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Tonight at 7 p.m., at the onomatopoetic SPLAB in Columbia City, two poets who don't suck:

1. David Rowe* of New Orleans, reading from his collection Unsolicited Poems—poems that not only acknowledge their unsolicitedness (unlike all those other poems, trying to pretend they're wanted), but also are unpretentious, unannoying, often funny, and possibly great. If you require more adjectives, Bookslut.com called Unsolicited Poems “beautiful and chaotic and sexy and sonorous.”

2. Alex Bleecker, whom Paul Constant calls "local awesome poet" and who claims to have spent most of 2010 "being the falangster of love in southeast Asia" (I don't know what that means, either)—Bleecker is also one of the facilitators of Capitol Hill's Breadline reading series at Vermillion on Capitol Hill (the one tomorrow looks good).

Part of the mission of the Unsolicited Poetry Tour is to gather submissions for Dorado, a letterpress literary magazine from David Rowe's publisher, so poets are urged to bring poems (making them, for once, solicited).

*The conflict of interest here: David Rowe and I went to college together. He lived directly upstairs from me in the dorms at one point, and I could hear him walking around. He wore a wool plaid jacket—of the hunting variety, not professorial—nearly constantly, as far as I recall. He seemed brooding, but was actually quite pleasant when you talked to him.