Alli Warren and Laura Moriarty: February 19, 2015

Steve Dickison introduces Laura Moriarty. Moriarty reads "Ladybug Song," "Ladybug Honey," "Ladybug Story," "Ladybug's Lament," "Ladybug's Laws," "Poe's Bug," "Angry Ladybug," "Imitosis," "Smitten," and "Ladybug Bites," from Ladybug Laws, concluding with "Welcome Dear Chaos" from Who That Divines.

Steve Dickison asks Laura Moriarty back to the stage, and she introduces Alli Warren. Warren remarks on winning The Poetry Center Book Award for Here Come the Warm Jets and having won an essay award in her childhood. She then opens by reading Laura Moriaty's poem "Light" from The Case (O Books), then reads a new poem, "A Yealing Hole for Light," followed by poems from Here Come the Warm Jets: "Whose Rules Relate Regardless of their Names," "Sensorium," "I Was Living in a Devil Town," "Coco Was a Royal," "Sausages, Hogsheads, Legs of Mutton, Lard, Tripes," "A Few Facts About the Thorax," "Bummer and Lazarus," "Getting Ready to Have Been Fully Ensconced," "Environments for Shopping," "A Practice Known As Churning," "Junk in the Trunk," "Three Banquets for a Queen," and "Left Coast Lifter."

Laura Moriarty and Alli Warren converse with one another, and respond to questions from the audience, including their varying practices involved in composing a book; the nature of collaborative writing. Together they read "Consolatory Gesture," a poem they co-wrote, from Moriarty's Who That Divines. They speak to the multiple connotations and meanings activated in their poetry; on Warren "editing" her poems during the act of reading, and on editing by ear; on "multiple textures" activated in Moriarty's work; on the intentions of Bay Area poets writing in the 1980s and presumptions of political relevance.