Chris Vitiello Book Release Reading (with Hassan Melehy)
On Tuesday, 27 March 2012, at 8 p.m. sharp, the Wax Wroth Reading Series returns to Carrboro’s Looking Glass Café, in a co-presentation with the Hinge Literary Center.
The featured reader is Durham’s CHRIS VITIELLO, arts writer and poet extraordinaire, whose new book Obedience (Ahsahta Press; 2012) can be read forward, backwards, or both ways at once. Regardless, it’s a tour de force of sustained scientific and linguistic interrogation.
Chapel Hill’s HASSAN MELEHY, a poet and literary critic who teaches French at UNC, opens the proceedings. Admission is free, though you can support the Café by purchasing a wide variety of beverages, from espresso to alcohol, and food.
Quick Facts
What: Poetry reading
Who: CHRIS VITIELLO & HASSAN MELEHY
When: Tuesday – 27 March 2012 – 8 p.m.
Where: The Looking Glass Café – 601 West Main St., Carrboro, NC
About the Readers
You know the meanings of certain concrete nouns without having directly experienced the things they refer to
You may feel this disappearing, unraveling, or dissipating
This is your decision’s result
This was your decision’s result
Look at your reflection
This is a point of possible closure •
This is the beginning
This happened
This line is being read and has now been read
Relocate that point of possible closure to the start of this book
Align your rituals with this
Take this opportunity •
Hold a noun
Write the first adjective you learned in the space below
–Chris Vitiello, from Obedience
CHRIS VITIELLO is a freelance writer and poet living in Durham. His arts journalism appears regularly in the Independent Weekly, and his books of poetry include Nouns Swarms a Verb (Xurban; 1999), Irresponsibility (Ahsahta; 2008) and Obedience (Ahsahta; 2012), which will be heard and on sale at this event, in all of its multi-directional, interactive glory.
____
Is there a navel reserve below your pectoral fins?
Your voracious palm frond’s in the way—
Studs are added to your collar bone from the organs below the belt.
The church pipes smoking in the distance put the organ to shame:
You can give that old field a corncob lift.
A grain elevator on the horizon of grassy goodness.
The law’s taken over every last storefront and public toilet.
Man can’t get a good sheet of country plastic no more,
No covering for his tender behind
With all the gumshoes sticking it up all over the place.
We ought to be able to buy statehood from those woodsmen in Congress in no time.
What say you to our own place in the heart of the Chamber?
If I were a dummy I might think you was a ventriculist.
The blueprints for the new dome are sky high.
–Hassan Melehy, “Frontier Ditty”
HASSAN MELEHY’s verse has appeared in nthposition, The Hat, Redheaded Stepchild, Red Rock Review, and Borderlands, among others. His most recent book of literary criticism is The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (2010). He has also published essays on film and cultural criticism, and is writing a book on Jack Kerouac’s poetics of exile. He teaches French at UNC.
About the Wax Wroth Reading Series
Wax Wroth is a poetry reading series organized by Brian Howe whenever he feels like it and has the opportunity to present something really cool. Prior Wax Wroths have been held at the art space at 715 Washington in Durham, and have featured readers such as Tony Tost, Heather Christle, and Chris Tonelli.
Series organizer Brian Howe is a Chapel Hill-based journalist, critic, poet, and et cetera. Find out more about his work at http://waxwroth.blogspot.com/. Questions regarding the Wax Wroth Reading Series may be directed to brian.g.howe@gmail.com.
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