…and then some

A windblown Jessica Piazza reads–of love, of fear–

For more video clips, visit the RIOT Ink Vimeo site.

It was another sweltering June evening for our third RIOT Ink reading. Jessica Piazza gave an outstanding performance, proving that the art of the sonnet is not dead, it’s DEAD SEXY. RIOT Ink was pleased as punch to have her grace our stage.

Later on in the evening our open mic included a few new faces among some of our favourites. Some of the readers included Bree Rolfe (with her moving love letter to Vinny D. aka Vincent Donofrio), Ryan P. Young (reading a sonnet for an *ahem* a rubenesque girl), Paul Foreman (who read from Texas Liveoak), as well John Herndon, Ken Fontenot, Steve Pressler, Marty Lloyd and Lindsay Low.

—————– Our Next Feature: Jessica Piazza —————–

(So NICE, she gotta be introduced TWICE!)

 

The beautiful and talented Jessica Piazza was not able to make it out for our last reading, but we’re ecstatic to have her read this time around. Here’s your double take…. Our Jessica Piazza bio & mini interview:

The next RIOT Ink reading will be

this Thursday, June 26

and will feature the fabulous

Jessica Piazza

Jessica Piazza’s poems have appeared in Agni, The Indiana Review, Ocho, No Tell Motel, and Pebble Lake Review. She is Founding Editor of Bat City Review and Co-Founder of the Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she now lives in LA while pursuing a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. (Bio, courtesy of Coconut)

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting this wonderful woman, and she was kind enough to oblige me a little mini interview. Please note, a few of these questions are ripped (and slightly tweaked) right out of the now defunct blog Here Comes Everybody. Enjoy.

1. What are your three favourite words?

Pillow, martyr, scaffolding

2. Who do you keep bedside (on your nightstand?)

A very small man in a very small sailor suit, of course. He likes it on my nightstand. But seriously, I’d say my go-to poets are a pretty motley crew. Eliot’s in there and so is (as of recently) Millay and Williams, but then Albert Goldbarth and Marilyn Hacker make their appearances. As everyone who knows me knows, I’m all about my friend Jill Alexander Essbaum’s poetry, and while I’m plugging some fantastic poet friends I’ll also mention Eric McHenry and Craig Arnold-each of whom has a first book I adore. In fact, I’m big on a bunch of first books poets now, so…

3. Who was your first poetry love?

Sad to say Shakespeare, but that’s probably the truth. Although when I was in high school I had a pretty different aesthetic, and I was gaga over Sandra Cisneros’ Loose Woman and Sharon Olds’ The Gold Cell. Then later, in college, Marilyn Hacker really got to me, which is partially why I started to play with form, meter and rhyme.

4. Is there one poem, poet or experience that made you decide to be a poet?

There are plenty of experiences in my young life that made me start writing poetry, or maybe I should say “poetry,” since that verbal vomit most of us write as children and young adults doesn’t much resemble what we write after we actually start reading verse regularly. I will say, though, that I began to consider pursuing poetry in a serious way (I mean, okay, I don’t really do anything in a serious way, but I guess I mean as a career) in college, while working for Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project at Boston University. The project was so inspiring-all these everyday, non-literary people explaining why a particular poem moved them, and in some cases saved their lives-that the form became a lot more real, more visceral and urgent, I guess, than it ever had been.

I had also taken some great undergraduate classes (with Joe Osterhaus and Eric McHenry, particularly) and met some amazing poets who had recently finished the grad program at BU (including Maggie Dietz, whose recent first book is also wonderful, I might add). And I suppose it isn’t very highbrow or intellectual to say this, but I liked these people so much-just as people as well as poets–that it made me realize being a poet wasn’t some random or esoteric thing that was unachievable. Like: cool people were actually poets! (Umm, sometimes. But still!)

5. How would you explain poetry to my fellow student MBA douchebro who think’s Shakespeare’s for pussies?

Poetry in general is for pussies. But fuck it, sign me up. And anyway, much like taking Home Ec. in high school, MBA’s should consider that there are mad hot girls writing and reading poetry and a relatively small number of straight and/or unmarried men in the field. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, I tell you!

6. What is the last dream you remember?

I just got new tattoos (yes, this is ridiculous, but I got an iamb on one foot and a trochee on the other-metrical feet) and I dreamed they started to flake off. I suppose even in the dream world formal poetry only has a tentative foothold. (Wow, that was bad. But Jill Essbaum would be proud of such punning.)

7. Which three poets would you resurrect, and what for?

Oh, I’d like to talk to all manner of dead poets for all manner of reasons, but let’s face it: Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman would make a HELL of a party.

8. Now for a little Bibliomancy: open the nearest book to a random page and point anywhere on the recto page. Write the name of the book and the sentence your finger lands on. This sentence is a metaphor for _________.

Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Tony Barnstone)

He thinks he sees the space between her words,
the unknown underneath, can diagnose
the case, so he ignores the things he’s heard
her say, the symptoms, postulates he knows
the concealed truth, and in this way resists,
playing good doctor in white coat and specs.

