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There is a poem I wrote in the early spring that describes the moment of meeting, and attraction, as... cellular intelligence, as when my electrons got all jumpy-like from first you walked in the room recognized yours like an overdue reunion refugees from the counties of each other  and I bring that up now because, metaphorically, our Exit Strata electrons have been getting all jumpy-like a hell of a lot recently. Far beyond a one-to-one connection, this piece posits a theory of interpersonal co-evolution that I've been tossing around lately -- one that suggests that we instinctively recognize our creationary comrades: those who will make our world and life a better place, who will inspire us, challenge us, and help us evolve. This electromagnetic impulse, lets say - the biological inclination to draw this person or these people into your self or your environment - becomes/grows into "love" with WORK: because even chemical reactions require catalysts, and require the appropriate conditions for full realization. We come to love those people who bring this original impulse into being -- through the ultimately selfless act of commitment to another person or group of people. We appreciate and feel in our very bodies how awesome it is that these people stay with us, and give of themselves and their energy again and again. So we're going to start out with a big hearty THANK YOU. Oh man. We love you people. We love our contributors, the people who come to our events, the people who write us email, the people who chat with us at our tables -- and we get all jumpy for you. You know why? Because you make us believe in what we're doing, and you show us that YOU believe in what we're doing. You let us know that it supports and inspires you. That it is encouraging and enabling and growing your work and your connections and your community. And because altogether, we're feeling like we've, well, LEVELLED UP. To a new Strata. Let's hear it for 2012! Did you know it's the United Nations' Year of Cooperatives? I think that "country of eachother" those lines channel an understanding of is, in fact, the collaborative, cooperative future we are building here together.

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[caption id="attachment_474" align="alignleft" width="300"] photo: jonathan weiskopf[/caption] Adam Falkner is a poet, musician, high school English/Creative Writing teacher and former Michael Jackson dance-off champion – although he will probably deny the latter of those if asked. In addition to being published in anthologies and journals including decomP Magazine, The Esu Review, and The Other Journal, Adam’s poems have also been featured on HBO, BET, Michigan and New York Public Radio and in Time Out New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn. Succinct Musing from Caits Who is Secretly in Love with Adam, but Only His Brain Because She is Married to Someone Else: A few short months ago over dinner, I looked at Adam with a suspicious side eye. He appeared a blurry apparition through the candle light, or maybe from the second glass of wine I'd just finished. He was smiling a very nice smile because he is a very nice guy. I was giving him this unusual look because everything he said was eerily familiar. The voice in my head said, Are you me?
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Elinor Nauen: An Appreciation
Bill Considine
Elinor Nauen has written a remarkable book, So Late Into the Night, from Rain Mountain Press (2011). The book is a long poem in 8-line rhyming stanzas, the ottava rima of Byron's Don Juan, with some medieval variations and half-hidden games.
Perhaps you'd like to hear more of Byron - My master, my love, my poet, my guy - And the traits that draw me to him: iron- Y, for one, as modern as any high- Tech gadget, and as assured. The siren Allure of sympathy, thrills and sex. Why He's not everyone's fave poet I don't Get. He isn't for anyone who won't Admit humor and human narrative To the pantheon of poetic purpose.Ms. Nauen too has the range and fluid speed of Byron's verse, the humor and... the plain-enough diction, Smart allusions and dead-on depiction In his characters and types. The poem is autobiography, a life in full with frank insights. It's the voice of a poet, a woman, a wife, a devoted friend, a child of the prairies and an East Village artist. She muses deeply and turns flippant. She has fun, and that's one of the joys of the poem. The form is in masterful hands and knows it and shows it. She plays with words, for laughs and for the Word. At times the tone is instructive; she means to share what she's learned, as well as what she's loved.
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Today we begin the community portion of our Poetry Month: Inspiration, Community, Tradition series with Peter Reilly writing on Mary Oliver's poetry and its influence on his work. PR: Mary Oliver's gift is to describe the natural world simply, in a way that reveals the deepest secrets of our human heart. She is grounded in the reality of survival - life and death - predator and prey; yet never loses her eye for the eternal, for amazement, and for the magic of transformation. From "Wild Geese" You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.   [caption id="attachment_434" align="alignright" width="300" caption="photo: Brian Reilly"][/caption] But little by little as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper  into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do - determined to save  the only life you could save.

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[caption id="attachment_389" align="alignleft" width="594" caption="Sō Percussion"][/caption] Sō Percussion Pop-Out Media Player :: For your full multimedia pleasure, please click on this link to listen to selections from the Sō Percussion catalogue as you read! (oooooooooh, fancy!) Who is Sō Percussion? And what are they doing with that cactus? Well... what *aren't* they doing. No, seriously. These Brooklyn-based percussive polymaths come to Carnegie Hall tonight as part of the outstanding, genre bending, boundary pushing "American Mavericks" series put on by Carnegie Hall (and a range of neighborhood partners). I love these guys SO much (the puns are impossible to avoid here!), and they are a perfect example of the type of collaborative, expectation defying, community fostering, teaching, sharing, mentoring, hard working creatives that Exit Strata strives to emulate, encourage, and promote!

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Poets, Lovers, Friends --
Exit Strata would like to invite you to celebrate Poetry Month this April as a Participant in the Exit Strata CoCo Online Series,
'Inspiration, Community, Tradition: 30 posts from 30 poets on 30 poets in 30 days"
What we're looking for is breadth: to have this month introduce our community to the universe of poetry that affects and alters ourselves and our colleagues, others with whom we may share a practice but whose influences are vastly different than our own.
As we read and write this work, other poets become important to us for a million different reasons, often ones we could never entirely anticipate or explain -- in observing our community one quickly notices that each person's own relationship with poetry has grown in diverse and unexpected ways, with little known, local, foreign, or forgotten poets taking up solid and subtantial residence in the heart, mind, and psyche of each -- in turn, altering inestimably our relationship to craft.
When we are in school or in workshop, perhaps even more than from the didactic intention we glean from our *community* a richness of engagement and influence, as density of dialogue provides each of its participants an unending supply of suggestions -- names, books, poems, movements, and so on.
An introduction to an entirely new voice that speaks to you, as an adult out of these systems, is a rare and potentially life-altering gift... one that Exit Strata's international creative network has the chance to offer all of us, as we replicate that atmosphere here in the virtual Commons.
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