right welcome everybody if you can hear the sound of my voice that means we're going to start a poetry reading so that means you shall adjust all television sets and turn off all cell phones if you are looking at something scandalous on your i pad right now using the free wi fi stop that and come and watch something more scandalous which is live poetry yes all right reading jam let's give it up for yourselves give it up for us yes it is the warmest day of the winter so far and you've decided to come here that's awesome awesome awesome awesome but again the lower town meeting jam is sponsored by the st paul mn ak and the there the books for st paul are here you can purchase them here at the black dog cafe let's give it up for the black st paul minn act is a literary organization that creates opportunities for understanding learning and building relationships through sharing people's stories we'd like to thank our sponsors and you can clap for them after i'm done with the list this activity is made possible in part by funds provided by the lowertown future fund of the st paul foundation and support from st paul neighborhood network i feel like i'm on a p b s i can do that for a living this is good s p n n airs our shows throughout the month on their cable access channel let's give it up for the sponsor and and and for those of you that are afraid of sitting up here please sit up here one of the poets is not shamoun they will not wait you can all right since we're dealing with food and poetry i just wanted to start us off with a little food poem and this goes out to all of you that have to deal with this during the winter and you'll know what i mean and this is called meeting the in laws  thank you very much all right it's a haiku we just that i'm stuck at three three lines so so here we go oh wait oh what's this for i don't know i like now so the title of tonight's show is called double hungry sustainable poems and it was curated by hyde erdrich so i'm going to introduce a let's give it up for if you don't know who she is she's amazing but i'm going to tell you what i have here this is this if this isn't correct make it up so which would be fun to hide erdrich writes teaches and collaborate with other artists  across she's the author of for poetry collections most recently sell traffic new and selected poems a recipient of awards from the las literary center the archibald bush foundation the minnesota state arts board and first peoples fung fund fun almost said funk that would have been cool among other honors hide one a minnesota book award for national monuments in two thousand and nine her newest book or original local indigenous foods stories and recipes from the upper midwest which is selling here tonight is selling like grandma gore knows corn cakes visit w w w dot hide erdrich dot com for more information and you can pick up original local right here tonight so please give it good evening i have not turned off my cell phone because i am not going to be cut out not remembering what i have to say thank you so much robert creamy thank you all for being here to come a everyone who is helping us out  i want to thank the black dog especially for making a menu based on items from the cookbook that i just wrote original local which for a poet is a really fun assignment because it means that we're that i'm able to write all the little notes that go with the recipes as a really short prose poems so i'll read a couple of those to you later at the end of our evening but tonight i'm going to introduce our readers who have come out in the warm as we call it here when it's above freezing in minnesota in december to read with me and i invited them because i wanted to hear them read and when i got done picking the three people that were going to read with me tonight i realized i'd picked the three most elusive poets in the twin cities i've rarely heard them read i'm excited at this chance i was stunned that they said yes i was really excited about it and the first one is james d audio and james is a visual artist as well as a poet so i have that wonderful interest disciplinary that i love invite him here tonight and i'm able to say that he's artist of kno he's been at the vermont studio center for a residency and his poems have been in north american review drunken boat and other magazines and journals i love to read his poems they have this complex rhythm and syntax although they seem very short and slight just the the effort of them and the intricacy of them is very beautiful so tonight james is our first reader i m james this first poem is something about toast it's called black smoke of st peter's square sunday with sharps or a didn't hand i saw a piece loaf wide but just so with only the slight press and shimmy that coax it into the toaster slot god knows it likely won't return from down there but i've managed to squish it in red glow working voodoo and now i've only to wait leaning bedhead it against my counter yesterday's fruits from the loom i just might stigmata my hand but no my upper lip tips over it drawing more air than folgers christ the neighbors can probably see me perched here overflowing my brief band but it's my house anyway curtains underpants i could peel an orange but it seems too much effort toast where are you for the love of god come out of there it's beginning to look like we can even choose a pope i just have to say when hyde asked me to do this reading i was very honored and i immediately accepted and i was also quite stunned that i accepted i do not come out and read very often so you're very fortunate i get to read tonight i get to be here tonight this one is called the apples back when we ate the apples that the old man was saving for pies he horse whispered from