Readings at Parkside:
Naive Poems

The Parkside Lounge
317 East Houston Street
New York City
Saturday, October 19th, 4pm

Celebrate NAIVE POEMS with readings by —
Alan Felsenthal
Kye Potter
Lee Mary Manning
Matt Connors
Michael Klausman

NAIVE POEMS Volumes I and II are sourced from school district anthologies, student-edited chapbooks, and small printed efforts by teachers bringing together their students’ work — all from a geographically diverse sampling of American children and teens from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. These original mimeographed or offset chapbooks and journals highlight a classroom or school’s work at a particular moment in time. Intended to be handed out to family and friends or simply archived in the school library, these publications were rarely circulated beyond the zip code they were created in. Kye Potter & Michael Klausman have selected and edited the volumes in the spirit of a mixtape, fortunately sharing these exquisite works with a wider audience. 

Michael Klausman is a poet & publisher who lives along Colorado's Front Range. He co-edits & publishes the quarterly poetry print mag, Luigi Ten Co, and with Wry Press & its subpress Awry, presents a range of literary work both archival & new. Author of Aeolian Darts (Séance Centre, '17), he most recently edited & published a lost manuscript by the eccentric English modernist queer poet, Oswell Blakeston. A cassette of his soundworks under the moniker Fielding Daws was published by Love All Day in 2024.

Kye Potter is an artist working in painting, handbuilt ceramics and books. He’s a collector and curator with an interest in the post-Cage avant-garde and its continued imprint on contemporary culture. He’s published dozens of books and records and organized exhibitions and concerts. In addition to Naive Poems, recent projects include Jazz Protein, a cassette compilation of jazz / electronic music from the 80s, published by Pre-Echo and The Best of the Yellow Springs Police Report (2003, w/ Julia Dzwonkoski), ‘a microcosm of human folly condensed into a pamphlet’, re-published this year by Wry Press. He lives and works in Los Angeles.