Nate Pritts + 5 local writers = a reading this Saturday, June 22

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After Nate’s workshop this Saturday, he’ll be reading at the Fertile Underground at 7pm along with Mark Baumer, Joanne Hart, Nick Potter, Sarah Tourjee, and Mary Wilson. This might be your only chance ever to hear these six wonderful writers read in a grocery store. So you should come!

More summer reading recs

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10 days till summer! it’s too late now to plant a lilac bush so you might as well just get some books and lie down beneath a ceiling fan.

Our thanks to RI fictionista and hybrid writer Mary-Kim Arnold for these latest reading recs!

mary-kim

Mary-Kim Arnold’s writing has appeared online at Tin House, Wigleaf, The Rumpus, HMTL Giant, and elsewhere. She maintains a personal blog and spends too much time on twitter. She lives in Pawtucket.

Plainwater, Essays and Poetry by Anne Carson
The “short talks” in this book are dazzling and surprising and strange and haunting. From On Orchids: “We live by tunneling for we are peopleplainwater buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying.” And later, On Hedonism: “Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris, I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”
In “Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela,” Carson traces her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. It is a beautiful, rich meditation on faith, language, love, and our pursuit of knowledge – of ourselves, of others. “You reach out your hand for bread and grasp a stone. You touch stone, you feel sweat running down your body. Sweat running, day going black, it is a moment that does not move. How I did waste and exhaust my heart.”
And in “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Women and Men,” she explores the end of love charting the map of her travels with a man who is an anthropologist of China. Interweaving Chinese history, the sites they visit, and the unraveling of their love, Carson is relentless in the rigor with which she interrogates both the limits of love and of language: “It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together. Be careful of this storyteller’s tendency to replace precise separate lines with fast daubs of ink. I know how to fool your mind so that your eye accepts what it did not see. A curtain of wash is not a desert. Where ink bleeds into paper is not an act of love, and yet it is. See.”
simicDime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic
This slim volume is a meditation on the life and work of Joseph Cornell. It cannot be called criticism so much as a literary companion to approaching Cornell’s work, weaving biography, criticism, observations, and excerpts from Cornell’s own notebooks. The short fragments often read like poetry, and the overall effect is evocative of Cornell’s enchanting and mysterious boxes. At turns odd, dramatic, and contemplative, it is like walking through a dream with Simic as guide.
In his preface, he begins: “I have a dream in which Joseph Cornell and I pass each other on the street.” And the book unfolds as the dream does. Here is a fragment called Secret Toy:
“You make unknown the child’s sleeping face, his half-open eyes and mouth.
Everything in his world is a secret, and the games are still the game of love, the game of hide-and-seek, and the chilly game of solitude.
In a secret room in a secret house his secret toy sits listening to its own stillness.
Crows fly over that city. The ghosts of his and our dreams come together at night like window dressers and their mannequins on a street of dark, abandoned buildings and white clouds.”
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
William G. and Neaera H. wander into each other’s lives and in so doing, they set in motion a series of events that will change them. They are lonely and isolated. “Sundays are dangerous,” William G. says, “the quiet waits in ambush.”
Their meeting and the sudden sense of purpose they discover – in setting sea turtles free from the London Zoo – enlivens them. They find new russell hobanaffirmation in this project and they return to their lives with restored vigor and hope from this small, but important act of shared humanity. Neaera H. says: “I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders.”
The story is told in short sections, alternating between the two voices. It is engrossing from the opening lines, spoken by William H.: “I don’t want to go to the zoo anymore. The other night, I dreamt of an octopus. He was dark green, almost black, dark tentacles undulating in brown water.”
Turtle Diary is being re-released by New York Review Books on June 11, 2013 with a new introductory essay by the fabulous Ed Park: 
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/turtle-diary/

Summer reading recs from local authors; or, Who is Mark Baumer?