his parts were we sat upon a weather lording over yard in field we ran from the tree through the old man's lavender which was indeed lovely we were and clutching our treasure made our way to a neighboring pasture upon which we lays star afternoon for years have replayed the scene old gray beard rising from his throne leaning heavy on the rail the running the apples and you breathless and buttercups soon my more recent work has been a little bit more experimental i'm playing around with syntax and pushing words together just kind of seeing what kind of meaning comes out of it so we'll see how this one goes it's called farmer's market clinging been there tilted haunches receding unbuttoned in the open air market it is to a nimble rooster who pushed out the oily eggs for this the assembly men having biscuits been terribly in candace and crop often built on stitch particles that this chick picked clean were navigating and nearly packed proton cloud lashed to my brought coffee bottle at  anybody please raise your hand if you can tell me what that one was about i have no idea that walks the winter would the mass of man monster comes from the cold when minnesota's moon of crusty snow is near half past and spring is still being beaten back by biting cold twigs and lake nourishment for wild creatures grow grows scarce cold morning thatched fog crows steaming upon posts when to go trumps from the deep wood crosses the meadow and enters the indian village iced walks are greased glass and pedestrians don't trust their muck lux should they need to run when to go crutches and shadow tom rumbling sharp smell seeps from the caribou on every corner hissing is suppressed so for the cute crowds we're all my fingers fresh from orange peel press acid at last and just beyond the cloud glaze makes a clay paste of the road i fill my mouth with fruit she's hungry i know but in a vague way and without pain we can go all the way to the funerals my dear or you can just wait on the carriage bench seat in your clingy skirt with the corduroy cushion cutting treads down your backside but she declines the horse team pounds slip sod mounting the judge well to each roadside the dead sing white lipped cradle and sly i pull on the window tossing orange peels out i'm pumped in my finger primed to eat the plums jam be damned i don't even consider offering one but here she's button hooked tied like luck and looking only to put a leap home she's quail and tummy rumbles i'm knocking to pitt as we pound around the bend here's the family estate now stonework an ivy maze of head dros while inside the house made poles large loaves from a cast iron the smell of bread is heaven let me come inside funerary bells are ringing in the village the horses are restless but i don't want to leave it's been raining a while my fruits all gone your cue tis a hat you're very polite thank you i have one more poem i'd like to read this one is called that hottie more reality this is a pretty recent one this one was just published in a journal called the yellow medicine review i the former the first one to me this one seems to be something about a chicken leg i put the chicken leg back the back leg of that chicken left that the chicken labor raft of leg with egg  leg that i took though put of egg in extra little leg and i walked with it and the hen remains twisting in chicken scratch moved over only by leftover leg i left all chicken leg dangle my lips moist on that tangle for that which tingle hang upon such delicious bones so much plump meat me so leggy to be cat but for egg that took in the sack earmarked for market i have it the egg and the little leg and my wet lips only then i regret big regret which i had rarely known i took a leg back to bent pen a great full chicken in the dirt left back that leg leg that that was great i loved james's poem sometimes feel like carrying something heavy up and down the steps or carrying a debt backward down the steps the way they move back and forth with the same words and damn jam that was a good one if you haven't wondered  want this fist in the spoon i do a thing called the cooking show we have a thing called the people's cook if you want recipes for the holidays we have them for you and i wore this for hides book because i wanted to like be in solidarity because it says the revolution starts in the kitchen on the back and so it's like so what revolutionary doesn't have poetry and recipes in there you know because i don't know about you all but  you ready for me now she's ready for me now give it back up for high erdrich erdri again this is really delightful for me and i hope it is for you too i have a couple things to say before we go on to our third reader tonight and one of the things is that  the previous reader i really enjoy the idea of reminding us that hunger is need and food and other things that feed us have to do with need and in that spirit i have done my reading last night in a meeting tonight in order to be able to make a year and donation to dream while health which is in hugo minnesota it's an indigenous foods garden and they have begun a pilot program of doing the first ever indigenous food c s a and they work with native youth in the twin cities have farmers markets by the midtown why in the summer and also over here in st paul in the locations escaping my mind i think near the elders home so i'm happy to share with the need that i can meet in that way to some extent but also i want to say that i there's people here who made this little event take place and i'm really happy to have worked with you kimberly and nigel on and i can like blind as i can see everybody to remember and also other people here important to me clarence and a little later i'll tell you about my husband because