The Greatest Poem I Ever Wrote

I've been watering this damn plant for like 5 friggin' years, and finally...a flower!

Upcoming So and So/Boston Poetry Collective Readings

Air Jordan, Air Jordan, Air Jordan.

That's right, people...So and So turns 23! Come help us celebrate!

John Mercuri Dooley * Derek Fenner * Ryan Gallagher * John Mulrooney

Saturday * March 22nd * 8pm * The Distillery * 516 East Second Street * South Boston, MA 02127

Feel free to bring booze and snacks.

John Mercuri Dooley lives in Cambridge, Mass., where he and his husband, Andrew Richardson, curate the Demolicious Poetry/Multimedia Series. MuBet, an ongoing online project, can be seen at . Other work has appeared in literary magazines and sites including Blaze Vox, facsicle, Gut Cult, Moria, No Tell Motel, Shampoo and Word For/word, and has been distributed as mail art by Marymark Press. His multimedia work has been presented at the Brickbottom Gallery in Somerville, and Oni Gallery and Atlantic Works Gallery in Boston. He has written book reviews fo Boog City and Jacket.

Derek Fenner is a graduate of the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics MFA Program and currently resides in Lowell, MA above Page’s clock. He is the director of “Unlocking the Light”, a federal grant for a program he helped design to incorporate art in the professional development of the Department of Youth Services in Massachusetts. Previous to this, he began an art mentorship program and taught art to juveniles in a maximum security lock-down facility for the State of Massachusetts. Some of the work he did with these students was chronicled at the Rhys Gallery from February 10th - March 4th, 2006 and called "Temporary Walls: The Visual Voices of Detained Youth." He is the author of My Favorite Color is Red: Experiments with Lines 1999-2005. Derek has also finished his portraiture series: 100 People You Should Know. He also runs the Union Square Poetry Series,a bi-monthly Saturday reading at P.A.'s Lounge in Somerville, MA with Ryan Gallagher.

Ryan Gallagher lives in Lowell, MA with his wife and daughter. He is the author of Plum Smash and Other Flashbulbs published in 2005. Ryan has finished translating The Complete Works of Gaius Valerius Catullus, a project he began at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where he completed his MFA and where he was the recipient of the William Burroughs scholarship. He received his B.A. in Literature from Boston College. He also studied Thangka painting, traditional Tibetan Buddha paintings, for two years and is an accomplished oil painter. Ryan currently teaches high school literature.

John Mulrooney’s chapbook If You See Something, Say Something came out from the Anchorite press in 2006. His poems have appeared in Fulcrum, Pressed Wafer foldemzines and Shampoo, and are forthcoming in Process.



and



The inaugural Boston Poetry Collective reading!

Josh Bell * Ashley Capps * Noah Eli Gordon * Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Monday • March 24th • 7pm • The Lily Pad • 1353 Cambridge Street • Inman Sq. • Cambridge


Josh Bell's first book is No Planets Strike, Zoo Press/University of Nebraska Press, 2005. He received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellow. He was the Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Creative Writing Institute, 2003-04, and in the Summer of 2006 was a Walter Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writer's Conference. His poems have appeared in such magazines as 9th Letter, Boston Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Triquarterly, Verse, and Volt. He is currently an instructor at Columbia University and is finishing his doctoral dissertation for the University of Cincinnati, where he was University Distinguished Graduate Fellow.







Ashley Capps received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2006. Her first book of poems, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, was also published in 2006. New poems appear in the current issues of Granta and Black Warrior Review, and are forthcoming in H_NGM_N and Columbia Poetry Review. She is working on a second collection of poems entitled Then Self.






Noah Eli Gordon is the author of six collections, including Novel Pictorial Noise, selected by John Ashbery for the Nation Poetry Series. He teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver, and worked in Boston for a few years in the '90s selling jewelry from a cart at Downtown Crossing.






Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of three books, including Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Iowa) and Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon, Tarpaulin Sky). Next Spring two new books are due out: The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo) and 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics, an anthology of younger poets in conversation with their mentors (Iowa). After growing up in Seattle, he lived in Turkey, Slovakia, Arizona, Ireland, and Colorado, and he's recently settled in Chicago to teach at Loyola University.

Breakfast with Pessoa

from The Book of Disquiet:

"To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut."


"Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions--the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way." (this one reminds me of Elisa's "prenostalgia for [her] hangover")


"I frequently do not recognize myself--it's something that often happens to people who know themselves...I accompany myself in the various disguises with which I am alive. Of everything that changes, I possess that which is always the same; of all that which makes up everything, I possess that which is nothing [...]

Fatigue. Remembering is a respite, because it is doing nothing. How many times, to get better rest, have I remembered what I never was, and there is no clarity or nostalgia in my memories of the provinces [?] where I was just like those who live board to board with the floor, I oscillate the oscillation of memories, in vast halls where I never dwelt.

I turned myself into a fiction of myself to such an extent that any natural feeling that I have, of course, from the moment it's born, becomes a feeling of imagination--the memory in dreams, the dream of forgetting about the dream, knowing myself by not thinking about myself.

I stripped off my own being to such an extent that existing means dressing up. Only when I'm disguised am I really myself. And around me all unknown sunsets, as they die, gild the landscapes I shall never see."