G.P. Skratz and Smooth Toad

5 APRIL 2012 — thursday

Poetry Flash celebrates Everything Else, a collaborative book of poems by the late Darrell Gray and G.P. Skratz, with reading/performance by G.P. Skratz and his group Smooth Toad (Skratz, vocals/guitar; actor Bob Ernst, percussion/blues harp; and Hal Hughes, fiddle/guitar), Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the event
Poet G.P. Skratz and his group Smooth Toad (Skratz, vocals/guitar; actor Bob Ernst, percussion/blues harp; and Hal Hughes, fiddle/guitar) will be celebrating the new collaborative book of poems, Everything Else, by Darrell Gray and G.P. Skratz, with drawings by Dave Morice and photographs by Shelly Vogel. The late poet Darrell Gray wrote "Actualism— Manifesto" at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1972, thus putting in motion a whirlwind of inspired nonsense that swept up at various times Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Marshall, Jim Nisbet, George Coates, and David Schein of the Blake Street Hawkeyes, Skratz, himself, and many others into paroxysms of poetry, art, music and Actualist Conventions. Andrei Codrescu says of Everything Else, "It brought back a wavelet of nostalgia and a horrible desire for coke. Go forth, my child. History's horny for us." G.P. Skratz is also the author of the book of poems Fun, the prose poem collection The Gates of Disappearance, and he was ghost writer of the Three Stooges biography, Larry, The Stooge in the Middle.