Alexandra Hartman's Ethos

J.C. Todd is author of What Space This Body (Wind Publications 2008), and two chapbooks, Nightshade and Entering Pisces, both from Pine Press. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner and on Verse Daily. Awards include two Leeway Awards for Poetry, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and fellowships to Schloss Wiepersdorf arts colony in Germany and the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Sweden. She has edited translation features on Lithuanian, Latvian and Slovene poetry The Drunken Boat and is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

Alexandra Hartman’s Ethos is an experimental concept in music and poetry performance that fuses Louis J. Porsi Jr.’s soulful electric bass guitar grooves and rhythms with Hartman’s topical and confessional spoken word poetry and prose. Hartman and Porsi explore a new edge in sound and monologue that they call, “Word.” Hartman has been involved in poetry and independent film for the past decade. She recently earned a master’s degree from Goddard College in embodiment studies and film, and much of her poetry focuses on the body, and bodies that “disobey” by not conforming to societal norms. Porsi is a multi-talented instrumentalist. He studied studio recording engineering and sound at Los Angeles Valley College. His musical endeavors span forty years and both coasts. Porsi says Word is sophisticated, but structurally simple. He says it’s aimed at audiences who appreciate progressive, experimental sound.

Veasey has been a journalist, editor, arts administrator, musician, writing teacher, and public radio host. He's produced two plays which were shown in Philadelphia and Lancaster.

As a journalist, he's written hundreds of articles, conducting interviews with David Lynch, Laurie Anderson, George Carlin and Joan Baez. Jack Veasey writes poetry concerning the working class and individuals alienated as a consequence of economic class, race, and sexual orientation.

Veasey has studied with a number of poets, including Etheridge Knight, Alexandra Grilikhes, and Ted Berrigan.

David A. Warner, writing in The Philadelphia City Paper said of Veasey's poetry: "Jack Veasey's poetry lets you know from the outset that the poor are the people he sings about, and that's that. His strongest poems are spare, sympathetic portraits that reveal whole histories of loneliness in small details. These are deceptively simple, surprisingly resonant poems."

Her verse has appeared in numerous publications. Dial is an entrepreneur and publisher, as well a respected East Coast poetry entertainer. Dail hosted the first Capital City Poetry Slam Competition, sponsored by the SisterArt, a local collective of women of color. Proceeds benefited the "Women of Strength," an Open Stage of Harrisburg production celebrating black women. A SisterArt member, she is known as "The Voice."

Dial is also an independent creative arts instructor working on her first spoken-word CD and publication of two volumes of poetry.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin suggests that monoglossia is always in essence relative, as one's own language (or presumably one's own dialect, ideolect, voice-zone, whatever one chooses to call it), "...is never a single language: in it there are always survivals of the past and a potential for otherlanguagedness...."