Broetry in Motion: Rust Belt Books, 10/18/07

House Press is a poetry-centered group of artists and writers which began to form in Buffalo, NY in 2001. Its mission remains simple: to publish their own work and other work they variously believe in (from their website at housepress.org - check it out!)


Disclaimer: I only discovered the House Press audio file after I wrote this so forgive my lack of preciseness regarding the poems.

Aaron Lowinger
It is even in everyday conversation that Aaron's voices seems to arise from a cavernous well, and then, rearing its head in open air, finds the world as huge and resonant as the place whence it came. But within the lived-in space that his poetry draws, populated by the flickering or dew-soaked objects that have the uncanny ability to make Buffalonians laugh, the sound of his speech must find its way over, through, and around the bits and pieces that occupy the page. With poetry Aaron's voice finds expression in a world complicated by the fact of his object-language staring up from an undeniable podium in a room portentously hot one year and six days after Armageddon. We hear it stopping at the physical elements of our environment, its volume displaced by pressing things. There is not a lack of surety but an abundance of care. Its origin is vast but it emerges tempered and humbled by a measured self-consciousness demanded by the locally multifarious objects of its address. Or perhaps by the mystery of the Muskie "fish of ten thousand casts," the slippery nature of legend complicating a poetry that seeks to be rooted in place.

Kevin Thurston
The beckoning of Odin signaled the subsequent verification of the possibility for a single god of madness, mead, and poetry. The god Odin purportedly gives to worthy poets the Mead of Inspiration, mixed by a team of dwarves. With his associates Russell and Kristy at the bar, Odin's liquid favor rained down on Rust Belt rendering it all the rustier...utter madness----- dick painting, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and a reading voice progressively representative of the Northern U.S. Nederlands dialect, the diarrheal speech of boss, and Thomas Dolby------ Kevin's poetry was only separate from his performance when the performance itself became concerned with that very distinction. The pronunciation of one was modified increasingly with each reading, monitoring the poem's migration from page to performance space as the interference of sound gradually rendered its content unreadable. And furthermore, once self-conscious performativity is established in the context of Kevin's conversational poems, the listener is confronted with the question: is the self-conscious performer to be held accountable for his or her words as is the casual conversationalist? -- i.e. ought we acknowledge the potential offense of the boss' language once it is reincarnated as performance and cast judgment upon both the author of those words and their poet-messenger? Kevin, do you wish to be absolved?