Wordspace: David Meltzer & Michael Rothenberg / Rockpile Tour

David Meltzer—poet (Beat Thing; Big Eyes: Lester Young) musician and essayist (Writing Jazz; Reading Jazz; Shuffle Boil Magazine), and Michael Rothenberg—poet (Choose; Unhurried Vision) and editor (Collected Poems of Philip Whalen) will journey across the U.S. performing with local musicians as part of their Rockpile Tour. In Albuquerque they’ll join up with the Thunderbird Poetry Orkestra—named after the infamous Thunderbird Bar, watering hole for hippies and locals in Placitas. A free improvisation ensemble of myriad poet/musicians formed as an ongoing exploration of words and sound —as Mark Weber puts it, “The Thunderbird Ork is a cyclotron of instantaneous unknowing knowing, purely intention’d, honestly impermanent, perfectly dispersed. The tides that brought us in, also take us out.” JB Bryan, alto saxophone, percussion; Mark Weber, hubcapaphone; Leif Rustebakke, koto; Jon Baldwin, cornet; Mark LeClaire, cello; Daisy Kates, mellophone, balafon, percussion; Lou Liberty, taiko; Jim Burbank, djembe, didgeridoo; John Tritica, percussion; Riha Rothberg, percussion; plus special guest Terri Carrion, accordion.

Rockpile is made possible by a grant from Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, supported by grants from The James Irvine Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and is sponsored by Committee on Poetry, Inc.