June Bloom: upcoming June Events
Another dispatch from phaentompoet! In this newsletter I share my upcoming June and July events and do some brief reflecting on the virtual launch of MISEDUCATION, and my current Southern residency
Hullo friends!
It's June! it’s Gemini season! It’s due time for another newsletter!
So the first big thing to talk about is that my in-person chapbook release event is coming up soon– basically like 9 days from now! Some beloveds and I have some beautiful words and sounds to share to celebrate the occasion! And if you are nearby Denver you are most welcome to come and celebrate this occasion together with us! We got sounds by the fantastical wonderful DJ Alisha B ! And we got poems from the magnificent lovelies Briannah Hill, Franklin Cruz, and Nathan Alexander Moore !
This will all be happening Saturday night June 17 at 7pm at Counterpath in Denver, CO (7935 E 14th Ave, Denver, CO 80220 – it’s just off Colfax and Tamarac). (& Counterpath is such a fantastic place, so all my thanks to Tim and Julie for sharing the space with us!) Admission is $0.00FREE but the chapbook will be for sale as will merch & books & stuff from all the artists if they choose to bring stuff. If you feel called to donate money, it's all going to my fellow performers.
I have the flyer I made attached below– feel free to share if you’d like. And here is the event page on the Counterpath website: https://counterpathpress.org/book-release-for-aerik-franciss-miseducation-with-dj-alisha-b-artsyq-franklin-cruz-and-nathan-alexander-moore-saturday-june-17-2023-7pm
MISEDUCATION is a poetry collection that centers on my brief foray as a doctoral student studying political theory at an elite university on the west coast. The chapbook was the winner of the New Delta Review 2022 Chapbook Contest. The central thesis of this project can be summarized in a paraphrasing of a famous quotation from Mark Twain: Never let schooling interfere with education. Eventually being pushed out of the program after experiencing various forms of neglect, manipulation, exploitation, and racism, I collected these poems over the years that find play and beauty within restricted forms. Denouncing rampant academic abuse, this experimental collection of poetry explores the forms and erasures of academia for people who, too, have had a harsh and complicated history with school and education. The title MISEDUCATION is a nod to the text The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter Woodson, and musician Lauryn Hill’s album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Cover art designed by multimedia artist Ophelia Arc.
Here is an order link if you are interested in purchasing a copy before the event: http://ndrmag.org/chapbooks/2023/03/miseducation/
I would love to see you there, truly! ✨🌱💚
Other things happening:
I’m once again returning to the Clocktower Cabaret to perform at the Off the Clock Late Night Tease event on Friday June 16th. Tickets can be a bit pricey so I totally understand if you can’t make it. But if you are looking to have a special night out and want some fun and unique entertainment, the shows are always most excellent! It is truly an honor to be included among a constantly changing lineup that nevertheless always brings heat! Pole dancers and belly dancers and aerialists and drag performers and singers and everyone is so so talented and everyone always shows some skin– in fact, I’m often the most clothed performer! In some ways I feel out of place, but then again, my poem is always on theme and the audience always gives me mad love. I would even venture to say that these crowds give me more energy, more laughs, more responses than typical poetry audiences! And my fellow performers, in addition to be talented, are also always really kind and welcoming to me, so it truly is a treat to perform. Basically I’ve been performing there once a month since February– I do have to admit it is partly nepotism (as many things are haha) because my lovely cousin hosts the show and her and her husband co-own the venue. But it is also because the poems do what they need to do and everything fits and works in the show– plus I love that we really get to showcase a lot of different types of art and performance, as is the history of vaudeville shows. So if you are interested you can find tickets here: https://ci.ovationtix.com/35628/production/1113016?performanceId=11195646
https://www.clocktowercabaret.com/
On June 27th I will be facilitating a virtual writing workshop in collaboration with Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Denver Art Museum. For this month’s virtual Drop-In Writing at the Denver Art Museum, we will be focusing on the exhibition Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnstone Collection. This exhibit features works of painting and calligraphy from Japanese women artists from the 1600s to the 1900s. Strikingly, most of the art featured in this exhibit are actually writing and literature, specifically poetry. For this writing workshop, as we look at the various artworks, we will discuss poetry, the writing practice, and materiality, and use these discussions to generate new poetry and poetic experiments. When I visited the exhibit I was immediately inspired, and as I spent more time, it got me thinking about poetry differently– what would it require of me in 2023 to create poetic work that could be consumed in a visual art museum? By materiality I mean thinking critically about where we write/publish poems– on paper, in books, on screens– and how we make the words– with ink, with pens or pencils or markers. And it also got me thinking about playing around less with the *what* of what we write and more of the *how*– the size of the letters/words, what hands/limbs/tools we use, our choices of handwriting/font/typography. I think these are really exciting questions and give way toward experiments and multimedia play in our writing practices. For me personally, I’ve been considering plastic as a medium for poetry, something to allow us to reduce our tendency to trash plastic and instead consider how we may recycle/reuse plastic. I’d really love to create plastic scrolls or plastic vessels for my poetry… a future project indeed! Also interested in ceramics and learning more calligraphy/upping my handwriting game (my handwriting isn’t bad but it really isn’t good either haha). Okay so if you are interested in attending the workshop here is the link for that: https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/calendar/drop-in-writing
I have two more events to mention but they are both collaborations with the wonderful poet Ashia Ajani. As I do every final Friday of the month, I am hosting the Slam Nuba open mic at Redline Contemporary Art Center in Denver, CO. This month’s show is on Friday June 30th and we are featuring Ashia and doing a hometown celebration of the recent release of their debut book of poetry Heirloom (available for purchase via their website
https://ashiaajani.com/
and also very likely at your local bookstore!). Keep an eye on the Nuba social media for an eventbrite link to purchase tickets– general admission is $10 and $5 student prices, and the money goes toward making sure we can pay our features and keep the show going each month.
