Chris King's "Medley of bad guys"

So like I was saying, there will be a poetry performance at Mad Art (2727 South 21st St.) at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 to close The Shape of a Man group art show. The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar. The reading will last about an hour and be followed by a reception.

The performing poets will be K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), reading in the opposite order of that list. Leading up to the event, I plan to post a little more info about each of the poets, along with one of their more "manly" poems.
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A MEDLEY OF BAD GUYS
By Chris King

He showed up drunk, a syringe
tattoo turned into a knife. Put out a lit
cigarette on his tongue, like
a guy hit by lightning strike left thirsty
the rest of his life, or wine
country scavengers left deaf by cannon bursts.
He carried cyanide in

his shoes, knew creepy people, figured creepy
people must want to blow up
other creepy people, so sold explosives.
In the joint, he rigged a bed
sheet and magazine, fanned himself by waving
one toe. You gave me a grave.
I made for myself a little open door.

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Florida: she made me chase
a lizard from her house. I should have known right
there. Then, she married the worst
kind of bastard: the kind that can kick my ass

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He was a Cajun screw from
Port Arthur, Texas. Got a blow job, didn’t
feel a God damned thing. Don’t think
you’re owed, now. Just because I got a lot of
shit don’t mean it ain’t all mine.
Kind of guy could never write the novel of
his own life. Why? Because he
doesn’t know how to laugh, cry, at the right parts.

from The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints) (c) 2012

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Chris King is a multi-media creative worker and producer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He casts his poems as 7/11s, a form innovated by the St. Louis poet Quincy Troupe. The Shape of a Man group show was the occasion to publish his first collection of 7/11s, also called The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints, 2012). He has published one previous chapbook of poetry, A heart I carved for a girl I knew (Skuntry, 2006). He serves as creative director of Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media. Expected later in 2012: the second movie he directed for Poetry Scores, Go South for Animal Index, and a boxed set of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Library of Congress recordings, to be released on our national record label, Smithsonian/Folkways.

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At the January 30 show-closer for The Shape of a Man, I will perform poems with Josh Weinstein on double bass.




And I will perform my poems through Noah Kirby's sculpture, With Solid Stance and Stable Sound.



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Also in this series:
K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us.
Stefene Russell's manly love song
Nicky Rainey wants to tell us where Leo is now

Nicky Rainey wants to tell us where Leo is now

So like I was saying, there will be a poetry performance at Mad Art (2727 South 21st St.) at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 to close The Shape of a Man group art show. The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar.

The performing poets will be K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), reading in the opposite order of that list. Leading up to the event, I plan to post a little more info about each of the poets, along with one of their more "manly" poems.


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Where Leo is now
By Nicky Rainey


As soon as the BP oil spill began, my cousin Leo started finding fishes in his dedicated spaces -- an anemone in the bathroom sink, krill wiggling out of his ear, a baby shark flopping around in his underwear drawer. The dreams were worse. One night he got chased by clansmen through a post-apocalyptic coral reef. The next, eyeless cavefish replaced his teeth. Like many of us, Leo’s nightmares led to insomnia, gluing him to CNN live -- you could see it refracted in his eyeballs during the daytime as he played cards or ate a sandwich. The ticker tape, talking heads, looping stories, the endless ebbing and flowing of black gloss and sea.

On day 43 of the spill, Leo found a handful of oysters in the urinal at work. By 55, kelp fingers untied his shoelaces. Soon, he completely stopped sleeping and the dream animals took over. As the disaster worsened on his television, the wildlife in his reality thickened and buzzed. His house became a clam-shell, a pile of turtle eggs replaced his lover. And so, Leo left. Remembering 1980s images of EarthFirst! teenagers scrubbing herons with toothbrushes, he packed modest supplies and caught a Greyhound bus to Baton Rouge where he's staying by the seashore, calling me on the payphone collect to say, "Tell my boss I'm not coming back, Nicky. My heart is aligned with this filmy tide." I said: "Do you need me to send a tent, baby?" He laughed, asked about our mothers, and hung up to plot his revenge for us all.

(Where Leo is Now was previously published in Bad Shoe Magazine, issue #3).

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Nicky Rainey makes zines, writes grants, stories and letters to her pen-pals. She represented St. Louis in the National Poetry Slam 2009. For a copy of her latest zine, "Let's Talk About People," send her an email at n.k.rainey@gmail.com.

