Fun poetry reading yesterday at Poetic Research Bureau in Chinatown yesterday with Anthony McCann and Dorothy Lasky

2 poems by Anthony McCann

Dreams of Waking

Over the photographed earth to the photographed park

Once I woke up in my ape suit “just thinking”

It was very important to be prevalent once

Extreme States was just the name of my shirt

And to hegemonize sleep was not just a game

With the drool of a year attached to my name

My left eye still smeared happily shut

Napping means to go drool shadow now

While the sky scalds itself with aluminum dread

Back in nineteen whatever you fill in the blank

Can you believe now once how my body talked

With all these words in the hands of the dead

Everyday I disown myself twice wake again

Go back to sleep with my brains in my hands 

Letter Never Sent

The hills in the yellowing light

The sound of traffic far off

I remember the names of the grass

The terrible names of each blade

The sound of my voice in your name

To memorize you and your hands

Your lips, how they close when you look

How you looked repeating my name

O, please just no more events!

To kiss all your noise and your name

Now I describe my emotions

The sky is a lower case x

I say the names of my hands

First left and then right and then right

Strange to have hands and a name

I look down to my hands when I speak

I don’t say my name to my hands

(I’ll save that dark magic for last!)

This event will go unrecorded

Weird, fake birds overhead

from http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-11/anthony-mccann.html

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these three collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer.

Who to Tell

Who to tell no one cares when no one cares
No one takes the time to care for a monster

I care for monsters
But only because I am one

I go in the dark house
With the ghosts
And the ghosts take my coat off
The junkies

The other man sits slumped in the chair
Is he dead yet?
I do not know

I know that no one cares about anything
I do know that the dressing room
Is drab and grey

And my pink patterned dress
Looks ridiculous against something so truthful

Wildness is not sadness
The wilderness is not sad
It is naked

I am not
If only because
Decomposition is
Not nudity

Who to tell this?
Who do I tell when no one cares

I did not expect them to
I did not expect them to care
I am not mad

I’m not mad any longer
People eat tomatoes
People eat bread

I am a monster
I eat life

But only because I am losing mine
Into a horrible void
That for you is only an idea

I once felt better about things
I once felt better about things
When the blankness was just an idea
Like the way you still think of it

Still I don’t think love is an idea
I don’t think compassion is an idea
I don’t think babies are born out of loneliness
I don’t think the sea is cold

I only think it is cool
Cool cool sea
Blue-green mystery
Mysterious fish

If only I had been born
A fish
Instead of a monster

If only the water were my only home
I would swim so quietly
I would not say hello to you
I would no longer be sad

I would still be me though
And I would not let you catch me
For your dinner

And when you wanted to eat me for your dinner
I would disappear

Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE, Black Life, and the forthcoming Thunderbird, all from Wave Books. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She currently lives in NYC and can be found online at http://www.birdinsnow.com.

from http://www.thethepoetry.com/2011/12/poem-of-the-week-dorothea-lasky/

About the Poetic Research Bureau
The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in Northeast Los Angeles.

As an out-of-pocket California milk-crate boosterist enterprise, it serves as the irregular literary umbrella for projects such as Ara Shirinyan’s house of concept & constraint, Make Now Press; occasional poetry journal The Germ (’97-’05), edited by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card; and art-lit mag Area Sneaks, edited by Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi.

As a research bloc, the PRB attempts to cultivate composition, publication and distribution strategies that enlarge the public domain. It favors appropriations, impersonations, ‘compost’ poetries, belated conversations, unprintable jokes and doodles, ‘unoriginal’ literature, historical thefts and pastiche. The publication emphasis is on ephemeral works, short-run magazines and folios, short-lived reprints and excerpts in print-on-demand formats, and the occasional literary fetish objects of stupidly incomparable price and value.

The Bureau also hosts a reading series at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown, and invites writers whose work lacks the ‘commercial tendency’ while harboring the bright, high-minded intentions that often lead to broad panic, righteous perversions, improbable arguments, and the ill-served cul-de-sacs of genius. The series is programmed by the aforementioned Messrs Maxwell, Mosconi and Shirinyan. If you’re sympatico, passing through town, or need a megaphone, 50 seats and a big blank space, give us a write.

Contact: directors@poeticresearch.com