JO ANN WASSERMAN

I don't know how better to warn you than to simply explain that you can not go on living without Jo Ann Wasserman's poetry unless you want to be a wuss & pretend life is something other than what it is. She asks urgent questions that require immediate albeit impossible answers"-- & implicit in the answers she provides are the opposite responses. "how do you know god wants you to win? because you have won." Her poetry provides you with the noose-you-can-use information that frames day to day existence in accurate if harrowing terms. Pointed poems on how we got into such a state and what maneuvers, manifestations of awe amid the seen it all we can make next. Her phraseology & reasoning is as relentless as it is complex "-- the lines are emergencies within an emergency & are filled with the heightened & accelerated awareness of the Wasserman Intensity.

TONY TOWLE

I was talking yesterday with some people abt being immortalized in other people's poems -- of poems as a way of defeating death & abt how its not as common now as it was just a few years ago. Tony Towles's been immortalized in just such a way in many people's work, notably through Frank O'Hara on one dementedly hot july evening & he's returned the favor many times over. Entering a poem of Tony Towle's is not unlike entering a crowded loft rife with fast moving conversations. Tony, the assertively humble host is only too delighted to take your elbow & lead you to the best spots to easedrop from. He's the playful guide through sometimes rancorous waters, the urbane connoisseur of sudden transformations, the captivating impresario of creative friendship & chronicler of happy accidents in a world where nothing is accidental.

AMY HOLMAN

arguments? that's how maybe uncertain of welcome yet he complains of elusive beauty of coral, a passing mammal large words on cows my best friend turns a freight train through a new house

AMY HOLMAN is a 24 hour writer, constantly recording the ways in which people around her carve patient connections through the mountains that divide them & observing the ways in which those connections expand her own secret ideas about them. Her reservoir of memory flows through an underground network, a system powered by time itself & guided by a wilderness of totemic animals, a sustaining wattle to the thach of ideas that link separated relatives & friends whose blues are beyond repair. Her work is haunted by absent figures & people who live on the other side of unsurmountable chasms yet her writing -- & her work as a mentor to countless other writers -- her work has been relentlessly to bring people together & help individuals find their ways. How many writers owe their evolution, owe a closer understanding of their own callings, how many people owe that to Amy's ongoing work? Well, tonight, you can add us to that list.

BILL KUSHNER

begins to run i was laughing like this mist that comes lumbering -- a thing never seen a king how like life unsung & anonymous saints here the sweet no one else encourages them to ring princess

Bill Kushner has always wanted to be the thinly veiled, but instead he finds himself like the rest of us aliens unto ourselves. His extraordinary new book In the Hairy Arms of Whitman, is a collection of lyric sonnetoids in search of a world where their language is the normal language of everyday speech. But what would such a world be like? A lot saucier than this one, for starters. The poems, a panoply of loss & the not yet attained, play out against a backdrop of sexiness. A backdrop we are all made aware of, the way some sailors are always aware of changes in the red sky at morning ahead. Someone's always gone in the morning in Bill's work & its not him. Yet, despite the melancholy there's always someone beside bill for him to whisper his asides to. Every privation hold in it the thing itself. Sometimes delirious, sometimes rhapsodic he explores the difference between types of love, between serious and glorious. & even in an urban landscape populated by the sighs of tragic figures awake in the wee small hours, everything is forgiven & everything is alive with anticipation, for the degree to which we are whitman ourselves is the degree to which we are all as one.

TRACEY MCTAGUE

tongues french kiss the translator read the fine print all age chipies with sentient epiphany yr faith mbroidered in gold change the values the other woman and servo hips girl fights universal ecce-homo

