Brolaski, Koeneke & Mohammed 9/13 7:30 pm Stumptown Division

Please join the Switch for a special Friday the 13th reading with Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Rodney Koeneke and K. Silem Mohammad. 

When: September 13, 7:30 pm

Where: Stumptown, 4525 SE Division Street

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011) and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books 2009).  Julian lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press and plays country music with Juan & the Pines. New work is on the blog hermofwarsaw.

Rodney Koeneke is author of the poetry collections Etruria (forthcoming from Wave Books April 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003), winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award, along with several chapbooks. An early member of the Flarf Collective, he was involved with Poets Theater and Neo-Benshi events in the San Francisco Bay Area until 2006, when he moved to Portland, Oregon where he currently lives, writes, and teaches British and World History at Portland State University.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003), Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), and The Front (Roof Books, 2009). He is a professor of English and Writing at Southern Oregon University.












By Julian Talamantez Brolaski:

horse vision

clock reads 7 at all hours
juncos make selves known in the snow
this time dawdling
I write in horse, but I see in athabaskan
when it’s time for elevensies, the clock reads 7
what telling fortune therewith
time is a thing that gets spent, like youth, $ and desire
n/t so lovely as a cardinal against the snow
or a tree w/ fruit on it
by the time I have ceased to write this
it will already be 7
adjourned to the park
n/thing will come of n/t
starfish creak inna wood
lurid amulet    w/ a fish onnit
sign reads SEVEN all day & at all hours
the dogs curse each other from afar
in dog language
when did the word corrupt begin to take on a moral cast?
horses see in wide angle, and have a much wider periphery than humans,
but with a blind spot in the very center
so if you want to be sympathtic to a horse say sucks
about those blinders
or if you want to make fun of a horse, tell them
they can’t even see whats in front of their face




By Rodney Koeneke

young historian’s scoring rubric

It’s why we have opium—to blaze

and nod on a scale whose pain

is my thesis forgot in a mesh

of working parts. To follow sirens

until they are enclosed by fellahin,

agree to record them, dye them cerulean

while rewriting their papers

in excellent grammar—they paid

for those papers, paper cites directly

a chant one once directed at the Sun.

Analysis is solid, and done

in a historical way, but free

from all history, balloons

on a tether with girl in a picture,

primary evidence let fly away.



By K. Silem Mohammed

Monsters

my friend the tax lawyer is licking his lips
his comment is one of the many, of the crowd
—Jesus, I deserve to be free!

he is a soldier and a liberator
behind the wheel of a big car

down the street it seems
to go like a ray of light

manufactured by the system
and spread via all means
I don’t even know what game

for all the objects
here in the darkness surrounded by filth

there are many more masses
in the form of people walking around
going fast through the alternating banks

the shadowy giants finally catch up

the story was that we make the monsters
these goddamn things and then it’s goodbye

Erika Staiti & Paul Maziar 8/15 7 pm

Special one-off Switch reading! Erika Staiti is in town from Oakland, and we are happy to host her for a reading Thursday 8/15 at 7 pm at Warehouse 640 on 640 SE Stark Street. She'll be joined by the Switch's own Paul Maziar, reading from his new manuscript Pneumatics.

Erika Staiti is author of the chapbooks In the Stitches published by Trafficker Press in 2010 and Verse/Switch and Stop-Motion in 2008. Recent work appears in OMG, SAGINAW, Mrs. Maybe, and forthcoming in Dusie.

See her work at
http://erikastaiti.tumblr.com/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/08/social-reading-number-one-rachel-levitsky-ariel-goldberg-on-erika-staitis-the-undying-present/

evan kennedy

Paul Maziar will read from his new manuscript, Pneumatics. He once self-published a book of poems, Last Light of Day printed by Publication Studio in 2010, and his book of spontaneous prose, What it is: What it is was published by Writebloody in '08. Both are out of print. Some poems can be found in Pataphysics and Peaches & Bats.

