April 04, 2007
Tommorow Night: Last Observable Reading!
I know that cribbing too much from press releases is bad form, but Chris King's press releases transcend the form. He sent a particularly ticklish one about tomorrow night's Observable Reading (the last this season kids! This is your last chance to go this season!) which I'll quote from liberally:
"In honor of the poet's appearance this Thursday, April 5 in the estimable Observable Readings series at The Schlafly Bottleworks, and the first week of a new baseball season, The Skuntry Museum, Library, Beer Cellar & Prop Shop has unveiled a baseball signed by the St. Louis poet David Clewell and also inked with his portrait of a space job in flight.
Clewell, a master narrative and comic poet, is a self-described "nut job" who makes extraterrestrial life and UFO's a major, minor theme of his work, among other inscrutable things, though he also writes beautifully about his wife, his son and other things that non-nut jobs write about.
"I suckered Clewell into signing the baseball and drawing it, like I have been suckering him into things for precisely twenty years," said Chris King, curator of the Skuntry Museum. "I was something of a child poetry impressario, and even as a lonely runt at Wash. U. in the '80s, I was talking Clewell out of his hermitage to read with Eugene B. Redmond at Cicero's as small groups from the Lincoln High Jazz Band (RIP) played hard bop. Then as now, Clewell was an adorable grouch and a confirmed hermit."
The curator said the poet signed the baseball for him over cheeseburgers at
Hugo's, a favorite burger haunt for Clewell near his long-standing gig at
Webster University.
"I remember the burger buns were stale," King said, "and I remember an
unforgettable phrase Clewell improvised when talking about how his teenaged
son plays both his parents against each other: 'He's an equal-opportunity
opportunist.'"
Clewell will read with a poet unknown to the museum, Joy Katz, this Thursday
at 8 p.m. The Schlafly Bottleworks are on Southwest Avenue in Maplewood. No
charge for admission.
"Thursdays are family nights for me, so I'll miss it like I miss everything
else," King said, "but at least I can write a sarcastic praise release in
honor of this important event."