Scenes from Washington University Commencement

Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Donald M. Suggs

Student President Alex Cooper

Awed by the St. Louis Children's Choirs

Last night we attended one of the 2012 Spring Concerts for the St. Louis Children's Choirs, with an emphasis on the plural Choirs. At the 7 p.m. program we saw three distinct choirs perform, with a finale that brought everyone onstage -- including a number of alumna.

The Choirs use the college paradigm of graduates and alumna more seriously than we knew before last night, this being the first season-culminating concert in which our daughter Leyla Fern performed. A major highlight of the program, as impressive as the impeccable singing, was the recognition of the graduating high school seniors leaving the Choirs after as many as 11 years.

I'm not a terrific fan of ceremonies, and skipped all of my own graduations, so I don't have the widest experience base when I say these were the best graduation speeches I have ever heard. But these were the best graduation speeches I have ever heard. The quality of narrative and impact of anecdote were overmatched only by the total command and poise at the microphone.

What these youth testified about the Choirs gave a clue to how they got this poised, experienced and articulate. A series of graduating seniors testified to the adventures of world travel tempered by the rigors of discipline, all experienced as a cohort of young people making their way across the greatest stages of the world. A Disney movie about the Choirs would do less to communicate the elusive magic of collective artistic endeavor than the successive statements of these teenagers.

We got the sense there is something physical, something tangible going on here. In attention to the tough love of conductors who expect precise musical achievement, these youth are shaped by an organization that has an unabashed healing mission, namely, that music can heal the world. It's a message that is shown to them as well as taught, as the youth all testified to choir practice providing what one graduate, Will O'Brien, described as "weekly healing sessions".

We watched our daughter onstage, singing in one of the two most junior of the Children's Choirs, and we felt secure in a way that parents seldom are allowed to feel these days, when we tend to question all authority and every influence on our youth, for very good reasons.

This morning, my wife, a thrifty African immigrant, said, "I don't always give extra money to all of these organizations we're already paying for their services, but I am going to give these Children's Choir people some more money."

Sounds good to me.

Jeremy Rabus adds a dash of flesh to his pallette

Jeremy Rabus has a one-man show, Twilight Canopy, up at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, which I still think of as the new, smaller Hoffman LaChance.

Rabus has offered an effective solution to a one-man show in a small room by producing a large number (27) of small and very small paintings. This gives the visitor a lot to look at without crowding the walls or making you feel like you're in a dorm room with a picture pinned everywhere.

Compared to the other work of his I've seen, he also gives us a lot to look at in the form of figures. Jeremy's work usually strikes me as a phenomenon of gushing color where I don't even begin to wonder about what might be going on under the abstraction, in a representational sense. This work is a little different.

I see more things. Judging by the frequently representational titles of the pieces, it seems that Jeremy sees more things too, though we almost never see the same things. Where he sees, or at least says, "Teal Beam," I see a dolphin tail; where he sees "Strapped Cloud," I see a bird beak; his "Turbine" is my whale; his "Ice on Embedded Platform" (above) is my high-heeled shoe.

We also have two hits, or only near misses: his "The Bikeway" is my highway, and his "Striped Bug" is "Easter eggs" on my scorecard.

Moving toward a more substantial point, where Jeremy thinks he has painted a "Birdbelly," I am seeing sexy bikini thighs, and in a piece he titles "Avoid the Void" I'd swear I'm seeing a fragment of a female nude belly-down, with the creamy rise of her buttocks.

Up until now, I'd say his work has been asexual, though deeply in touch with the forces of nature we associate with the feminine: waterfalls, mountains, rainclouds. I think he is finding more flesh on his pallette. That's not a bad thing.

I also appreciate his respect for the local art buying public's poverty. These pieces are priced $50 to a low ceiling of $375. He already had sold 15 of the 27 paintings when I walked through yesterday evening, and the more people who see the show, the more he'll sell. It's good, fresh work by an artist who is growing, priced to move.

Twilight Canopy is up at Hoffman LaChance, 2713 Sutton Blvd. in Maplewood, through May 26. Curator Michael Hoffman may be reached at 314-398-9636 or info@hoffmanlachancefineart.com.

Open letter to the mayor of Alton

Dear Mayor Hoechst,

You lead a river city, and yet you missed the boat.

