We were lucky to have had Rivka Galchen, Mya Green, Patrick Rosal, and Khalik Allah join us for the Apogee Journal co-sponsored final reading of our fourth season.  They reminded us why we try to get the writers and artists we love under the same room for some electric language and images.

Rivka Galchen gave us a hilarious new take on the first person plural by reading the first few pages of Moby Dick, substituting “we” and “us” for “I” and “me” (during which time she was joined by her self-possessed young daughter, another plural).  She then read from her essay about a Elmhurst Hospital Center in Elmhurst, Queens, “the most diverse neighborhood in New York City and maybe in the world.”  Galchen completed part of her medical training at the hospital, which offers translation services in 153 languages, and could attest that to treat patients there one had to know the afflictions of the world, not just your corner of it.  The “we” was everywhere in evidence!

Mya Green then took the stage with the strong, round sounds of her poetry (“carry the one, conquer, divide by none”).  Often about the fault lines between the natural world and the social, the racial and the elemental, her poems slide along, pulling place into people and turning people back out again into places.  “Sweet with wilted cherry skins/dirt under my nails, rattle.” Her last poems were part of a “Tornado Series,” inspired by the tornado that devastated her hometown, Tuscaloosa, AL.  In “Damage Path,” she writes, “Tornado, I am your witness and your face.”

And then Patrick Rosal danced onto the stage with his liquid lines that nonetheless punch, punch, punched, mixing in his Filipino roots, his b-boy and dj past, and his ability to adapt as an outsider to culture after new culture.  One poem was about a dj who was “half black and half Filipino and passing as Latino…some might say that’s what being Filipino is.”  He writes of of carving out a presence in the city, on the streets– “Sometimes the only way to lay out a punk who ducks you is to trick him into singing.” A line from one poem might capture an aspect to Rosal’s poetic ventures: “Two tunes left to play at the same time will sync up…pick ax and wax wing…” He, too, responded to natural disaster with a poem about a teacher’s brutal will for her students to survive the tsunami of 2009.  As they watched friends and relations wash away, she lashed them to telephone and electricity poles lining the street, “building an orchard of them.”

We ended the night with Khalik Allah‘s stirring, exploratory documentary Antonyms of Beauty.  Allah spoke briefly about the work before he screened it, explaining that when he began filming and photographing in the streets of Harlem he thought he was seeking out the ugliest, rawest images he could find.  But he ended up finding beauty, finding his “superheroes.”  The film follows and interviews “Frenchie,” a Haitian immigrant who lives on the streets, watching him in his social context, absorbing the constant motion and sound of the streets, and listening carefully while he answers questions about the philosophies that guide his life, about god, and about the people who might look at him and see only loss.

Thank you to our readers/artists and thanks to our audience for a rich night! We’ll be back in September with more great line ups!