Next stop: Deacon Blue Cafe

Last Wednesday I participated in a literary reading with, among others, the marvelous poet Samuel Menashe. The venue was the Deacon Blue Cafe at 417 Prospect Place in Brooklyn, between Grand and Classon, just several blocks up Washington Avenue from the Brooklyn Art Museum. The joint was jumping with words setting themselves spinning in all different directions. Usually literary readings are as enticing as open casket funerals: there is either much monotony and uniformity in the material being read or egos supersede timekeeping and one is subject, no, held hostage, to 45 minutes of tedious palaver. The Deacon Blue reading series is winningly electic and electric: besides Samuel Menashe and myself, there was a fine short story reader, a free-style hip-hop ranter, and a raconteur with a hilarious tale about domestic mischief in an African-American family set in the rural South during the fifties. If any of you wish to spin some fables, verse, or whatnot, let me know: we'll organize a reading with the series organizer, Michael Dorr, and welcome summer with some quality artists: you! j. curley