Burlesque is the art of the almost nude. Burlesque artists do not get nude on stage. They get almost nude. You'd know this if you attended burlesque shows, but you have said you do not, and would not.

Fine, don't. Better view for the rest of us. But don't shut down what you don't understand.

I don't expect that a man of your age and inexperience would know this, but Burlesque is flourishing in our river cities. St. Louis is an international leader in this art form. Alton has been contributing to and benefitting from St. Louis' leadership and success in this art form.

You have put a stop to that.

Mayor, is it better for a city to encourage the vitality of young, creative people, or to destroy it? Do you want lively, engaged people in your city -- or leaving your city?

I am a Metro East boy (Granite City), though I live in St. Louis now. The St. Louis mayor is not much to my liking in his politics, but he has the sense to encourage the emergence of St. Louis as a world city for Burlesque.

Could our mayor find a code violated by our Burlesque performances in St. Louis? Does a fish shit in the river? Does our mayor and our police force allow our Burlesque artists to flourish because Burlesque artists do not, in fact, get naked, only almost naked? Does a fish take a drink in the river?

Mayor, you missed the boat. But it's not quite too late. Come on onboard. The water is fine, and the dancers are almost naked.

Respectfully,

Chris King
Community-based artist

cc: Mayor Slay

Reading at The Royale: eight poets & a sculpture

Noah Kirby's sculpture With Solid Stance and Stable Sound inhabited by Chris King at Laumeier Sculpture park's The Platforms performance. Photo by this guy I know Sean from Twitter.


There will be a free live poetry performance 7-9 pm Wednesday, April 4 in the courtyard of The Royale public house, 3132 South Kingshighway.

Starting at 7 pm and performing for 15 minutes each in this order will be:

Aaron Belz
Jazzy Danziger
Uncle Bill Green
Devin Johnston
Chris King
Stefene Russell
Stephanie Schlaifer
Brett Lars Underwood

with the option that our traveling poet, Belz, do a brief second set at the end if people come late and miss the guest of honor.

I don't know all of these poets, but I did build links that are hyper into each of the names, so you can read more by or about us.

There is an added feature. Our arts organization Poetry Scores is curating Noah Kirby's sculpture With Solid Stance and Stable Sound for 2012, and it currently is curated into The Royale's courtyard. Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media, and we encourage the poets to perform at least one of their poems through Noah's sculpture.

I think we'll eventually count this as the opening reading of a 2012 Poetry Scores Reading Series. Our board has agreed to doing a reading series based around Noah's sculpture, which engages our mission of poetry entering another medium. But Belz just dropped this availibility on us at the next to last minute, so we slapped together a reading potluck-style.

Again, the reading costs no cash money, though some of us will hawk books. Publican Steven Fitzpatrick Smith will operate a bar and food service as only he so stylishly can. Belz starts prompt at 7 p.m. -- don't miss him!

Poetic travelogue of notorious Roman suicide sites

I was deeply saddened this morning by news that Fakhra Younus killed herself by jumping from the sixth floor of the building where she lived in Rome. Ms. Younus, age 33, had survived a vicious acid attack by her then-husband in Pakistan, Bilal Khar, who was acquitted of any crime. Thinking of the beautiful young dancing girl who gets smothered in a repressive marriage and survives horrible disfigurement only finally to end her own life in a grand foreign city like Rome made me wish I had the poetic resources to write an elegy for her. The best I can do is offer this co-translation of the contemporary Roman poet Roberto Gigliucci that I did with Leonard Barkan. It's a poetic travelogue of notorious suicide sites in Rome. (For those who dislike reading longer texts online, I have uploaded the poem as a Word document.)

