Tuesday, November 1 — Joseph Martin, Chris Mason, Lola Pierson, Mike Young

WORMS is back for a third season at a new location — METRO GALLERY (1700 N Charles) — and it's on a TUESDAY now. But don't worry! Joseph Martin, Chris Mason, Lola Pierson, & Mike Young are going to be there to help us adjust to the FLUX inherent in the Univers.

CHRIS MASON grew up in Minnesota but has lived in Baltimore since 1970. He is a member of The Tinklers and Old Songs (an ancient Greek poetry song translation group). His book of poetry Hum Who Hiccup was published by Narrow House in 2011.

LOLA PIERSON is a self-producing playwright from Baltimore, MD. She is a founding member of The Un Saddest Factory, a Baltimore based DIY theatre company. She holds a BA in Human Rights and Playwriting from Bard College, and lives and produces work at The Bell Foundry, a performance space which specializes in live literary, theatrical and video performance. Her work has been performed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The LOF/t, Access Theater, The 2640 Space and a number of smaller nontraditional theatre venues on the East Coast.

MIKE YOUNG is the author of Look! Look! Feathers, a book of stories, and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, a book of poems. He edits NOÖ Journal, runs Magic Helicopter Press, and writes for HTMLGIANT. Find him online at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com/.

Tuesday, November 1 —— 8 p.m. —— FREE
(but bring $$$ for booze and books)
@ the METRO GALLERY (1700 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD)
RSVP to the facebook event
----WORMS is not responsible----

NO IDEAS BUT WITH WINGS: A review of Chris Toll's " The Disinformation Phase"

In his new full-length book of poetry, The Disinformation Phase (forthcoming this month from Publishing Genius), Chris Toll offers up a vision of poetic enlightment. Within a deceptively minimal set of syntactic maneuvers, Toll presents a rich and varied world of boundless danger and boundless wonder.

Many poems parody teaser-trailers, setting the scene for some cataclysmic event, ending just before we get there. The book is heavy on foreplay, which is all for the better. Toll earns every climax:

"and my God is you."

"There is an ache where my heart used to be."

"Be light."

Etc., etc.

Counter to the bulk of the last few decades of American poetry—noncommittal, objectivist, compulsively brainy—The Disinformation Phase is aesthetically certain (almost a manifesto, in fact), imaginative, and emotionally fearless. Even when employing classic post-modern devices, Toll remains an enchanted practitioner. For example, puns, too often the frustrated purpose of idle poetic hands, here act in the service of an ongoing, fruitful investigation of a secret spiritual language.

In some ways Toll has been writing the same poem for years. But don't confuse a focused artistic vision with the lack thereof. That's how most people missed the brilliance of the Ramones the first time around. The poems resemble each other because each is an incomplete incarnation of the same vast and intangible generative force. It's like the Tao Te Ching, except it's all lies. Of course, I don't quite mean that. In his poems Toll plays the part of the snake oil salesman, but in this case the snake oil works, and hidden in the performance of the con are many actual truths that range from the personal to the cosmic.


Disinformation Phase release party:

Saturday, June 25, 2011
8PM at the Metro Gallery
(1700 N Charles St, Baltimore)

Readings by
Chris Toll
Christine Ferrera
Megan Boyle

Music by
She Bites!
Sweatpants
Jacob Panic

$10 (w/ book)

www.disinformation-phase.com

"The Pilgrim Dreaming" by Chris Toll

I’m in a suburb of Cleveland.
I’m talking to a monitor in a mailbox.
The husband and wife are wearing pig masks.
They say they won’t deactivate the force field.
Missiles are screaming over my head
and destroying houses a block away.


