so this is life

fab time last night. fun lucipo (lucifer poetics) reading at the flea last night. Todd sold some Lucifer Poetics t-shirts. 3 sets of 3 readers with two breaks after...

The reading went like this, near as I can recall...

After Adam Good's outstanding intro, in which he whipped the partisan crowd into a flea-bitten frenzy, Chris Vitiello led off with a serial prose work comprised of permutative paragraphs of impotent description. Then Veronica Noechel read some lyrical poems, one of which was a kind of meditation upon a kitten that had been quashed in a roadway. Then Brian Howe gave us selections from "F7," which uses Microsoft Word's spellcheck function, as well as Googlism, to transform familiar texts like the Lord's prayer and the US pledge of allegience into oulipian word-collages.

Then we took a break. There was a lot of beer around. It wasn't Ryan Walker's birthday but we sang him Happy Birthday.

Tony Tost resumed with a single prose homage to Guy Davenport and Ronald Johnson that was like a displacement of reverence. Then Randall Williams read some new poems featuring some cool neologisms like "kiln-sleep." And then Tessa Joseph read four love poems except they weren't "love poems."

Then we took another break. The beer pretty much ran out. Lorraine Graham bought one of the Lucipo t-shirts off Ken Rumble's back.

Todd Sandvik opened the last set with a low, intense work -- a kind of growling research ritual with frogs in it. Marcus Slease batted next with a section of "Campagnology" that concluded with a shouting abecedarian litany of Iris names. And Ken Rumble closed out the gig with a few sections from "Key Bridge" -- a hometown work -- one of which wove references to Fugazi and such clubs that featured them.

We retired to a neighborhood Chadwicks, where we baffled and bamboozled the wait staff, who apparently had never seen 2 hungry/thirsty poets in one place before. Vexed, they nonetheless fed our passions. Late, a smaller group of us enjoyed breakfast-y things at the Bethesda Tastee Diner.

That's all.