I want to give props to someone who has really benefited the writing community in central, PA. Ally Bishop, a student in the Graduate Creative Writing Program of Wilkes University, has taken it upon herself to start a reading series. The reading series, OutLoudLit, is held every few months at The Gallerie, located at  13 E. Main Street in Mechanicsburg. The reading series features current students, alums, and faculty from the Wilkes program. Bishop has managed to pull together writers from all genres and provided them with a unique opportunity to share their work.

The next reading will be held on Saturday, Dec. 11 at 2 p.m. at The Gallerie. I will be one of the readers at the event, and I’m eager to share the stage with other writers whose work I’ve enjoyed reading  or listening to through the Wilkes program. This event is free and open to the public.

To learn more about the program, check out this article written by Wilkes alum Lori Myers, who will also read at the event next Saturday.

Last weekend, I took a trip to Ithaca, New York and want to recomend a few places we visited. Our first stop was the famous vegetarian restaurant The Moosewood. Though the menu was not terribly long, I was impressed by the fact it changes it every few weeks or so and includes various sandwiches, salads, soups, and tofu dishes. Also, the price ranges are affordable. Most of the meals are not over $10.  There’s also a variety of seasonal beers available, some of them locally brewed. If you stop there, I recomend purchasing one of the organic candy bars near the cash register. The chocolate is so rich, and you won’t feel as guilty after eating it!

After we stopped at The Moosewood, we visited Autumn Leaves book store, located at 115 The Commons, in the downtown, only a few blocks from The Moosewood. The store’s website brags about having over 60,000 used books, and I believe it! Every section has dozens and dozens of used books filling the Ikea shelves. Of course I went to the poetry section first. I found the section to mostly contain collections from canonised poets and more helpful for customers seeking a collection by Frost or Whitman rather than more contemporary work like Terrance Hayes or Kim Addonizzio.

The store also contains two other floors-The Owl Cafe on the third floor and Angry Mom Records in the basement. The record shop has something for any vinyl lover. Just like the book store, the stock is fairly expansive. There are dozens and dozens of jazz, blues, and hip-hip albums and hundreds of rock ‘n roll albums. Even the punk rock and indie section is pretty huge. I came away with a copy of Patti Smith’s LP Horses and a Best of Blondie LP and only spent about $10 for both.

I plan to schedule a poetry reading for Ithaca  in the coming months, and I certainly will stop at these stores again!

 Electric City published a nice review of my poetry chapbook Front Man this week. You can check out the article here.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

Last week, one of my favorite rock ‘n roll icons, punk rock poetess, Patti Smith, won a National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, which recounts her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who later confessed he was gay and died of AIDs in the late 1980s. I haven’t read this book yet, but I look forward to it. While I was in Ithaca, NY over the weekend, I managed to pick up an autographed copy of it for $45!

Upon winning the award, Smith started crying and said, “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on the shelf.” In the age of the E-reader, Smith also made a defense for the book as a physical object, saying, “There is nothing more beautiful than a book,” adding, “Please don’t abandon the book.”

Now that Smith has won a National Book Award, perhaps it will bring more attention to her poetry collections. As a recent article posted on Huffington Post points out, Smith has a long relationship with poetry. Anyone who has listened to her albums or live concerts knows she has always blended poetry with punk rock, and her love of the genre goes deep. According to the article, her mother gave her a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience when she was just eight.  And the title of her latest poetry collection, Auguries of Innocence, is a quote from Blake.

I also want to mention that one of my favorite contemporary poets, Terrance Hayes, also won a National Book Award  last week for his latest collection of poems, Lighthead. The Pittsburg-based poet’s fourth collection is a great book that contains a variety of narrative and lyric poems featuring icons as diverse as Harriet Tubman and Wallace Stevens. The book is a great combination of personal and cultural history. Check it out, and also check out his earlier collections, Hip Logic and Wind in a Box, two of my favorites.

My first poetry, chapbook, Front Man, has generated some positive press. Go Lackawanna/The Weekender ran an article this week. It can be read here. Last week, Electric City ran an interview with me, which can be read here.  

Furthermore, after doing a reading in Boston at a new Borders over the weekend, I’m having my first local reading tonight at 7 pm at the Vintage Theater, located at 119 Penn Ave. The event is free, and I’ll have books on hand to sign.

Over the last few years, I’ve drifted in and out of writing groups in the Philadelphia and Scranton areas. Some of them merely dissolved because the group’s members either moved away or just stopped writing. Some of them I left because they were more like group therapy sessions. But once I finished graduate school, I knew I needed a writing group in order to keep writing and gather feedback on my poetry.

I’m now part of a writing group that I enjoy. We meet the first and third Monday of every month at the Vintage Theater, located at 119 Penn Ave. in downtown Scranton. This group is only a few months old, but thus far I’m impressed by the feedback different members of the group give each other’s work. I also enjoy the age range of people that show up. So far, we’ve had high schoolers, college students, and middle-age folks working on memoirs or poetry collections. We’ve even had some folks bring their application essay for graduate school. So, if you’re looking for a writing group, I recommend this one. All genres are welcome, and again, we meet the first and third Monday of every month at the Vintage Theater, starting at 7 p.m.

Hey folks! I’m about to hit the road and really start promoting Front Man hard over the next several weeks. I hope some of you can come out to one of these readings. The mini-tour starts this Friday in Boston. Here’s a list:

 

Every year, during the beginning of winter, I like to hunker down with a novel and take a break from reading poetry for a while. Every November or December, I tend to reread a novel by Thomas Wolfe, my favorite author of fiction. I started this tradition as a way to remember the first time I read his famous novel Look Homeward, Angel. This happened during a winter break in college, and I was immediately awe-struck by his long, ambitious sentences filled with beautiful, poetic lines describing the novel’s rural North Carolina town and protagonist Eugene Gant’s burning desire to leave his hometown and establish a name for himself.  I still feel that novel is one of the best American coming-of-age stories told.

This year, I’m rereading The Web and the Rock, Wolfe’s third novel. I’m doing this because I don’t remember the book as well as his other novels. This time, I’m going to read it slower so I do remember the scenes.

Besides The Web and the Rock, I’m also reading Samuel Hazo’s poetry collection Sexes: The Marriage Dialogues. This is a great collection, one I read a few years ago and I’m now going back to. Several of the poems contain arguments between a married couple that involve everything from the way a table is set before dinner to a decision to buy a new car. The form is especially interesting to me because Hazo uses clipped, jagged lines throughout several of the poems. He also centers the poems around dialogue as a way to focus on the language of argument, gender differences, and tension.

I hope the rest of you find a good novel or poetry collection to enjoy during these coming winter months. If you feel like committing to classic literature and a great American novel, then I suggest one by Thomas Wolfe.

Halloween is in two days, and I assume a lot of people will partake in costume parties and events all weekend. But if you’re still unsure what you want to be for Halloween, then maybe the annual Dead Poets Reading will help spark your imagination. Hosted at Anthology New and Used Books at 515 Center Street in Scranton, PA, the event encourages local writers and poetry fans to dress up as their favorite deceased poet and read a few lines. I’ve been going to this event for a few years now, and I’m always impressed how well people pull off costumes of Poe, Plath, Sexton, Kerouac, Frost, Whitman, and a slew of other favorites.

The event starts at 7 p.m. and will also feature prizes for best costume! So, dress up and stop by to share the wise words of one of your favorite poets.

Happy Halloween!

This weekend, I took a bus to NYC to catch up with some friends, and one of the places we visited was The Poets House, located at 10 River Terrace  in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City. Basically, this is a building with shelves and shelves of poetry books (over 50,000 volumes according to the website) that the public can read when they visit. What impressed me most about the venue is the Poet House Showcase at the front of the massive library that features several new books published within the last year. For poets to have a chance to showcase their work like this is quite an amazing opportunity! Furthermore, once the year passes, the books are then placed on the shelves in back and remain there for visitors to browse. The venue also has a pretty extensive collection of literary journals, so for anyone looking to get published, the venue provides an invaluable service of allowing writers to browse the latest issues of journals free of charge.

There’s also several workshops and readings that go on throughout the year. Recently, the Poets House hosted Nick Flynn, Kevin Young and current U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin. I’m still a little bummed that I missed Kevin Young and Nick Flynn read together.

In addition, my thesis mentor from graduate school and a great poet, Neil Shepard, is doing a workshop that runs until Nov. 9.

New Yorkers are so lucky to have a space in their city that supports writers so much and allows the public to just come in and pick up any of their books. If I lived in NYC, I’d probably visit the place a few times a week to write and read while I looked out at the gorgeous Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

My friend Tez took some pictures, so you can get an idea how spacious this place is.