Sunday, April 18, 2010

Next Reading: Monday, May 10, at Duff's in the CWE


Chris Parr and Tony Renner, co-founders of Chance Operations.
Photo by Josh Maassen.

The next Chance Operations reading will be held at Duff's, 392 North Euclid in the CWE, on Monday, May 10, beginning at 7:30 p.m.

Confirmed readers, so far, are Brett Underwood, Molly McNew Ebel, and Erin Quick.

More details to follow.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Lauren Keefer to Read at Debut Chance Operations on April 12 at Duff's in the CWE


Lauren Keefer will be one of the featured readers at the debut Chance Operations reading on Monday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m., at Duff's, 392 North Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End. Admission: $3.00.

Lauren Keefer is a Saint Louis transplant, hailing from Huntington Beach, California. Lauren recently graduated from Washington University with a degree in women and gender studies. She debuted her poetry at the Get Born series in summer of 2008, and since then has read at the River Styx Hungry Young Poets series, Voices from the Underground, the Speakeasy, Bad Shoe, and at the Day of the Dead Beats (as Amiri Baraka).

Likes: love letters, making lists, calculus, the Star Wars saga, and the Mississippi.

Dislikes: the patriarchy (really, exploitation of any kind).


SPILL YER GUTS.


i once turned to lips for answers to all life's questions
i drank sweet saliva and relished
filmy traces left on collarbones and breasts.

and when lips held me no more, i looked to hands
i saw from whence they came: exquisite shoulders, broken wings.
ancient spine supporting tense sinews of muscle and mannish flesh.
his ragged arms bear the weight of too many lovers
above me, always, this wounded beast of mine.

each finger told stories of all the skin it'd met before
fingers spoke more to me than his lips would ever permit.
and i found hope in the gentle caress of pleasure-driven digits.
your hands, they're blinding me, darling man!
that's why it took me so long to realize:
it's neither lips nor words and definitely not fingers or touches
that break my heart
because love, really, is only made up of guts.
guts are all i've ever got -- everyone else's, spilled without end, and mine own.
but never yours.

i imagined myself a surgeon and i cut you open in my dreams:
under flesh and warm viscera i found nothing. i dove deeper into silence.
yes, your sweat continues to pour hard and fast down my stock curves
but the weight of your silence is suffocating me.
your scars are heavy, and your guts are gone!

and your fingers trace each droplet a bullet. and because i once welcomed lips and then hands
i no longer have armor to protect my fragile flesh.

i have no more skeletons to support it all, dear sir
and my skin's bruised and taut.
-- Laureen Keefer

Readers' biographies:

Elly Herget and Erin Wiles, from Bad Shoe, St. Louis' only literary magazine featuring entirely women writers and artists.

Matthew Freeman, author of the recently published Darkness Never Far, his third collection of poems.

Chris Parr, performance poet who has read his work at art spaces, music venues, and poetry events, in his native New Zealand, as well as in Boston, New York and St. Louis.

Lauren Keefer, a veteran of both Get Born and River Styx's Hungry Young Poets series.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Love from the Riverfront Times


Leave It To Chance

By Paul Friswold

Last week we bid farewell to the Get Born poetry reading series. This is April, which in addition to being spring's most fecund month, is also National Poetry Month, and so it's little wonder that a new reading series has cropped up from the heaving earth. Chance Operations, the bloom of Tony Renner and Chris Parr's mind-gardens (and here ends all plant-based imagery), debuts at 7:30 p.m. at Duff's Restaurant (392 North Euclid Avenue with readings from Elly Herget and Erin Wiles (both of Bad Shoe literary magazine), Matthew Freeman (author of the new collection Darkness Never Far), Lauren Keefer (hey! she's a Get Born vet!) and Parr himself. It is safe to assume that Renner may also have something new to recite; the man's nothing if not industrious. Admission is an arts-lover friendly $3, and bring some money to take advantage of Duff's well-tended bar.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Elly Herget to Read at Debut Chance Operations on April 12 at Duff's in the CWE


Elly Herget and Erin Wiles
Photo by John Moynihan

Elly Herget will be one of the featured readers at the debut Chance Operations reading on Monday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m., at Duff's, 392 North Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End. Admission: $3.00.

Elly Herget is a poet from St. Louis, Missouri, who is Mary Poppins by day and hollers the blues all night. She is co-editor of Bad Shoe, a print forum for female poets in St. Louis published by JK Publishing. Elly has been published in the University of Missouri-St. Louis' Litmag and Bellerive, and in spring of 2009 released a chapbook with JKP called Thus Far.
Persephone (Winter 2009)

Dusk comes as a guest at supper
and there are no poems in me.
I blow shameful idle chatter
between spirit puffs
and can’t begin to tell the truth
anymore, even here amongst friends
and handsome drunks.
I sway half-lidded,
in this refracted light,
in these silly boots,
in this body that I couldn’t identify
in the street,
if I were sprawled right in front of me.
I have always hated the word lonely,
though I think on it often.

I was born of February;
I must dwell there half-year,
like Persephone.
It’s comfortable, the old
lack of smells,
lack of texture.
We pen ourselves inside
and shutter the windows with music.
We scritch and scratch at paper
like wee pepper-colored chickens
settling to roost.
And this is where
and when we pair--
to speak, to bed down
in the snow--
caves of ice are warmer
than bare air, these days.
But I see respite will be found
in empty spaces,
for these calloused fingers,
for this tangled hair.

Dear Winter,
I am ready.

I ate those seeds slowly,
with relish, and they planted
in my belly understanding of your cold.
They chipped my teeth
and soured my gut
but once begun there was nothing
to do but keep chewing.

I know your secret.
You were my best professor
in transience.
You will pass
and come to pass.
True, you wear at my bones
and skin like water over a rock.
True, you twist my sleep
into a foreign imposter
that offers no succor.
But we pink apes can wait
and dream and fight your claim.
The earth will warm
and call me to take my chances.
Until then, I’ll not apologize
for the crusted grey ditch I am in.
I was starving and naïve
and I have eaten my seeds.
-- Elly Herget

Readers' biographies:

Elly Herget and Erin Wiles, from Bad Shoe, St. Louis' only literary magazine featuring entirely women writers and artists.

Matthew Freeman, author of the recently published Darkness Never Far, his third collection of poems.

Chris Parr, performance poet who has read his work at art spaces, music venues, and poetry events, in his native New Zealand, as well as in Boston, New York and St. Louis.

Lauren Keefer, a veteran of both Get Born and River Styx' Hungry Young Poets series.

Chris Parr to Read at Duff's on Monday, April 12

Photo by Jamie Ford

Chance Operations' co-founder Chris Parr will be featured at the debut reading at Duff's, 392 North Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End, on Monday, April 12. Admission is $3.00, and the doors open at 7:30 p.m.

Chris is a performance poet who has read his work at art spaces, music venues, and poetry events, in his native New Zealand, as well as in Boston, New York and St. Louis.

© 2010 Christopher Parr


Readers' biographies:

Elly Herget and Erin Wiles, from Bad Shoe, St. Louis' only literary magazine featuring entirely women writers and artists.

Matthew Freeman, author of the recently published Darkness Never Far, his third collection of poems.

Lauren Keefer, a veteran of both Get Born and River Styx' Hungry Young Poets series.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Erin Wiles to Read on April 12 at Duff's in the CWE

Erin Wiles will be one of the featured readers at the debut Chance Operations reading on Monday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m., at Duff's, 392 North Euclid Avenue, in the Central West End. Admission: $3.00.

Erin Wiles is co-editor of Bad Shoe, a print forum for female poets in St. Louis published by JK Publishing. Erin hails from Ohio, where she earned useless degrees in English and French. Since moving to St. Louis, she has become marginally employed, started the St. Louis Projects, and has performed with many spoken word artists. She has written two chapbooks, Fractals (2008) and I & Apopcalypse (2006) both available from JKP.
No Waiting Hands

As my belly churns to swell
& fill the heated vacillating space
where I once clutched you
& my petty sometime gods
to my breast, I cross
my hands over my newly
blue-veined chest & faith-fall
into no waiting graspful hands
below me. This fear is not alone

as the homeless are alone. It is not
the endangered lonely of bag-lady
burying cans under the overpass,
stuffing shat-upon tee shirts
beneath her housedress, hoarding
her layette of broken bric-brac
in a grocery store's perambulator. It is not
her crowded lonely of streetside
defecation, her working and embellishing

that smell of the piss
of the heartsick, creating the stench
to say: go away! stay away! Unless
you have something for me . . . My alone
is not her alone but like her,
I am begging,
we must carry these signs,
they are body-written,
they cannot help but say:

One, you didn't love us enough
to stay. Two, we are too proud
to ask for this anyway. And three,
this is the struggle without which
we cease to exist, a.k.a,
I want you to owe me.

Streetside, we wait
and watch lumbering city buses
locked and loaded with explosives
trying to become people. Thirty weeks
have passed since we have fallen:
it is too late
to unpack these bags, we are
too far along and gone
to change course, so we rest
to rewrite
the signs.

-- Erin Wiles

Readers' biographies:

Elly Herget and Erin Wiles, from Bad Shoe, St. Louis' only literary magazine featuring entirely women writers and artists.

Matthew Freeman, author of the recently published Darkness Never Far, his third collection of poems.

Chris Parr, performance poet who has read his work at art spaces, music venues, and poetry events, in his native New Zealand, as well as in Boston, New York and St. Louis.

Lauren Keefer, a veteran of both Get Born and River Styx' Hungry Young Poets series.