Small Press Traffic

we're going to hiatus-land

2011-02-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

This blog is clearly taking a nap.

Mosey on over to our website to get current content and up-to-date listings at smallpresstraffic.org

EVENT CANCELLED: DECEMBER 10th

2010-12-03T07:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

While Etel Adnan still holds this year's place of honor as SPT's lifetime achievement award winner, she will unfortunately not be in town to attend this event. Therefore, the event on December 10th is cancelled.

In recognition of our respect and admiration of Etel, we will be collecting materials to post on our website in honor of her. If you would like to contribute to this, please email smallpresstraffic@gmail.com.

Thanks much,
Samantha

SPT=YOU

2010-11-19T19:13:00.000-08:00

Dear Friend of SPT,

It would mean ever so much to us over at Small Press Traffic if you would take a few moments to fill out our anonymous online survey here.
Your responses will help us to continue providing the kinds of programs and events that you find most fun, inspiring and relevant.
Thanks ever so,
Samantha.

still need to renew your membership to Small Press Traffic? Visit smallpresstraffic.org to join today!

Please join us for a Tribute to Leslie Scalapino

2010-11-19T14:17:00.000-08:00

You're invited to the premiere production of Leslie Scalapino and Kevin Killian's STONE MARMALADE!

Saturday, December 4 · event begins at 7:30pm
Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street, San Francisco, CA
entrance $8-15/ members free
Stone Marmalade, directed by Kevin Killian
Visuals by Wayne Smith with a cast including Lindsey Boldt, Karla Milosevich, Brent Cunningham, Taylor Brady, Laurie Reid, Erin Morrill, Tom Comitta, Craig Goodman, Jocelyn Saidenberg, David Brazil, and others.

Stone Marmalade retells the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, as seen through the theoretical writings of Giorgio Agamben. Scalapino and Killian attended Agamben's lectures at UC Berkeley 15 years ago, and misusnderstood the philosopher's thick Italian accent so thoroughly that they got quite a lot wrong in their script.

When the Nazis inducted prisoners into the death camps, they first took away their passports and stripped them of their former nationality. Agamben said that doing so reduced the prisoners to "mere birth-life," but we thought he was saying "bird-life," and so a lot of our play is bird oriented. It takes place in Hell, where Eurydice, the Queen of Hell, operates a duty-free shop (another Agamben notion about the extra-juridical status shared by duty-fgree shops and by the death camps) assisted by an easy-going PA, Kathy.

The women find themselves in a double triangle, both of them variously attracted ti Orpheus and to the visiting Giorgio Agamben. But the play doesn't really begin until Kathy gets pregnant and will give birth to a bird unless Eurydice allows her to have a human baby, and also, the gates of hell part and Julia Roberts has come to make a film there, or to die there, no one is sure which. Over the past 15 years we have put on various scenes, but this will be the first time the play has ever been seen in its entirety.

_________
Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

In childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Asian Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne, throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom continued these travels including trips to Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced by these travels. She published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Scalapino’s most recent publications include a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), and her selected poems It’s go in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (UC Press) was published in 2008. In 1988, her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In 1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly 100 titles includes authors such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).

Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute.

Of her own writing, Scalapino says “my sense of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension itself that ‘one is not oneself for even an instant’ – should not be,’ is to be participation in/is a social act. That is, the nature of this practice that’s to be ‘social act’ is it is without formation or custom.” Her writing, unbound by a single format, her collaborations with artists and other writers, her teaching, and publishing are evidence of this sense of her own practice, social acts that were her practice. Her generosity and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere evident to those who had the fortune to know her.

Scalapino has three books forthcoming in 2010. A book of two plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals Zoom was released this summer by Post-Apollo Press; and a revised and expanded collection of her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.

YOU ARE INVITED TO AWESOMENESS

2010-11-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic and Encyclopedists (Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis & Kate Schatz) cordially and entusiastically invite you to join us for an epic literary extravaganza...

X-REFERENCE: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA VOLUME 2 F-K LAUNCH PARTY!

READINGS & PERFORMANCES by
...
Mary Burger
Tammy Rae Carland
Tyler Carter
Jaime Cortez
Amanda Davidson
Gloria Frym
Bob Glück
Sailor Holladay
Christian Nagler
Kirthi Nath
Jocelyn Saidenberg
Sara Seinberg
Chuleenan Svetvilas
Bronwyn Tate
Brian Teare
Amy Trachtenberg
Sarah Fran Wisby
and possibly more!

Music from the Alameda Ensemble!

Get your copy of Vol 2 F-K, hot off the press!

BE THERE!

