| THE MIND'S EYE
at
The Schoolhouse Center
Thursday, August 23 at 8 p.m.
JENNIFER LIESE
Presenting "Bardic Fling: Poets Who Sing" Paulette Beete
Lee Ann Brown
Nada Gordon Narrowland Arts is pleased to present The Mind’s Eye at The Schoolhouse Center. This summer’s residency at the Schoolhouse Center takes its form as a concentric curatorial, an episodic salon in which a group of seven participants have been invited not to perform but to invite. Each resident is asked to turn outward and enact his or her own contribution by choosing another artist to come and make an event in Provincetown. In this way a series of readings, concerts, talks, exhibitions, and other happenings will proliferate, each contextualized by the interests of the instigating participant, but realized in the performance of the guest. In practice, then, the season’s visiting artist is not an individual, but a kaleidoscopic figure shaped by elastic accidents and long-standing appreciations, the interconnections that generate what’s known as inspiration.”
On Thursday, August 23 at 8:00 p.m. JENNIFER LIESE will present
Paulette Beete, Lee Ann Brown, and Nada Gordon. The performance takes place in Manso Hall and is free and open to the public. After years living in Provincetown, where she was editor of Provincetown Arts and director of DNA Gallery, Jennifer Liese moved to New York last fall, and is now an editor at Artforum magazine. She is elated to be returning to town accompanied by three exceptional poets who share the rare and radiant habit of performing their words in
song.
Lee Ann Brown’s first full-length book, Polyverse won Sun & Moon’s New American Poetry Prize Competition and was published by that press in 1999. Her book The Sleep That Changed Everything is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Brown’s poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies including: The Best American
Poetry 2001, edited by Robert Hass, Blood & Tears: Poems for Mathew Shepard, edited by Scott Gibson, (Painted Leaf Press), An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House), and Writing from the New Coast: (o.blek editions). Recent work has appeared in Java , How2 , Fence, Oasis Broadsides, Backwoods Broadsides, The Boston Review,
The Baffler and Verse.
She has performed her poetry and shown her short films internationally and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Fund for Poetry, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artists Residency, Rocky Mountian Women’s Institute, and the Foundation Royaumont. In 1999 she was among five poets to attend a collaborative residency between poets and songwriters at The Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia.
Brown is editor and publisher of Tender Buttons, an independent poetry press which features experimental poetry by women. Born in 1963 in Saitama, Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, she now lives in New York City where she teaches writing and literature at St. John’s University. Nada Gordon was born on January 14, 1964 in Oakland, California. In 1988, she moved to Tokyo, where she lived for eleven years. Now she lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of more hungry, Rodomontade, lip, Koi Manuever, Anime, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, and Swoon (with Gary Sullivan). Paulette Beete started writing poetry seriously after moving to Chicago in 1994, and her work is very much infused with that city's jazz-blues flavor. She has been a Winter Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and has been twice awarded grants by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Her poems have appeared in several
journals including Provincetown Arts, Crab Orchard Review,Callaloo and Rhino. Her work is also forthcoming next year in the anthology "New Sister Voices: Poetry by American Women of African Descent." "I got a voice like an angel..." that I use to break hearts.
I sing baby with the accent on
the "ee" so it punctures. I want to be a precise angel. It starts with my glittering mouth
flies up to my eyes & then
I'm shimmering Bud Powell's
wailing piano-wall, shaking
my black, blue & serpentine
just like Ma Rainey. They always ask me to sing my glorious
knifey song again and again... I can tell you my whole story
in one sweet heart-cracking note. When you ignore a child except to ask why she's too
lazy to practice her piano (How beautiful I am!)
that girl-child will eat those keys
building chords made of nothing
but their biting middles til you don't have
a child no more but an entire satin-lined
symphony (How beautiful I am!) I sing low down & kicked around
right out of the Hallelujah Chorus songbook
a tangle of heartbreak & bamboo
sting, keening & bending fingers back
til I sprout great big wings. ~Paulette Beete
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