For Stark & Saint Redwood's YouTube channel, I read some poems last night. Opening with a reading from this website, which is followed up by readings of past online editions of Anvil Tongue, including poems by: Joshua Merchant, David Hay, Anthony Seidman, Rusty Morrison, Angela Acosta, Paula Cisewski, James Cagney, Heller Levinson.
Anvil Tongue, a small press and online poetry publisher, can be found on the web, here.
Fuck it, I'm doing this. This time around I will try my best to not delete my channel, ha.
The truth is I was struggling with my art, with my poems for the better part of 2022. So one way I figured to lend myself a bit more kindness, and patience; is to record some of my time with other poets and their work. I hope documenting this in a readings series will be beneficial, both to myself, and perhaps, to anyone out there who may stumble upon these videos.
Please forgive the rambling, as speaking on camera is not exactly my forte right now, and I think I woke up a bit towards the middle of the reading. One problem I had with my previous video readings is that they felt too scripted. Too mechanized, so I wanted to try an impromptu reading @ 10 p.m. -- going off the cuff and just riffing a bit.
Anyways, I chose to group these poets together because they seem to be of similar ilk. There seems to be a common thread woven throughout the poets presented here tonight. Since this was totally impromptu, it is highly possible that further meditations will likely happen off-camera.
Without further ado though, here's the video of my reading of Michael Lee Rattigan's Liminal, Alejandra Pizarnik's Extracting the Stone of Madness, Barton Smock's rocks have the softest shadows, and Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End.
