Experiments of awesome.

As I was set to do some travel, I tacked on two trips into Portland to visit the gang.The first just passed and while there I finally was able to participate with the reading series of Jamalieh Haley and Donald Dunbar, If Not For Kidnap, which happens the last Tuesday of every month in Donald’s SE home. This month’s reading was packed to the gills.

The usual format is two readers and a musical guest. This month was Riley Michael Parker, Curious Hands, and myself. Riley is the founder of Housefire Publishing which is an interesting new independent press which experiments with soliciting writers with prompts in order to create work specifically for Housefire that the writers wouldn’t have created on their own. Housefire recently published their first book, the compilation Nouns of Assemblage which has work from more than 60 authors including Matty Bylos, Kevin Sampsell, Carrie Seitzinger, J. Bradley to name a few. It was a pleasure to meet Riley and hear his work, which rides somewhere between absurdist fiction and prose poetry.

Curious Hands has a thriving bassline going under the chorused singing of its guitarist and drummer, tongue in cheek lyrics, and a sound somewhat like quiet punk–probably due to the fact that they are a punk band playing an acoustic set. It was good sitting-on-the-stairs-while-nodding-your-head type music prompting some folks to take up dancing in the small space of the foyer.

It was great to at last be a part of the Kidnap show and getting to share the stage with Riley and Curious Hands, especially getting to read a batch of new work with folks. Amongst others, I got to share my poem about parking cars in an alternate universe, this short poem inspired by one of James Gendron’s Money Poems, as well as a recent poem  dealing with the connections I find between science/the universe and religion/spirituality and how those differences and similarities manifests themselves between my wife and I.

photo from Erik Rice