Thursday, April 26, 2012
720 Records in Lawrenceville
8:30-10:30 PM
free and open to the public

As we were preparing the details for this next ((PRO) (FANA)), the University of Pittsburgh was barraged with a series of bomb threats over the past month. Given this ((PRO) (FANA))’s theme, it seemed fitting that all of this unfolded and peaked with Mercury in retrograde. “Poet Projective: Somatics, Clairvoyance, and Intuitive Engagements” explores how we can come to new insights when we turn aside from “rationality” — a deductive, empirically based method for understanding the world — and engage subtler impulses in pursuit of a new portrait of reality. Indeed, some of our most lauded and inventive minds have dabbled in the occult — Isaac Newton, Carl Jung, William Blake, Maya Deren, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and David Lynch come quickly to mind — and the “New” Age in fact echoes our most ancient cultural practices.

“Poet Projective” brings together two of the foremost practitioners of intuitive engagements in contemporary poetry for an evening of dialogue and exploration. Join us as CA Conrad and Debrah Morkun discuss their poetic practices, how they came to this mode of writing, and some of the startling insights they’ve achieved.

CA Conrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers on the side of the highway for his teen mother and helping her shoplift. A skilled Dakini Tarot reader, Conrad’s numerous books include Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press), a collaboration with Frank Sherlock titled The City Real and Imagined (Factory School), and The Book of Frank (Wave Books) and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books) as well as recent essays in the anthologies Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? (AK Press) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press). Among his various projects, Conrad also edits Jupiter 88: A Video Journal of Contemporary Poetry as well as Paranormal Poetics. His prizes include the Gill Ott Book Award and a Pew Fellowship by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Find out more about him at his website. 

Debrah Morkun believes in near death experiences and prays to the old gods. A graduate of Naropa University, Debrah is the author of The Ida Pingala (BlazeVOX, 2011) & Projection Machine (BlazeVOX, 2010) as well as several chapbooks. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she curates The Jubilant Thicket Literary Series & co-curates (with Kim Gek Lin Short) The General Idea Series. You can visit her at her website for more of her poetry and reviews.

What an incredible event — 720 Records was standing room only! Many thanks to our generous friend, Nate, for allowing us to use his store space, and to the many guests and attendees of the night. Below are the introductions we shared as well as some photos.

Lauren Russell is currently a graduate student of the MFA writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and comes to us by way of Los Angeles and New York city. Her chapbooks include The Empty Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better) and Dream-Clung Gone (Brooklyn Arts Press). Her work could be the love child of Michel Foucault and a tortoise shell cat, objectively remorseless with its gaze into what we culturally construe as “psychic well being.” She charms and terrifies us by turns, her whimsical word play coupling with the recognition of what our mad society has wrought onto ourselves. (SJL)

Yona Harvey teaches for the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University and her first poetry collection, Hemming the Water, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Yona’s poems beg the questions: How does a poem get made? What are its materials? Language, in Harvey’s poems, comes from a range of sources, including the quotidian — music reviews, fashion magazines, grammar primers, and cookbooks. The poems re-imagine what’s possible given the material that we experience everyday — the material that we take for granted — and casts this language into a new realm as if to command us to look at it again, to re-think what we thought we already knew about its powers. Harvey’s poems, as they recycle and reinvent might bring us to the ends of language, a butting up against those ends. (DLM)

Evie Shockley grew up in the shadow of southern trees and now teaches as an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick. As a poet, Evie writes through and feels strongly the traces of history at work upon our cultural consciousness. In her writing, we see how we are products of our era, which was in turn shaped by what came before. But in her whimsical, determined, vigorous prosody, these traces of history needn’t be pine coffins lined with pretty verse. The past is black — in all the glorious subtle shades of the word — a rich sod to till and draw nourishment from, to nurture ourselves with knowledge and understanding. It is alive and speaks even now to us with a challenge to be great — more human, more attuned, more inquisitive and alert to the world we move in and shape. There’s a strange and tender delight in her work, and I think you will love her.  (SJL)