November 19, 2010
event begins at 7:30pm
entrance $8-15/members free
Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street, San Francisco, 94107

SPT Presents: the Shakers! a play by Kevin Killian and Wayne Smith

2010-10-18T09:03:00.001-07:00

SPT PRESENTS: The Shakers! a play by Wayne Smith and Kevin Killian

Friday, October 22 · event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 entrance/ students and members FREE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Timken Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More Info Shortly after the US Civil War, a band of spiritual pioneers live simply on a rural commune, rejecting the temptations of the outside world. United in their devotion to Mother Ann Lee (but separated by gender), they invent ingenious chairs still used today: rocking, high, electric and wheel, among others. In ecstasy, they whirl, tremble and shake on the floor, hence the name "Shakers." But wrinkles are beginning to appear in their 19th century utopia of clean lines. A rebellious Shaker girl with amnesia begins naming the stars in the sky, daring to dream of a life outside her village; an aged patriarch hides a shameful secret; an old woman tells fortunes by listening to apples ripen; a wounded and bitter Civil War veteran watches as his world divides in two. Near the end, a new broom is invented.

SPT and Mill College present: Hiromi Ito!

2010-10-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

SPT and Mills College present: Hiromi Ito!

Tuesday, October 19 · 7:00pm
Mills College, Mills Hall Living Room
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA

Born in Tokyo, Hiromi Itō is regarded as one of the most prominent poets of contemporary Japan. Since her debut in the late 1970s, she consistently has expanded her creative spheres: from issues of sexuality to the oral traditions of Native Americans, the lifecycles of plants, and migrant and transnational experiences.

About Itō’s first U.S. edition of work, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō, renowned poet Anne Waldman writes, “Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth. . . . Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats.”

Itō has published more than 10 critically acclaimed collections of poetry; several novels; and a dozen books of essays, including Oume (Green plums, 1982), Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjuhimeko, 1993), and Kawara Arekusa (Wild grass upon a riverbank, 2005), which won the prestigious Takami Jun Prize.

SPT PRESENTS: A Community Writing Itself

2010-09-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Please join us for:

A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area
including participation with Kathleen Fraser, Robert Glück, Michael Palmer, Camille Roy, Sarah Rosenthal, & Elizabeth Treadwell reading for Leslie Scalapino

in excitement for the new anthology edited by Sarah Rosenthal (Dalkey Achive, 2010)

Saturday October 9, 2010
event begins at 7:30 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, CCA SF
1111 8th Street, SF, CA 94107
$8-15; SPT members and students free

Readings by authors featured in the book
Q&A with audience members*
Wine, water and refreshments

You are invited to bring your own questions for Kathleen, Robert, Michael, and Camille, about any aspect of their work. Below please find a (not exhaustive!) list of links in case that's helpful as a starting point.

More about the project:
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100098560

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) and the chapbooks
How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000), and not-
chicago (Melodeon, 1998). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including
ecopoetics, Bird Dog, textsound, dusie, and Fence, and is anthologized in Bay Poetics
(Faux, 2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 2005) and hinge (Crack,
2002). Her essays and interviews have appeared in journals such as Jacket, Denver
Quarterly, Rain Taxi, Otoliths, and New American Writing. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award and grant-supported writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center,Soul Mountain, and Ragdale. An Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, she has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and Santa Clara University as well as privately, and writes curricula for the Developmental Studies Center.

Kathleen Fraser:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Fraser
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/fraser/
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/kathleen_fraser01.shtml
http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Fraser.htm
http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/2009/01/cant-stop-cars-poemtalk-13.html
http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron/volume4/contents/index.html
http://jacketmagazine.com/31/lett-prit-fras.html
http://jacketmagazine.com/25/guest-iv.html

Michael Palmer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Palmer
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/98
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/palmer/palmer.htm
http://www.poemhunter.com/michael-palmer/
http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2006/09/michael-palmers-poetry_07.html
http://archjournal.wustl.edu/node/36
http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/external/Mary/archive/Mary_spring2003/interviews/palmer.htm
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=181659
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0ilP2PX7rA

Camille Roy:
http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooTwentytwo/roy.html
http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooTwentynine/roy.html
http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/issue_two/quotes_Camille.html
http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/roy.html
http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_2_1999/current/forum/forum.html http://blogs.salon.com/0001600/
http://www.cca.edu/calendar/1174

Robert Glück:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Gluck.php
http://www.sfsu.edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/gluck.html
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/08/spotlight-on-robert-gluck-jack.html
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2004spring/gluck.shtml
http://www.dipity.com/timetube/YouTube_Graphic_Narrative_Storytelling/list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Narrative

In Case You Missed It: A reading report on Ariana Reines

2010-09-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

by Steven Lance

Ariana Reines did not walk onstage in a pantyhose helmet. She wasn’t wearing a burkha of trash bags over a scotch-tape bra that crinkled her boobs and refracted the spotlight. As the audience clapped and finished red cups of prosecco, Ariana did not rip through her black plastic outerwear, break her stick-on nails and dig the stumps into her arms until they bled, “saying something about women and fashion.”

That had been the plan, though, she said.

As it happened, Ariana Reines took the stage modestly in a black sweater and black pants, with a fifth of Old Grandad as her only accessory. She had stayed somewhere downtown the night before, she said, somewhere cheap; bedbugs and “fucking the guy from the hotel” had kept her from finishing her ensemble in time.

“But this is a poetry event,” Ariana said, “so we can still appreciate it conceptually.”

