Arts Listings

Guitarist John Schott will join poet Steve Dickison in an unusual “back and forth, call and response” poetry and music improvisation as part of this coming Monday At Moe’s reading series, 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Ave. Admission is free. 

Poet Steve Farmer will also read. 

Owen Hill, who coordinates the reading series at Moe’s, explained how the show got put together after Dickison’s book Disposed (Post-Apollo Press) was published last year. The book earned him the Poet to Watch distinction from Independent Bookstores Awards, for which Hill was a reader. 

“It’s rare for him to publish,” Hill said. “He’s better known for being the director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State and for his work with Small Press Distribution. He’s a regular customer at Moe’s, so it was easy to convince him to read. He chose Steve Farmer as co-reader, and I thought of John Schott playing as an interesting combination with Steve’s poems, which are jazzy. John’s playing is all over the map, but I think of him as a jazz guitarist. And I didn’t know they knew each other. So they’ve worked something out to perform together, besides a solo set each.” 

Dickison said he has known Schott since the days that Yoshi’s was open on Claremont, before the club moved to Jack London Square. 

“Going ’way back to the days Yoshi’s was on Claremont near College, when he and Ben Goldberg worked in tandem a lot, in bands like Junk Genius, which played a lot of Monk and other bop-inspired work with sidemen who’ve since moved to New York,” Dickson said. “And I miss the old Beanbenders series on Shattuck, that musician-run thing that was done really out of pocket. You knew every Sunday you could walk downtown to the old bank and hear really amazing music. John played there a lot.” 

Dickison went on: “When I got to know John better and went over to his house, I found he was a deep reader of poetry. At his ’Round Midnight concert recently—he called it a midrash!—he had a table out with books, not just about Monk, but also Alfred Lord on the oral tradition in epic poetry.” 

Schott and Dickison are both Berkeley residents, “right around the corner from each other. I’m on Blake, which really was named after William Blake, and John’s on Parker. I like to think it was named after Charlie Parker!” 

Dickison even took guitar lessons from Schott a few years back. “I found out John’s been reading my book, so suggested we trade off in the call-and-response tradition,” he said. “What he plays will dictate what I read, and so on.” 

Steve Farmer, who lives in the Danville area, has put out books of poetry that include Medieval (Krupskaya, 1999) and Coracle (1988).