pancrazi lives north of here, in Inwood, NY; works in a bakery slightly to the west and across one river, in Englewood, NJ; and is an MFA candidate at NYU. In other words, the shape of her life is a large triangle.