Pittsburgh Lit Events: September 6 - 12

Monday, September 6:

Free Poetry Workshop
Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange hosts open poetry workshop on the first Monday of each month. Call for details.
Borders Books - Eastside
5986 Penn Circle South Pittsburgh, PA (East Liberty)
7:00pm - free - (412) 481-7636


Tuesday, September 7:

Prosody
91.3 WYEP Radio
7:00pm

Release: Open Mic
Open Mic for poets, emcees and vocalists.
Shadow Lounge
972 Baum Blvd Pittsburgh, PA (East Liberty)
9:00pm(18+) - $5 - (412) 363-8277


Thursday, September 9:

WEAVE FEATURED EVENT!
Century Mountain Opening Reception
Weave Issue 03 contributors/cover artists William Rock & Huang Xiang bring their Century Mountain Project to Robert Morris University for a new show: Expanding Borders, Exploring Humanity. Opening reception to feature special performance by Huang Xiang. Exhibit runs through October 14.
RMU Media Arts Gallery
600 Fifth Ave Pittsburgh, PA (downtown)
5:30pm - free

Pittsburgh Writes
Weekly writers workshop.
Crazy Mocha Coffee
531 Beaver Street Sewickley, PA
Call for time - (412) 741-4444


Saturday, September 11:

Writers in the Gardens 2010
Autumn House Press & City of Asylum Pittsburgh present a unique walking garden tour/reading along Pittsburgh's Mexican War Streets, featuring Phillip Terman, Derek Green, Jan Beatty, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, and Weave Issue 03 contributor Sheryl St Germain. Event is free, but limited to 60 attendees. Reserve a spot by contacting: lauramustio@gmail.com
City of Asylum Pittsburgh
Sampsonia Way @ Mattress Factory (north side)
4:00pm - free - lauramustio@gmail.com

WEAVE FEATURED EVENT!
City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert
Annual showcase of free global literary expression features 18 musicians including Oliver Lake, and writers including Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakka (U.S.A.), Marya Martysevich (Belarus), HInemoana Baker (New Zealand), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and City of Asylum writer-in-residence Khet Mar (Burma). Concert concludes with "world music and beat-matched poetry" dance party with DJ Soy Sauce.
City of Asylum Pittsburgh
Sampsonia Way @ Mattress Factory (north side)
7:30pm - free - (412) 321-2190




Do you have a literary event you want to see listed on our calendar?
E-mail details to: joel.weavezine@gmail.com

Announcements Galore!

Weave has a number of announcements this week. First and foremost, we have a fantastic bunch of new editors and readers who have joined the Weave team. When Weave asked for people to send in their CV's and get involved, we got such a great response from amazingly talent and intelligent people. Check out the staff page to read up on how awesome we all are.

Thanks to everyone who inquired about sharing a table with Weave at AWP! Weave will be tabling it up in 2011 with the fantastically quirky indie journal A cappella Zoo. Oh the colorful swag we will have at our table! I cannot wait. A cappella Zoo and Weave are also teaming up with Ampersand Books for an off-site reading. The details are still in the works, but it promises to be filled with great poetry, awesome prose and extremely posh furniture. And of course booze. Stay tuned!

Weave is also happy to announce that we have a fantastic line-up of talented readers and performers for our SPF offsite event on September 25th. We only wish we had unlimited time to include everyone who wanted to read.  So for now, save the date, and check back later this week for more info on this event.

Finally, be sure to stop by the Century Mountain Exhibit this Thursday, September 9th! Amazing artistic collaborations between artist William Rock and poet Huang Xiang! Spontaneous poetry readings! Weave issue 03 for sale! What more could you want?

Pittsburgh Lit Events: August 30 - September 5

Tuesday, August 31:

Prosody
91.3 WYEP Radio
7:00pm

Release: Open Mic
Open Mic for poets, emcees and vocalists.
Shadow Lounge
972 Baum Blvd Pittsburgh, PA (East Liberty)
9:00pm(18+) - $5 - (412) 363-8277


Wednesday, September 1:

Pittsburgh Poets' Playshop
You’ve heard of a writer’s workshop, but this is a playshop! Join local poets and writers
in collaborative compositions, surrealist writing games, found poetry exercises, and much more. Come learn, compose, and have fun with writing.
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Large Print Room
4400 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh, PA (Oakland)
12:00pm - free - (412) 622-3151


Thursday, September 2:

Pittsburgh Writes
Weekly writers workshop.
Crazy Mocha Coffee
531 Beaver Street Sewickley, PA
Call for time - (412) 741-4444

The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven Book Party
Join author Aaron Skirboll in celebrating the release of The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven: How a Ragtag Group of Fans Took the Fall for Major League Baseball.
Firehouse Lounge
2216 Penn Ave Pittsburgh, PA (Strip District)
7:00pm - free (cash bar) - (412) 434-1230


