ALEXANDRA GRILIKHES

CELEBRATING A LEGENDARY

PHILADELPHIA POET DURING

HER FAVORITE MONTH

ALEXANDRA GRILIKHES

THURSDAY, 10/16/08, 7:30pm

corner of 10th & Pine

look for the sign:

ALEXANDRA GRILIKHES LIVED HERE!

BRING YOUR FAVORITE GRILIKHES POEMS TO READ!
AND BRING A FLASHLIGHT AND UMBRELLA IF IT RAINS!
POETRY HAS NO RAIN DATES!

from EMBLEMS

Turn and die. The
engine again. That was a day
I let go quickly and slowly the
turn of the pages together by
water and flame, fused words.
What did it mean? What does feel
mean? How does it fit? Three of us
eating a last meal at the seashore, the
van burning with my poems packed in a
box. I like the idea of a big
dumb enemy out there, he said.
That's how it fits.

ABOUT GRILIKHES:

her years at the University of Pennsylvania

EOAGH Issue #3

EOAGH reading (see #5 and #6)

her novel YIN FIRE

mention at top of this interview with Rachel Blau Duplessis

"And if they are not perfect we criticize them for not being good enough. We consume performances like food. Yet we are never satisfied because we always want the next performance. And then we are still not satisfied. I wonder if our lack of satisfaction is that we can't be satisfied by watching and consuming a performance because we need to feel our participation in the piece; to feel the wave of the universe in our bodies, to feel what anthropologists call participation mystique. And the real reason we attend performance is to maybe try and catch the wave that we see in the performer's body."

--Alexandra Grilikhes, from a conversation with Masaki Iwana (American Writing, 1998)

(thanks to Michele Belluomini, literary executor to the Grilikhes estate)