he's important to me too into the the work i do like absolutely crucial right now we're going to get to hear from krista naca or naca as i like to call her she's the author of bird eating bird which won a national poetry prize and the national poetry series prize and she's also a teacher at mcallister college here in st paul she moved here a little while ago so she's new to the upper midwest and we're really happy to have her here her work is published all over in pra indiana review and a lot of national organizations most recently she wrote an essay about poetry and food and i thought wow she is the person i want to hear tonight so please join us in welcoming but i guess it is true i was thinking about whether or not i was a looser and i don't i mean i don't think i've read in the twin cities for more than a year so i think that's why i'm getting there so i'll do the same thing is just my phone and was great to hear about you know new book and that she was going to be having some ratings of people reading poems about food and i was like oh that's no problem i don't write about food and i was like well maybe i have one bomb and then i was like well maybe i have four or five poems oh maybe it's like a constant trope but it's really just in the background you know all these kinds of excuses but i'm i'm really pleased she asked me to read tonight so i always seem to write about different kinds of different places i've lived in and this poem is about living in seattle it's called grocery shopping with my girlfriend who is not asian through the doors gleam pyramids of apples peaches broccoli hybrids i pronounce a name and men guideline pull back its leaves and reveal small white flowers although watch her mouth the words and make white flowers translations she asks what it is and i tell her how my auntie grew the woody fruit next to foot long beings tomatoes my father claim to grow on his own if she needs more i'll list ingredients like a poem like garlic onion ground pork and potatoes vegetables i don't have words for stew for an hour and that we don't last long before the blitz of shiny packaging overwhelms her one c green cellophane submit to a lie p than  teal wrapper the lucky elephant or lotus stamp the photographs of curious food items that luxuriated and draw a cartoon sketch of a boy's face above some steam lines and a bowl delight that the delight the angle that his eyes slant as he devours the noodles brands we differentiate by script  path a language takes to conquer infiltrate or drift some brush strokes and a tip sharp as my tongue when i dish out old fashioned asian lady barking the aisles feed into a basin where aquariums line the walls and the fish glint beneath fluorescent light bulbs when i say so gorgeous i feel guilty eating them and that's not the half of it next week will trade in excess beauty to shop at the markets my mother took me and i still shop as though my girlfriend and i had never met where we fish beans from boxes dodge old ladies throwing elbows at the bins scales unraveling off a fish when a butcher knocks the daylights out of it and in time come the meals we dine on chicken that stinks of piss to feathers unable to write a new poem for those reading but i thought i would read a poem i very seldom rate so it's pretty new to me hope not to know it's called in the time of the sweeten your tongue on the roof of your mouth til come out if you want to pronounce the name today begins elvis week and e's heart pounds elvis sweetening her meaty lining though her name's the shape of an eye the shape of an o in childhood photos and i wonder she's ever known love dust and all my over touching when elvis clinches his jaw as someone else speaks it's all his over acting tupelo mississippi nine hundred twenty nine a child who would be a very tan king is born on the t v elvis suits the savage gypsies who store booty in a shiny caboose the acapulco cliff divers shirtless trap piece artists a to z of dizzy love hong woman seriously devoutly desperately nuns bullfighters make that one all along the black gum in our front yard fizzles caterpillars locusts scorched the sky with the sticky torch song and some other cases the black gums rendered the black to goes the leaves when the black gums the leaves go faint and wholly my parents put their feelers on the dusty apostles also fade as christ begs for strength in the face of death how the silky caterpillars litter the pavement falling through the holes they've eaten to death with their fingers we clench ice cream scoops between saltines sweeten oveh kotto which sugar and swoon when n t e rings fizz from the o's of a sponge her fingers bark from all the bleaching she's as big as a house mom and dad pound her when she isn't around or isn't looking she stops her branch in the murky water fingers for the rice sweetening the bottom of the point of the pan pick your poison says the neighbor a peevish red bud a blooming in his yard gripped with love i pound white rice until i'm full white bread till i'm numb a was men say when christ calls fill his jug with laughter his eye sockets with song no black people sun and blue hawaii or fun and  even in las vegas leaving one explanation to tan in a canoe elvis fingers his tiny instrument oh flaming ukulele  passion ukulele of desire what a gas dad pounds his foot sweetening his story with the singed bodies fizzed elvis you ever known love have you ever never wanted the girl and still know and love a ticked off at mom and dad tweeze bodies with the fingers through their hair i watch them and wonder through the kitchen window the two in the front of my head i lived in st paul longer than i lived in minneapolis and i can safely say that after living in minneapolis for a couple years i figured