So, finally, I have a podcast. And I’m talking about the thing that started with Philthy Art: online art marketing for artists. Ch-ch-check it out:
Also, I return to Philadelphia, after my year of exploring, in the beginning of October. Watch for more events here at Philthy Art and get in touch if you have any thoughts or ideas.
Yours,
Nina
November Moonstone Readings
At Robin’s Bookstore
108 S. 13th Street, Philadelphia, 267-735-9600,www.robinsbookstore.com,
Robin’s Website
Books & Events for Independent Minds from Philadelphia’s Oldest Independent Bookstore
Free and open to Everyone
Sunday, November 11, 6pm - Group Event
Anne Elizabeth Moore
author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity ($15.95 New Press)
What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are co-opted by corporate America?
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111107_6.html
Monday, November 12, 6pm - Fiction
Don Devine
author of Jane: A Flight to Freedom ($14.95 Cold River Books)
Jane follows the adventures of a young woman on the Underground Railroad and explores the attitudes and actions of people in both the North and the South.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111207.html
Tuesday, November 13, 6pm - Non-Fiction
Paul Buhle
co-author of A Dangerous Woman: the Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman ($17.95 New Press)
There is probably no one in the world that knows more about the history of American radicalism than Paul Buhle. A former member of Students for a Democratic Society and a disciple of CLR James, Buhle founded the journal Radical America as well as the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111307.html
Wednesday, November 14, 6pm - Non-Fiction
Stephen L. Gibson
author of A Secret of the Universe: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Discovery of an Eternal Truth ($26.95 Truth-Driven Strategies)
This is the story of two high-school pals from the Midwest for whom a personal tragedy sets in motion a journey of inquiry that spans a lifetime of cruel and glorious twists, and culminates in an astonishing discovery.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111407.html
Wednesday November 14, 6pm - Non-Fiction
Shaun Powell
author of Souled Out? How Blacks Are Winning and Losing in Sports ($22.95 Human Kinetics)
Souled Out? is absolutely must reading for anyone sincerely interested in developments at the interface of race, sport and society. In this regard, the book clearly portrays where we are as a society and where we are headed as a nation relative to these issues.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111407.html
Thursday, November 15, 6pm - Memoir
Walking in the Footsteps of a Stone Giant
by Iron Thunderhorse presented by Tom Big Warrior
Tom “Big Warrior” Watts, Lenape Historykeeper, Founder Red Heart Warriors Society, friend of Chief Iron Thunderhorse, Quinnipiac Renapi, Medicine Chief of Red Heart Warrior Society. Iron is a political prisoner/POW incarcerated in Texas who has been struggling for American Indian spiritual rights inside the Texas prison system for more than 30 years.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111507.html
Thursday, November 15, 6pm - Poetry Workshop
The Life of a Poet Workshop with Leonard Gontarek
4 sessions for $50. Contact: Leonard Gontarek gontarek9@earthlink.net, 215-808-9507
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/gontarek.html
Friday, November 16, 6pm - Non-Fiction
Ken Lamberton and Richard Shelton
authors of Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer ($17.95 University of Arizona Press) and Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (17.95 University of Arizona Press)
Richard Shelton’s Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer is a one-of-a-kind account of the triumphs and heartbreaks, successes and failures of establishing creative writing programs within the Arizona prison system. Through his
writing workshops, Richard Shelton touched many lives - including Ken Lamberton’s Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment. A former science teacher, Lamberton attended Richard Shelton’s writing workshops while serving a twelve-year sentence and there learned to write with candor about his life and his incarceration.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111607.html
Saturday, November 17, 2pm - Fiction
Tom Tancin
author of Man in the Moon ($12.99 Destifire Books)
A small college town terrorized by the murder of college couples calls on the services of Detective Lindsey Scott.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111707.html
Monday November 19, 6pm - Non-Fiction
Sensei Anthony Stultz
author of Free Your Mind ($10.95 iuniverse)
“Through transcending Buddhist terminologies, Sensei Stultz reveals significant insight into our egos and sources of unhappiness. Readers will benefit on several levels through the analysis and practices taught in this work.” -Rev. Alfred Bloom, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Buddhism, University of Hawaii.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/111707.html
Tuesday, November 20, 6pm - Poetry
Women’s Ink Presents:Philadelphia Sunny aka Sylina
Sharing poetry from her debut CD Sometimes the Sun Shines at Night
Hosted by Karima Wadud, Open reading to follow.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/112007.html
Tuesday, November 27, 6pm - Poetry
Moonstone Poetry Series Presents:
Dan Collins and Jim Mancinelli
Dan Collins has been a performing poet with the grassroots collective Compassionately Stoneground Books. Jim Mancinelli is a Philadelphia poet, schooled in the alleyways of South Philly, listening to Italian folk tales, looking at people upside-down, and freed by a beat with a beat.