There are a lot of things I could say about TRACEY MCTAGUE & will in my unauthorized biography. But let me start this way: Unless you see the connections that join all of us, unless you come to understand that we must hang together or we will all surely hang separately, unless you realize that the contingencies of your identity are secondary to the fact you are all alive within a system that prevents your identity from flourishing, unless you manage to arrive there, TRACEY McTAGUE will fucking kill you. Boundlessly compassionate & agressively discerning, Tracey's poetry is the writing of a Bhuddist Assassin. Not that her beliefs are circumscribed by one spritual system or that the charges against her have ever held up in court. Not, in fact that her work could be contained within any tidy category. In fact, she writes against the constraints inherent in identity itself. Writes against it because of the limits a name tag puts on your evolution, & also because of the arbitrary & devisive boundaries any one identity places against people of all other groups. & she explores the terrain of the priviliged few who exploit those differences to keep us divided. Her work isn't explicitly political as much as it is aware of larger context, the Baraka, the Net of Indra in which we are all suspended. She draws on many cultures & systems, from African-American Hoodoo to the mores of low life Brooklyn. Her work constantly pushes away from the self, using the private tools of corporate malfeasence, suburban pod life & isolationist identity poetics against their owners. She is a dissident against complacency. Complacency that reduces people to drones 60 hrs a week, that has been at war with one Iraq or another for 200 years, that replaces the spirit with consumerism in a self-perpetuating cycle of having to earn more to buy things to make up for the time spent earning more. Complacency isn't merely treason against the not yet born truely democratic nation, it's is a form of suicide. & Tracey's work is an antidote that turns the spontaneous mind into -- to borrow here from woody guthrie -- a machine that kills fascists. Some people look at America as being filled with idiots & run by maniacs. Tracey thinks of it prehaps more accurately as a great unfulfilled promise. Right now the beast is all belly & we are all in it -- it's dark down here, but what better place to organize, unseen, than in the center of it all. I've been informed she's going to take advantage tonight of both the Talking & the Reading elements of the Zinc Talk/Reading Series -- she'll start with a five or six minute talk on some reasearch she's been doing & then read some connected work.

KAREN WEISER

Kitchen table As if there is a Religion or an Escort A New self We are drawn Envelop Is half the way Stolen Evidence of Rumbles

Eileen Myles once said "everybody/has one missing piece/and all the beauty's/about it." On the cover of KAREN WEISER's Eight Positive Trees are seven trees and her work fills the space between the title & the image. An object contains a fixed order within itself & an observer can sum up is comforting, immutable essence. Karen's human universe lives in the negative space described by & between objects, where genesis is constantly at play, identity is in a state of becoming, stasis is impossible and all statements are replaced with questions -- sometimes ecstatic sometimes unbearbale but never at home within the finite confines of an answer. Karen's is the work of a person who's undergone transmutation in the retort, projected from one identity into an unknown & it carries with it the vision to comprehend the changeable, the way trees do over time & from every perspective. Within a seemingly cohesive person there are many fractured identities, chosen & imposed, emerging & vanishing, sometimes integrated, sometime irreconcilable. Between seemingly separate individuals are invisible fields that permeate & connect them into one shared self. How do you comprehend loss when what's lost is a self to do the comprehension? The catastrophic evolution of Karen's work reveals every state to be a chrysalis to the next. It reveals identity as telemetry, as change over time & not the individual's exclusive domain but cooperatively held by every other person moving by your side.

Continue simultanteous with Hat offensive & Ê Raw I didn't sign up for Solid Moon thought A word with Red Teeth In the handicapped Night

If Chris Martin were a machine would you want him as a companion as you grew old & yr senses began to fail, or while you were just starting out & full of wonder? ÊWhen would it be more useful to have someone point out nothing is as it seems, that what you sign up for is not ever what you end up with. ÊIn Chris' hopeful cosmology, everything is a potential entrance, a door behind which you discover the lady is the tiger with fragmented grenadine running through its slippery veins. ÊIntegrity is a fragile interlocking system of plastic & hair the color of pale corn. ÊOn this planet, most people know how long they've been here but don't know what here is. ÊWell Chris doesn't know how long he has been in this place, or how long it'll last, but here, here is Chris Martin.

JOHN TRANTER

Jars of honey Of summer hail Hunks at the cafe Narrative -- as though The weather Reluctantly shifting Aside Now a Turn Enjoyed all delusions & Regret You can forget time, but time won't forget you. Ê

John Tranter's fragmented inner monologues live amid moments of small decisions & incidental judgments. The inventory of a life made up of such moments. ÊThe slow accretion of character. ÊThe diagonal & disconnected relationships of teachers & preachers towards their flocks, the resistance to & indulgence in, nostaligia, between older figures with fully realized Êidentities & emerging individuals without a self of their own . ÊThe Ê clarity & alienation inherent in looking back on young love from a perch years removed gives his work a psychological & disjunctive tension that grants even the diminutive elements of a life a kind of mythic stature.

NADA IN NEW YORK

Not on A thigh Draw the breath And your figure Groin to your Origin Rough in Dream Of what there is to be Not here

Even after years in the Bay Area, years in Japan, NADA GORDON is still in a kind of exile. But its a spontaneous-mind exile that allows us to see the importance of distance and absence in facilitating communication. Only if there is a gap between subject and object can there be tendrils to keep them together. Her work is extremely sensual, transforming abstractions & emotions into embodied talismans of the five senses, defining the indefinable in terms of touch, smell & so on. In that context, beauty is less a thing to possess & more a guide, the body and its senses, sexuality in all its forms are made into mentors. Her poetry is overtly an examination of constructions of femininity & of the self, but covertly about the distress and conflicts at play within that realm. & in fracturing the individual, in creating & spreading the distance between the parts, she makes evident the motives behind behavior & desires in a way that's much larger than just the self, that makes love make sense in all its off-key hymns & water-damaged sexy icons.

