Audio By Carbonatix
Don’t expect a traditional poetry reading at Robert Rutherford’s release party for Dragging Out the Old Cheer, his first poetry collection. The former member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted is approaching his poetry much the same way he approached his music. “There’s going to be noise and loud instruments and the same sort of whiny, affected, aggressive indie-rock stuff that everybody seems to love in their art,” he says. “There’s a handful of [the poems] that I’ve turned into songs with friends, a couple of the guys from Rabbit Is a Sphere. So rather than read, we’re going to perform them.” Also playing will be Somerset Catalog, a band made up largely of former Rutherford bandmates.
The poems themselves emerged from a months-long period of isolation that Rutherford used as a platform for breaking free of the stagnation he was feeling as a writer. Seeking a new approach, he challenged himself to write a poem a day. The best of that work became Cheer, a collection inspired by everything from wild birds to the people he saw on the bus, full of “loneliness and drunkenness and depravity,” according to Rutherford.
The program starts at 8 p.m. tonight at Deer Pile, 206 East 13th Avenue. Admission is free; the book is $8. For more info, visit tiny.cc/rutherford.
Sat., Dec. 14, 8-11 p.m., 2013
