Thursday, April 26, 2012

Lost World of Horse-Drawn


Red Shuttleworth
(photo by Steve Rimple)




Lost World of Horse-Drawn

You see it in the eyes of mounted deer heads,
saloons of poetry's source materials....

Barmaids in thin cotton gym shorts,
muted TV screens in strip mall offices,
shooting galleries of non-season traveling carnivals.

In the heyday,  when things mattered,
stovepipe hats had arrows through them.


Monday, April 23, 2012

Punch-Outs & Love: History-on Strings, A Red Shuttleworth Poetry Chapbook


Punch-Outs & Love: History-on-Strings

a Red Shuttleworth poetry chapbook
from
Theatre in My Basement
(Christopher Danowski, Artistic Director)
Phoenix, Arizona


Monday, April 9, 2012

More... Your Gunslinger Shadow Grows Amber



More... Your Gunslinger Shadow Grows Amber


To observe (absorb?)
the enduring dead...

(Mysterious Dave Mather
dead and wormy
in an Oakland flophouse
suggests the late work
of a civilized West...
and no mystery
beyond a need-of-cleaning
pistol mentioned
in the will)

...you must allow
yourself to be
a lone figure
--clouds
like concrete
pressing down--
breaking your
interior ceiling.

All that aged,
rotted
drywall
falling in chunks from heaven.

Bat Masterson
yet approaches his squarish
New York City journalist form.
Steak-clogged arteries.

These are primary
juxtapositions:
Old West
and walking pantomime.
What a goddamned trick:
levitation with the dead.

          -To the Memory of Ed Dorn



Sunday, April 8, 2012

High Plains Fandango: Production Photo's from SUNY Fredonia

Clayton Howe (O'Garr), Caitlin Molloy (Isabelle Roche),
Sean Marciniak (Louis Roche), Andrew Albigese (Moss),
and Claire Elise Walton (DQ)
in High Plains Fandango


High Plains Fandango: Production Photo's from SUNY-Fredonia

The premiere of High Plains Fandango at SUNY-Fredonia on February 24th exceeded by far my expectations.  Beautifully and faithfully directed by Tom Loughlin, performed by a sterling cast of young actors, this theatre experience gave me a happiness I'll carry through all my days.



Claire Elise Walton (DQ) and Andrew Albigese (Moss)
in High Plains Fandango

Jessica Drew-Cates (Aquinas) and Jonathan Dimaria (John Hooley)
in High Plains Fandango

Cassandra Giovine (Cinthia) and Clayton Howe (O'Garr)
in High Plains Fandango

Jessica Drew-Cates (Aquinas), Jonathan Dimaria (John Hooley)
and Nicolas Nieves (Father Ben)
in High Plains Fandango

Jonathan Dimaria (John Hooley) Tony Taylor (Ken Adams),
and Kelsey Rispin (Waitress)
in High Plains Fandango

Clayton Howe (Ken Adams) and Jessica Drew-Cates (Aquinas)
in High Plains Fandango

Cassandra Giovine (Cinthia), Andrew Albigese (Moss)
and Claire Elise Walton (DQ)
in High Plains Fandango

Nicholas Nieves (Father Ben) and Jessica Drew-Cates (Aquinas)
in High Plains Fandango

Clayton Howe (O'Garr) and Tony Taylor (Ken Adams)
in High Plains Fandango

Tony Taylor (Ken Adams)
in High Plains Fandango


Special thanks to Tom Loughlin for the photographs!


Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Happy Birthday, Johannes Bobrowski



Happy Birthday, Johannes Bobrowski
(April 9, 1917 - September 2, 1965)

Yes, Johannes, we do, sooner or later,
sleep each other's sleep.  Like you,
I love villages at midnight...
or later when the saloons empty
into the commotion of shadows.
After five years in one of Stalin's
coal mines, wrung-out each night,
head bowed to poems-in-progress,
you loved to gorge on marbled beef
from the pastures of mother Prussia,
pastries, sweet bread, shots of cream.
Was it a sharp, half-chewed nut
that broke from your appendix...
forcing the journey across the river
to sleepwalk alongside Georg Trakl?
Young poets with rucksacks search
Germany for you in morning mist,
kids heavy with the imperative
of filling Moleskine notebooks
with scrape-by hikes along rivers.
We learn, eventually, at faint-last,
there is no Here to remain within,
no land of eternally full pantries.
Only the rivers remain...
older than poetry's first ink.