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Welcome to the second installment of our summer reading recs from local writers. This time, fiction writer Mark Baumer has three reading experiences to recommend to you.

We're not sure if this is Mark Baumer.

We’re not sure if this is Mark Baumer.

 

Mark Baumer once taught a class on mathematics at Hudson City Community College, but his formulas were so abstract that no students signed up for the class. To make up for the emptiness in the classroom, Mark drew human shapes on a brick wall and stood three inches from the brick wall while he gave his lectures. A few of his lectures have been archived at: fiftynovels.com.

 

from Mark:

  • My favorite “novel” ever is one that I actually read yesterday. It is called “The Survivors”. I’m not sure who it’s by, but from what I can tell a bunch of children wrote it. One of the children is named “Bear Paradise.” Some people might not believe me when I say it’s the greatest novel ever written, but it is…so there’s nothing to not believe. Here is the opening paragraph: “At11:30am, central standard time something happened. It’s not clear what it really was. The human world just kind of ended. No one floated away or acted crazy with signs about the end. No one even died. Not immediately. They all just fell asleep. Like millions of bears in winter. Except that it was summer…” From there it went to glowing purple bears to farting trees and smoking peaches.
photo-full

 
ghost

  • The third greatest book ever written is “Ghost” by Sarah Tourjee. This book is like a beautiful, high-powered racing horse that never dies because after its racing career ends it begins a secondary career as an economic consultant on a spaceship orbiting a distant planet thousands of years after earth melted. ***
 
vision quest

  • If I was only allowed to read one book the rest of my life I would probably read “Vision Quest” by Terry Davis because it is the only book I’ve read that was better than the movie version while also existing in a world where the movie version was also better than the book version. The movie and book versions of Vision Quest both exist in equal parallel universes of greatness in my own brain. 

Thanks, Mark!

***Note– we did not pay Mark to recommend Sarah Tourjee’s book. It just so happens that Frequency has the author of “the third greatest book ever written” teaching a class for us this summer. Coincidence.

 

 

Three lit events this Thursday!

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Providence has lots going on in the literary world this Thursday.

Unknown-1At Books on the Square, Amy Brill will read from her first novel, The Movement of Stars.

 

 

 

 

Frequency’s workshop, Genre-Defying Prose, starts at the wonderful Ada Books.

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And over at the Providence Public Library, it’s a literary Gala– info below:

New England Poetry & Art Gala

ne-poetry-art-gala-flyer-a

Providence Public Library Grand Hall, Providence, RI

Please join us for a special evening of Poetry, Paintings & Music, on Thursday, June 6, at 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM in the Library’s newly renovated Grand Hall and Ship Room.  Meet and be inspired by the poetry of Fred Marchant, Stephen Dobyns, Rick Benjamin, Wendy Mnookin, Richard Hoffman, Alan Feldman, Alice B. Fogel, Jennifer Militello, Vivian Shipley, and others!  A buffet and refreshments will be served. Doors open at 5 PM for registration, appetizers and art exhibits.

Featuring Guest Poets from throughout New England, the Gala celebrates the contributors of The Loft Anthology: New England Poetry and Art.  Winners of the 2013 Loft Prize for Poetry, judged by nationally acclaimed poet Denise Duhamel, will be announced live at the Gala.

Tickets: $15 by June 1. To reserve seats, please send a check with names and emails of attendees to:  The Poetry Loft, PO Box 8235, Cranston, RI 02920.  A confirmation will be sent to you with program details and additional information.

We welcome your questions at info@thepoetryloft.org

 http://theloftanthology.com/

Summer Reading Recs– post #1

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This week’s recs come from RI poet talvi anselTalvikki Ansel, who has published two books of poems: My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets Award) and Jetty & Other Poems. Her poems are currently or forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, and in the anthology The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat, 2013). She has received a Stegner Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a grant from the Money for Women / Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an adjunct instructor at The University of Rhode Island.

And may we just also add what a lovely poet she is. Check out some of her work online at The Poetry Foundation.

