Spare Room: Ashby/Cunningham

Sunday, October 16
7:30 pm

The Waypost
3120 N. Williams Ave.
503-367-3182

$5.00 suggested donation


Chris Ashby is a writer, musician, and poet. His work has appeared in James Yeary's newsletter, Creep of Light, and is forthcoming in Sam Lohmann's Peaches and Bats and visual artist Nate Orton's My Day series. He splits his time as a graduate student at Portland State University and a forestry technician with the Mt. Hood National Forest.

Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his wife and daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005; his second book, Journey to the Sun, will be published next month by Atelos Press. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. Since 1999 he has worked at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.


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from After Language

Blowing through the trumpet, he resembled a weasel in sight and sound. Would you please take out the trash and wash the dishes? If we crawled in, we would be children in the monster's mouth. She was having a permanent out of body experience. We rolled off the boat holding our noses, anticipating the splash. His background in Guatemala City had been the impetus for becoming a traveling clown, and he wouldn't have met her if anything had been different. It's good to know that sometimes we don't have to do anything but look at one another. I sang to her, not to hear myself or as an attempt to impress her, but to hear her sing for she was apprehensive to do it if one asked her without a concrete reason. To take the newspaper and treat it is as artifact in order to expand the boundaries of performance. What is the original doom track? It is the ocean both crashing on the rocks one moment and gently rolling away the next.

Chris Ashby

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from Journey to the Sun


it's true you must study

it's true you must reason

coming ever nearer to THINGS

& who gets to have them

moving & burning & crying

boring & overbearing

it will never be easy

but what else were you doing



8 hours a night

dividing & symbolizing

conjugating & declining

stars & animals & literatures

famine & practice cities

& cave-men literally DEMENTED



& now look at them

out in the malls

waving their hats

Brent Cunningham