ROCKPILE Poetry and Music Festival coming to St. Louis on Tuesday, November 24

ROCKPILE is coming to St. Louis. No, not the late 1970s/early 1980s rock band with Dave Edmonds, Nick Lowe, Terry Williams and Billy Bremner - it's the ROCKPILE Poetry and Music Festival, a collaboration between traveling and local performers that will take place at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, November 24 in the performance space at the Regional Arts Commission, 6128 Delmar.

ROCKPILE is the brainchild of poet, musician, and essayist David Meltzer (pictured) and Michael Rothenberg, a poet, songwriter and editor of Big Bridge Press. Inspired by "the tradition of the troubadour" and "the spirit of improvisation and collaboration," Meltzer and Rothenberg are traveling to eight U.S. cities to perform poetry, composed on the road, with local musicians in each city.

St. Louis will be the seventh stop of the ROCKPILE tour, which also will have visited New York City, Chicago and New Orleans before wrapping up in San Francisco. Meltzer and Rothenberg are documenting the tour online at http://www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/ with daily performance clips, journal excerpts, interviews, video and audio files.

Performers in St. Louis will include musicians Zimbabwe Nkenya (bass, mbira), Dave Black (guitar) and Bob Malone (piano), plus poets Michael Franklin, Shirley LeFlore, Michael Castro, K. Curtis Lyle, David Jackson, Alexander Balogh, Sean Arnold, Terri Carrion, Howard Schwartz, and Philip Gounis.

Admission is to the St. Louis ROCKPILE performance is free and open to the public. For more information, call 314-863‐5811 or visit the ROCKPILE Web site.