SP CE Poem Reading II

This article first appeared as a post titled "Best Thing I've Heard This Week: SP CE, Pt. 2" at Vouched Books on 10 July 2013.

Last autumn, SP CEbooks published Rachael Wolfe's chapbook Sauce. In a previous review of the collection, I wrote:

Wolfe’s collection contains eighteen short poems, each of which are titled “Sauce.” But Wolfe makes sure to note that the “very repetition of sauce makes it somewhat meaningless as a title. [Its] function is similar to that of an asterisk or a number or anything else used to separate parts.” To this extent, the chapbook can be read as a sequence of interrelated poems that speak to and against one another... [wherein] the individual poems work as a series of both absurd and witty non sequiturs, keeping readers off-balance through threadbare connections and associative leaps.

The poems, to my mind, are reminiscent of Berrigan's The Sonnets in their associative leaps, disconnected logic, and the manner in which individual poems converse with one another throughout the entirety of the collection. During my recent visit to Nebraska, Wolfe read an excerpt from SAUCE in the lobby just outside of the SP CE studio in downtown Lincoln:


And speaking of Berrigan, that same evening, Justin Ryan Fyfe, one of the SP CE founders, read his wonderfully titled poem “Give Me Berrigan's Liver”:


Finally, Mike Knott, another SP CE poet, read his poem “Stheeee”: