Thursday, July 23, 2015

Marisol Ramirez Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27


Marisol Ramirez will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman and Jennifer Goldring.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is free.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Marisol Ramirez came to her sense in the fall of 2011 and found the courage to call herself a poet. Earlier, she had tentatively been the future lawyer, the future teacher, the future marketing manager—never the writer. She took her first-ever workshop senior year of undergrad simply for pleasure. The problem with dabbling in passionate hobbies is that they might become careers. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a Bachelors in English, she moved across country, away from her Arizona border town, taco stands, open range, rattlesnakes, chorizo con huevos, purple mountain ranges, and flaming sunsets to join the MFA writing program at the University of Missouri St. Louis. In 2014, Ramirez was named the third UMSL poet laureate.

Jennifer Goldring Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27.



Jennifer Goldring will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman and Marisol Ramirez.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is free.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Jennifer Goldring, originally from Arizona, received her MFA in Poetry at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.  She was the University of Missouri - St. Louis's Poet Laureate for 2013.  Jennifer has her BA in economics from Arizona State University.  Despite her training she has given up on solving the world’s economic problems and now writes poetry, which she finds to be a much more meaningful endeavor.  When she isn’t writing or taking photos she is Managing Editor for december magazine.  She lives in St. Louis with her two children and their small menagerie of pets.  Her poetry can be found in Tar River Poetry, Architrave Press, and the anthology Poetry with a Dash of Salt.

Matthew Freeman Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27


Matthew Freeman will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Jennifer Goldring and Marisol Ramirez.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is free.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Matthew Freeman woke up and found he was falling when as a teenager his football coach got him into Dylan Thomas and a dear girl friend introduced him to the romantics. So began a wild journey which would leave him expelled from school and committed to an asylum, and diagnosed with schizophrenia. After bouncing in and out of hospitals and drunk tanks he finally began his recovery. He has had four books published and has graduated from Saint Louis University, where he was awarded the Montesi prize, and is now an MFA student at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he was awarded the Graduate Prize in poetry.
Finally I admit It: Yes, I Am a Bum 
Clear and terror filled my days I
walked as a living affront to realities
not bound,
a thousand miles from my home,
my cap pulled down over my eyes, 
watching the freight trains roll by.
(when you were sitting on the porch
you could vaguely hear your
father finally cry
from the front room
and you felt like—you
didn’t know—maybe like you
were made out of glass
and could be broken
by a conductor’s baton)

And now I sit all day with the innocents,
smokinging a cheap cigar,
strumming on my gay guitar,
singing with Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too,
when THAT GUY comes in
wearing a disguise
and it is the PHONE AGAIN
but star 69 does not work,
the yellow birds gather round me,
I look toward the dumpster for redemption
and only beg the Lord
to cast me out amongst the poor. 
-- Matthew Freeman