K.Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace
(from San Diego, CA)
Wednesday, May 28th 2008—7:37 PM
| Where: | College Inn (in the snuggery (aka the back room)) 4000 University Way NE Seattle, WA |
| How long: | Program should run about one hour. |
| Tickets: | This event is free. |
The Subterranean Yak is pleased to welcome poets K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace for their first Seattle performance.
After living for many years in Washington, DC, Mark and Lorraine now live in Carlsbad, California, a beach town north of San Diego. That’s good news for us, as they are close enough to head North to Seattle with their language luggage marked with a red tag: HEAVY.
So what’s inside this bulging behemoth?
How about our whole contemporary world, dissembled and reformed: "a freakazoid meta-level zombie, Cessna crashes, Roderick Usher, would you like soup with your asbestos? funfunfun, test bubble dynamo specialists, money owns you, peaceful nuclear devices, vacuuming up spiders, terrible day jobs, calcium and mucus, 3000 people played this sequence and blew up the world every time. Call Security! a zesty omelette."
“Long Republican Winter,” the first poem in Mark Wallace’s new book Felonies of Illusion encapsulates the struggles of living, working, writing, and loving in our current “State of Collapse.” These struggles are the life-gyro that powers Mark and Lorraine’s work, work that is playful and fierce, necessary and true.
***
BIO: K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming, forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009. She is also the author of several chapbooks: including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take Home Project. Ron Silliman writes that "Terminal Humming is a series of untitled prose pieces that join philosophy to sensation in ways that remind me fondly of Kathy Acker...My sense is that Graham is pushing her work as hard as possible – the ambition evident in just a few short pages is breath-taking." Her poetry, critical writing, and visual art has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Jacket, Area Sneaks, Fold, Magazine Cypress, HOW2 and elsewhere. A limited-edition CD of her work called Moving Walkways is available Narrowhouse Recordings. Lorraine has taught poetry and memoir at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC and at California State University in San Marcos. She lives in southern California with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet.
BIO: Mark Wallace is the author of a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. He is the author of a multi-genre work, Haze, and a novel, Dead Carnival. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press), a collection of 26 essays by different writers. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams, and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion. He currently teaches at California State University San Marcos.
***
Gone To Ground
Static bombast in a flower waste
what you’re having? Much shirt of dissolve
flounders squeeze play.
Why downtown stadiums hardball.
Flushed back. Stratified over a basin
to have but not to hold. Doesn’t
muck mean to do the bookend.
Stable table. That stack would ask
to happen again, flourish expertise
upon esteemed drubbings. What did
honey turn to true sweets or plural.
Two runs propel keys.
That’s no way to pull down the shelf
church of the row forlorn brit popsicle.
Ask me over easy.
Language and culture course health
drunken valet cleaners. Rid of
fast easy hair euphorically. Charm.
Entirely not to seek as plenty.
Together in cheese demise club beats.
Get into a zone and foggy.
-Mark Wallace
The Tiara of the High Priestess
At night fucking night we do
it and do it but how can we
do it unless we take more of our
clothes off? Irresistible
sanctuary of battle blood appeasement.
Wild crows, men thrown over
walls dragged over rocks. “Turn them
against your own body.
They are made for you.”
~
This moment fingers digging, an idiot
gift giving multitude. Seizing
blooming laurel. Dialect scissor mouth.
Now coastline salt evaporation. Death at
best is tragic: die choking on chicken bones.
-K. Lorraine Graham
Static bombast in a flower waste
what you’re having? Much shirt of dissolve
flounders squeeze play.
Why downtown stadiums hardball.
Flushed back. Stratified over a basin
to have but not to hold. Doesn’t
muck mean to do the bookend.
Stable table. That stack would ask
to happen again, flourish expertise
upon esteemed drubbings. What did
honey turn to true sweets or plural.
Two runs propel keys.
That’s no way to pull down the shelf
church of the row forlorn brit popsicle.
Ask me over easy.
Language and culture course health
drunken valet cleaners. Rid of
fast easy hair euphorically. Charm.
Entirely not to seek as plenty.
Together in cheese demise club beats.
Get into a zone and foggy.
-Mark Wallace
The Tiara of the High Priestess
At night fucking night we do
it and do it but how can we
do it unless we take more of our
clothes off? Irresistible
sanctuary of battle blood appeasement.
Wild crows, men thrown over
walls dragged over rocks. “Turn them
against your own body.
They are made for you.”
~
This moment fingers digging, an idiot
gift giving multitude. Seizing
blooming laurel. Dialect scissor mouth.
Now coastline salt evaporation. Death at
best is tragic: die choking on chicken bones.
-K. Lorraine Graham