Subtext Poets Nico Vassilakis and Robert Mittenthal Read Tonight

Image: Vassilakis via www.mipoesias.com

Two great, local poets celebrate their new books with a reading tonight (Thursday, March 20 at 07:30 p.m.) at Open Books, an intimate, poetry-only shop, run by poet/bookstore owners Christine Deavel and John Marshall.

An excerpt from Mittenthal's Value Unmapped (Nomados), as seen on the Open Books site:

It's an unfortunate iron that walks stiffly over us, pressing our clothes. I miss the comforts of a baggy garment which covers everything while revealing little.

"What follows is a gentle, meandering polemic," Marshall writes in the Open Books newsletter, "at times oblique and at times direct in which often finds itself studying the possibility that language controls the individual rather than the other way around.

A passage from Text Loses Time:

a new continent spills from / her eyes. A glassful / of pencils. An autobiography / composed entirely of photos.

Text Loses Time (Many Penny) is also described in the Open Books newsletter. As Marshall writes: "His poetry and prose move between the shimmeringly surreal and the flatly declarative... But Vassilakis takes text a step further. He also manipulates words, letters, and punctuation marks to construct visual poetry, the arrangement of text free of meaning, so the look of the building blocks of printed language becomes the stuff of non-representational art."

Plus, both of these guys are great readers.

Open Books: A Poem Emporium
2414 N. 45th St., Wallingford
(206) 633-0811

Topics: Get Lit

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Brokaw on Boom! at Town Hall

Source: Museum of Broadcast Communications, courtesy of NBC

I had to take a broadcast seminar while finishing school last year in Chicago. The instructor, a woman with a local news Emmy, was unapologetic about the need to wear more makeup on camera, cut your hair and change your name. Critiques of the substance of our work were conspicuously absent. She also constantly hounded us about our register. “Can you make your voice deeper?”� she would ask in exasperation. She never came out and said it, but people in the class heading to careers in broadcast journalism said they’d had internships and entry level positions where the potential advantage of a smoking habit was explicitly stated. But some day your career is over and a dear friend with a smoke induced smooth baritone dies before his time. Tom Brokaw knows. He buried his friend and competitor Peter Jennings, who died of lung cancer. It’s nice to know this lion of network news doesn’t think it’s such a great idea.

Last night Brokaw came to Town Hall to riff on the Sixties, Vietnam, 9/11 and his theory that Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton are twins separated at birth, bent on mutual destruction. He was there to promote Boom! Voices of the Sixties, his latest foray into cultural exploration. The book is a series of interviews conducted with various iconic (and not so iconic) figures of the Sixties. So in keeping with the format, Brokaw took the interviewee chair at Town Hall, sitting across from Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster to answer questions about the current state of media, race relations, and the current war.

At the risk of sounding too gushy, Brokaw was funny, self-deprecating and perceptive. When pushed by Brewster on the state of television journalism today, he praised the diversity of news sources, even Fox, as an improvement over the time when people’s view of the world was funneled almost entirely through the perspective of middle-aged white men on the Eastern seaboard. (Though the first examples of this vast array of quality options he listed were Frontline, CSpan and the BBC—as one audience member said, “welcome to the left coast.”�) He also managed to avoid being too dismissive of the conspiracy questions thrown at him during the audience Q and A. And no, he doesn’t have a blog of his own: “The last thing I want to do is hear from myself one more time.”�

Finishing out the night, Brokaw returned to the Sixties, reminding the audience that there was a time when political participation, if at times misguided, was the hallmark of a generation—Boom!

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