Paul Killebrew reading in front of Tim Bowen's paintings

Dorothea Lasky reading in front of Tim Bowen's paintings

First Reading

When: Saturday, March 17. 2007, 7 p.m.

The first event will feature Tim Bowen's series of 100 paintings entitled PeopleTIME 2005 which depicts various significant national and international events that occurred throughout the year 2005. The title is based on the idea of using two images per week, one from People magazine and one from Time magazine, focusing on relevant news items which juxtapose the superficialities of popular culture with the serious, often grim, geopolitical and social realities of the day.

Within the visual, public world of PeopleTIME 2005, poets Paul Killebrew and Dorothea Lasky will read from their new books. A single poem, Killebrew's Inspector vs. Evader (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007) is a litany of private observations in constant competition with one another. Like Bowen's project, the poem laces together moments both monumental and trivial while persistently seeking the meanings to be found between them all. By doing so, Killebrew illuminates the holiness to be found within each moment of experience, no matter its outward appearance.

From this same vision emerge the poems of Dorothea Lasky's AWE, forthcoming this year from Wave Books. Within this collection, Lasky captures the magnitude and privilege of having a brain and body isolated, even if sometimes painfully so, from all other brains and bodies. Insisting upon a solitude that transcends itself, the poems reveal a separateness to things that enables connection, a process that in turn makes possible our awe to be a part of anything at all, even more so, our awe to be a part of everything.

In keeping with the nature of the specific work of all three contributors, and in line with the application-to-life-mindedness of the series itself, Parallel Bars will dedicate its first event to local poet Frank Sherlock. Sherlock was hospitalized on January 22nd with a sudden and mysterious illness that turned out to be a serious case of meningitis . He needed emergency surgery and also suffered a heart attack and kidney failure as a result of symptoms related to the illness. Like many other Americans, Sherlock is uninsured. Donations will be accepted on his behalf, and the event will serve as a precursor to a benefit show to be held the next day by the friends of Frank Sherlock.