The second event with Ashia is a poetry showcase and conversation regarding Black and Indigenous Ecologies on July 7th at Counterpath. I’ll be reading some poetry at that event alongside Ashia and a few other wonderful poets. Very much looking forward to this event and conversation!
So those are the upcoming poetry events I have coming up– I would of course love to see you at ALL of them, but if you can only make one that’s cool, and if you can’t make any, there will be more so no worries. I’m grateful for your support in any form that it may come in!
So in the last news I would like to briefly talk about some reflection notes. I’m thinking I will write another newsletter soon in the next week or two that will get deeper into reflection, but I wanted to make a note about the MISEDUCATION virtual launch event that happened a few weeks ago as well as finishing up my Southern writing residency.
The MISEDUCATION virtual launch was so special! I just have so much love and gratitude for the New Delta Review team for really supporting and championing my work, it makes me emotional to think about it. I really have to thank Erin Little especially for leading the publishing of the chapbook from beginning to now. And I also wanna thank Emilie Rodriguez for coming up with the idea of the virtual event, hosting the virtual launch, making fliers, and just generally for all the support (and that we have our own little inside-joke/code word of STRAWBANA). But really the whole NDR team has been truly amazing, thank you all! Finally I want to thank Dorothy Chan, yes for selecting my work, yes for offering such a lovely blurb for the work, but also for the wonderful reading of poetry she shared for the event and for the truly generous engagement, questions, and conversation she offered toward MISEDUCATION. I always say it is an honor just to be read, but to experience deep engagement with the work is really the ultimate dream for me as a writer. Thank you. *crying emoji* *happy teary eyed emoji* *star sparkles emoji* *seedling emoji* *green heart emoji* (yeah I’m sure I could have just included the actual emojis but its also fun to see the words and pretend.) And thank you again to everyone to came through to the event. I wore a cap & gown and dramatically stripped it off to reveal a mesh shirt while America Has A Problem by Beyoncé played in the background. You just had to be there! *coy face emoji* *shrugging emoji*
I am currently writing this newsletter from Atlanta, GA where I’ll be for just another few days. I’m here visiting friends, but I would be remiss to not make a note about the organizing work happening here now around #StopCopCity. I think this article recently published in The Nation does a good job of reporting on the current updates, the recent vote to fund Cop City, and how it affects ATL as well as the USA at large: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/cop-city-arrests-atlanta-repression/ . I align my politics with the politics of abolition, which is to say Fuck Cop City, Fuck the Police, Fuck the Prison Industrial Complex.
I’m in Atlanta visiting a few of my best friends and because it was a convenient second stop after my 2-week writing residency at Firefly Farms nearby Knoxville, TN via the Sundress Academy For The Arts (SAFTA). Not only did I receive a residency spot, but I earned a summer fellowship to attend! https://sundressblog.com/2023/02/27/winners-of-summer-2023-residency-fellowships/
Like I said, I’ll do another newsletter to really reflect on my time, but to keep it simple, it was truly an AMAZING time! I got a lot of reading, writing, and editing done, yes, but I also got to meet & see so many lovely people. And I got to spend time with so many animals– ducks and chickens and sheep and dogs! For the first time in my life I saw fireflies!! And I was told that witnessing synchronous fireflies are very rare, that there among the Smoky Mountains was one of the few places on Earth where this phenomenon occurs! Wow! Suffice it to say I had a dream of a time!
Anyway, that’s all I got for now until I return to Denver and age another year. That sounds so dramatic but on the real I’m probably not gonna send another newsletter until after my birthday. My birthday is on June 19 and I’ll be turning 31 this year. I gotta say, 30 has been one of my favorite years yet– definitely saw some hardships, but mostly it was a year of friendships new and old, a year of poetry celebration and experimentation, a year of travel (I turned 30 in New Mexico– shoutout to my dear friend Rebeca!), a year of reaping the harvests I planted many years ago and feared would never sprout. But they did, they bloomed and are continuing to bloom.
Here’s to planting, to watering, to flourishing, to blooming, to flowering, to harvesting, to doing it all again. Thanks y’all *green heart emoji*