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Lead photo of coated gull from TheDailyGreen.

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Also in this series:
K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us.
Stefene Russell's manly love song

Stefene Russell's manly love song

So like I was saying, there will be a poetry performance at Mad Art (2727 South 21st St.) at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 to close The Shape of a Man group art show. The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar.

The performing poets will be K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), reading in the opposite order of that list. Leading up to the event, I plan to post a little more info about each of the poets, along with one of their more "manly" poems.


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Love Song
By Stefene Russell

He’s herbaceous. He’s a creeper.
A Mandrake in a crumpled suit
strutting his stuff down the street.

He thinks he’s a black angel,
but he’s just a dark green one
that looks darker after midnight,

A metallic singing telegram
with heavy elements
in place of vowels.

He tries the fake-out.
Says he bears flowers.
A bract is a flower
made from leaves
that aren’t green.
A dogwood has wood
but no flowers.

He says he’s The Deleter.
The lady says,
Bract, broken, bled.

Grains of gunpowder.
Itch of the firecracker
under the paper.
Red stars! Blue stars!
Saltpetre, motherfucker.

I see through you,
conjurer, with your
dark green magic.


(c) 2012 Stefene Russell. All rights reserved.

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Stefene Russell is the culture editor at St. Louis Magazine, and the former co-editor of 52nd City and Prinssess Tarta literary magazines. She is currently a member of Poetry Scores, an arts collective that translates poetry into other media. Manliest fact: she once won an arm-wrestling match in a bar with a guy named Friend, but suspects it was rigged in her favor.

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Also in this series:

K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us.

K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us

K. Curtis Lyle

So like I was saying, there will be a poetry performance at Mad Art (2727 South 21st St.) at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 to close The Shape of a Man group art show. The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar.

The performing poets will be K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), reading in the opposite order of that list. Leading up to the event, I plan to post a little more info about each of the poets, along with one of their more "manly" poems.

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from THE MONSTER AMONG US
Excerpt from the Merovingian Erosnaut Told in Tongues
By K. Curts Lyle

My freedom is the monster among us
A chant is a form of madness
My freedom is a chant inverse tragedy
First animate song against suicide pause of
Color between love and death pre herald
Of what is coming my freedom is
A ten stage tongue rocket already decreed

My freedom is the monster among us
Not your freedom not our freedom but
My freedom is selfish like a billion
Year old gene undying walking in reverse
The new man posing as a retiree
My freedom cracks mirrors for a living
My freedom casts no shadow no where

My freedom is the monster among us
Has no border cannot adjoin is both
Light shield and gravity my freedom shuns
Length and depth and breadth and joy
And pain and does not respond to
The short version my freedom has met
All yogas and tasted all pending psyches

Of Bella Dona Datura Amanita Father Peyote
My freedom can pick out a warrior
From a cluster of pimps she can
Stop the world turn a warrior back
Into a pimp a hero into a
Bum cake the one thing you’ve loathed
All your life into a secret lover

(c) 2012 K. Curtis Lyle
All rights reserved

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K. Curtis Lyle was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He was a founding member of the Watts Writers Workshop, joining it in 1966 and becoming a prominent member of the Los Angeles renaissance that the group represented. He has taught, lectured and read his poetry in performance in the major intellectual and urban centers of North America.

Lyle has published widely over the years and been anthologized in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe. Lyle’s work has been widely adapted to music, especially to jazz. He built a performing and recording relationship with the late world renowned saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill (1938-1995). The text of Lyle’s poem, Drunk on God, was recorded for Julius Hemphill’s Big Band (Electra/Asylum).

In June 2003, Lyle published a work of selected poetry entitled, Electric Church. In February of 2008 he published a long prose poem, The Epileptic Camel Driver Speaks to a Refugee Death (Poetry Scores & Firecracker Press). In November 2008, Poetry Scores and Firecracker Press published a new work entitled Nailed Seraphim.

He currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.


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The Shape of a Man group art show, featuring Amy VanDonsel, was organized in conjunction with the publication of Chris King's new chapbook of poetry, The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints, 2012). The peformance Jan. 30 will include a reception and book signing.

Extra! Extra! Free Gerald Early essay on the great Joe Frazier!

