Haiti Benefit This Sunday
Sunday, February 28th
5 pm, $10.00 donation (to OIC International)
@ The LAFF House (221 South Street)
BLEND, NPP & Light of Unity Association team up to host a benefit show @ The LAFF House. All proceeds go to OIC International.
Featuring readings and musical performances by:
Allegra Fletcher, Angel Hogan, Asttarte Deva, Jaz, Ish Klein, Peter Baroth, Elliott Levin, Alla Vilnyanskaya, Greg Bem, Sarah Heady, Courtney Bambrick, Debrah Morkun, Francesca Costanzo, Iain Pollock, Tamara Oakman, & Nate Graham
Thanks!
Thanks to everyone who made it to the Magic Gardens yesterday for NPP’s poem and chapbook making event.
Together we added bunches of poems & nearly thirty chapbooks to the world. Be proud.
They were weird & wonderful &, more often than not, about cats.
Special thanks to the Garden’s staff for making the afternoon happen!
Jan 16: NPP to NYC
REDEMPTIVE STRIKE: RECKONING THE DECADE
At the beginning of the century, we found ourselves in a dark wood. The past ten years saw the collapse of the Twin Towers, the marriage of religious fundamentalism and global politics, and the rise of digital communities. With this in mind, The New Philadelphia Poets launch a redemptive strike on the past decade. Join us for a reconsideration of this yet unnamed era.
Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery)
Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010
6:00 pm, $6.00
Featuring: Gregory Bem, Sarah Heady, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Angel Hogan, Matthew Landis, Carlos Soto Román, and Jamie Townsend.
Audio: 12/8 Highwire Gallery
Audio from the 12/8/09 reading at the Highwire Gallery is up. The night includes music by Josh Carrigan, two sets by Cuddle Magic, and readings by Greg Bem, Patrick Lucy, Sarah Heady, Debrah Morkun, Matthew Landis, Carlos Soto Román, and Jamie Townsend.
The recording is available for download at Greg Bem’s blog »
Tues, Dec. 15: Erotic Literary Salon
Philadelphia’s Erotic Literary Salon. Featuring- Debrah Morkun, a Philadelphia-based poet whose work travels through the realms of love, confusion, illusion, hyper-meta-cognition and metaphor. She will read her most brazenly erotic pieces while Asttarte Deva, sacred healer, will engage in tantric breathing & chanting. The forces of poetry and tantra will combine to create a unique evening of tantra-poetics -Along with New Salon Erotic Readings.
Where: TIME (The Bohemian Absinthe Lounge) 1315 Sansom Street, Center City, Philadelphia.
When: Tuesday, December 15, 7:30 pm
Doors open at 7:30 p.m. (limited seating), for cocktails, food and conversation. The event begins promptly at 8:00 p.m. Admission is $10, discounted for F/T students and seniors (65+) – $8. Salon attendees ages 21+ are invited to recite original erotica, words of others, an extemporaneous narrative or poetic work; share distinctive authors, books, and websites; and join in friendly discussions — all pertaining to this most intimate and human of literary genres.
More information and audio of past salons at the Erotic Literary Salon’s website »
Poetry, Wool & Music: Tues @ 7 PM
Join NPP for an evening of music, poetry and visual art, featuring Cuddle Magic and singer/songwriter Josh Carrigan, and fiber art by Wool Mammoth on Tuesday, December 8th from 7-10 at the Highwire Gallery (2040 Frankford Ave., Fishtown, Phila.) 5$ cover
Cuddle Magic (pictured above) is a large ensemble with members from Brooklyn, Philadelphia & Boston that performs lush, whimsical songs with wide-ranging instrumentation including strings, percussion, vibraphone, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, guitars, and sweet vocal harmonies. The ensemble, which sometimes swells to 12 or more, plays deftly crafted arrangements of their complex and varied set of original music. They are as friendly and inclusive as their name might suggest — after forming as a quintet over a year ago, they have gradually come to incorporate more and more of their musical friends into the band, constructing intricate soundscapes that include elements of folk music, avant-garde classical music, world music, and urban music.
Josh Carrigan is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer living in Philadelphia. His music admires and incorporates musique concrete, tape music, free improvisation, electronic sounds, vocal musics, percussion ensembles, field recordings, erotic psychedelia, drone maps, old radio programs, and pop classics from Seoul to Memphis. He has recorded hundreds of cassettes, using and re-using these as sound material for future tapes, accumulating and overdubbing humming networks of aural references & their sonic sources. Live performances feature these sounds juxtaposed with electroacoustic orchestrations and vocal aromatics.
Wool Mammoth: A fiber artist living in Philadelphia. Involving organic creations; animals, plants, a personal mythology emerging from the movement of eyes and hands. Works in various materials; whatever breathes, shrinks, and stretches itself to fit. Small things, big things, installations, knitted musculature. Like in long-legged dreams, an assemblage of seeing. Her creatures appear (sporadically) in various Philly venues, online, and at home roosting in Kensington. Sleeping cats keeping wool warm.
Poets include Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Jamie Townsend, Sarah Heady, Carlos Soto Román, Greg Bem, and Matthew Landis
Dec. 5: Bell, Sims & Massey
On Saturday, December 5th at 7 PM the New Philadelphia Poets will host a poetry reading featuring guests Laura Sims and Joseph Massey, as well as NPP member Marion Bell, at Fergies Pub (upstairs), 1214 Sansom St. Philadelphia, PA. Patrick Lucy and Jamie Townsend will MC.
Laura Sims is the author of two books of poetry: Stranger (Fence Books, 2009); and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books, Alberta Prize, 2005); and of four chapbooks, including Corrections (Bronze Skull Press, 2006) and Bank Book (Answer Tag Press, 2004). Her work was included in the anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), and individual poems have appeared in the journals: Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Aufgabe, Crayon, CAB/NET, Octopus, First Intensity, 26, How2, Parcel, 6X6, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, jubilat, LIT, andFence, among others.
Joseph Massey was born in 1978 in Chester, Pennsylvania, and has spent the last seven years in Humboldt County, California, where all of the poems in Areas of Fog—his first full-length collection—were written, as well as the chapbooks Minima St. (Range: 2003), Eureka Slough (Effing Press: 2005),Bramble (Hot Whiskey: 2005), Property Line (Fewer & Further Press: 2006), November Graph (Longhouse: 2007), Within Hours (The Fault Line Press: 2008), and Out of Light (Kitchen Press: 2008). His work has appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, Northwest Review, andAmerican Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among many others.
Write with us this Friday!
New Philadelphia Poets present:
A Poetic Obstacle Course!
Sponsored by the Kelly Writers House and Penn Arts Crawl
Friday, November 20
1:00-3:00 pm
Kelly Writers House
at the University of Pennsylvania
3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Get loose and goofy with your words, explore collaborative writing techniques, and learn some fun and fruitful ways to generate and revise text. After we put you through the poetic wringer, you’ll have a finished piece that will surprise and inspire you.
Stop by anytime between 1:00 and 3:00. You can expect to complete your poem in as few as twenty minutes, or as long as two hours—it’s up to you!
If you have some rough material you want to shape up, feel free to bring it—but you can just as easily (and perhaps more entertainingly) start from scratch.
This activity is perfect for beginners and seasoned writers alike. NO POETRY EXPERIENCE REQUIRED!
