SPT Presents: SUMMER WORKSHOPS!

We are so thrilled to announce these upcoming summer workshops! Please pass the word along to your friends and students.

SITE-BASED PRACTICES with David Buuck & Jessica Tully
Marin Headlands Bunkers>Sunday June 21, 11am-2pm
$40 ($30 for students and members)


Please join writer & critic David Buuck & artist & activist Jessica Tully for a site-specific workshop at the former military bunkers in the Marin Headlands. We will explore a wide range of methods and practices related to site-based writing & art practices, including several on-site exercises & experiments. This workshop is designed for ALL levels of interested writers & artists, to explore how we engage place, site, environment & the political histories therein as writers, artists, and citizens. We will provide optional pre-workshop reading that covers both the site's history as well as essays on site-writing & site-specific art practices. We will discuss & explore writing & research techniques as well as much more performative & embodied strategies of site-work, so be prepared to try new ways of thinking, moving, and working!

Note: We will arrange for car-pooling to the site, as well as lunch. Bring notebook, camera, sunscreen, outdoor shoes, layers for wind, etc. The Marin Headlands is home to several former military installations, including the bunkers, the Nike Missile Site, and the current home of the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Conceptualism and Craft with K. Silem Mohammad
CCA San Francisco Campus
Monday through Thursday July 6-9th
Time: 6pm-9pm $125 / $100 students and members


This four-day workshop will begin by examining and rehearsing various techniques central to Conceptualist poetics, broadly considered so as to encompass appropriation, transcription, and other versions of what Kenneth Goldsmith has called “uncreative writing,” as well as the deliberately awkward and expressively debased gestures associated with Flarf. We will then look at these techniques in relation to older and more traditional notions of craft: can there be coherent criteria for craft-based evaluation of texts written using blankly conceptual or intentionally “bad” methods? Do any of the familiar aesthetic categories still apply, and if so, how?

Oakland A's /Detroit Tigers Game with Bill Luoma
Oakland Coliseum
Saturday August 22nd
3:45pm workshop/6:05pm game
$40 includes admission to the game and a baseball to take home/ $30 students and members


In the spirit of the Basketball Aritcle by Meyer and Waldman and Yo-Yo's with Money by Berrigan and Schiff, we will spend some time working on the body of baseball & poetry. Or just poetry since that encompasses baseball.

*Note* Scholarship admission is available for those who need it. To sign up or get more information by emailing Samantha Giles at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com.

Robin Blaser 1925-2009

NEXT Friday 5/15: Gardner and Treadwell!

Please join us for this final event of our Spring season!

Friday May 15th, Timken Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco

Event begins at 7:30; reading at 8:00

$5-10 sliding scale; members and students FREE

Elizabeth Treadwell is the author of seven books including the recent Birds & Fancies (Shearsman, 2007) and Wardolly (Chax, 2008) as well as seven chapbooks including The Graces (Dusie wee, 2006). Writing in Stride magazine, Nathan Thompson has said, "Treadwell's is a difficult but deeply rewarding poetry. It has a precision and a tenderness all of its own." In The Believer, Stephen Burt wrote, "if you want a feminist invention that is at once comic and confident, melodic and bizarre, affectionate and committed to its principles—then Treadwell is the next poet for you." She is slowly working on a picture book as well as some long poems, one of which, "fleece pimsy" (formerly known as "Virginia or the mud-flap girl" and/or "Ancient Celebrity Tune-rot"), she will be reading from tonight.

Susana Gardner lives in Switzerland, where she writes, edits Dusie Press and makes things. Her first chapbook, To Stand to Sea, was published by The Tangent Press, translated into the Italian by Massimo Sannelli, and is forthcoming from Cantarena Press, Genoa. She is also the author of, Scrawl, Or, (from the markings of) the small her( o) which was published in part with the inaugural dusi/e-chap kollektiv and EBB Port which was featured in Jacket in 2008. Geraldine Monk called Gardner’s first full-length collection, [lapsed insel weary], “…a sequence of articulations on the enduring themes of loss, separation, and messy love…” [lapsed insel weary] was published by The Tangent Press in 2008.

This Friday: Stecopoulos and Zurawski in Oakland!

Join us this Friday, May 8, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. for this exciting night!

Please note the change of venue to the CCA Oakland Campus, Nahl Hall 5212 Broadway in Oakland

Eleni Stecopoulos's first book, Armies of Compassion, is forthcoming from Palm Press. The recipient of a Creative Work Fund grant for 2008-2010, she will curate a program series titled The Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice for The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, and write a book in response. She is currently at work on Earth Also is a Private Language, a book-length poem that takes place via the island of Evvia (Euboea): its geothermal springs and hydrotherapy traditions, mythology, and family stories from the island.

Magdelena Zurawski was born in Newark NJ and grew up in Edison NJ, but Providence RI feels like home because that's where she started writing and meeting writers and thinking of herself as a writer. Currently, she lives in Durham, NC, where she is studying 19th-century American literature at Duke. The Bruise, out now from Fiction Collective Two, is the winner of the 2006 Ronald Sukenick prize for innovative fiction. It is her first book.