Thanks, Talvi!!

woolfThe Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1925-1930
This volume of her diary covers the years Woolf was working on To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. It’s mesmerizing, and unmediated by a biographer though there are plenty of notes to explore; read it straight through, or dip into it: observations on life (moths, running a press, the labor strike), fellow writers (numerous, including a visit to Hardy), family dynamics, and of course the unfolding novels.

summer bookThe Summer Book, Tove Jansson
First published in 1972, reprinted as a New York Review Books Classics series. A grandmother and child on an island in the Gulf of Finland. We don’t hear much from the widowed father, and the mother is an absence. The grandmother and child are close, cantankerous, and curious. The island is unforgettable: stone ledges, moss, visitors by rowboat, an ancient salt-water soaked bathrobe, and drift-wood creatures in a forest. It’s a novel, the scenes strung together like memory or prose poems.

montaleEugenio Montale’s poems. I happen to have Collected Poems: 1920-1954 (trans. by Jonathan Galassi) and Montale in English (various translators, Harry Thomas, ed.) handy; there are others. The poems make summer and Montale’s coastline seem elemental and timeless. The poems allow for intrusions—the insect bursting into the oval of light above a reader, and regularity—the cicadas’ cries, heat, and geology. Striated and layered, with wisps of history and narrative, I can’t let go of these poems.

… check back early next week for recommendations from Mark Baumer, Mary-Kim Arnold, and other local writers whom the vast Frequency Office Staff admire.

The Last Couscous Evah

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Whether you’re a writer wanting to try out new stuff, a performance poetry aficionado, a literary groupie, or just a person looking for free & good entertainment, you’d going to wanna be at this event on TUESDAY NIGHT, 5/28, from 9:30 – 11:00 pm (yes, that’s way past Frequency’s bedtime too, but people– exceptions must be made), at AS220, 115 Empire Street, Prov.

tumblr_inline_mn5h6pbOMl1qz4rgpThe celestial pearl of RI poetry, Mairead Byrne, is hosting her last Couscous reading ever.

Mairead’s emceeing alone is worth seeing, but she’s got a great line-up of short readings/performances by people like the inscrutable Mark Baumer, the strangely funny Ric Royer, and Frequency’s own Tina Cane.tumblr_inline_mn2ehoeOGO1qz4rgp

ric royerAnd, there’s an open mic that starts at 10pm. You can read short stories, plays, strange rants, poems, etc. Let’s all go & read something at it. Come on.

http://couscous220.tumblr.com

Poetry Gala-Shindig-Hoe Down-Thing

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Need a little art & culture in your life? We are happy to pass on this invitation to all arts lovers in New England, courtesy of the Loft Poets:

New England Poetry & Art Gala

ne-poetry-art-gala-flyer-aProvidence Public Library Grand Hall, Providence, RI

Please join us for a special evening of Poetry, Paintings & Music, on Thursday, June 6, at 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM in the Library’s newly renovated Grand Hall and Ship Room.  Meet and be inspired by the poetry of Fred Marchant, Stephen Dobyns, Rick Benjamin, Wendy Mnookin, Richard Hoffman, Alan Feldman, Alice B. Fogel, Jennifer Militello, Vivian Shipley, and others!  A buffet and refreshments will be served. Doors open at 5 PM for registration, appetizers and art exhibits.

Featuring Guest Poets from throughout New England, the Gala celebrates the contributors of The Loft Anthology: New England Poetry and Art.  Winners of the 2013 Loft Prize for Poetry, judged by nationally acclaimed poet Denise Duhamel, will be announced live at the Gala.

Tickets: $15 by June 1. To reserve seats, please send a check with names and emails of attendees to:  The Poetry Loft, PO Box 8235, Cranston, RI 02920.  A confirmation will be sent to you with program details and additional information.

We welcome your questions at info@thepoetryloft.org

 http://theloftanthology.com/