Midrash: Jewish poetics in a strange land

Event Type

Until recently, Jewish poetics have largely been seen as parochial, disconnected from both conversations about aesthetics and general cultural trends. Recently, a widespread interest in diasporas and migrations have brought new ways of viewing Jewish poetics, allowing us to examine them as both a contemporary phenomenon, and an ancient written tradition. Midrash is a poetic technique invented more than two thousand years ago to derive text from given text. In this panel, four practitioners of "Jewish poetry" will read from their own work, and the work of other Jewish poets, and comment on the new/old technique of midrash and what it brings to our contemporary strangeness. We will discuss how Jewish history informs today’s poetics, and how the Jewish poetry of today provides essential commentary on the broader culture.

Starting Date/Time
Location
Wild Lotus - New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude

Belle Point Poets

Event Type

As a regional small press focused on the Mid-South, we are eager to explore the ways that this in-between part of the country relates to more established regions like the South/Deep South and the Midwest. We are especially interested in supporting work by writers from states that border our home base of Arkansas to explore conversations across our borders. This reading features three of our current/forthcoming Louisiana poets: Nikki Ummel, Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo, and Alison Pelegrin.

Nikki Ummel's Hush: Inside these pages, Nikki Ummel leads us into a quiet corner. Intimacy takes on many forms as she considers the weight of being responsible for those she loves. Whether confronting the reality of a sick sister, recalling traumatic experiences, or wandering the streets of New Orleans, Hush hums with a tenderness that stays with you long after the lights go out. Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo's Bottomlands: These poems manifest the Louisiana Gulf Coast and all its capacity for an environment experienced in full color. Crafting in equal turns a coming-of-age narrative and an ecological meditation, Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo invites readers to inhabit a space where they must consider the frightening reality of hurricanes, climate change, and a home ever threatened by the prospect of loss—while nonetheless managing always to find ways to keep communion. Wholly broken and often holy, Bottomlands is a debut collection by a poet as attuned to her own voice as to the beauties and dangers of the world around her. Alison Pelegrin is one of the contributors to our forthcoming Mid/South Sonnets anthology, edited by C.T. Salazar and Casie Dodd.
Starting Date/Time
Location
Art Gallery

BlazeVOX Books Reading

Event Type

BlazeVOX Books, based in Buffalo, New York, has presented wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry since its founding in 2000 by Geoffrey Gatza. Coal Hill Review writes that "BlazeVOX poetry collections tend to have three things in common: physically, they tend to be oversized and very attractive; stylistically, they tend to be experimental; and quality-wise, they tend to be strong." This reading will feature a variety of voices published by or forthcoming from this press. 

Starting Date/Time
Location
Art Gallery

Annulet Reading: A Rural Inquiry

Event Type

A reading featuring past and upcoming contributors, alongside editors, celebrating the release of the latest issue of Annulet and its first two years of publication. Participants from across the journal's five issues will read from their own work, each of which inquires into the porous infrastructures of rural life and experience, from the peripheral to the speculative, in poems that think with hobo markers, transit and poverty, hopping trains, desertifications, austerity's dilapidations, hidden extraction economies, water scarcities, and absurd transpositions of such structures into space. Readers and editors will also discuss, inviting audience contribution, Annulet's future as ongoing intervention and bright light in critical and rigorous inquiries, rooted into leftist and ecopoetic orientations, into poetics both of prose and poetry, literary criticism, and essay forms that are scholarly at heart and approachable in practice.

https://youtu.be/gFM-8QrizYs

Starting Date/Time
Location
Art Gallery

Dead Gods/Wild Spaces: Queer Landscapes

Event Type

Four Mississippi poets, Ellie Black, Melissa Ginsburg, Maggie Graber, and C.T. Salazar, will read from recent work. These writers navigate issues of queerness, gender, power, and the divine. Because where we’re from shapes how we speak, there’s an interdependent relationship between voice and landscape. These works dwell in landscapes natural and technological, shaped by history, myth, ecology, and pop culture. They are interested in psychology, violence, and trauma, operating at the intersection of the monstrous and the human. Enlivened by lush imagery, sonic play, humor, and formal innovation, these poems present angels and video game glitches, dead gods and endangered wild spaces, as sites of possibility, longing, and transformation.

https://youtu.be/S2hc5QG9kOQ

Starting Date/Time
Location
Cafe Istanbul - New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude

Subvert and Delight: Trouble-making Poems

Event Type

Some poems are rowdy, trouble-making, rabble-rousing, and rebellious—full of insurrection, revolution, and mutiny—and some poems aim to take that charge a step further. Poems that want to strip the paint off the wall and then take the wall down with a wrecking ball and pummel the plaster to dust. Poems that make you wince with absolute delight. James Kimbrell, Stefene Russell, Kerry James Evans and Travis Mossotti will share the stage to read some of their most subversive and delightful poems from recent and forthcoming collections, followed by a Q&A session.

https://youtu.be/pv80UEfmXUk

Starting Date/Time
Location
Art Gallery

SWWIM Every Day Editors' Reading

Event Type

How can you really judge a literary journal's aesthetic? In addition to reading the published work in the magazine, read or listen to the editors' own work. This rare opportunity sees all five editors of SWWIM Every Day--the only daily online literary magazine that publishes and raises female voices--read and discuss their award-winning poems. These five female editors' books and poems have won the National Poetry Series, St. Lawrence Book Award, The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Florida, The Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, the CIPA EVVY Gold Medal, Split Rock Review Chapbook Prize, Portlandia Chapbook Award, Best New PoetsTiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, and the Coniston Poetry Prize, among others.

Collectively, their poems, stories, creative non-fiction, craft essays, interviews, translations, and articles on the literary scene have appeared in The American Poetry Review, TheAtlantic.com, The Best American Poetry, cream city review, Creative Nonfiction, EcoTheo Review, Green Mountains Review Online, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review Poem of the Day, Narrative, Nimrod International Journal, Notre Dame Review, Pleaides, Poets & Writers, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, Split This Rock, Terrain.org, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. They've received residencies, grants, and fellowships from Artists in Residence in the Everglades, The Betsy Hotel-South Beach, CantoMundo, The Deering Estate, Letras Latinas / PINTURA PALABRA DC Ekphrastic, Maryland Transit Administration, O, Miami, Vermont Studio Center, and others.

In addition to running the SWWIM reading and residency series and operating SWWIM Every Day, they work as educators, journalists, publishers, copywriters, anthologists, advocates and administrators of the arts, and more.

Poets of Rebel Satori Press Reading

Event Type

Join Antonio Addessi(Sleeptalking, 2022) and Daniel W. K. Lee(Anatomy of Want, 2019) in a reading to celebrate this years newest additions to Rebel Satori Press—Octavio Gonzalez and Scott Hightower. The reading is a celebration of Octavio's debut full length volume of poetry Limerance and Scott's first book published under Rebel Satori Imperative to Spare. Rebel Satori Press is an independent small press based in New Orleans that has been publishing LGBTQ Poetry and the Occult for over twenty years.

Starting Date/Time
Location
Wild Lotus - New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude
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