His drawings can be found here, among many images and things he has stumbled upon:
http://andsotobegin.tumblr.com/


By Erika Staiti (published in La Fovea, http://www.lafovea.org/La_Fovea/erika_staiti.html)

Excerpt I: The Planned Experiment

The room downstairs is covered with sheets of plastic. There are statues in the corners made of glass. Every object in the room is bright and reflecting off of itself. The far wall is covered with disintegrating parchment - an old map of the world panning across it. The names of places that no longer exist are echoing across the room, bouncing off walls, getting trapped in corners, escaping out of slightly opened windows. A birdcage hangs at eye level. Stacks of newspapers sit on a dark wooden table that is not used for eating. Altitudes transition throughout the day. Subjects alter their perceptions. Overhead lights in the movie theater dim slowly.

II.

We are in a place ruled by mobs of conflicting desires. We slither through the people and smash into them. We wander among them as if they are statues. They are miming the selves they want to be rather than being the selves that they are. We tune the receptors in the creases between our heads and our necks. We mimic ourselves when angry and we mimic ourselves when sweet. We sleep with our arms around the weather as smog collects before rolling into the beginning of the next day. We call upon ourselves to keep pace. There are too many days to take into account but we keep accounting counting turning. They want to swallow us to fill their selves. We stand by. We watch them swallow each other. Filling the innards.

Kaia Sand & Maged Zaher 8/9 Hazel Room 7 pm

The Switch is very happy to host a reading by Portland's Kaia Sand and Maged Zaher from Seattle on Friday, August 9 at 7 p.m. at the Hazel Room and Mag-Big, 3279 SE Hawthorne Blvd.

Maged Zaher is the author of THANK YOU FOR THE WINDOW OFFICE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), THE REVOLUTION HAPPENED AND YOU DIDN'T CALL ME (Tinfish Press, 2012), and PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS AN ENGINEER (Pressed Wafer, 2009). His collaborative work with the Australian poet Pam Brown, FAROUT LIBRARY SOFTWARE, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007.

His translations of contemporary Egyptian poetry have appeared in Jacket magazine, Banipal, and Denver Quarterly. He has performed his work at Subtext, Bumbershoot, the Kootenay School of Writing, St. Marks Project, Evergreen State College, and The American University in Cairo.

Kaia Sand is currently artist-in-residence with Garrick Imatani at the Portland Archives and Records Center, a City of Portland Percent for Art Project managed by the Regional Arts & Culture Council. They are creating the Watcher Files Project through working with police surveillance files of activist groups in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. Over the next year, they will create a participatory cabinet as well as a subscription book called Looseleaf Service. (Visit http://looseleafservices.us for more information.)

Kaia is the author of the poetry collections, interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic book of the year; and Remember to Wave (Tinfish Books 2010), a book that was also a walk Sand led exploring the political history and present goings-on around the Portland Expo Center. With Jules Boykoff, she co-authored Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space. With magician and whistler Mitch Hider, she wrote and performed a magic show about the financial collapse, A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff; the text is now a chapbook (Above Ground Press 2013). This spring, her poems were anthologized in Kindergarde (Black Radish 2013) and Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press 2013). She is poet-in-residence at the Portland State University Honors Program.

The Hazel Room offers gourmet sandwiches and salads and specializes in a unique menu of alcoholic tea & coffee cocktails as well as some of the classics. They offer absinthe, wines, beers and cordials. The restaurant is named in honor of the co-owner's great grandmother, who ran a tea house/speakeasy during prohibition. Mag-Big is a retail shop for local artists and designers, a hub for artists of all sorts to bring their work into conversation. The concept of Mag-Big is a singular Portlandian paradigm of supporting local and taking pride in small scale, independent operations.

