Detroit Tonight Live: Poetry and Photography

Detroit has a lively arts scene and I’m proud to contribute to it in my modest way. My father and I will present portions of our ongoing photography/poetry collaboration as part of M.L. Liebler’s Detroit Tonight Live Series in May. I’ll read several Detroit-related poems as my father’s pictures of the city are projected. Other performers schedule to appear:
• Poet Sophia Rifkin
• Performance Writer Stephen Dueweke
• Blues & Americana Musician Maggie McCabe
• Poet Writer L. Bush
The show will take place May 30 from 7 to 9 pm at the Jazz Café at the Music Hall, 350 Madison Avenue, Detroit. Liebler always assemble diverse and diverting bills for this series.
www.jazzcafedetroit.com

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DTL Video

The July 11 Detroit Tonight Live show at UDetroit Café can be viewed by following the link below. My bit, including M.L. Liebler’s intro, begins at 1:14:16 but the entire program of music and poetry deserves a look and a listen.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23925630

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F&W Videos

Mongrel Empire Press, publisher of Fighters & Writers, posted a couple videos of me reading from the book on its YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/mongrelempirepress. One shows me at the Detroit’s Scarab Club earlier this year; the other is from the 2011 Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Oklahoma.

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Detroit Tonight Live, July 2012 edition

Poet M.L. Liebler’s Detroit Tonight Live series spotlights Michigan musicians and writers, and I’m scheduled to participate in the July 11 show (7 to 9 pm at UDetroit Café, 1427 Randolph, Detroit, MI 48226; more details available on the “appearances” page at mlliebler.com). While I might present a passage or two from Fighters & Writers, I plan to read several poems. (And why not? After all, I write about boxers at Gleason’s Gym in both the book and a poem in volume 8 of The Chaffey Review.)

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Downtown Boxing Gym in Critical Moment

Critical Moment, a publication billing itself as Detroit by Detroiters, chose to include an article of mine in the summer 2012 issue. The title put above my piece, “Success at the Downtown Boxing Gym,” pretty much sums it up. The CM website has more details about the issue, including the release party at the Cass Café.

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Fighters & Writers for Mother’s Day?

Poet Anca Vlasopolos and I will be reading at Leopold’s Books on the Friday before Mother’s Day. Last-minute gift-buyers could stop by to learn if her new collection, Walking Toward Solstice, or my Fighter’s & Writers, or both, would go well with a bouquet of flowers on Sunday.

The specifics:

Mongrel Empire Press authors Anca Vlasopolos and John G. Rodwan, Jr.

Leopold’s Books

The Park Shelton

15 E. Kirby Street

Detroit, MI 48202

Friday, May 11, 7 pm

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Scarab Club Reading

At the end of March, I read at the Scarab Club along with Anca Vlasopolos, Patricia Abbott, Caroline Maun and Olivia Ambrogio. M.L. Liebler served as master of ceremonies. Here I am reading excerpts from Fighters & Writers and Christmas Things.

P.S. I’ll be reading with Anca again on May 11 at Leopold’s Books in Detroit.

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Detroit Writers Celebrate Book Launch

Walking toward Solstice, a new collection of poems by Anca Vlasopolos, will be launched locally at the Scarab Club on March 31^st. Joining her in reading at the historic arts venue next to the Detroit Institute of Art will be Particia Abbott, author of Monkey Justice and Other Stories, and Caroline Maun, author of The Sleeping. I will read bits from either Fighters & Writers or Christmas Things – or perhaps from both. Olivia Ambrogio, who supplied photos for Walking toward Solstice (which has the same publisher as my essay collection), will also attend what should be a lively literary afternoon.

 

Here are the crucial details.

 

What: Book launch and multiple-author reading

Where: The Scarab Club, 217 Farnsworth, Detroit, MI

When: Saturday, March 31, 2012, 2 to 4 pm

Why: For the love of literature

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Mongrel Empire & Detroit

Recently I learned that soon I will no longer be Detroit’s sole Mongrel Empire Press author. The Norman, Oklahoma-based publisher, which issued my essay collection Fighters & Writers in 2010, plans to issue Walking into Solstice, poems by Anca Vlasopolos, this year.

 

As it happens, Vlasopolos was teaching at Wayne State University during my graduate studies days there, though I didn’t know her then. But since we have a city, a university and a publisher in common, we’ve discussed the obviously appropriate idea of holding joint readings. Some of her poems posted at The Stone Hobo and Beasts in a Populous City, with their images of bruises from punches and 24-caliber fists, suggest we have some thematic commonalities as well.

 

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Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries 101

Modern American boxing writing began with coverage of Jack Johnson’s defense of his heavyweight title against Jim Jeffries in 1910, or so George Kimball asserts in At the Fights, the Library of America anthology he edited with John Schulian. In the single selection concerning that bout, novelist Jack London says Johnson “played and fought a white man in a white man’s country, before a white man’s crowd.” Thus, from its beginning 101 years ago, boxing writing has never been exclusively about sports. Like many others in the rapidly constructed arena in Reno, Nevada, where Johnson and Jeffries fought, London thought the contest expressed something about racial politics, although as Kimball and Schulian point out in a head note, London’s most infamous line about a Johnson bout – “Naturally, I wanted to see the white man win” – occurs in an earlier article, one on Johnson’s ascension to the championship via victory over Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, in 1908. In still another piece, London urged Jeffries to return from retirement and retrieve the title for “the White Man.”

Johnson’s success did reveal something about racial identity, though not in the way London wanted. Though he preferred not to view himself as a representative of a race or a cause, Johnson did topple the myths of racial superiority harbored by the likes of London.

Kimball and I both spoke at events commemorating the centennial of Johnson-Jeffries and both contributed to the literature about it. In his collection Manly Art, Kimball includes an article about efforts to pardon Johnson for a bogus 1913 “white slavery” conviction. My Reno talk about the resonant symbolism of Johnson beating Jeffries on the Fourth of July, subsequently appeared in fall 2010 edition of The Nevada Review, and on their website the editors of that journal direct readers to some related works. Further, I write about At the Fights and Manly Art (as well as Johnson-Jeffries) in the May/June 2011 issue of The American Interest.

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