Poetry Sucks! feat. Klyd Watkins, Nickole Brown, William W. Miller and Mark Porkchop Holder
When: Thu., May 24, 8 p.m.
Where: Dino's Bar & Grill, 411 Gallatin Rd.

The sixth installment of the East Side’s grimiest, chillest, most salient poetry series has some serious, if somewhat misleading, connections to the 1970s. For instance: Nickole Brown, who had to cancel a while back, was once editorial assistant to Hunter S. Thompson. But that doesn’t tell you anything about her poetry, which is lyrical and quick (as you'll see in the clip above).

Klyd Watkins’ name might sound familiar — he was part of the quartet whose Poetry Out Loud series of hypnotic, tape echo-saturated recordings were re-released by De Stijl Records earlier this year. But he (probably) won’t be moaning through a delay pedal on this night, though we wouldn’t put it past him. Buttressed with music by Nashville institution Mark “Porkchop” Holder and fiction by Murray State professor William W. Miller, this promises to be another solid, primordially stirred session.

The sixth installment of the East Side’s grimiest, chillest, most salient poetry series has some serious, if somewhat misleading, connections to the 1970s. For instance: Nickole Brown, who had to cancel a while back, was once editorial assistant to Hunter S. Thompson. But that doesn’t tell you anything about her poetry, which is lyrical and quick.

Klyd Watkins’ name might sound familiar — he was part of the quartet whose Poetry Out Loud series of hypnotic, tape echo-saturated recordings were re-released by De Stijl Records earlier this year. But he (probably) won’t be moaning through a delay pedal on this night, though we wouldn’t put it past him. Buttressed with music by Nashville institution Mark “Porkchop” Holder and fiction by Murray State professor William W. Miller, this promises to be another solid, primordially stirred session.

• Helen LaFrance

Both of today's picks are for book events, but with extremely different topics: At University School there's a poetry reading by four students who've written a book about a 1918 train crash, while Kathy Moses will be at The University Club to discuss her new book, a definitive account of folk artist Helen LeFrance. Both events that are being held in extremely similar-titled venues, so we came up with this mnemonic device to help you keep them straight: Poetry School, Art Club. Totally brilliant. Don't mix them up!

If you need more help distinguishing between them, Steve and I expanded on the events in the following picks:

Regarding Rule 99 Reading
When: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 17
Where: The University School of Nashville's Gordon Multi-Purpose Room
Plenty of high school students have to write a paper at the end of the semester, but not many write a book — and publish it. Over the course of a semester, four USN students — Larkin Johnson, Katie May, Abigayle Horrell and Marcus Maddox — worked with poet and Vanderbilt professor Stephanie Pruitt on an ambitious and wide-ranging project: painstakingly researching a train crash at Nashville’s Dutchman’s Curve in July 1918, studying the work of great poets, and composing a book of poems about the rail tragedy, which claimed 121 lives. No less a local luminary than Ann Patchett calls the finished product “a work of compassion and artistry that fills the reader with wonder.” The authors will read from the book and sign copies; proceeds will go toward educational and creative writing projects. STEVE HARUCH

An Evening with an Author: Kathy Moses
When: 6 p.m. Thursday, May 17
Where: The University Club
Sometimes it seems that in order for art to be seen as important, influential or interesting, it has to be made in New York or L.A. But if you really want to dig into something unusual and horizon-broadening, check out some of the artists from the rural South. Case in point: Western Kentucky’s Helen LaFrance. LaFrance was born in 1919, and her paintings show colorful scenes of people dwarfed by their environments, with that obsessive self-taught quality that made the Tennessee State Museum’s recent retrospective of Howard Finster seem more psychedelic than traditional. An upcoming exhibition at the state museum is in the works, but in the meantime, Kathy Moses has just published a definitive account of LaFrance’s work — Helen LaFrance: Folk Art Memories — and she’ll be on hand to discuss the book tonight. Moses literally wrote the book on Southern outsider art — her Outsider Art of the South is now out of print, but is still considered an essential text on the subject. LAURA HUTSON

• Photo: Mark Haskett

In recent years, Rash has earned a solid reputation as an heir to John Steinbeck for his archetypal themes and his interest in social justice, and to Cormac McCarthy in his elegant rendering of the harsh, violent nature of both the wilderness and humanity. A highly regarded poet as well as a fiction writer, Rash eloquently draws the mountain landscape and the cultural milieu of Appalachia as metaphors for more recent circumstances.