3/31 at 6:30 p.m.: Poets James Yeary & Chris Ashby; Live Drawing by Nate Orton; Music by Kris Doty & Jenny Logan

We're thrilled to announce a celebration and performance: Sunday, March 31 at the IPRC at 6:30 p.m. (1001 SE Division.) for the launch of My Day #23, by visual artist Nate Orton; along with poets James Yeary and Chris Ashby. Nate will create visual art while the poets read works from My Day. Kris Doty and Jenny Logan will round out the evening with some music. This will be very exciting, please join us!

MY DAY was started by Nate Orton after he moved to Portland from rural Idaho almost a decade ago. He was frustrated with how large his new city felt to him, as he was familiar with every square inch of his previous town. Through line drawings, he created a visual catalog of major and minor places and events in Portland that would help him become better acclimated to the city. It worked. MY DAY on the MAX was completed as an edition of 35 Xerox copies. Much to Nate’s surprise, they sold fast. Another Idaho transplant Chris Ashby joined to write for MY DAY on the Burnside Bridge and Lloyd Center. Yet another Idaho transplant and writer James Yeary joined to help create MY DAY at Chopsticks Karaoke Bar.

Sometime after MY DAY at Chopsticks, James and Nate decided to walk across Portland metro. The first walk was turned into the book, MY DAY walking across Gresham, the second across Portland, the third across Beaverton and so on. They are currently at the Eastern edge of the Costal range with plans to make it to the ocean. MY DAY #23, Blazers vs. Thunder was released in February with both James and Chris contributing. Nate has plans to continue this project until he reaches issue 100. 

Chris Ashby is a poet, student, and musician. 2013 will see the second edition of his chapbook, The Return, a serial poem of transitional objections about what it means to read today. Also forthcoming in 2013 is the book length, but still rather short poem, Notes from the Raft. Recent publications include work in c_l Newsletter and Peaches and Bats 9. He has been collaborating with Nate Orton for over ten years on artist books and placed based poetic projects, most recently on the My Day series. This winter he began the small publishing venture (Couch Press) in order to publish local poets: Spring 2013 will see the release of Dawn’s Erasure (1) by fellow Portland poet and My Day collaborator James Yeary. He writes and works mostly outside.    

James Yeary is a member of the spare room reading series, the artist and writer collaborative inquiry 13 Hats, and the IPRC. He has chapbooks out from Couch Press, Hank's Original Loose Gravel, editions plane, and inkhorn. Visual work recently appeared in the Fantagraphics anthology the Last Vispo: visual poetry 1998-2008. A video recently appeared at unspokennw.com. He publishes work by many, many writers under the imprint c_L, see creepoflight.com. He is very excited to be reading, finally, at the IPRC, his dome away from dome.

 

Multi-instrumentalist Kris Doty has been playing music and touring for nearly two decades. She cut her teeth in the high deserts of Idaho and debuted her first solo record, Smoke in the Mirror, on her own dime; to immediate success. The album took nine solid months to record. It's full of pop-sensible indie rock with moody undertones and hints of Doty's jazz and classical music interests. John McMahon (Built to Spill) added to the moodier moments of Smoke with his cello and bass playing, while being its producer as well. Kris studied music at an early age, playing the bass which would become her main instrument (stand-up and electric) in her longstanding engagement with Portland OR band Drew Grow & The Pastors' Wives. Most recently; with DGPW, she toured the country with Merge Records band Wild Flag, and Sub Pop's The Head and The Heart. With Grow and company having completed their sophomore album, Kris is busy working on her sophomore release and the formation of a new band.

12/15: Gary Sullivan & Drew Swenhaugen @ IPRC

Hello PDX! We are thrilled to announce our next event: Saturday, December 15th, at 7 p.m. at the IPRC (1001 SE Division St.)

Poet and cartoonist Gary Sullivan has been translating the work of Austrian schizophrenic Ernst Herbeck for the last 10 years--a side project to the polarizing flarf movement that he gave name to in 2001. Everyone Has a Mouth, a selection of more than two dozen of his translations of Herbeck's poems, was published earlier this year by Ugly Duckling Presse. He writes about immigrant culture for opencitymag.com and international music at bodegapop.com.

