Homage & Odes to the Stones: Two Poets Celebrate the Rock Band's 53rd Birthday at KGB

NEW YORK - June 6, 2015 - PRLog -- Two poets, one from New York, Hilary Sideris, and another from New Jersey, Rick Mullin, met on the New York City poetry circuit and discovered that they had both published poetry collections inspired by lives of the Rolling Stones. It seemed inevitable that they would read together, and they have decided to do just that to celebrate the 53^rd anniversary of the legendary band's debut performance. On July 12, 1962, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones  with Ian Stewart and Dick Taylor played their first gig billed as “The Rollin’ Stones” at the Marquee Club, 165 Oxford Street, London. Their material included the Chicago blues as well as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs. On Sunday, July 12, 2015, Sideris and Mullin will celebrate that historic event from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at KGB Bar, 85 East 4^th Street, East Village, New York City. Their material will be selected poems from their Stones-inspired poetry books.

“I’m looking forward to a kind of call-and-response reading with Hilary,” says Rick Mullin.  “Our poems are diametrically opposed stylistically, but we are covering the same territory -- Altamont, the excesses of the road, the vagaries of fame, the brilliant liability called Brian Jones…. Once we get going, we’ll be finishing each other’s sentences and following with our own stanzas. Hilary’s book is a knock-out, by the way!”

The birthday celebration will be complete with a genuine “Let It Bleed” birthday cake and a Stones trivia contest with free signed copies of Sideris’s “Most Likely to Die” and Mullin’s “The Stones Jones Canzones” awarded as prizes.

Hilary Sideris’s “Most Likely to Die,” published in 2014 by Poets Wear Prada, is an anecdotal accounting written in free-verse couplets in the voice of Keith Richards, based on Richards’s memoir, Life.  Steve Koenig, Editor of “Acoustic Levitation,” praises the book, “You needn’t give a toss about Keith Richards or his autobiography to love Hilary Sideris’s ‘Most Likely to Die.’ Each poem is a stand-alone vignette, with the lasting resonance of a haiku. But the cumulative power of this volume is visceral.”  Sideris works at the City University of New York.  Her poems have appeared in “Barrow Street,” “The Brooklyn Review,” and “Verse Daily,” among other places.  “Most Like to Die” is her fifth book of poetry.

Rick Mullin’s “The Stones Jones Canzones,” published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, is a suite of poems about the Rolling Stones written in the Renaissance Italian canzone form.  Paul Stevens, Editor of “Shit Creek Review,” calls the book “a wicked, picaresque tour-de-force through bizarre vignettes of the great rock legends, shot through the intricate refracting lens of the canzone form, and pulsing out wild layers of emblematic trope.”  Mullin is a senior business editor at “Chemical & Engineering News,” the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society. His poetry has appeared in “The New Criterion,” “American Arts Quarterly,” “The Raintown Review,” and other journals.  His most recent volume of poetry, “Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle,” was published in 2014 by Dos Madres Press.

Hilary Sideris, who will also be celebrating a 53^rd birthday this year, was introduced to the Stones by her older brother, Paul.  “His incessant playing of the Rolling Stones got me hooked.” Sideris says she is very excited to be sharing her love of the Stones and the microphone with Mullin who arranged for their joint reading at KGB Bar.

Since opening in 1993, the KGB Bar has become something of a New York literary institution, where popular authors come to read pro bono. This speakeasy-style bar has been named best literary venue in New York City by New York magazine, The Village Voice, and others.

The reading is free and open to the public.  While there is no cover, KGB encourages guests to patronize the bar by buying drinks.  Copies of Sideris's and Mullin's books will be available for sale and signing at the event.