Wednesday, April 11: Julia Bloch + Julian Brolaski

JULIA BLOCH + JULIAN BROLASKI
Wednesday, April 11

Julia Bloch's poetry has appeared recently in The Big Ugly Review, Shampoo, Five Fingers Review, and Orpheus, and Faux Press's Bay Poetics anthology. She is the winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and is also the co-founder of Bigfan Press. Julia currently spends her time in San Francisco and Philadelphia, where she recently returned to graduate school and colder weather.

Julian T. Brolaski is a love poet, and dedicates all her verses to Love. Sie co-curated the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006 and the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005. S/he is the author of Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003), The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary's Diary (Cy Press 2005) and the defunct blog Swimming for Dummies (under the pseudonym Tanya Brolaski). She is writing hir dissertation on rhyme in medieval, Renaissance and Apache poetry.

Julia Bloch, from Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Dear Kelly,

Inauguration Day and it’s like, I want to cash in the next season now, please. Race past it. Like your sophomore album, late and yet too soon. And in a distancing gesture she creates space around the memory. I am in Pac Heights, in a black chair at Tully’s. You’ll still recognize me through the darkening window by the glittering at my breast. Listen, everyone wants music that transports them, Give me this moment, like an arpeggio, I admit! I love Gershwin! The world, stinking blonde in its ordinariness, will take your face and make it simply your own.

Dear Kelly,

At the piano recital, I heard the Yamaha sing out its cheap thick notes, the cheap trick of wide keys to make the piano seem more grand. I want to think you’re grander than that, not coated in black gloss so shiny I can see my pores. A flat tone, too, not muted but — gagged. No. No like that. I couldn’t think where I was supposed to put my hands to make it better.

Julian Brolaski, Call Me Cunt Sonnet

Call me cunt, I am my own big brother,
Like Hesiod, had he had his druthers
I’m spitting on the nail I out to clip
To make my heart thump harder on the lam.
That rhyming hazard that you thought you writ
That fucks folks harder than a free verse can
Is lisping with its colored consonants
Is buggering the fuck out of abstinence
While my bitch sits high atop the firmament
Tugging at the garter of the god of gods
& with such look of am’rous compliment
I blushed to voice, flushed to blow her wad
My rhymes though sometimes given to be shallow
Will not their horns unspill, nor pose themselves as fallow