Drew Scott Swenhaugen was born in Minnesota. He is editor of the chapbook press Poor Claudia, contributes in book design for Octopus Books, and co-curates the Bad Blood Reading Series in Portland. Occasionally he contributes to the Tin House blog as well as the The Volta, a website of contemporary poetics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like Shampoo, Weekday, Redivider, Lungfull! among others. He is an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and cannot wait for the multitude of job choices he will have to choose from after his degree is completed.

The Rhino.
by Ernst Herbeck, trans. by Gary Sullivan


The rhino is completely quiet in the woods.
The nose on high and does also
                            cause such pain.
That always causes such pain and does usually
                            does not hurt.
more than the animal so huge is it also
the rhino is a huge animal.
The rhino in the woods.
so jagged is the rhinoceros
and yet so fine.

from LIFEY
by Drew Swenhaugen

I’m going to go whistling on by this time. No touching

everything in my path. Not this time.

You can call me homey, although it sounds like you called me

homeless, which is fine. I don’t mind if we portray me like that.

You are not too good for your home, which you should not be ashamed of,

not in the least. I like that in you, which makes me leave mine.

The fact that you call me homey is determinant upon another fact : 

that I am no longer a close emotional or sexual companion to you,

which is also fine. I guess it’s fine. I’ll act like it’s fine for you.

But when I go whistling along, and you ask what’s up homey,

you must expect me to keep walking, or else I’ll stop

to realize that every single moment has been in vain.

If you tell me to keep walking, I’ll say okey dokey.

And when the rain comes, I’ll pray that the rain forgets

that it’s actually rain. Which is also fine this time, I now must say.

Although I wish I had a jacket, if it’s going to keep raining like this.

Dana Ward & Michael Roberts 11/1 7:30 pm Suzette

The Switch is excited to host Dana Ward and Michael Roberts Thursday, November 1 at 7:30 p.m. sharp (sharp) at Suzette, 3342 SE Belmont.

Dana Ward is the author of This Can’t Be Life (Edge Books). Two new books are coming out in 2012, one from Futurepoem Books, entitled The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, and another, as yet untitled, from Flowers & Cream. He lives in Cincinnati where he runs the Cy Press Poetry @ Thunder Sky reading series and works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over-The-Rhine Learning Center.

Michael Roberts was born in the small seaport town of Newport on  December 7th and again a year later in February. Roberts attended a school for simple wooden machines with human features in his hometown and later attended the local grammar school when his father went bankrupt and moved the family to Moscow. Roberts, only 16 at the time, decided to remain in his hometown and supported himself by tutoring as he continued his schooling for 10 more years. In 1987 he began to enjoy some small notoriety as a writer with small poems appearing in various papers, including Peterburskaia gazeta from 1987, and Novoe vremia from 1988. Roberts also published 2 full-length taffeta prom dresses and 2 small jewel-like blemishes above his right eye during this time, one of which was translated into Polish in 1990. This seems to have been the turning point. Interest in poetry grew to such fervor in the subsequent 12 months that in 1991 Roberts was abducted in a “black” operation and borne secretly to Oregon where he would spend the next 10 years composing surrealist poetry for the American Space Program. In 2012, an amnesty was granted for artists working under the umbrella of “Celestial Mechanics”, which brought him to Portland at last. Today he divides his time between writing and the perfection of the Fish Stick, his favorite dish.

I Live in a Castle
by Michael Roberts


Leave a note for yourself in the big room
so you'll know what not to do
you think you're reframing a mystery

What emotion has been encapsulated?
on a day like today whatever she felt wasn't fear
not commercial fear anyway

Here she is
mind-blowingly empty
or just blowingly

Like the gods
we're only human
in direct sunlight

So we're off to slave labor
our semipermeable minds a curious shade of blue
blue of the ragtag sea

Surrounded by masters
imaging each other as something
other than a slave

Someone else
who said the big room exists
but I don't recall any note

You could practically be loved
I wave
you wave back

You're right
Sicily is beautiful in winter
you describe the sky to someone else



Willows on Fire
by Dana Ward


The summer night
is like a perfection of thought & Patron
a perfection of that.

