BETWEEN POETS

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Friday the 13th last was a great night for poetry in Toronto at This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, starring David Meltzer, Terri Carrion, Michael Rothenberg, Jim Christy, and my good friend, Robert Priest.

Terri Carrión was conceived in Venezuela and born in New York to a Galician mother and Cuban father. She grew up in Los Angeles where she spent her youth skateboarding and slam-dancing. Terri Carrión earned her MFA at Florida International University in Miami, where she taught Freshman English and Creative Writing, edited and designed the graduate literary magazine Gulfstream, taught poetry to High School docents at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and started a reading series at the local Luna Star Café. In her final semester at FIU, she was Program Director for the Study Abroad Program, Creative Writing in Dublin, Ireland.

Always in search of original characters and experiences, Jim Christy is a literary vagabond with few peers. He was once described by GeorgeWoodcock as 'one of the last unpurged North American anarchisticromantics'. His buddies have included hobos, jazz musicians, boxers,and non-academic writers such as Charles Bukowski, Peter Trower and Joe Ferone. “I never dismiss another’s story out of hand,” he writes, “no matter what it’s about or how outrageous it may seem.” Christy’s often wry reminiscences of his travels, trysts and trials are fueled by a hard-won pride. A gardener, a sculptor and a spoken word performer with a jazz/blues ensemble, Christy has been seen in film and television productions, usually in non-speaking roles as a thug or a gangster.