Monthly Archives: April 2017

Seven Reasons to See Catastrophic Theatre’s Snow White

April 24, 2017, by

Photo credit: Anthony Rathbun

Photo credit: Anthony Rathbun

If you haven’t seen it yet, Catastrophic Theater’s production of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White only runs for two more weekends – April 27th – 29th, and May 4th – 6th! (Get your tickets here.)

  1. Snow White by Donald Barthelme – this staging is the world premiere of any fully staged adaptation of Barthelme’s take on the classic fairy tale. Barthelme had begun to write an adaptation himself, which was shelved (okay, put in a drawer) before it could be finished.
  1. The performances – as director Greg Dean put it, he “needed actors with a facility for language, that could ‘switch styles’ easily, and locate the feelings and the jokes that often lie just below the surface of the prose.” His cast delivers, making effortless shifts in tone and energy to match the acrobatic language of the script. Check out the Houston Chronicle and HoustonPress reviews for more.

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Just A Few More Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month in Houston

April 17, 2017, by

Voight,EllenBryantFor those who have yet to find time to honor National Poetry Month or for those eager to continue the celebration, Houston has some exciting events you should know about. This evening at 7:30 pm poet and MacArthur Fellow Ellen Bryant Voigt, will present a lecture on narrative and lyric poetry with a focus on poems written by Robert Frost and Randall Jarrell. After the lecture, poet Tony Hoagland will moderate a short Q & A. If you’re unable to make the lecture, Voigt will read from her most recent collection, Headwaters, and other work, Tuesday, April 18th, 7:30 pm. Both events take place at Inprint House.

cropped JFH_Poet Poster copy_lowres (1)On Wednesday, April 19, U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Mexican-American to be named Poet Laureate, will give a reading at the University of Houston-Downtown, 5:30 pm in the Robertson Auditorium in the Academic Building, free and open to the public.

As part of the Gulf Coast Reading Series, A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner Chen Chen will read from his collection of poems, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Friday, April 21st, 7 pm at Rudyard’s British Pub. Continue reading →

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A poetic night with Ada Limón and Gregory Pardlo

April 13, 2017, by

RM3_7535Last Monday, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series welcomed poets Ada Limón and Gregory Pardlo. The poets, former classmates at NYU, have both recently been recognized: Limón’s Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Pardlo won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Digest, and as of Thursday, a Guggenheim Fellowship. Poet Kevin Prufer, who also serves as a professor at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, moderated a discussion with both after the reading.

Limón opened with “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” in which she imagines the power of a race- winning filly’s 8-pound heart: “Don’t you want to tug my shirt and see / the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it’s going to come in first.” When Prufer asked after Limón’s performance of the piece, she referred to Frederico García Lorca’s duende, and the heightened expression embodiment can bring to the work. Many of Limón’s poems showcased the same, with lines like, “You wake some days / full of crow and shine,” and “[…] then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails […]” Continue reading →

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Five reasons not to miss Gregory Pardlo’s Inprint reading

April 1, 2017, by

Pardlo, Gregory Pardlo-author-photo photo by Rachel Eliza GriffithsAs we begin National Poetry Month today, Inprint presents Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gregory Pardlo Monday evening as part of the 2016/2017 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. Here are five we should all be excited to come out and hear him! 

“Song of Myself”

Not only does Pardlo have geographical ties to Whitman’s Brooklyn and New Jersey—he and his family live in Brooklyn and he attended university and teaches in Camden—but Pardlo’s work is often rooted in a formally expansive Whitmanesque poetic in terms of structure and content. When Pardlo writes in the much published poem “Written by Himself,” “I was born across the river where I/was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,/broadsides sewn in my shoes,” one hears Whitman’s voice and walks through his same America. Continue reading →

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