Hosted by Justin Vitiello, Open Reading to follow
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/112707.html
Wednesday November 28, 6pm - Reading
Dr. Niama L. J. Williams
Dr. Niama L. J. Williams is a poet, essayist, memoirist and adjunct professor of English with a Leeway Foundation grant, inclusion in an NAACP Image award nominated anthology Check the Rhyme, and participation in a Sable Lit Mag/Arvon Foundation writing workshop.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/112807.html
Thursday November 29, 6pm - Jazz
Harrison Ridley Jr. on Max Roach: Percussionist, Composer, Activist
Harrison will discuss who Max was influenced by and who he influenced; his relationship to the Black Arts Movement; his influential recordings; the Max Roach- Clifford connection; and a rare interview with Dizzy and Max.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/112907.html
Thursday, November 29, 6pm - Poetry Workshop
The Life of a Poet Workshop with Leonard Gontarek
4 sessions for $50. Contact: Leonard Gontarek gontarek9@earthlink.net, 215-808-9507
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/gontarek.html
Friday, November 30, 6:30pm - Photography
Michael Grecco
author of Naked Ambition: A Rated Guide to the X Industry ($40.00 Rock Out Books)
A fine-art book that offers an unabashed peek under the silken covers of the multi-billion dollar pornography industry, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas.
For more information see: http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/113007.html
Two of my poems “Mary, Mary” and “Nietzsche” can now be read at the online literary journal Contemporary Rhyme. Many thanks to them (especially because they’re a paying market)…So rare for poetry. But free to you, gentle reader.
Vive la rhyming poetry! I know some think it’s woefully old-fashioned, but I sure ain’t over it. It incorporates the musicality we look for in song and the sense of inevitability that we look for in art.
I also have a free-verse poem “bees” being published in the print journal Grasslimb. I will let you know when that issue comes out.
White Beard
Tonight I am the old man’s white beard
wizened and grizzled in deep lined cuts
resigned to the slope and bend of flesh
gravity pulled furrows over ashen dust
It was the clink of glasses that started this
taking small potent steps down the hall
inching closer to her hated breath
the weight of her, heavy, lurking,
creaking the same wood boards
Can one grow into a giant overnight
when the yearning stops and the
becoming is
knowing one’s art is revealed, suddenly
unearthed by one massive heave
of black earth
To know a person for so long
and see their face go colorless
foul scents utter unrecognizable clods
of rancid words and clouded tongue
Should I take on hatred and this dark
into me, onto me, held and sacred
like the vows now melted away by
the lightest heat from palest sun
Something disappears from me tonight
A piece I can never reclaim or repair
a note held deep in my heart
now scratched thin out of a rusty flute
aching for its rounded wonder
spitting tin and teeth and nails
It was the clink of glasses that started this
a dark celebration and bitter turn
a collapse and fold and deep line cut
of the old man’s white beard
-Rick Wright
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
-W. B. Yeats
Rain Upon the Gossip Tree
The window frames the Gossip tree tonight
Dark brick below
A clean gray blue above
It rained for over an hour
The air cooled
I thought of you
The birds sung
My room felt like a rain forest
I think of what I would say to you
I scratch my arm
There are many songs I could sing
Lullabyes and ballads
Sung a thousand times
They are so deep, like ruts
So easy to flow into
They tell a story you would like to be a part of
But I cannot imagine how I have come here
And that is what interests me
The question of being
How I came to be in this body
In this city
What of my past?
-1999
-the room I lived in during grad school
-the
Pacific Ocean
in its particular composition
of molecules
and vectors
in February 2000.
Where are the hours I thought
I would be in so much trouble
If I didn’t finish a paper, or read
Another chapter, or get to class on time
In what way have I escaped?
I look around me.
I am 29 years old, I live in
Philadelphia. I work.
You are 42. You are getting divorced. There is
A house involved. I live in an apartment. You
Have a studio. We sketch on Thursday nights.
I am me. The me who slipped, who wanted to die.
I am me, whose skin burned with self-consciousness,
Who saw pathos in bracelets and ponytails, who
Couldn’t befriend people she wanted to be.
I am her, but I am not her anymore. I am easy,
I make many words, and have a sure voice. I don’t
Ask.
But I don’t write my poems
Like I used to.
The need to confirm
That I have an interior.
My eyes had not adjusted to dreams or light,
Now, they suffuse all, and involve themselves in all.
I spare no personal expense
In entering.
But I spend nothing I do not wish to spend.
And yet, and yet,
Who is this
With arms that wave
With fingers that fly
Who I will not be
In a moment
Or day
Who is in this body
Who will remain in this body
But who will be left behind
In this Sunday evening, May 2007.
-Nina Alvarez
In Every Direction
As if you actually died in that dream
and woke up dead. Shadows of untangling vines
tumble toward the ceiling. A delicate
lizard sits on your shoulder, its eyes
blinking in every direction.
And when you lean forward and present your
hands to the basin of water, and glimpse the glass face
that is reflected there, it seems perfectly at home
beneath the surface, about as unnatural
as nature forcing everyone to face the music
with so much left to do, with everything
that could be done better tomorrow, to dance
the slow shuffle of decay.
Only one season becoming another,
continents traveling the skyway, the grass
breathing. And townspeople, victims, murderers,
the gold-colored straw and barbed-wire hair of the world
wafting over the furrows, the slashed roads
to the door of your office or into the living room.
The towel is warm and cool, soft to the touch,
but in another dream altogether
a screen door creaks open, slams shut,
and across the valley a car’s headlights swing up
and over. And maybe you are the driver
with both hands on the wheel, humming a tune
nobody’s ever heard before,
or maybe the woman on the edge of the porch,
grown quiet from fleeing,
tough as nails.
-Ralph Angel
Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
-William Carlos Williams
Giving Up
Sometimes
It is good to be
Not good enough
To not know where the line breaks should go
To get angry at a fussy computer
To spill hot chocolate on it
To dislike Sunday evenings as the sun is going down
And you have to work all week
But don’t have money
For coffee
Sometimes
It is okay
To look through the hall of the century
Through your shoddy lens
And feel wistful for the Parisian twenties
To imagine that Gertrude Stein
Knew something you don’t
In all my words I kept planting a song
A hopeful victory song
Of a metal-chested knight,
His fist to his heart
I kept saying
I have something to say
But sometimes
It is just what it is
Here, in this moment
Not knowing what to say
Or where to put the line breaks
Just sliding down on someone
Else’s convention
Rushing through a poem
Without hope
Of answering
The vibration
That knaws
To know
-Nina Alvarez
Caged Bird
Some believe there’s somewhere in the brain
that senses minor fluctuations in the Earth’s
magnetic field and uses a sort of memory
of that to travel the same route year after year
over thousands of miles, over open ocean
on moonless, clouded nights, and a built-in clock
that, save for weather’s influence, tells
when it’s time to go. But they utter nothing
of thwarted dreams in birds’ brains, how
a few cubic feet near the ground, however
well-kept and lighted, however large it seems
around a small bright bird, is like a fist
closed tight on feather and bone, how, certain times
of year, the bird’s heart races as if to power flight.
-Matthew J. Spireng
Photography, drawing, and painting by Nina Alvarez