So the difference between Patron
& water is that clear Sarah looks to see
her eyes through all that's left--

the image of the structure
on fire hung up in the structure is pillow talk
the thing that gets me hottest

as Willow on fire with grief
found the necessary callousness to call
the doe from nowhere out of trees

then slit its softish throat
for young blood. She loved herself
far too much to ever suffer

Buffy’s corpse in the soft agave
ground, & running water from the tap
the fucking mystery of feeling & the weirdness of sensation

where Brechtian surgical lamps
incandesce with the power smiles pushing
through blush in French painting

to light the indelible candy
this rookery yields like our lives to plainly
death as if we knew from economics.

Oh god why am I so upset
by the mildew all over this copy of ‘Motherless
Brooklyn’ is there something

growing sundial feelings washing up
on the nano-reef here at our faucet
a ribbony Mao Molly brought from Beijing

hangs beneath this kitsch ceramic clock
where an angel guards the face of a cloud
frozen up & correct

twice a day semblance of injurious perfection
it is so much like water
when it stagnates in the heart.

It makes a living culture
when the lab-work comes back
it's as if instead they tested lake of fire.

Willow’s love for Buffy though
will always be more real
than anything we’ll ever feel

between us, in credulous bodies
there’s nothing like the lively despair
of Willow’s spell? We’ll never see

its sacrificial, self-regarding picture
if we give our sails to one another well
send the body of our lover

in a vessel of pure disbelief
at their loss that stays impossible, we leave
one another inside us over rivers

dying in its commons, & heaven
an imageless pacification that engines
all the images fails.

For Buffy this anodyne nowhere
flowing with saccharine prescience
made her hate tap water then

once Willow brought her back
from the total Patron of the corporeal end.
They show her standing there hand under the faucet

thinking with this blank expression
to herself & staring where to time that's hard to tell I think
she's thinking fuck their hapless, fearsome care that brought me back

David Mutschlecner & Endi Bogue Hartigan Oct. 11, 7:30 p.m.

The Switch is happy to feature poets David Mutschlecner from Los Alamos, NM, and Portland's Endi Bogue Hartigan on Thursday, October 11 at 7:30 p.m. sharp at the wonderful Division Leap bookstore, 211 SW 9th Ave, Portland, OR.

Endi Bogue Hartigan is the author of One Sun Storm, which was selected for the 2008 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and a chapbook out of the flowering ribs in collaboration with artist Linda Hutchins, which will be out this fall. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Verse, Volt, Chicago Review, Pleiades, Peep/Show, LVNG, and other journals. With a collective of poets she co-curates the Spare Room reading series, and she is a member of the collaborative group 13 Hats. She lives in Portland with her husband poet Patrick Playter Hartigan and their son.

David Mutschlecner is the author of four books of poetry, including Sign and Enigma and Light, both published by Ahsahta press.  Recently, he has had work in New American Writing.  Mutschlecner’s work explores theopoetics, where poetry enters the realm of theology as a nondogmatic light, where theology casts its own color upon poetry.  Mutschlecner hopes that if both are poured out, one for the other, perhaps a new kenosis is accomplished.  The poet lives and works in Los Alamos, New Mexico.






By Endi Bogue Hartigan:

All night long
one thunderclap

Love and the demolished lot

the old St. Francis building bulldozed up
today, the last of its rubble

All night long the birth
of a child

All day long
the birth of a child

one thunderclap

& gifts to wrap
with white bows

From One Sun Storm, Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, 2008.


By David Mutschlecner:

I feel thy finger and find thee
touching the flute hole in my head,
the worm hole in my heart,

God shaped,
that riffs itself, coiling
into the music of some other sphere.

Come at Christmas,
come at Easter,
pinwheeled to and from my need.

From “Enigma and Light in Every Relation, II”