*

EASY POEM ABOUT HOTELS

By Roberto Gigliucci
Translated by Chris King and Leonard Barkan


There’s a hotel with a courtyard that stinks,
a hotel that opens out to a narrow street,
almost an alley, and its lobby
is a tunnel of wind, never gets warm,
not even in summer, staircases green,
the rooms modest, not too clean,
with big tall wardrobes and a bathtub
equally majestic and useless. In Room 34
a young man killed himself,
a writer, a poet, I'm not sure,
you could ask the hotelkeeper
but he doesn't like talking about it too much ...
The suicide's room is small
also because – as I have said – the furniture
is overblown and invasive, and the window
faces the courtyard that stinks,
a stagnant pool of scrawny light and odors
which come up from below slowly
miscegenating, ugly odors of cooking
and animal corpses, smelly rags,
underfoot rot, soft wood,
live animals in heat, cats, mice,
rotted ghosts, sweaty souls.
The suicide's room – the poet –
that's what I want to call him, the poet,
because the young man, the handsome young man,
did, in fact, write poetry, in some little
magazine he’d even published a bit,
rather well written, they had substance, even
if they were exceedingly sad, when not positively
gruesome. The poet’s room,
as I was saying, was, and is, narrow, but not
savagely melancholic
as you might like to think, so sweetly
shadowy and romantic, with a painting
depicting fruit, and, above the bed,
a madonna in the Byzantine style, but tender.
A watermelon split in two might seem
almost jolly, with grapes and bees,
and the tiny bathroom
with that improbable barge of a tub
could even seem touching, if only the poet
hadn't killed himself in it,
the handsome young guy, this poet
who obviously didn't know what to do
with all his youth, his beautiful hands,
his beard of a man at twenty,
his whole body mercilessly young,
a passing gift, precious and defiant,
that he refused to give to anyone.
He took his life with sleeping pills, in a hot
bath where he also drowned, poor guy,
once he had lost his senses; he wasn't naked,
he'd put on underpants and a shirt
and a gold chain around his neck
and a watch that was waterproof (never mind
the irony...).

                      It's a beautiful winter’s day
and I want to take you to a pensione,
economical but gracious, somewhat
away from the city, facing a simple park
with pines and maybe a palm tree,
where the sun sets behind a hill
that seems like an emblem of unlucky joy,
some small suffering mystic penitence,
a flight for old nighttime gentlemen,
for hard luck dogs and mute infants.
The pensione is called Aurora despite
its position facing the sunset.
The proprietor is a young woman
with a strange accent, half-English,
half-German (who knows?), with two permanent
rings under her eyes always violet, very polite,
delighted to tell you at length
the story of the man who killed himself in his dressing gown
on the terrace of Room 18,
a terrace suspended in front of the park
with the green glow of the suburban, as the poet said.
Not a narrow terrace,
fifteen meters square, without plants,
naked but nice and airy
with a wicker easy chair and table
and pillows with hand-painted roses.
The man in his dressing gown must have been
fifty, had a leather attache case
full of papers, forms, reports,
pens, little aluminum tins
with cigarettes and cigars and some new
socks, some white, some black,
that sort of thing. He shot himself
on the terrace around noon,
tired of his great shock of hair
so silver and magnificent, sick
of the dressing gown and the attache case.
He had on his feet not slippers but shoes,
black, almost elegant, with no socks
(even though he had just acquired some)
and his naked knees were wounded, as though
he had fallen to his knees on brambles or stones
or the thorns of his own thoughts
wading in the thorny lake of bitterness.
He blew himself away at noon.
Some old lady probably reset her clock.

       Let's get out of here, let’s get very far away,
because I want you to see this elegant hotel,
right on the main square of a celebrated town
with a beautiful cathedral and a cute little cafe
and a really pretty fountain. We’re talking
the best hotel in town, four stars,
recently built, enviable
lobby, all green with plants
and a marble bar with mahogany and mirrors,
elegant waiters and a liftboy
with flame red hair, a handsome boy
if a bit short and cow-eyed.
It's great talking to him, going from floor to floor,
hearing him, young and a little cruel, tell the story
of the lady who slashed her veins
in the toilet of Room 49.
A lady unlovely but refined
with money and a heavy unhappy face,
face enough to make you scratch
your balls, he said, but he exaggerates
to seem callous and virile;
a lady alone on a final vacation
in a bubble of ultimate emptiness,
desperately bejewelled, useless
in the elegance of the moribund
like a solitary noble mummy (I translate
the words of the liftboy into verse).
With a razor blade the lady sliced
her veins, then managed to swallow
the blade after breaking it in half;
the liftboy swings his big boy hands,
frantic while speaking, he never stands still,
when he smiles it is life itself that smiles,
hot life full of blood and fiber
which speaks of death and rotted blood shed.
I believe the lady was flirting
with this boy, this brutally cheerful boy,
at least he suggested that,
their courtship graceful and funereal,
glances, smiles, glances, wind
surrounding towers, bunches of flowers,
petals strewn at the feet, imaginings of roses,
how beautiful on the mountain are the feet of the messenger!
(I believe he wears Size Eleven Double E).
The lady left a note with a few last words: I have lived
little, not even seventy years,
I die young, and I feel selfish
because I've never given anything to anyone,
and I feel generous because no one
has ever tried to take anything away from me.
The boy recites her testament from memory,
forcing a smile, but his stupendous
wet nowhere eyes reflect
a shapeless helpless sadness.
We're on the ground floor, light
glares off the piazza, sour
odor, a burst of spring,