(DAMN, that’s a long fucking sentence.)

This sentence is a metaphor for several of my most recent relationships, if the he/she pronouns were reversed.

9. Word association:

cherry: bomb

glass : house

riot : grrrl (yuck)

ink : tattoo (circumstantial, I suspect)

rhyme : time (Sorry. Jeopardy)

body : electric (I heart the 80s)

10. How would you describe your philosophy of poetry?

The same way I’d describe my philosophy of anything: I don’t think less is more. I want more more and then some, and then some motherfucking more.

You can read some of Jessica Piazza’s work here, and here.

Some pics

George Leake read a fantastic set the other night.

A nice crowd, considering the tyrannical heat. We’ll try to post some clips on Vimeo soon. In the meantime here are some pics:

 

 

  George Leake, reading from ‘Blood and Chocolate’.

 

  

 Our hot audience.

      

A few readers in our open mic: Travis Freeman on the left, and Katherine Wallace on the right.

 

    

 John Herndon read from “Mapping the Debris Field” and Ken Fontenot gave a beautiful recitation of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man”.

 

Us, later that evening.

From left: Matthew Anderson, Ryan Bender Murphy, Paula Mendoza-Hanna, Zack Tuck.

Our Next Feature: George Leake

Our lovely feature Jessica Piazza won’t be able to make it this time around, but in her place we will have the formidable poet George Leake.

George Leake runs the production company Ars Notoria, as well as Pull Down Press. He has published several chapbooks including “Blood and Chocolate”, “Tacit Notes”, “Nine Nocturnes” and most recently “The Hedgepig Agonistes”. We lost him to San Fransisco not two years ago, but we celebrate his homecoming now and the poetry scene is all the richer in his return. He is a consummate host and has produced such memorable events as WAR TRANCE at Hyde Park Theatre, featuring UT’s own giants, Douglass Parker and Tom Cable.

His work is lush, ornate and sensuous. He, like Jessica Piazza, has a deep reverence for form and his sonnets, sestinas among many other works are truly breathtaking.

We hope to have Jessica Piazza as our feature at a later date, and I’ll be sure to keep all you lovely people posted.

We’ll see you all this Thursday.

It’ll be a magical evening.

THE RIOT INK MINI-INTERVIEW:

1. Three favourite words

vouchsafe, cherish, dweomercraft

2. Who do you keep bedside (on your nightstand?)

I almost never read in bed

3. Who was your first poetry love?

Shakespeare

4. Is there one poem, poet or experience that made you decide to be a poet?

Seeing a performance of several scenes from Shakespeare (particularly from Hamlet, Twelfth Night and The Tempest) performed live by members of a professional touring company at my high school–what was all but dead recited in class, recordings on vinyl records or on film (like the Julius Caesar with Brando), was incredibly gripping live in person, a sort of magic that transpired between the spoken words and seeing the fully realized work from the mouths and eyes of the performers

5. How would you explain poetry to my fellow student MBA douchebro who think’s Shakespeare’s for pussies?

from your brief description, one would think it best not to dangle *pearls before swine,* but obviously he has not grasped the best of his work like Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, and so on. Does this person know that the plays were wildly successful in their day, produced in a raw atmosphere where other entertainments of the day included ritual torture, beheadings, bear-baiting, dog-fights, and so on? That Shakespeare’s company had to tour the English hinterlands when the Plague returned to London? That he lived through a time when Catholics, then Protestants, not to mention Jews, were alternately persecuted and purged? These were not times for the prissy faint of heart–nor has Shakespeare’s power diminished, though many Americans have a well-deserved reputation in Europe as someone called a “quick study”, including some who pose as academes, and one who calls himself President. Why bother with someone who’s probably working on a dissertation proposal focussed on, say, the hegemony of YouTube, Beyonce, and the iPod?

6. What is the last dream you remember?

last night I was wandering around a library, and there were contradictory notices posted everywhere around the stack areas. Some lickspittle bureaucrat man with poindexter glasses was trying to make espresso in the break room, next to boiling ramen.

7. Which three poets would you ressurect, and what for?

those that wrote The Mahabharata, Beowulf and The Kalevala (assuming that one poet wrote each of those pieces) just so I can thank them and place a face with a great piece of work. I’m sure the douchebro MBA would think they are pussies as well.

8. Bibliomancy: open the nearest book to a random page and point anywhere on the recto page. Write the name of the book and the sentence your finger lands on. This sentence is a metaphor for _____.(I can fill in that blank if you want)

“Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama” by Ake Hultkrantz…”Soul loss generally presupposes a belief in soul dualism.” This sentence is a metaphor for money. (in other words, substitute the word soul with money in the sentence). Maybe the MBA dude can get to that, eh?

9. Word association:

- cherry: clitoris

- glass : houses

- riot: police

- ink: well

- rhyme: word

- body: rock

10. How would you describe your philosophy of poetry?

as Anthony Burgess says in his autobiography, while some people stress emotions or this and that, its mainly, or basically, about *words*…