was a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It was led by a desire to support artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art. This website serves as an archive of Yale Union’s programming from 2011 through 2021.

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TOM BLOOD

EV

A reading of exp
Wednesday, March 28, 7pm
$5 suggested donation; Free for students and artists

Tom Blood will voice the advance copy of exp (extremely experimental poetry) into the first person. The book is hard to place. We could approximate and say the book is both funny and sad, or we could quote from it (See Fig. 1).

We prefer quoting rather than paraphrasing, as it permits you to show the thing itself rather than the pale and never quite right simulacrum that paraphrase is. The difficulty might come from the fact that Tom Blood is a poet, but this book of poetry seems to assault what passes for Poetry. This puts Tom Blood, the poet outside the old-nature-abiding-lyrical-boy network of Poetry. Is this thinking more hopeful than accurate? Actually, the idea of having a position at all with respect to poetry (of any kind) strikes us as the wrong thing to do. Having a position seems contraindicated.

Drinks and copies of exp will be on hand, “lingerie department autographs and/or dedications ok,” says Tom Blood. Tom Blood’s second book, The Sky Position, won Tom Blood the 2007 William Stafford/Donald Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Tom Blood lives in Portland.

Fig. 1