           so let’s go, let’s go toward the sea
to a marvelous terrace facing the gulf,
a hotel with a view where you drink lemonade
and navigate, myopic, the tepid air.
Beneath it cliffs, gentle not scary,
cliffs that are not cliffs but precious stones,
almost mirrors, or emeralds, or fantasies.
It’s difficult to think that from this balcony
a blond girl threw herself down,
in autumn as brilliant as this spring
but more shining and moody, three years ago,
a pale girl, blond and crazy
on a brief October holiday
with parents who were dead with fear
for her. She must have hit the cliffs
the way a scarf falls on glassy gems,
bright, gold, and mad. Perhaps
there wasn't any blood, only
waves and splintered light. Surely
it was unexpected; the girl
passed quickly through the lobby
flew to the terrace and into the gulf,
her father and mother on the edge
of the pool frozen
like statues that never feel the sun.

       Best to get away from this sky too
and from these waters, hit
the highway and wait for night,
stop at that motel which in the moonlight
doesn't look all that squalid after all.
There, in a room green and yellow,
light soft, a television even,
minibar and a big bright vanity,
a boy and a girl, numb to hope
and perhaps desire, abandoned life
by gulping pills, wrapped up together
in a yellow wool blanket, drunk on bad wine
and sweet tears mixed in a glass,
having sung so many songs together,
no guitar but keeping tune,
“shiny happy people holding hands,”
barely adults, incomprehensible,
sacred perhaps, perhaps beloved of God, who knows,
maybe even airborne and transformed into stars.
To me, terrifying wastrels of beauty,
of flesh, love, sense, and emotion,
hard sinners against youth.

       Wait, before I end up all rhetorical, let’s
take shelter at the Pensione
Regina, ignoble hostel of derelicts,
where in a puddle of dementia and shit
an old painter hanged himself.
His canvases he stained with colors,
with tomato sauce and ink,
threw on there coffee and wine
then even pissed on it, if the mood took him;
he was an ape, filthy shadow
of a painter, and finally was evicted;
so he found a room at the Pensione Regina
and decided to end his existence there,
terminate everything in Room 21.
He was loathsome, filthy, raging; not a soul
will regret him, so his lament is mine
to tell, against my will. He had
with him his last painting, which he spat on,
which he shat on, and which he vomited on twice;
he also painted it with toothpaste
and drops of gum blood.
When they told him to get going
from the pensione, he took a belt
and attached himself to the window clasp,
falling seated, half-drunk,
who knows how he managed to die that way
but it's certain that he did. Room 21
got disinfected, the last painting
burned. I’m an abysmal
biographer, but perhaps it is enough to sing
the life and death of an artist
who never sought the admiration of anyone,
least of all himself.
He will get from me some limited
admiration, a little esteem,
a little disgust.

       I could lead you on
to a hotel in the mountains where a very rich
man offed himself in a suite,
swallowed poison like an old
school suicide (he died in hospital),
or else to the pensione in the city
where two women died together,
one lovely, one vile, or else
to the Hôtel de la Ville where a madman
dropped lead into his wife and then
slammed his head against the wall (you don't believe me?),
or else, or else, or else, or else – but enough.


**

This translation appeared in TriQuarterly issue 127 (Northwestern University, 2007).

Lola takes the mean girl out

Last night a good friend and I took in the 2nd annual Shimmy Showdown at Jumpin' Jupiter. A Lola Van Ella production, the Shimmy Showdown mashes up burlesque routines with solo improv comedy and the "death match" model of competitive live performance.