Friday, May 7:

Gist Street Reading Series
Pittsburgh's world-renowned reading series welcomes Joy Katz (poetry) and Tara L. Masih (fiction).
James Simon Sculpture Studio (3rd floor)
305 Gist St Pittsburgh, PA (Uptown)
8:00pm – $10 - (412) 434-5629




Do you have a literary event you want to see listed on our calendar?
E-mail details to: joel.weavezine@gmail.com

Review of Deborah Digges' The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart

I hadn’t read much of the poetry of Deborah Digges prior to my encounter with her last collection, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of my Heart, published posthumously this year following her apparent suicide on April 10, 2009, but I had heard her name, since she grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, just thirty miles away from my own hometown of Linn—and, let’s face it, central Missouri isn’t exactly known as a literary mecca (however much I might want it to be). Nothing could have prepared me, however, for the intensity of the voice one finds in the pages of this collection. Even putting aside—if such a thing were possible or desirable—the tragic circumstances surrounding the poet’s passing (alluded to quite discreetly in an editor’s note), circumstances that will inevitably shape the reception of these poems, it’s clear that this is work written at a lyric pitch uncharacteristic of much contemporary poetry—and one that is therefore bracing, refreshing, if difficult to sustain. Reading this collection, one is reminded (perhaps too easily?) of the famous comment by George Steiner on Sylvia Plath’s final book, Ariel, that her last poems were written at such a white heat or from such a perspective “she could not return from them.” Such a statement implies that to write such poetry is, like Orpheus, to descend to the realm of the dead in an effort to retrieve something that cannot be brought back alive (and which, by association, may ensnare the poet, leading him or her to their own death). But what Digges’ last poems reveal (like Plath’s before her) is a sensibility fiercely engaged with life, if also one struggling to reconcile that feeling of vitality with the losses of a life—of a spouse, of a beloved brother—that can diminish or threaten to overwhelm it.

The title poem that opens the collection, “the wind blows through the doors of my heart,” (presented somewhat self-effacingly, as are all the titles, without capitalization) is representative of the swirling vortex of syntax found in many of the poems and testifying to the force of feeling that, like lava in subterranean chambers, underlies them. The poem begins with a sweeping image of a wind that is gradually undoing all of the materiality and detritus of a life:

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
Flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.

The rhythm established here by the anaphoric repetition-with-slight-variation of the titular phrase “The wind blows through the doors of my heart” catches the reader up in its haunting refrain, enacting a process of erasure so swift that, by the ninth line, even the syntax itself has begun to erode. For how are we to read the final line quoted above: “In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy?” Is there an omitted “it” there, as in the sentence, “It is dark and windy in my heart and its rooms?” Or have we arrived at some other place of “darkness” and “windy-ness?” After continuing in this vein of gradual erosion and erasure for another sixteen or so lines, we come to the end of the poem and a tense shift that indicates we have arrived at a very different place indeed:

It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

Is it possible that these final lines are written from the perspective of one already dead, looking back from the afterlife? The “cobwebs” in the hair, the “coolness” of this place—“a quilt spread on soil”—would seem to indicate the realm of the dead (though we’re told “the wind does not [normally?] blow through the rooms of the dead"). Nevertheless, the lyric voice in this poem is otherworldly.

“now we are nine”—which in its title may be giving a nod toward Wordsworth’s great elegy, “We Are Seven”—is an elegy for the poet’s oldest brother (who is also elegized in a number of other poems in the collection). As the title implies, Digges came from a large Missouri family of ten children. The poem laments the rending that has occurred in the once-perfect circle of ten children by the elder brother’s apparently violent death (“Head first onto a marble floor, / six hours he lay alone, now we are nine”). Unlike the little girl in Wordsworth’s poems who blithely insists the she and her siblings “are seven” despite the fact that two of them “lie in the churchyard,” Digges refuses all consolation for the loss of her brother:

Now we are nine, the circle of our privileged lives torn open.
True north is where our brother broke the waters
of our womb. Head first onto a marble floor,
six hours he lay alone, now we are nine.
We are nine now. Say what you like—

The poem moves from rage over the brother’s death and an apparent desire to follow the brother toward that “True north” to an earlier memory of timeless summers and autumns of apple-picking led by the brother, when the children still existed as a complete unit:

We’d board the wagon, evenings. He pulled us home,
yes pulled us, his younger brothers, sisters,
and the weight of the bushel baskets full of apples,
Henry Clay, Golden Delicious. Oh what a wedding train
of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay,
smelling all night the apple rot between our toes.
Mornings, wild-haired, we followed him out into the orchard.
Bliss of dew before Missouri heat.