When the great heavyweight champion Joe Frazier died, I felt The St. Louis American should run a news obit. I suspected Michael Spinks or someone from the Spinks team would provide our local St. Louis hook, and I was right, but I also asked Gerald Early for a quote.

As author of The Culture of Bruising, one of the great brainiac books on prizefighting, Gerald would pass muster as an expert quote on boxing in any publication. As a black man who lives in St. Louis, he was the perfect quote for St. Louis' black newspaper. More than that, Gerald is a Philly guy, and Philadelphia is the city that defined Frazier as a fighter. I hit him up.

I never heard back before deadline. I didn't take it personally. Gerald is a busy man, and Frazier died on a Monday night, only giving me one full day before our deadline day to pull my story together. I'm the paper's managing editor, so I do any reporting by hook or crook between managing assignments and crunching copy. The time I'd like to spend nagging my sources for their quotes I actually spend nagging my reporters and photojournalists for their copy and photos.

More than two months after Frazier's tragic death, I heard back from Gerald. He said he needed more than a quote in someone else's newspaper piece, which is why he wrote the Belles Lettres piece. Belles Lettres is a publication of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, which Gerald directs. Since I am one of his Community Advisory Board members, Gerald fairly assumed I'd read his piece, but for some reason I had not received my copy. I asked for one.

Yesterday I received in the mail the September/December 2001 issue of Belles Lettres, which ends with Gerald's essay "The Fire-Breather, the Gym, and the City: How Boxer Joe Frazier Defined Philadelphia." It's just exactly what I wanted from to hear from him when I asked for my quote: the perspective of a black man from Philadelphia who knows and loves prizefighting. It's an unforgettable, bravura piece of writing.

I see now you can find the essay online, but when I assumed there was only the print edition, I asked Gerald how my friends who love boxing and his prose (not a small number of people) can get a hold of a copy of Belles Lettres. He reminded me our magazine is a free publication with an open subscription. To request a copy of the issue with Gerald Early's classic Joe Frazier essay, and sign up for future issues of Belles Lettres, simply notify our adminiastrative assistant Barb Liebmann at liebmann@wustl.edu or 314-935-5576. This particular issue is a slick, handsome 36-pager; any fan of prizefighting will treasure it.

Here is what's funny, and I pointed this out to Gerald before I'm telling you. I'm sure Frazier died on the doorstep of his magazine deadline, just as he did on our newspaper deadline. In rushing this essay to print, Gerald dropped his byline from his essay. The essay appears without author credit. Gerald is the publisher and editor, so he only has himself to blame, and I'm sure he has forgiven himself. But Washington University can be a conservative and stuffy place, and like any high-profile institution it is very jumpy (and rightly so) on issues of race. I'm fairly certain that Gerald Early is the only person at Wash U who would sign his name to a piece of writing in a Wash U publication that drops both the F-bomb and the N-word. Yet the writer of this essay is a non-bylined phantom!

Strong language, Gerald explained his choice of words, for a strong man. Absofuckinglutely!

K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey, Chris King read manly poems

The public will have a last chance to see the group show The Shape of a Man at Mad Art when we host a show-closing poetry performance there 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 at the gallery, 2727 South 21st St. in Soulard in the old Police station.

The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar.

The poets for this farewell Shape of a Man reading are K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), and we will read in the opposite order of that list. I will perform with Josh Weinstein on double bass and through Noah Kirby's sculpture With Solid Stance and Stable Sound.

Each poet has been asked to perform for 15 minutes, so the whole reading should last about an hour, from 7:30 to 8:30. After the reading there will be a book signing and reception in the gallery, with a last chance to see the art show in the company of lead artist, Amy VanDonsel.

The art show and this reading are organized in conjuction with the publication of my chapbook of poetry The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints). All of the poets have been asked to read poems that are in some sense "manly".

In a review of the book by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell, Clewell writes, "Musician/poet/agent provocateur Chris King discovers some acutely painful sharp angles that contribute to The Shape of a Man. These are poems full of beer, bad guys, car rides, near-talismanic ears of corn, and a laundromat where the speaker’s determined to see his dirty laundry through, all the way to dry.”

In her review, Stefene Russell writes, "Though his poems are not the average lyrical domestic still life, that’s not to say they float in some ionosphere, or don’t sound like they were written on Earth. On the contrary, they are earthy, randy, often hilarious, disarming in their lack of sentimentality."

Yesterday at lunch, K. Curtis Lyle told me, "These new poems, they are not as scattered. They are much more incisive. I don't know if it's the influence of Leyla, or what. "

Leyla is my eight-year-old daughter. My old friends like Curtis have noticed a vast maturation process brought on by fatherhood. Just as important to my starting to improve as a poet, as I told Curtis, was my discovery of the Seven/Eleven poetic form innovated by our mutual friend Quincy Troupe. Here is my review of Quincy's new book Errancities where he introduces the form. All of my poems in my new book are cast as 7/11s.
I'll be back to blog more about each of these poets and to post some of their work in advance of the January 30 show. Hope to see you there!

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The image is one of Amy VanDonsel's pieces from The Shape of a Man.

Before they set up the carnival (poem for a Bearded Lady)

We had a great night last night with The Shape of a Man at Mad Art Gallery. Lots to say about it, and very few regrets.

One regret: too late to involve her, I learned about Brunhilda Beardsky, The Bearded Lady from The Beggars Carnivale. 
As I told her, my chapbook The Shape of a Man has a Bearded Lady reference. It's in the poem that got Amy VanDonsel and me started on the concept of the show.

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BEFORE THEY SET UP THE CARNIVAL

I was at the carnival
before they set up the carnival. I saw
them setting it up. I saw
The Pirate when it was buck seats in the dirt,
The Tilt-a-Whirl before it
tilted or whirled, the tonsils of the plastic
clown fitted with balloon lips.

I saw The Bearded Lady
putting on his beard. I saw The Strong Man hit
up in the ass with human
growth hormone, administered by a midget
still in street clothes. The Midway
at the beginning, when there is no money,
only hungry drunken men
with disassembled games, paper tickets, and
candy for kids. I saw you
when no one saw the You in you that dazzles
everyone now, but not me.

-- Chris King

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Another regret is we did not prepare a performance poetry component that would work with a smashing success of a Mad Art opening. That's okay, I like having to work around smashing successes!

It does, however, beg for a performance poetry event at Mad Art before the show comes down at the end of the month. I think I'll have to talk to The Bearded Lady about that.

Stefene Russell reviews my chapbook "The Shape of a Man"

So like I was saying, Amy VanDonsel and I have co-curated a group art show where I'll release my new chapbook of poetry on Intagliata Imprints (printed by Firecracker Press): The Shape of a Man. The art show, also called The Shape of a Man, goes down 7-11 p.m. Friday, January 6 at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in St. Louis. The event will be a potluck catered by men who cook.

To drum up a little publicity, I sent my manuscript out to some poets I admired and asked them for a blurb. I have already shared the review by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell; here is the response by my dear friend and colleague Stefene Russell.
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Chris King’s Shape of a Man channels a multitude of voices, and describes a number of different places. But the poems are anything but reportage—Wounded Knee, Manhattan, and South St. Louis become places-beyond-places, a little bit mythic or haunted. Even corn, that grain that’s been reduced to a metaphor for all things small-town, wholesome and pedestrian, gets taken back to its magical roots: “Mother of bread, father of beer, common face/on the pyramid walls, corn/whiskey, corn pone, you could sustain us alone.”

Like the earliest poets, Chris King is both writer and musician, and builds his lines to ring inside a reader’s ear. He is also a teller of stories—ones that stun you with their sadness, beauty and strangeness, like the woman who uses her bed as ironing board and burns her lover, who wears his wound gladly, because it means she’s branded—claimed—him.

Though his poems are not the average lyrical domestic still life, that’s not to say they float in some ionosphere, or don’t sound like they were written on Earth. On the contrary, they are earthy, randy, often hilarious, disarming in their lack of sentimentality. They don’t let anyone off the hook easily, including the poet himself.

On the other hand, it is rare to find poems marked with such generosity, or such a largeness of spirit, where you feel that the poet is writing for all of us, even when he’s writing first-person.

—Stefene Russell

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Stefene will join me on Friday when we do a brief (8-8:30 p.m.) poetry performance at Mad Art. I'll perform two short set sof duets with musicians — Fred Friction (spoons), Roy Gokenbach (electric guitar) and Josh Weinstein (double blass, clarinet) — with Stefene performing one manly poem in the middle. Hope to see you there!


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The image is one of my paintings on vinyl records incorporating quotes from my poems that will be in the Shape of a Man art show.