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Monday, March 1, 2010

John J. Trause | Seriously Serial




GOOD NEWS: WOOD-RIDGE (Dec. 27, 2007) — Wood-Ridge Memorial Library’s director, John Trause, has a new book of his own to add to his library’s shelves. Trause released his latest collection of poetry, entitled “Seriously Serial” on Dec. 3.

— Dana Rapisardi, The Leader


Click here to read Reporter Dana Rapisardi's interview of John J. Trause that appeared in the New Jersey paper The Leader on December 27th, 2007



SERIOUSLY SERIAL
Poems by John J. Trause
Soft Cover, Saddle Stitched, 22pp
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)



John Trause is unique: a classicist who loves pop. His poems capture our desire to mock and at the same learn every juicy detail of pseudo-celebrity (Edie Sedgwick, Doris Duke, Gov. McGreevey) with all the classical style of Plato writing about Atlantis. He is our generation's undiscovered T.S. Eliot.

—David Silverman, author of Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars (Soft Skull Press, 2007).


Don't trust the adverb in the title. You never can tell if John is serious or not. His deeply shallow poems are simultaneously extravagant and poker-faced.

—Mark Swartz, author of Instant Karma (City Lights Books, 2002) and H2O (Soft Skull Press, 2006).


These poems are the ideal mixture of gravitas and fun. Trause is able to encompass doubt, and art, the Holy Land, celebrity and much more in these refined lyrics. The spirit of play moves through even the most serious of these poems.


—Matthew Rohrer, author of Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007).




Credit: Jill Greenberg

JOHN J. TRAUSE, the Director of the Wood-Ridge Memorial Library in Wood-Ridge, N.J. since 2000, has been writing and reciting his poetry for 25 years. The Serials Librarian (seriously) at the Museum of Modern Art Library from 1991 to 2000, and a participant in The MoMA Strike of 2000, he has been an active part of the NYC art scene as well as an avid devotee of avant-garde public raucousness. His poetry, translations, and visual work have appeared in Cover, Global City Review, Parse, Radix, The Rift, Now Culture, Sensations Magazine, The North River Review, The Troubadour, Xavier Review, the artists' periodical Crossings published by the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, as well as on-line at ThePedestalMagazine.com and Sidereality.com, and is forthcoming in Sulphur River Review. His monumental performance poem “Ishtar Redux” was staged in spring 2001 at the renovated Loews Theatre on Journal Square in Jersey City, N.J., and his “Latter-Day Litany and Other Pseudo-Hagiographica” has had a number of revivals after its New York debut in 1998, most recently at the Bickford Theatre at the Morris Museum, Morristown, N.J. in late autumn 2004. In 2005 and again in 2006, Mr. Trause was featured in the Visible Word at Stevens Institute, Hoboken, N.J. which paired poets with visual artists. In 2005, he co-founded the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N.J., where he continues to serve as programmer and host. Aside from his professional interest in literature and the arts, Mr. Trause also enjoys film, dance, juggling, hiking, Chinese footbinding, and Afrin® nasal spray. In his adolescence, he modeled for the monolithic sculptures on Easter Island.




Anthony
Joel
Lee


He manifested himself amid the
manifestos of the Nuyorican,
slender and tender, a reed bent
but not broken at the confluence
of the Red and Assiniboine,
muddy waters of Winnipeg,
weathered by life along the Hudson.
By the waters of the Passaic dashing
on the rocks below, you rock.
By the lazy currents of Tan-shui and
Chi-lung, you rock.
By the Narrows of Saint John’s, you rock
and flow and go with the flow,
cyber-singing on the ethernet,
here now, now gone,
there in that bit of cybertext
silent, there in the flickering
still, evanescing here now,
in the stillness, ethereal there
tuning to the music of the spheres.




JOHN J. TRAUSE RAPS IN MIDDLE ENGLISH [Video Credit: David Silverman]

John J. Trause doing "The Canterbury Rap" with Zayid Blackmore
at the 40th birthday party of Donald Zirilii on Sunday, July 30, 2006.
John has been performing this since 1981
(YouTube.com, October 10, 2006)





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