The exuberance and “vagabond” quality of these lines with their sharply-drawn particularity stand in luminous contrast to the “tearing open” of the Edenic womb of the poet’s childhood, though we know this exuberance cannot last. The final image of the poem is that of the brother continuing on ahead with his wagonload of apples without his nine brothers and sisters, who are “too tired…to jump the tractor, catch the store.”

Reading poems such as “now we are nine” and others like it in this collection, one would say that the speaker is experiencing what, with almost perverse irony, has been recently designated by the DSM-IV “complicated grief disorder” (as if, maddeningly, all grief isn’t complicated), a kind of excessive grief that persists well after the death of the loved one and can lead to feelings of wanting to follow the beloved all the way to the “undiscovered country” of death itself. As a counterweight to this downward pull toward death is the specificity of detail that preserves the world in its aching (because finite) beauty.

Perhaps the finest poem in the collection, also deeply rooted in the landscape and labor of central Missouri, is the poem “haying” (though I may be biased, having some nostalgia, if one can believe it, for this difficult-but-worth-it type of labor). As with the title poem, the poem opens with great lyrical intensity and a subtle musicality:

Scythe to root cut, rolled backwards into time,
the hut-round ricks lashed down four-square with linen
like bonneted and faceless women.

The combination here of alliteration (“root,” “rolled” “-round ricks”), assonance (“scythe” and “time,” “-round” and “down”), mutes (“root,” “cut”), and marvelous near-rhyme (“linen” and “women”) in such a short space creates an incantatory feeling that, like “now we are nine,” carries us “backwards” into this space of timeless memory and Edenic innocence. Inevitably, this feeling gives way to the present reality of loss:

Heartbreaking now such symmetry,
which kept our earthly house
that you or I would ever cross the windrows
of a field ripe for the haying, one or the other lost,
head high until, at last, the field raked clean
showed nothing but the seeds, crows circling,
stumps and stones, such strident fog the ghost crowds
hauling willow baskets—

The particularity of the description here conjures the whole field before our eyes, even while the language itself undoes the very image it has created, leaving us in the presence of ghosts. It is at this point in the poem we come to the speaker’s startling declaration of a desire, once again, to follow the dead beloved to the brink of death itself: “I’d try on death to find you, gown made of grasses / harvest time, early, the loose hay drying in the mow”; and later, these lovely and haunting lines:

I have lain down across such orchard grasses on your grave
smelling the deep that keeps you, tasting snow,
something gone out of me forbidden, beyond birdsong
or vision, mantle trivial worn by the living,

The sheer musicality of the phrase “mantle trivial worn by the living” convinces us of its rightness—and its profundity. In this poem, Digges has, like Persephone, slipped off the “trivial mantle of the living” to walk for a time among the dead and return with this bitter wisdom.

The one question or possible criticism that lingers with this collection, a “trivial” criticism indeed, regards its “completeness”: is this the book Digges herself would have wanted us to have? The editor’s note mentioned earlier suggests that some guesswork was involved in assembling the collection in the exact order Digges would have intended and indicates that some of the poems still existed in multiple versions (though most are said to be “entirely finished and clean copies…prepared by her”). But the uncertainty surrounding the final form of the book does nothing to diminish the ultimate impact of The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart—it feels more finished, weightier, than many books that were no doubt shepherded lovingly from beginning to end through the editorial process. Though these poems may not, finally, have been able to console or provide hope for Digges—and perhaps this is not, in the end, the purpose of poetry for the poet—they give me hope for American poetry: if more poets wrote with the razor’s-edge urgency, lyrical precision, gorgeous imagery, and emotional depth of Deborah Digges, perhaps “Poetry” itself would, well, matter more. The greatest tribute to Digges would be, as Pound said of Eliot at the latter’s memorial service, to “READ [HER].”

Century Mountain: Expanding Borders, Exploring Humanity

Chinese poet and calligrapher Huang Xiang and American artist William Rock are exhibiting their Century Mountain portraits at Robert Morris. Century Mountain is a collaborative project created by Xiang and Rock. The project name is inspired by the great minds of the people the portray in the work. Of the project, the artists say:

"... collaborative art honors the greatness in us as human beings that has made itself evident throughout the centuries in the form of outstanding creators, thinkers, discoverers, leaders -- essentially people who stood out like mountains throughout the centuries."

Their portrait of Murasaki Shikibu, Japanese novelist and poet, is featured on the cover of Weave's third issue. The exhibition opening takes place Thursday, September 9th from 5:30-8:30pm and will feature spontaneous poetic performances by Huang Xiang. Weave will be in attendance to sell the third issue. Please come out to the Robert Morris Media Arts Gallery and support this amazing project.

The exhibit opening will also include spontaneous poetry performances from renowned Chinese poet, Huang Xiang and Weave will be on hand selling copies of the third issue. This event is not to be missed