Unlikely Saints, July 2024
On July 18, 2024, the Unlikely Saints gathered at Bar Redux in New Orleans for a night of poetry, cupcakes, and fun! James Norman, JP Bartley, Walker Rose, and Daryl Gussin read their poems. This is the full footage of all four readers.
James Norman is a vagabond poet and carpenter who has crisscrossed the world in search of his next meal, or at least his next adventure. He has traveled via hover boat, hitchhike, train hop, Cessna (via a Craigslist rideshare, no less), etc. He is presently working on his ninth full-length poetry collection, tentatively titled Statute of Limitations. He also closely with Bruce Isaacson as an associate editor at Zeitgeist Press, a publishing company that has been continuously releasing new titles in the genre of “street poetry” since the eighties, cofounded by deceased poet, David Lerner. He has been published in Vice and King Kong Magazine.
JP Bartley, born and raised in New Orleans. Father of three girls. Author of Colorless Society (A Collage of Thought), 2009 Xlibris publishers. Just recently, a couple of poems on the Ogden Museum blog. When he’s not overworking, overthinking, or under the weight of a mediocre normal oppression, no worse than the long checkout lines at some retail giant, he’s yet, working for retail giants. So, writing and reading poetry, to process the brilliance and absurdity of human kind as he endeavors to turn noun into verb, in his own life is, the perpetual experiment of survival.
Walker Rose is a wanderer, a floundering idealist, a hellbent wordsmith trying to squeeze some nectar from the flowers of experience. On a mission with no definable goal, he’s found himself sailing overseas on a voyage bound for failure, hitchhiking the endless highway to nowhere, babysitting black market crops in the outlaw backcountry of Northern California through fire-choked summers and biblical downpours. He puts it all on the page from the perspective of a passenger on an out of control ride, a train fleeing the tracks’ command and ultimately following the path of least resistance.
Daryl Gussin is a writer and musician who has been awkwardly standing around at punk shows for the last twenty-something years. Thankfully at some point in his late teens he decided to become a little more productive, and has been working on zines, setting up shows, and playing in bands consecutively since then. In 2006, he became integrally involved in Razorcake fanzine where he is currently the managing editor. His writing revolves around the honest, bittersweet, and ultimately triumphant aspects of counterculture and its flavorful inhabitants. The heartbreaks, the implosions, and the defiant victories. Community over commercialism, create and destroy.
