5/14 Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books

Why not? This Saturday, May 14, from 10 AM to 5 PM is this book fest in East Liberty. Six Gallery authors will be there, reading from their works, which will also be available at the book fair table we’ll most likely be sharing w/ pals from After Happy Hour.

11:45 AM at the Poetry Tent in Bakery Square (LOL), catch Angele Ellis (Arab on Radar, Under the Kaufmann’s Clock) & Don Wentworth (Past All Traps, Yield to the Willow, With a Deepening Presence).

Then, at 1:00 PM in the East Liberty Presbyterian Church, catch Paola Corso (Vertical Bridges), sharing the stage (or altar) w/ Sharon Dilworth. Register on Eventbrite to make sure you get a seat for this one.

There are all sorts of other events, readings, & whatnot throughout the day, including a puppet show at 10 AM & a jazz set by the excellent Deanna Witkowski Trio at 5 PM (also prob. a good idea to register).

So drop by if you’re not at Pittonkatonk or doing something else!

Don Wentworth Noise & Silence Interview

Yes, this is some old shit, but I was just clued in to it by a Joan Bauer email & Don’s book launch is tomorrow, so…

Back in the summer of 1989, I was just beginning to send poems out into the small press poetry world and heard about a little magazine that had just printed its first issue called Lilliput Review, edited by Don Wentworth.  The actual size of the magazine (4.25” X 3.5”) reflected both its name and focus.  The submission guidelines asked for poems of ten lines or less.  Curious, I sent off a buck or two and received a copy in the mail.

I’ve been reading it ever since.

Do you REALLY care about poetry? Come to the launch tomorrow! There will be NINE fucking readers, all reading briefly, so in the unlikely event you don’t like one, there will be EIGHT more, plus whatever weird booze & food people bring…

Why do you think you’re so attracted to the short form?

The story of my attraction to the short form is a simple one. I returned to writing poetry around the age of 30 for a variety of life-inspired reasons. I wrote lots of work in what was, and still is, a fairly standard free verse lyric form of 20 to 36 lines or so, some a bit shorter, some a bit longer. A close friend at the time, a musician/song writer, who was the only one paying any attention to what I was doing and who was not a poet, simply said your short stuff is your best work, the rest is crap. At the time, Rolling Stone was using very brief works as column filler in their album review section at the end of every issue and my friend urged me to send them poems. Naively, I did. And, amazingly, the work was accepted. That was the beginning.

“Interview with Small Press Legend Don Wentworth (Editor of Lilliput Review and author of Past All Traps)” by Christien Gholson, Noise & Silence