Clarence Major and Patricia Spears Jones: March 3, 2016

Steve Dickison introduces Clarence Major who remarks on and reads an unpublished statement on poetry and painting. Major then reads "Bride Stripped Bare," "Question Mark," "In My Own Language," "Art," "Coffee Shop," "Waiter in a California Vietnamese Restaurant," "Woof," "Winchester and Black Man Shooting, 1876," "Territorial Claims," "East Lansing, Michigan September 10th," "Subject for a Ballad," "The Red Bench," "Down and Up," "No One Goes to Paris in August," and "Father."

Steve Dickison introduces Patricia Spears Jones, who opens her reading with new poems "Zud," "Ghost Country," and "A Desire for Underdevelopment," followed by "Sonnet I" and "Sonnet III" from the sonnet sequence "Mythologizing Always: Seven Sonnets," "Encounter and Farewell," "The Usual Suspect," "All Saints Day," "What the First Cities Were All About," "All Saints Day 2001," "Shimmer," "Waiting for the Year of the Horse," "Pump," "Last Day of Passover, April 2006," "Murieron tal vez de verg?enza esos trenes que se extraviaron?," "Beuys and the Blonde," "Kara Walker Draws the Blues," "Life Lessons," and "The Fringe of Town," all from A Lucent Fire.

Clarence Major and Patricia Spears Jones take questions from the audience and comment on sonic elements of the composing process, the selection of cover art for their books, art works as a point of departure for writing, how they select poems in preparation for a reading, and on revising and rewriting older poems.