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Ted Rees reads from Dog Day Economy

 

On March 26, I attended a reading in Philly at Vox Populi on North 11th Street, featuring Jena Osman, Ted Rees, and Samuel Delany that was hosted by Lonely Christopher for the Segue Reading Series. It was great.

Samuel Delany, who was last, and was going to read prose, remarked before he began, “I’ve always been a lover of poetry. Like Auden used to say, playing with language is much more interesting than expressing ideas. You play first and the ideas come second. And that’s why I loved so much of what I heard today.”

The novelist, I think, was playfully referring to Ted Rees, the poet who had read before him, from his new book, Dog Day Economy, a book whose first half was created out of experiments, sentences cut (ripped) from the pages of the Economist, and Wikipedia articles about missing persons, untitled collages like Exquisite Corpses there pretty much by chance, yet chosen, a stream of consciousness not the poet’s, but the universe’s, the powers that be, trying to put into words what the “I am the I am” is saying.

The second half of Dog Day Economy, poems with titles, was written on a huge roll of butcher paper that just kept unrolling, I suppose, like Jack Kerouac used to type, not dictated by the page, but the flow.

You can hear the results of this poet’s work on the Vimeo below, Ted Rees reading from Dog Day Economy. Enjoy. 

 

 

 

 

Dog Day Economy is published by Roof Books. You can check it out here:

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781737970323/dog-day-economy.aspx

 

@ Vox Populi. Photo by Lonely Christopher

 

Lonely Christopher, Ted Rees, Samuel Delany @ Vox Populi. Photo by Don Yorty

 

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