It goes like this. After lavish and hilarious introductions, twelve dancers compete in groups of two for the first round. The pairs are drawn one at a time from a bowler hat. For each pair of dancers, Lola goes back to the hat and pulls a prop and a musical genre (big puffy red stuffed heart pillow; "hip-hop classics").

The dancer whose name was pulled first takes the first pass at a solo routine, incorporating the prop and danced to an unexpected piece of music; then the second dancer is handed the same prop (often fresh from the clenched teeth, or some other hinge, of the first dancer) and faces a different, unexpected piece of music within the same genre.

After each pair of dancers is finished, there is no raw instant elimination. Rather, the girls ("girl" is the word when the stage lights are on) giggle their way backstage as the names of the next pair are picked. Only after the first round of twelves dances is completed does Lola move into elimination mode.

She does this with great tact and insight into morale. Half of the dancers sail right through the first round; the other six face a modified dance-off, where two winners advance to the next round while four girls are escorted off-stage. They are escorted (by impeccable-looking stars from the local burlesque scene) to a V.I.P. lounge replete with craft cupcakes, chicken satay and champagne. That's what "losing" is like in Lola's world.

It goes like that until the final dance-off -- the very final round -- which is the first time for any girl the dance is sudden death elimination, with a single winner and a single loser. So the only time the potential hurt is that raw, it's all over right away and the "loser" is being lauded with love and gifts as the second to last girl strutting.

Lola totally takes the mean girl out. That's one of her most sustaining gifts. The production team of wild women (and the odd stray man) that has evolved around her just pulses with love and compassion. She creates a safe space, a sanctuary. It's a major reason why dancers from other cities gravitate to St. Louis. I admire this in Lola dearly and have tried to learn from it as her friend and occasional production colleague.

Okay, so I totally get the more immediately amazing things about the St. Louis burlesque scene -- the pee-your-fishnets hilarity; the dangerously acrobatic dancing; the absurd and fabulous costuming; the incomparable beauty of all these differently sized, shaped, and toned women stripping down nearly to how God made her in the flesh. But if you watch how Lola (and Kyla and Katie and Michelle ...) operate, it starts by taking the mean girl out. I love these girls!

*

Photo by Alex Rimorin.

When are we going to get together, John Ashbery?

I have been thinking about John Ashbery, because he was honored by President Obama yesterday, and I have been thinking about love poetry, since it's Valentine's Day. So, I pulled out Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart (1991), which has several sustained passages of straight-forward love poetry -- unusual for a poet who is seldom straightforward and seldom in the mood to sustain anything.

Reading my marginal notes over a Valentine's Day dinner with my daughter, I picked out this passage from part I of the VI-part Flow Chart. It takes awhile, in this bit I've typed in, before we get to the straightforward love poetry, but that's essential to give the flavor of Ashbery.

*

This mound of cold ashes that we call
for want of a better word the past wouldn't inflict the horizon
as it does here, calling attention to shapes
that resemble it and so liberating them into the bloodstream
of our collective memory: here a chicken coop, there a smokestack,
farther on an underground laboratory. These things then wouldn't
depress (or, as sometimes happens, exalt) one, and living would be just that:
a heavenly apothegm leading to a trance on earth. Yet one scolds
the horizon for having nothing better to offer. Did I order that?
And when the bill comes, tries to complain to the management
but at that point the jig, or whatever, is up. Yes I've seen many fine
young girls in my time take that path and wonder afterwards
what went wrong. I've seen children, taken from their homes
at too early an age, left to wander about like Little Nell,
not knowing that they were never obliged to do this thing. O
paradise, to lie in the hammock with one's book and drink,
not hearing the murmur of consternation as it moves progressively
up the decibel scale. Yet I see you are uncertain where to locate me:
here I am. And I've done more thinking about you than you perhaps realize,
yes, a sight more than you've done about me. Which reminds me:
when are we going to get together? I mean really -- not just for a
drink and a smoke, but really
invade each other's privacy in a significant way that will make sense
and later amends to both of us for having done so, for I am
short of the mark despite my bluster and my swaggering,
have no real home and no one to inhabit it except you
whom I am in danger of losing permanently as a bluefish slips off
the deck of a ship, as a tuna flounders, but say, you know all that.

*

Then he goes on like that for another 187 pages!