out why people don't come from minneapolis to st paul and it's mostly because it takes longer even though it's the same distance and you don't understand it till you live in minneapolis thank you for those who came from minneapolis st paul tonight when i moved here one of actually one of the readers that was when the first people i met here because we had a little poetry scene in a bar which was having moved here from the east coast and where you know it was still very strange to be a poet i didn't live in new york when i lived on the east coast of north dakota moved to the east coast and it was so cool that we had a pub that we had actually closed down we had a poet pubs meeting and some of you might remember that so it was hard to hard to leave st paul i'm glad to be back here i'm going to read from a regional local which actually has poems in it it's a cookbook there's little stories little anecdotes some journalism activism it's pretty much the whole buffet line of stories and food there's only one thing i like more or would like to add to the whole combination of visual arts performance and food and that is any mention of elvis so think because i love that poem it's a tour de force i could see that you read it beautifully but it's it's a difficult poem to read i just really appreciated it because i know i magine it on the i imagine how much stamina it takes is a great story so yes the furious passionate ukulele i'm going to start with a little piece on there samples of a new man if you've never had hand harvested numminen you think that wild rice is that hard black stuff that takes forty minutes to cook you are wrong that is a cultivated product that has been and will continue to be manipulated is generally not grown by native people and not in their control although there are some native groups that do grow cultivated wild race but how do you call it wild when it's cultivated i don't know original newman is something else and it's very beautiful and varied and a lot of people have a very strong relationship with it it comes as a part of spiritual belief for ojibwe people and this is a short piece called food that grows on water it may be that i was born in the birthplace of a new man the food that grows on water told of an ojibwe prophecy it may be that the ojibway came west in search of this food as our traditions tell that's a scholarly book but quite interesting maps tell stories even when the names are translated the red river of the north flowed just underneath the window of the hospital room where i was born raise of the red which became the broader between minnesota and north dakota include two rivers both called wild rice i do not know if still grows on the wild rice river in north dakota but i know it did when i was a girl my first memories of rice my first memory of wild rice is of my father harvesting the long thin grains with a neighbor and hauling them home recently and when i asked my father when that was he thought it was maybe hundred sixty nine or nine hundred seventy and that fits with my sense of how old i was at the time i have a glimpse of memory of a blue plastic kiddie pool filled with my new man ready for processing in the new yard between our house and the warrens our neighbors from white earth who eventually ran a large pricing operation on the reservation in minnesota ricing was not our family tradition so not long ago i asked my dad how he came to harvest minoan on the wild rice river as we talked my mother slipped out of the door i assumed she was bored with us but soon she returned from her canning cache in the basement to produce a jar rice from that very harvest and a beautiful old glass jar composed of rings to composed of rings to create a shape like a honey scalp there remained several cups of long very thin rice smoky brown minu mn less opaque than the minnesota lake rice astoundingly it looked perfectly edible i opened the jar and it smelled of parching kettles wood fire and river water all at once forty four years old and i would eat that rice today but i don't mom says she keeps it in a cool spot in the cellar and that she would use it for special occasions i think of all the enormous moments in our large families history births graduations weddings awards more births deaths times of need in times of rejoicing and i wonder just what ok john was my mom waiting for my mother gave me some of them a neumann which will keep to help remember that long ago adventure and in the hopes it might one day be of interest to those returning newman to the rivers in our region so that goes along with a lot of discussion about how newman is used in various types of cooking sweet and savory ways you'd expect in ways that we invented my husband john worked with me on the cookbook quite a bit and i wanted him to put his name on it and be my co author and he said i didn't write any of it but i know i washed every dish so he was the baker too but i couldn't like i said i had to put some poems in it so i have a poem this one's called what gathers that's about berry picking so it's on the opposite time of year when it's very hot and everything is starting to get ripe what gathers twisting stems weave green to red against leaves raindrop shaped and tender shelter for blue black berries we taste pure purple we gather we touch our tongues to juice we've asked to grow for us we children in our northern gardens gather dark sweetness of saskatoon indigenous fruit that ojibwe beadwork patterns of vine and leaf winters longing worked by hand reminder of a hot day to come promise bright against threat doubtless that was part of it what was gathering long ago the rush of other the great change foods woods bi n prairie gods goods songs all about to alter we touch our