David Leo Show-Biz Cheez-Wiz Jizz Goat-Cheese-Goodness Sirois 😉 on the wire here – welcoming you to Open Secret, that fabled church of the spoken & sung word/intimacy issues support group you’ve probably heard about ad infinitum, ad nauseum eeeeeven.
Our weekly Wednesday open mic blooms wildly at Le Bistrot des Artistes (6, rue des Anglais, in the 5th, a sexy little passageway that marries Boulevard Saint Germain & rue Lagrange – metro Maubert-Mutualité on line 10, or Saint-Michel on line 4). 8:30pm, sign-up spirals upward into the whole night, & at 9 pm the imaginary curtains open. 🙂
+++This week our featured poet is Rufo Quintavalle, cutting-edge wordsmith who uses both his genius & his humo(u)r to make things new. He will be reading from his still-dew-laden new collection of poems, which was launched on 29th September! More about him below+++
This Wednesday’s Not-Theme, but Thing To Do, our kind command, is Listen To Your Intuition. “A true artist lets her intuition take her wherever it wants,” Lao-Tzu says in his testament to the enlightened life, the Tao te Ching. On the back of my copy of the book, which I borrowed from a college friend in 1989 & never returned (half on purpose), it proclaims “The Wisest Book in the World.” Well, “Whatever gets you through the night/is all right, is all right,” as a more recent prophet said, n’est-ce pas? I’m certainly down with it!
I love how in my translation, Stephen Mitchell alternates between masculine & feminine pronouns for the Master, the enlightened teacher. Seems fair to me, especially since I’ve always espoused the divine feminine, the Tao (though the first lines are “The Tao that can be told/is not the eternal Tao./The name that can be named/is not the eternal Name.”) & also because I am the student of a living woman saint. Fortunately – otherwise I’d really be a goner, like in the days when I used to answer people who asked “So, what do you do for a living?” by saying “I’m a psychic! I work for the police.” Think I wanted to feel special, & get a little attention?
Our Special Guest Reader:
Rufo Quintavalle was born in London in 1978 and now lives in Paris. He was formerly poetry editor for the online magazine nthposition and also served on the editorial board of the Paris-based literary review Upstairs at Duroc. From 2011 to 2013 he ran the bilingual reading series Poets Live and currently teaches creative writing at NYU Paris as part of their MA program in literary translation. Rufo is also a regular contributor to the Stanford Social Innovation Review on topics relating to finance, food and the environment. His most recent books of poetry are anyone for anymore (Red Ceilings Press) and Weather Derivatives (Eyewear Publishing).
Please don’t set yourself up to be regretful for as long as your body lasts, even to the end of the universe, if you miss this precious reading!
Open Secret – “Listen To Your Intuition.” Welcome to your world.
Nina Karacosta is an actor and poet. Born in Athens, Greece she moved to London, to New York City and then in 2009 to Paris. Since 2003 she has studied with many exuberant living poets (Ann Waldman, Alice Notley, Marge Piercy, Simon Pettet, Sparrow) at the Poetry Project and the Poets House in New York. Work of hers has appeared in Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Best of Stain Anthology, Surreal-zine, The Melancholy Dane, The Smoking book, Upstairs at Duroc, Ditch, Upstart, issue.Zero, Tears in the Fence, Core, can can, Big Bridge, Shearsman magazine. She is a poetry editor at Upstairs at Duroc. Her chapbook “Previous Vertigos” as well as its French translation by Anne Talvaz “Vertiges Précédents” are published by Corrupt Press. She is currently working on a collaborative collection called “kaleidograph” with Irish poet Anamaria Crowe Serrano.
SpokenWord Paris 