{"id":3915,"date":"2014-09-29T06:31:52","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T12:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=3915"},"modified":"2014-09-30T15:38:25","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T21:38:25","slug":"a-very-public-poet-celebrates-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/09\/a-very-public-poet-celebrates-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"A very public poet celebrates new book"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Vanishing\"<\/a>

Jessica Jane Hart<\/p>

Dave Caserio is throwing a launch party this Thursday for his new book of poetry, “This Vanishing.”<\/p><\/div>\n

Dave Caserio is a poet, but he is best known in Billings as a performer of poetry.<\/p>\n

In the past 10 years he has collaborated with musicians, dancers, actors, painters and other poets to create improvisational amalgams of creativity unlike anything else available in this part of the world.<\/p>\n

Caserio said he tries to capture what art was like in an oral culture, when movement, music and speech were all one, an unconscious fusion of forms.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these things come out of the same root for me,\u201d he said. \u201cThere really isn\u2019t a distinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caserio will be performing again this Thursday during a gathering to mark the publication of \u201cThis Vanishing,\u201d his first book of poetry. The book launch and signing will run from 5 to 7 p.m. at Buchanan Capital, 201 N. Broadway.<\/p>\n

He will read some of his poems accompanied by his frequent collaborator, bassist Parker Brown, and a couple of other musical guests.<\/p>\n

Caserio is a native of Chicago who lived in New York, Seattle and San Diego before settling in Billings in 2003. He has worked at Bistro Enzo during all his years here, making for a startling contrast between the demure waiter and the frenetic performance artist.<\/p>\n

He was at his incandescent best in \u201cA Feast for the Hunger Moon,\u201d presented in 2008 and 2009 at what is now the NOVA Center for the Performing Arts. He would read \u2014 or declaim or act out \u2014 some of his best poetry while a troupe of experienced jazz musicians played off his words and each other\u2019s music to create one-time-only songs that were alternately soothing and explosive.<\/p>\n

\"caserio<\/a>

The book cover features \u201cThought Transference,\u201d a painting by Michael Zansky.<\/p><\/div>\n

Other poets read, too, and during different parts of the evening free-form dancers would give writhing interpretations of what was being spoken. Painters did something similar, creating a work of art in just a few minutes, based on whatever poem was being recited.<\/p>\n

Caserio opened the performance by wandering into the audience, seated dinner-theater style, looking and sounding like a possessed street person, raving incoherently before bursting forth with bits of poetry or wisdom. Every time, there were clearly some in the audience who didn\u2019t know who Caserio was and seemed to be thinking, \u201cI knew I shouldn\u2019t have come to Montana Avenue!\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was an unsettling performance even for those in the know, so completely does Caserio lose himself in his characters. Another highlight of the Hunger Moon series was Caserio\u2019s recitation of scenes from \u201cBeowulf.\u201d Dressed in a tunic and carrying a staff, Caserio made Old English seem like a living language, showing how much meaning is held just in the sounds of words, and using dramatic gestures and expressions to convey the rest.<\/p>\n

Other collaborations were presented at the Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co.\u2019s Garage Pub. In \u201cWordSongs\u201d and \u201cArc of the Communal,\u201d Caserio and other poets, some of them quite young, performed on stage with musicians.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Conjure a Stubborn Faith,\u201d directed by Patrick Wilson and presented at the 2013 Fringe Festival, was a described by Caserio as \u201ca play for voices,\u201d and also involved live music. At the Yellowstone Art Museum, he performed for teachers earning continuing educational credits, and he has teamed up to perform with the Terpsichore Dance Company.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Through the Speakers Bureau of Humanities Montana, Caserio and Brown, the bassist, have taken their show to Billings high schools and to a dozen other towns across the state. He has done similar outreach across Eastern Montana under the sponsorship of the Billings YMCA\u2019s Writer\u2019s Voice program.<\/p>\n

He has even won a Tuney<\/a> \u2014 the music award created by the Billings Outpost \u2014 for best spoken-word artist. More important than the award, he said, was the acknowledgment that poetry can be considered part of an evening\u2019s entertainment, not merely a bookish indulgence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt shows that it\u2019s included, the way I think it should be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Caserio has also taught writing workshops for cancer patients and survivors at Billings Clinic. There, he was paired with a therapist, not a dancer or musician, but again there was collaboration and discovery.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did the same thing from different angles,\u201d he said of working with the patients, \u201cand that was not intended.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Chicago<\/a>Caserio has given readings at the High Plains Book Fest<\/a>\u00a0in Billings and will be taking part in the Festival of the Book <\/a>in Missoula in a couple of weeks. Later in October, he\u2019ll be reading at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival<\/a>\u00a0in Newark, N.J., which over the years has hosted Nobel laureates from around the world.<\/p>\n

Caserio prefers not to describe or characterize his poetry \u2014 \u201cCome see it live; come hear it\u201d \u2014 but fortunately other people have done so, including this complimentary review<\/a> from Sunday\u2019s Gazette.<\/p>\n

Martin Jude Farawell, director of the Newark festival, said Caserio\u2019s poems \u201cconnect us again and again to the thousand different things that, like us, are vanishing, and remind us that that, even while vanishing, we can sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tami Haaland, of Billings, Montana\u2019s current poet laureate, called the poems in \u201cThis Vanishing\u201d \u201cearthy and gently articulate \u2026 streetwise and elegant.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book of poetry involved other collaborations Caserio is eager to acknowledge. The cover painting, \u201cThought Transference,\u201d is by New York artist Michael Zansky, whose \u201cInsomnia\u201d exhibition showed at the Yellowstone Art Museum last year.<\/p>\n

The back cover photo is by Jessica Jane Hart, formerly of Billings, and the cover was designed by Peter Tolton, of Billings. Tolton has performed his own poetry at Caserio\u2019s events, as has James Hickman, who designed the book\u2019s interior.<\/p>\n

Editor’s note: <\/strong>Ed and John Kemmick, friends of Caserio, will play\u00a0some music with Parker Brown during Caserio\u2019s performance Thursday evening.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Caserio is a poet, but he is best known in Billings as a performer of poetry. In the past 10 years he has collaborated with musicians, dancers, actors, painters and other poets to create improvisational amalgams of creativity unlike anything else available in this part of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1420,1425,1424,1422,620,1423,1421,845,407],"class_list":["post-3915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-dave-caserio","tag-festival-of-the-book","tag-high-plains-book-festival","tag-james-hickman","tag-jessica-jane-hart","tag-martin-jude-farawell","tag-pete-tolton","tag-tami-haaland","tag-yellowstone-art-museum","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}