tongues to summer what gathers now we do not know some rumble on the globes we gather nail tips and lip stained we do not we do as our blood asks these berries the same berries our ancestors plucked rolling  in sensual acts the fruit asks we gather chilled still by a long winter always just behind us always just ahead thanks sometimes when i asked people for a recipe they just gave me a list of ingredients which i called the cast of characters or they sent me a poem so this one's called le garrette and dried chokecherry kate c anybody know do you know which terry's taste like a few of you they were the main ingredient in wild cherry cough drops from very familiar cough drop company for many years and that's not the best version of it but you can kind of a sense that wild cherry very important in cosmology and a very very important food to a lot of people of the great lakes great plains but not often eating it was a favorite and people were very jealous about their chokecherry patches when i was growing up and we still get choked cherry every year this is called the grand dried chokecherry cakes and it's from my friend denise lodgment bear who is a poet who i asked for her chokecherry recipe and she sent me this after the first freeze go out into the turtle mountain bush to your favorite spot you keep it secret from all your cousins and pick some choked cherries when they are sweetest you won't have to fight mosquitoes or ticks have your grand children help you pick pound the choke cherries on your coop comes flat rock using her oval shape pounding stone that fits snug in your hand grind the pits is finally as you can shape the pounded berries into small cookies and lay on an old window screen put on top the lean to where they will drive slowly in the north dakota sun store in a cracker ten on thanksgiving day put a couple cookies worth in a cast iron skillet with some water and set over a low fire w stopped and starting to smell like summer add sugar and a pinch of flour to thicken stir in some bacon grease and fry it up a little put a small amount on all your relatives plates kids too tell them they have to eat it pits and all the last two pieces i'm going to read in here have to do with the fact that i grew up in the seventy's and a couple days ago tom loughlin passed away did anybody know who tom laughlin is yeah great hero to a lot of native people not a native person but a great hero he played he invented played and produced the billy jack movies and i had always had him in my sight of cosmologist one of my heroes so briefed beef not beef jerky but bison jerky and other jerky is from indigenous animals to get used to that meat and also to get used to the idea that people didn't have slabs of meat they used a little bit of meat in their food and usually dried meat and this is the way we survived for a long time sometime in the one nine hundred seventy s some don draper advertising genius urged everyone to make cowboy beings by adding barbecue sauce to canned beans to serve  cook outs well that was also the era of billy jack the indian hippy b movie hero who took off his socks to kick racist behinds these tribute beans are made from sauce anderson and dried meat which we call we us they could be made vegetarian like billy jack sweeping washed out blood pacifist girlfriend the ants to paraphrase billy jack i'm going to take these beings and walk them right next to some bread and there's not a dang thing you're going to do about it these beans are for you billy jack so good you'll go who want to kick we s some devil spit famous daves a maple syrup and some sun dried tomatoes cook it all up and it's good cook it in a can if you want the authentic experience all right so that's one of them and the last recipe i'm going to share with you it is not for sour cream in craze and pyatt but black dog cafe and wine bar made sour cream and praise in pie from john burke's recipe that's john back there you want to wave and i would just say what if somebody made up high with crays instead of sour cream and maple instead of sugar and then somebody would like a miracle at my house is wonderful and then i wanted to come up with a recipe for something with wild plums have any of you ever picked wild plums there they're a little different from regular plums they look a little different they're more yellow but when you cook them they turn about the same color as regular plums we used to go out to farmers windbreaks and shelter belts to to harvest the wild plums would ask for permission and we would go with my family and we'd skin is sour to be sure but tender and the yellow interior glows with sweetness easily coaxed by cooking we walked to shelter belts and parked alongside drainage ditches went out in force and picked enormous buckets of wild plums from small trees so loaded that the memory of their smashed sunset of spilled fruit marked itself forever on my child's mind while as psychedelic at display as my older siblings tie dyed t shirts i ate so many once that now just a little has the taste and tang of stomach ache to me i go easy on the raw plums but would happily cook down a pound to make a sweet and sour sauce for duck or fish and have enough left over for a breakfast of raspberry look for eggs coconut milk maple syrup and mila some butter or sunflower butter which we actually use here a long time ago a little bit of flour a tiny bit some sugar and salt my love loves me and i know because he makes me claw food the most tender and simple way to treat fresh fruit is all frenched up in name but down home in fact there's nothing more lovely to put to your lips except of course a kiss thank you right it says elvis and chokecherry i never knew it would happen together but it's finally come together