Chris will be performing his work at WORMS on March 16. Watch the trailer for Chris' forthcoming book, The Disinformation Phase, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOqe0W-yVg0

by Rupert Wondolowski

Just as regular as a clock can tick you reach up for the old pigskin high on a dusty shelf as the sun is setting and the light is becoming gray and pointillist and your hand brushes an old Halloween mask. You pick up the mask, but it's slippery and brittle at the same time and you realize it's an actual face. As you drop it and collapse to your knees little songbirds jet up from the wrinkly folds and warble to you with outdated pre-recorded answering machine voices. Your mother calls to you from downstairs that dinner's ready, but she's been dead for five years now.

Your brother used to be able to imitate your grandmother's voice perfectly, breaking your heart when you came home from school to what you thought was an empty house, but then there was what you thought was the treasured voice of granny. Your brother could never imitate your mother, though, and the last anyone's heard he's currently hiding in a polar grotto below the visible pattern of the natural world, going by the name Red Reflectors On a Tree Stump. The manifesto he issued to the press, which now consists of a bunch of slightly above average intelligence junior high students sending out a bunch of emails grading events or personages either "stinky", "not stinky" or "chill", states simply "Ouch".

The scene on the small street outside does nothing to calm the beating of your heart or settle your emotions. Everyone is sitting outside their homes, it is a beautiful early fall evening after all, but they are so still and their eyes are all covered over with lid flesh and sloppy hand-stitching. No one seems bothered by this state, in fact no one is moving or saying anything at all.


Rupert will be performing his work at WORMS on March 16.

from "Star Hoppers" by Dave K.

Eventually there came a more pressing concern: Wendell had to go to the bathroom. Certain primal, physical needs were good at boxing in loose strands of thought, or just passing through them altogether, piloting through the asteroid belt of Wendell’s mind and diffusing to the parts of his brain that made him stand up, walk to the bathroom, open the door, lift the seat. Some actions are beyond theory. When a volcano is erupting, no one tries to figure out whether a tectonic shift or mantle plume caused it. They’re too consumed by fear of its output. This is what Wendell’s galaxy of anti-psychotics had reduced him to: a gastrointestinal Pompeii.


Dave will be performing his work at WORMS on March 16.

"Secondwave Dysphoria" by Buck Downs

sweating it out

until it's over

I did a double

take with my feet

the way I lost it

a map will not help

Buck will be performing his work at WORMS on March 16.

Wednesday, March 16 — Buck Downs, Dave K., Chris Toll, Rupert Wondolowski

You would regret missing this WORMS with Buck Downs, Dave K., Chris Toll, & Rupert Wondolowski.



A native of Jones County (Miss.), BUCK DOWNS lives and works in Washington, DC. His books include Marijuana Softdrink, Ladies Love Outlaws, and Recreational Vehicle.
www.buckdowns.com






DAVE K. is a Baltimore writer whose essays and speculative fiction have appeared in Welter, Front Porch Journal, Battered Suitcase, ULA Redux, and the Nautilus Engine. He is also a regular contributor to Adfreak, Adweek Magazine's weblog. In addition to the experimental work he publishes through his 'zine imprint, Banners of Death, DK is working on a novel about clowns. When he's not writing, DK is a village and civil parish in Hampshire, England.



CHRIS TOLL is a poet and collagemaker who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He co-curates the Benevolent Armchair Reading Series. Publishing Genius Press will soon release his new book, The Disinformation Phase.






RUPERT WONDOLOWSKI is editor of Shattered Wig Review and Press, which has somehow become Baltimore's longest running literary magazine despite no one knowing of it. He is the author most recently of The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius Press). His work has recently appeared in City Sages: Baltimore, The i.e. Series Reader, Everyday Genius and Fell Swoop. He also appears in Luca DiPierro and Michael Kimball's film "60 Writers/60 Places". He is currently clearing a spot in his house for getting down and ugly with some acrylic paints. Shattered Wig Press activities and Rupert's writing can be found at:
http://shatteredwig.blogspot.com/

As always it's free, but bring $$$ for books and to help Buck make enough money for the train ticket back to DC; he's been stranded all day, & he has a good job, he'll show you his pay stub and his ID.