Flow Chart is dedicated "To David," that would be David Kermani, Ashbery's partner since 1970. It must be a central work in Ashbery's mind, as it certainly is in mind, since he apparently has named his legacy The Flow Chart Foundation.

A town without shade and a Cherry County corn man

I was happy to receive a package in the U.S. mail from a friend in northern Italy this week. It's the first solo record by Andrea Van Cleef, Sundog, a more quiet folksy statement from a leader of rock bands.

Andrea sent me the record because it has a co-write with me on it, "Town Without Shade." Here is that song.

Andrea.Van.Cleef.Town.without.shade by ChrisKingSTL

Andrea wrote the music, I sent him some lyrics, and then he rewrote the lyrics quite a bit.

The lyrics I sent him were drawn from my first visit to Lakota country, all those reservation towns without shade.

I'm most proud of these lines, which conclude his song:

I wish we could get the sun drunk and high
And watch it fall down, off the sky

That sums up the desperation I saw in Indian country. It wasn't all desperation, but that's what the desperate parts looked and felt like.

I took this trip a very long time ago, about twenty years ago, so it's odd that in the same month Andrea's record with this song was released, I also released a chapbook with a poem culled from that same journey across the Plains.

*

CHERRY COUNTY CORN MAN

He tore each head open, see
it’s good, I done good, I can do something right,
I can make people happy.
I’ll give you a deal: fourteen head, two dollars;
here, you can take two for free.
He never wanted to see forests on fire.
Nobody ever explained

Communism to me. Not democracy
either. I went to study
trees in Missouri, but they sent me to die
in Vietnam. Now isn’t
that nice? He can’t pronounce the name for what went
wrong, but he can grow corn, so
sweet, fourteen head, two dollars; here, take two free.

On giving anarchism to the anarchists & Cherokee Street before superfluous hipsters

Today I went to Black Bear Bakery on Cherokee Street to drop off a few things.

Last year my friend Paul Reiter was shot dead interrupting the burglary of his neighbor. I helped Paul's sisters clean out the bachelor's house and sell some of his stuff. I held onto a book called Anarchism Today -- the "today" in question being 1972 -- thinking Paul would like it if I took it to our local anarchist bakery. More than eighth months after Paul was taken from us, I finally put that book into anarchist hands.

When I grabbed the book from my trunk, I also snagged a copy of my new chapbook, The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints). A friend who is a successful businessman paid for this printing, so I am doing my very best to sell the little books rather than give them away, as is my wont. But my publisher is a far-left progressive and student of philosophy, and I just knew he'd like the thought that our first library copy was donated to the library at an anarchist bakery.

And then there is the example of Roque Dalton to think about. The great Salvadorean poet and revolutionary -- one of my most important models as a poet -- wrote, "Poetry, like bread, is for everyone." Roque Dalton approved of this donation.

The man at the bread counter accepted both donations. So, if you want to read up on anarchism ca. 1973 or read my new poems, Black Bear Bakery is the spot.

I also brought a copy of the CD Outstandingly Ignited: Lyrics by Ernest Noyes Brookings Vol. 4. This 1995 compilation of bands making songs from a nursing home resident's poems features my band, Eleanor Roosevelt. I've kept in touch with the producer David Greenberger, who recently mailed me a box of these discs.

Some neat-looking young Asian woman at the Black Bear counter liked the looks of the CD, her eye drawn first by the cover art work, drawn by Daniel Clowes.

She has her own copy now.

Walking up and down Cherokee Street, which I no longer visit as much as I'd like, I was struck by the things one hears about "The Street" nowadays, namely, the influx of so-called hipsters. I have a soft spot for hipsters, having lived in St. Louis at a time when one would have killed to have thousands, hundreds, even dozens of strangers running around who liked weird music, tattoos and comic books.

When I see this new Cherokee Street in formation, in fact, I am reminded of the years that I lived in the neighborhood, when there was no such thing as superfluous hipsters on Cherokee Street, or any other place around here. I wrote a song one day after walking up and down Cherokee Street right about when Eleanor Roosevelt was appearing on this hip compilation in the mid-1990s.

It's pretty grim, but this is what "The Street" looked like then.
"Song from Home"
Chris King
Recorded by Roy Kasten


Song From Home by ChrisKingSTL

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.
**

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.

*

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

*

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