Poison Pen Reading Series with Paul Otremba and Andrew Porter

This recently published poet is toning up

Comments (0) By Dusti Rhodes Thursday, Jan 28 2010

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Poet Paul Otremba, who's appearing at today's installment of the Poison Pen Reading Series, is changing his tone. "Not to say I want to take it lighter, but I want to have tone varieties that reflect the range of experience that I have...that a human being has," says the Academy of American Poets prize winner, Krakow Poetry Seminar fellow, Washington Post contributor and recently published author (his collection The Currency came out in 2009). To do this, Otremba is allowing Prime Time Paul and Academic Paul to meet on paper - apparently they already meet frequently in his head. "Within ten minutes of my day, I could go from thinking about Aliasand Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angeland Kenneth Burke and Osip Mandelstam and Plato all in one breath, and I don't see that as any incongruity," he says. This plays out on the page in works that put forth hypothetical stories about ancient Greek philosophers ("Gorgias in Love"), and epistle-style poems in which Otremba addresses a person named "B," "who may or may not be real," he says. Otremba appears with fiction writer Andrew Porter at 8:30 p.m. Poison Girl, 1641 Westheimer. For information, call 713-527-9929 or visit www.poisonpenreadingseries.com. Free.
Thu., Jan. 28, 8:30 p.m., 2010