ORNITHOLOGY OF MARIANNE

Mage on each side A bird in flight Receiving It, the object that yearns And cannot be seen No longer Never Existed at all Sprung up in History books Apple of my eye Never Existed Each day Never existed at all

MARIANNE SHANEEN wants to know what you are getting at when you say information. Her work is a network within the network that connects modern to vestigial, the open to the encrypted & that creates new meaning out of the failure to connect. How does communication collapse? No sender, no receiver, sender & receiver the same person willfully split in two in order to talk. Intercepted messages replaced with forgeries. A radio in an empty house, the ring of an unanswered phone, a blog nobody knows about. Even in successful communication, how do you overcome mediation & return back to touch? There's catching a carrier pigeon, running your fingers over a braille directive in a World War I trench. But Marianne's after something more intimate, that is, the dangerously tactile power of gaze, of the eye putting something onto the thing it sees. Of objects & people giving up their elements into the eye. Her poetry manipulates the ineffable medium that carries the physical through lines of communication, through the ether which reveals all mediation to be illusion & allows phenomena like the covetous evil eye to operate and the mano cornuta, mano fico and hamsa hand to wave it off. Please allow Marianne to perform her operations upon you tonight & you will be happily transformed.

It Was Andrei

and look up to natives dirty red restaurants eat all your critical of anarchist dollar bills radio said each step to the Capitol city's living rooms understood & became much

When you've been through enough challenges, when youÕve seen enough attempts to smoke out whatÕs best in humanity, yr given optimism as a kind of parting gift from the inert, insulated world. ANDREI CODRESCU has intersected with history in such a way that nonchalance & lightheartedness are perfectly intelligent & honest responses to new frames & senses of scale. His position as exile & as composer of work across every category, places him in the indefinable but altogether clear terrain beyond any one system's clutches. The liminal land where all cultural icons, be it John Lennon or a pierogi from Kiev on 2nd Ave, can be brought together in ways both absurd & reverent. He's a sociological gumshoe who investigates entire cultures by taking them out for a hot meal on a snowy night, or a cold drink on a sultry one, & gets them to talk. He makes connections between worlds that an occupant of either one could never make Ñ One December night he looked up & saw the windows of Bellvue Hospital looked no different than any other apartment buildingÕs here in Manhattan. & On this cold December night I believe, he'll be leading us out of Zinc Bar & into some other buildings, buildings that contain all the missing 13th floors of the world. Put your best shoes on & try to keep up, here's Andrei Codrescu.

Todd in the Ass Factory

toxic but hardly on me Clean me dreamer dreamer claim I only work on the bed & none of your little wars bike over you for dinner tonight

When i first heard TODD COLBY... had been murdered by another poet, I was concerned -- because Todd was the one telling me this. With Todd it is never clear whether that's a mask or if itÕs the seductive, boyishly chaotic face of calamity into which yr staring. Some people are alleged to have work that takes risks, but it will be you the listeners who will be doing the risk-taking tonight. Todd's work is demanding, not in the traditional sense of stemming from a confounding theoretic base, which it does, but in the way a man with a gun is demanding, or a train coming at you is demanding. If you want to continue having your picnic on the tracks you have made a very brave decision. Years ago, at Todd's first appearance at Zinc, a person actually got up and left in the middle -- not sheepishly like people typically leave a reading but completely schitzed out & needing to get back up to street level where people pretend everythingÕs fine. Be warned: Todd will welcome you into his poems & show you around before announcing he "forgot something" outside & will be "right back" & then you are there all alone, in the extremely dirty & illuminated world of rank & filed-to-the-bone situations, a world of hilarious & anthropologic nightmare that comes with instructions & advice that will only get you in deeper. If there's a prickly feeling on your arms, if you see yourself veering towards the unimaginable conclusions of seemingly innocuous initial conditions, then it is too late for you to be helped. Todd can't slow down the speed of light any more than he can eat a wafer & shit out a new savior, but he knows people who can & they will take care of you. They are your new & only friends. He has no need for cops or sleep, for order placed on the inchoate world. There may be darkness up ahead but Todd Colby has got our backs.

