ruth weiss reading with 17 Poets! series host David Brinks, New Orleans, April 2012

ruth weiss is returning from Europe, where she participated in the prestigious Sprachsalz Festival in Innsbruck, Austria, with three fresh books of her work in hand from German and Swiss publishers.  She’ll be joined in this reading by David Brinks and Megan Burns, traveling here from their home in New Orleans, who have just brought out a beautiful edition of her classic work, Desert Journal under the impriint of their Trembling Pillow Press.  Brinks and Burns, poets, writers and publishers married to one another, also run the weekly 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series (www.17poets.com), among other activities.

poet ruth weiss reads at Bird & Beckett Tuesday October 16th at 7 pm

ruth weiss is undeniably one of the handful of significant poets of the Beat Generation still active today. Born to a Jewish family during the rise of Nazism, she eventually made her way to the United States where she became a friend and colleague of the key writers who became known as the literary flank of the “Beat generation.” She pioneered the jazz and poetry merger that found full expression in the coffeehouses and bars of San Francisco’s North Beach.  ruth began spelling her name in lowercase letters in the 1960s in a symbolic protest against “law and order.”  For decades, she has lived in the Mendocino (Northern California) town of Albion, surrounded by the forests, and in this age of high-speed information exchange, she still uses her “Loyal Royal” typewriter to produce her timely and eternal work.

Dave Brinks founded the New Orleans School for the Imagination, Trembling Pillow Press, the 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series, Entrepôt Magazine, and edits of YAWP, A Journal of Poetry & Art. His family is from New Orleans—his mother is Acadian French, and his father is Choctaw—where he lives with his wife, poet Megan Burns, and their three children. Brinks’ poetry and essays have appeared in magazines, newspapers, journals and anthologies throughout the US, Canada, and overseas including The Nation, Exquisite Corpse, Shambhala Sun, Scrisul Românesc, National Geographic Explorer, Louisiana Cultural Vistas and Gathering of the Tribes. His works also have been featured on NPR’s Hearing Voices and PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Brinks is the author of six published collections of poetry including his newest, The Secret Brain, Selected Poems 1995-2012 (Black Widow Press, 2012) and the critically acclaimed The Caveat Onus (Black Widow Press 2009).  Currently Brinks is working on a biography of early jazz pioneer Emile Barnes (1892-1970); as well as a comprehensive work titled The Geometry of Sound—an investigative, cross-disciplinary study that explores the origins of alphabets, ideograms and pictographs; with a specific focus on phoneme-based structures and frequencies derived from the I Ching, and which directly correspond to hexagonal patterns found on turtle shells.

Megan Burns edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com), and has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks as well: irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop press, 2012) and a city/ bottle boned  (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). She lives and works in New Orleans with her husband, Dave Brinks.