Friday, September 26, 7:30 p.m.
Aaron Shurin’s new book is King of Shadows, a collection of narrative essays, just out from City Lights. Other books include Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005), A Door (Talisman House, 2000) and The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1999). His honors include National Endowment, California Arts Council, and San Francisco Arts Commission literary fellowships. A longtime Bay Area educator, he directs and teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
Anne Waldman is an internationally celebrated poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural/political activist and the author, most recently of Red Noir (Farfalla, McMillen & Parrish), In the Room of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press), Structure of the World Compared To A Bubble (Penguin Poets), and Outrider (La Alameda Press). She also co-edited The Angel Hair Anthology and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. She founded (with Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, the first Buddhist-inspired school in the western hemisphere. Her CDs include Battery: Live at Naropa and The Eye of The Falcon (with Ambrose Bye) and Matching Half (with Ambrose Bye & Akilah Oliver). She has participated in festivals in Berlin, Wuhan, (China), and Mumbai in the past year. Forthcoming: Humanity/Manatee, and the complete Iovis trilogy.
Ambrose Bye, musician (keyboard, guitar, voice) and composer, son of poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye, grew up in the environment of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, counting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as “poetic” godfathers. He graduated from The University of California, Santa Cruz and has studied at the music/production program at the Pyramind Institute in San Francisco. He has performed on stage with Anne Waldman and Bob Holman in New York’s Issue Project Room in a program that included Steve Buscemi reading form the work of William Burroughs and accompanied Anne Waldman at The Boulder Theatre’s “Music and Poetry for Progressives” headlined by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and Jello Biafra. He is working on new project which includes the poet Amiri Baraka.
At SPT, Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye will perform selections of Matching Half, their exciting 2008 CD with poet-performer Akilah Oliver, which mixes poetry and experimental music. These original compositions & soundscapes bring a new dynamic to “spoken word.”
