Barbara Cole’s poem “Foxy Moron” is anxious: anxious over being read autobiographically, as a female poet (whom she often feels are read autobiographically), and over Modernism to name but a few things. While these concerns could be enough to make some artists head towards erudition, Cole’s ability to cut into these worries with her sense of humor and wit make her self-awareness a pleasure to read on the page.

“Foxy Moron” is the second part in her planned five-section work tentatively titled Situ ation Come dies. Recently in conversation, Cole relayed the following anecdote on how the project evolved, “I was 24, living in Philadelphia, and I had finished my Master’s, was teaching at two different places, tutoring students and the last thing I wanted to do was write. I was telling friends of mine how for the first time in my life I couldn’t write and they, being older, laughed at me. ‘What do you mean for the first time in your life?’” From there she began to put together Situ ation Come dies, which examines “this four-year-old creature that always wanted to be a writer,” said Cole.

“Foxy Moron” covers late childhood and adolescence, dealing with learning how language works within specific social contexts (there are moments where the narrator relates reading an adult novel she found and uses context clues and the dictionary to decipher some parts) and sexuality, which are charming as they are related with an odd mixture of innocence and intelligence that captures the voice of a young smart person.

Poet Brian Kim Stefans writes of “Foxy Moron,” “Cole’s writing exists somewhere between the genres of public confession that we associate with the late Spalding Gray—in this way, a form of drama, but in a distinctly American humorist tradition—and the large-scale collage works of someone like Ted Berrigan or Bruce Andrews, moving assuredly through a mélange of juxtapositions between pop-culture jingles and the delectable traumas (to a teenager) of sexual catharsis.”

Cole recently read at Buffalo State’s Rooftop Poetry Club and said that she doesn’t plan on reading from “Foxy Moron” in public again for quite some time, so anticipate the next phase in this on-going work, “Ear Say,” which she describes as being “more grave in tone, as it deals with medical issues.” She seemed almost nervous when she said it, like everyone expects nothing but laughs. However, with Cole’s deft ability to shift tones within the poem under discussion, don’t be surprised if this new section is equally captivating.

Reading with Cole is Canadian publisher and poet Jay MillAr. MillAr runs BookThug, one of the few truly independent Canadian small presses (it doesn’t receive any government funding). His most recent work is Demtened Poems, 1-10 published by Kemeny Babineau’s Laurel Reed Books. Like many works of contemporary poetry, MillAr’s book works within a set of restrictions. What is interesting about his use of restrictions is that he applies them to lyric poems, more specifically the occasional lyric poem, which is a form that generally describes one’s feelings or ideas for a particular moment.

Curious about work that the artist approaches sytematically, I asked him about his new project and discovered it is a good thing Canada uses the metric system as MillAr loves systems of ten:

“Well, Demtened Poems, 1-10 is the first 10 poems of a 100 poem project that came out of my discovering some old poems in a drawer that I’d written like 100 years ago (1995). I’d forgotten about the poems, and kind of marveled at them, sort of. They’d been written because myself and a friend had traded little books in which we’d written titles for poems at the tops of the pages—we each had to fill out the poems for one another’s titles. I was struck by my ability to write what I thought of as the occasional lyric poem, something that I don’t feel I’m into much any more—the influence of the project book being what it is these days, all around us, endlessly invading and at that particular moment, annoying me. Or even the structural “damage” of (MillAr’s) Double Helix. I had just finished writing “Lack Lyrics and Other Poems” (not yet published as such), which works toward and against the notion of the project or sequential poem-book, Lack Lyrics themselves being a sequential, long poem type project, and the Other Poems being more or less a collection of occasional lyric poems that attempt to chide the pompous behavior of Lack Lyrics.

“Suddenly I was looking for something else to write. As is usually my wont I started meditating on some way to get me writing something. Why not write a collection of 100 lyric pieces? Why not return to the occasional lyric again head on? Could I do it? Apparently not, as I continued to mentally formulate the structure of the book. But that was the original idea. Somehow I became curious about the relationship between the title and the poem. I can’t remember why or how, but I started by stealing titles from other poets’ poems for arbitrary poems that I was writing. Which was fun, but I couldn’t steal 100 titles from the world of literary history could I? Why would I want to?

“Since I like groups of ten (I once wrote a book around 1997 called J : A METRIC SYSTEM that had ten books of ten poems of ten lines that started with the letters determined by counting through the alphabet by ten starting with the letter J—the tenth letter of the alphabet. The book isn’t terrible but it isn’t great, either, mostly a style of confessional lyricism that seems endless.) I would have ten groups of ten poems, the first ten stealing their titles from the world, and then each subsequent ten poems stealing their titles from the respective poems in the sequence before it. I’m hoping that there will be an interesting rippling effect.”

Barbara Cole and Jay MillAr will read at 7pm on Thursday, September 20th at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen St.