Help Chris McCreary

Crouch or crawl several Humid conditions Residing in In the work Safety Makes him feel strange Common sense Common? Ruin Entombed among the rabble Another moment Rather doglike You say

Chris McCreary lays an idea inside a host where it secretly feeds until it hatches. Within any system are encrypted voices of protest & dissent that wear the system as their own face until the proper moment. HeÕs aware of lineage great & small, from the poem thatÕs based on the collision of big traditions to the phrase that can only exist on the heels of just-written line above it. His work leapfrogs from moments of lyric vulnerability to vortices of high speed parataxic surrender. ThatÕs Chris playing variable footsie with you under the table even as he pours you another glass of spiked wine above it. Can you trust a man who's only too happy to pull on the frayed end of language until the whole baggy sweater, your favorite sweater, is a pile of thread? Oh go ahead, because here he comes & you have no choice.

Mark's Correspondence School

Moment of composition And loss Relevance Knocked me off my horse Without a younger Animal Love A Long trip along technolo- Along the Calling of Evolve or revolve

In that first disoriented moment when we find ourselves floating in space, we all have floating in space in common Ñ but we all go our separate ways, speculating & exploring our own areas of concern. Despite our differences, Mark WallaceÕs foundation for a metaphysics of evolution apples equally to each one of us. Is basing your life, as many of us in this room have done, on a useless concern a sign of our stupidity? Or is it that, whatÕs taken to be useful & good, is itself a model for stagnation & slow decay? Against an unstable background, the aim for a human is different than for a poem or a factory but the exploratory process by which each speculates & discovers what it is they are supposed to be doing is equally necessary. WhatÕs the best way to peer over the horizon to discover what, amid mutable, tenuous morals & inexorable mortality, to discover & navigate what you should care about? Yr distracted right now by some anxious thought. Everyone has their own concerns imposed upon them & so everyone has something to transcend. WeÕre all floating in space & have no choice but to head in some direction, so whatÕll it be? Well, for the next half hour letÕs face forward, forward towards that distant sun Mark Wallace.

Jacqueline Waters vs. John Donne

Just a bunch A bunch of Camera-ready Quivers Up to your Elders your Lincoln Ideal Now I Err Without relief As stars Though the Evening Relieved Streams away

Jacqueline Waters has the disassociative visionary awareness of an epistimological philosopher in a busy downtown forensics crime lab where the evidence that will crack the case is jackie herself. In JackieÕs work, everything we gaze at is brought to life through the energy we give it & thereÕs no clear boundary between inanimate objects, living entities & oneÕs own self. When your proprioceptive sense extends miles in every direction & determines, not just perceives, the nature of everything in itÕs path, the guiding principles of the universe run in some very new directions. To the extent yr perceived, you exist, but are also hemmed in. To the extent yr invisible, yr completely free, but are also reduced to nothingness. Jackie tacitly explores the fundamentals of sentience & living ontology, of vanishing on one side & imprisonment on the other Ñ & uses her work to create a new metaphysics that permits autonomy & engagement to coexist & build on one other.

Cedar Sigo faces Broken Windows

Cakes of Enough Death Applaud for Romanticized Sorry thinking I own this Guess I'll smear my Once automated songbook

This Guy, Cedar Sigo walks into a room, your room & reorders everything in it before you have a chance to say who are you & what are you doing in my house? In his work his statements are questions in disguise & the questions are commands, issued with the confidence of someone who knows consciousness well enough that he can walk into it with all the lights out, grabbing what he needs & reemerge a moment later with a new explanation for relationships & the context in which they take place. Its a work of extreme? Total erlebnis. The you and what army? of his work reflect less mistrust of received wisdom than emphatic conviction of his own Ñ his clear sense of how things fit together & the implicit belief that the head to toe equity of human experience belongs to nobody, but that everybody has the right to take liberties with it if the liberties move things along. He wonÕt take nonsense from you & by the time CedarÕs done tonight you wonÕt take any from anybody.

tonya foster

Townsfolk Of Denver Need a place You need a place Advice From the Offer Silver and Turquoise Eyes Responsible for keeping

From New Orleans to New York, Tonya FosterÕs work investigates the way cultural phenomena are internalized. How they can be used to ensnare or can be retooled as elements of liberation. How the effect of rigid control systems & social organization yields a phenomenology of problemetized & concrete hermeneutics. Whether addressing the family or the nation, her work emerges from the contextual factors & elements that determine how information & identity gets communicated, handed down & channeled into specific courses. Her writing in lungfull addresses issues of race & the manufacture of the individual into a concept, as filtered through the controlling lens of sociology & law enforcement.