In The Cove, the crisis results from the truth behind Walter’s arrival and the vainglorious ambitions of Chauncey Feith, a banker’s son and local Army recruiter whose insecurities incite him to demagoguery. Given the remoteness of the conflict from the lives and livelihoods of the local populace, Feith is deeply resented by those whose sons he sends off to war. Wounded veterans like Hank Shelton treat Feith with naked scorn. As a result, Feith is driven to prove his worth by stoking fears of the so-called “Huns.” Most contemptibly, he heaps suspicion on a professor of German at the local college for having befriended a group of German naval officers being held in genteel captivity at a resort in nearby Boiling Springs after their ship was stranded in New York Harbor at the outbreak of the war.

Feith represents the knee-jerk, xenophobic stereotyping of “the enemy” so typical of our own time, when racist agitators inflame persecution and, too often, violence against those who come from a different culture or practice a different religion. The Cove’s inevitably tragic conclusion makes clear the human casualties of reckless ignorance and jingoism.

Tonight's reception starts at 6:15 p.m., and the reading begins at 6:45.

• Marcel Proust playing air guitar on a tennis racket circa 1892

We might just have to do a series titled, "Extremely Serious Photos of Extremely Silly Alt-Weekly Writers." Hmmm ....

Speaking of her novels, here's Lyda Phillips on her latest over at Chapter16.org:

The prologue to Sarah McCoy’s new novel, The Baker’s Daughter, is set in Garmisch, Germany, and opens with a provocative image: “In the kitchen, bundled dough mounds as white and round as babies lined the countertop and filled the space with the smell of milk and honey and promises of a full tomorrow.” It is 1945, and Elsie Schmidt, the daughter of a Garmisch baker in the last years of World War II, is just sixteen. She is frightened by the war news, the rumors of death camps, and the fact that her sister is in a Nazi breeding program. Yet Elsie is still just a young girl longing for love, eager to step from the bakery kitchen into the larger world.

More than sixty years later Elsie is a widow, still baking German bread and pastries, but now in El Paso, Texas, where human beings are once again routinely pursued and detained by the authorities. When Reba, a young reporter working on a Christmas feature, seeks out Elsie for her memories of Yuletide in Bavaria, she doesn’t get the “killer quote” she’s looking for. ...

Though The Baker’s Daughter is not an autobiographical novel, it bears traces of the author’s own life, from her childhood in Germany as the daughter of an Army officer, to her later life in El Paso, where she wrote an article for a local magazine about the large community of Germans who live in Texas and New Mexico. When McCoy, whose first novel was The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico, met an eighty-year-old German woman selling bread at a local farmers’ market, The Baker’s Daughter was born. In it McCoy delivers an intimate and nuanced view of people trapped in the nightmare culture of Aryan supremacy and draws an intriguing parallel to between Nazi Germany and the current U.S. debate over immigration.

The ensuing thriller draws a bloody path from Afghanistan to Washington, D.C., while award-winning author Ellison uses her background as a White House and Department of Commerce staffer and her forensic research to snare her protagonist in a web of intrigue. Ellison will read from and sign her latest book 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, May 12, at the cool Lenox Village mystery bookstore Mysteries & More, 6965 Sunnywood Drive. (And stop afterward at a CL favorite, Bruster's Real Ice Cream.)

Gregg Allman’s appearance at last year’s Americana Music Awards show gave fans the chance to see a great survivor — the singer fought the rock wars his own way. Born in Nashville in 1947, Allman lived through tough times, including the 1949 murder of his father, before gaining fame as singer and keyboardist for The Allman Brothers Band. He’s in town to mark the publication of his new memoir, My Cross to Bear, which lays out his life in suitably laconic style.

Like many a rocker of his generation, Allman fell passionately in love with soul music: Early in My Cross to Bear, he describes seeing a 1960 Jackie Wilson and Otis Redding show in Nashville. Allman skillfully explains how such R&B singers as Bobby Bland and Little Milton influenced his style. It’s a tale of success and excess, and Allman comes through as a soul man for our time.

He’s signing copies of his book at BMI in conjunction with Parnassus Books, and if you purchase or preorder a copy of the book in-store or through the Parnassus website prior to the event you’ll get dibs in the book-signing line.

RIP Mr. Sendak.

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”

Read the full New York Times article here.