RED JUICE party TONITE

EFFING PARTY AND READING AT 12TH STREET BOOKS

photo by Matt Valentine

To mark the publication of the latest Effing chapbook, Red Juice, Hoa Nguyen will read Friday February 18 at 7 PM.  Her book will be available for sale at the event along with other fine Effing publications. Beer, wine and snacks will be available. Donations are gratefully accepted.

12th Street Books, purveyors of used, rare and out of print books, is located at 827 West 12th Street, 2.5 blocks east of 12th & Lamar, between Shoal Creek and West.

Comments

[Farid Matuk]

This a poem by Frank O'Hara brought to me by Susan. His best stuff puts me in the mind of our best nights in the 12th Street parking lot. This damn thing is gonna fuck up the layout but here goes with love to effing press:

AVENUE A

We haredly ever see the moon any more
so no wonder
it's so beautiful when we loop up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
your hair over your forehead and your memories
of Red Grooms' locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want someoranges/I love the leather
jacket Norman gave me
and the curduroy coat David
gavve you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
in a vast tragic veldt
that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries

everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
to my equally naked heart

-- Frank O'Hara

[scott]

Farid, your love feels good.

That's a great poem. It's true though isn't it, that for that hour or two after a reading it is EVERYTHING to be with our familia outside in the cool night air whilst the buildings of our city wrap around us?

I am also reminded of my favorite part ( part IV) of Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric:

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then?
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well;
All things please the soul — but these please the soul well.

[justin]

i've only been lucky and able to share in one evening inside the 12th street parking lot but, it was just and quite like that. good eye, Farid.