Welcome to pax americana #11: The Poetry Brothel Issue. Every once in a while, we like to give the editorial reigns to someone we admire. In this issue, we’re proud to let our friends, Nick Adamski and Stephanie Berger (aka Tennessee Pink and The Madame) of New York’s Poetry Brothel, showcase a number of poets they love. The Poetry Brothel is one of our favorite reading series in the city. It features a wide array of young upstart and established poets reading as “whores” in a richly crafted brothel environment. There’s nothing like it. Be sure to check out their website. Please note, each of the poets in this issue have submitted both a “whore” bio (which gives background to their brothel character) as well as a personal bio statement.
Also, be sure to check out our store for a new pax americana pdf offer: donate any amount below $20.00 ($0.01, $1.00, $19.99, etc) and we’ll send you a pdf of our 2nd print issue as thanks!
And now, without further ado, the editors of issue #11…
Happy Reading,
Ben Mirov
In the grand tradition of madamly rhetoric, I’ll start with something crass and move from there to a loftier note. Nell Kimball, my personal favorite of the Storyville madams in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century, wrote in her memoirs, “Sometimes a thinking whore is a sad whore—” and she was right. While I may be “The Madame” of The Poetry Brothel, I am also a poetry whore in that I sell private readings of my work for money, and it pains me a great deal to think why, for my life, I have selected the poems in this collection versus any other poems that were submitted. I will say that I think the basic concept of The Brothel leapt out of a sense that there is something important about poetry itself, which has been either absent or sorely lacking in the context of traditional poetry readings—the most pronounced of these something’s being that poetry is not boring. To be more specific, the best poetry is not boring because it draws us in close, because it makes us new, because it transports us into its world and traps us there, happily. The Poetry Brothel, as it now truly exists, is a world shaped by a loose association of wonderfully disparate writers and artists whose influences and vision for their own work and for The Brothel as a whole vary wildly, as you’ll soon read in their character biographies and poems. Yet the world of The Brothel is solid in its shiftiness, captivating in its loose embrace, and gently transformative for both its patrons and participants. I believe that the poems herein will serve you similarly; please do not break them with your thoughts.
The Madame
I wrote once, when we were starting this experiment, “perhaps you have been too long, out in the cold my love, away from the bright fires of poetry” as an invitation into our house. I meant it, for since the first Poetry Brothel we have felt a particular kind of heat within each gathering and have learned much about this flame and her feathers. What I did not know, however, in the harried moments before that first meeting was the way this coming together would ignite us all.
My teacher always asks me what I need to nourish the poet animal inside me. It was not a question I could answer until the first Poetry Brothel, but it fed more than that. Poetry has been a kind of refugee in our culture maybe for the entire life of this country, living in camps or tents on the outskirts of the city. Poets in the United States have existed as single flames dancing atop candles in the quiet corners of their dark rooms and, except for the occasional house fire of ferocious, agonized, or ecstatic eloquence (think Ginsberg, Bishop, Whitman) our cities have not burned with words the way they did in the older countries before electricity and spun wire took the place of tongue and lips and lungs.
In this small volume we have gathered some of the words living in the mouths of the poets in our Brothel. Please read these poems aloud and into the ear of something alive. From the first fanning of these small flames we knew the Brothel was a new kind of Pentecost. Having come together finally to celebrate the intimacy of the word again and again to sing not to the darkness or the keys, but to each other, we have found not only our hearts and our tongues but our whole city on fire. As the sparks of this blaze are swept off by the trade winds and find themselves among the dry grass of the Spanish coast or the ancient rafters of Paris bordellos we know that soon, and together we will set the world ablaze and the day on fire.
So join us in our love and our longing, mes incendiaires, please enjoy this volume, please keep burning in the night, and please join us when next we gather, with flames in our faces and praise on our tongues.
All my Love.
Tennessee