She promised scary surprise for the end of the night. I can only imagine what everyone was imagining. Then she asked any audience-members who could already tell they weren’t going to like her to leave. It’ll save us all time, she said. She waited. No one moved.

I sat in the shadowy safety of the comfortable seats, wishing I could be Ariana Reines, lusting after Ariana Reines, fearing Ariana Reines. Her performance at CCA last Friday was, among many other things, sort of early punk: glammy, visceral, abrasive, smart, funny. I came away feeling as if I had split my night between an intellectualist literary thing and an grungy house-show in Oakland.

In the contemporary poemosphere, Ariana’s work is unique, partly because she does things many poets seem afraid to do. She talks about fucking. She risks things, emotions. She valorizes “the work that humiliates itself.” But there’s more to her than scandalizing the bourgeoisie. She’s obscene, yeah, but she never comes off as sensational; she’s emotional, but never sentimental — and she’s intellectual, but not quite academic. I think she’s our Catullus.

Or our Exene Cervenka. It doesn’t really matter whom she’s channeling; she seems to be a writer who is always, necessarily, what she is. I’m misquoting a line from one of her poems by saying this, so I’ll throw the real thing in here:

“When I am on all fours and I have to pee and he has to pee and he fucks me the tension in our bellies and the blood in our middles makes us have to be what we are.”

I like this line because I would never have written it in a thousand lifetimes. And also because it’s really complicated. What it’s describing is a sex act that leads not to transcendence, godliness, soulification, but to something like ecstatic incorporation. Not toward a soul but a body: the penetrating force is Sebastian’s arrows, not Christ’s wounds. It’s a figure of dualism conflating itself and becoming whole. And this seems to rhyme with something I noticed in the reading.

At least since Wagner’s innovations at Bayreuth (most essentially, killing the house-lights and nailing down the seats), theaters have been structurally and systematically turning audiences into voyeurs, performers into spectacles, depersonalizing everyone. The theater last Friday at CCA, with its movie-house chairs, convincing spotlights, and elevated stage, was fully equipped to do the same — but Ariana refused to be aestheticized. Every time she felt the fourth wall descending, Ariana attacked it like a German kid with a sledgehammer, or Don Rickles. She talked to the audience, inviting questions after almost every poem, passed the Old Grandad to a friend in the front row, and interrogated anyone who looked like they might be heading to an exit.

“Goodbye, Mister,” Ariana stopped one poem to say. “Everyone, we have lost the man in stripes.”

“I’m just peeing,” said the man in stripes (who later proved his good faith with involved questions about Ariana’s translations).

Ariana never failed to be funny in these exchanges, and was usually comically self-deprecating (she did her best to minimize even her most formidable credentials, such as translating the writings of Anarcho-Zionists Tiqqun, and serving as French interpreter on a UN relief mission to Haiti) but I found myself wondering whether the moments of banter between poems weren’t themselves literary events, or at the very least, somehow, expository. Thinking about this during the reading, I typed unnecessarily cryptic notes in my phone: “Persona as poem.” “Body = Body of Work.”

But I was probably missing the point, because the poems were holding it down on their own. Ariana is sexy and charismatic, and seems to have strong ideas about how her work and her public persona should be experienced, but the poems would be good even without all of this.
Another thing: I get the impression from hearing Ariana read that she’s an expert in Medieval French literature, which would make sense in a very neat way. Besides being our Catullus or whatever, I think she’s also something like a troubadour: she writes in the vernacular, she makes art of her romantic adventures, she spreads poetry beyond the clerics, and, also, secretly, she sings.
Troubadour-like, she invited the audience to come closer before she started reading Friday. She began and ended the night with covers. The first was spoken: she read the lyrics to Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” which became an incantation in her hands, more magical and just as melancholy as the well-known Jimmy Durant interpretation. “Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few / September, November / And these few precious days I'll spend with you / These precious days I'll spend with you.”
She stood while reading this, but knelt for her own poems. If issues of stability and the less-than-half-full bottle of Old Grandad were a factor in her decision, then I can only say that Ariana is a very classy and subtle drunk.

Explaining that she had read from The Cow last time she was in San Francisco, Ariana performed only works from Court de Lion and her new book, Mercury, which is coming out in four installments from Fence Books.

I was especially into a poem called “Palace of Justice,” which is going to be part of Mercury, so I was happy to find a selection from it on Fence’s website. Here’s a selection from that selection:

You shake your head like Stevie Wonder when you come
Your wife says I am a skank who looks like a rat
I have to admit I agree with her
And I do not understand altogether
My tendency toward violent disclosure
As though I deserved it or
As though you did. This does not matter however
Because inside the Palace of Justice
There sits a craggy man
Whose desolate honesty belongs to the earth and to earthly things
And in this respect his desolation is accorded to the evil
Only of earthly things

If I were in grad school right now, I would write a paper called “Neo-Neotericism in the Poetics of Ariana Reines.” Since I’m not, I won’t, but I will say that Ariana’s poetry gets to me in a way that most other new work doesn’t. Yes, I do like that it scandalizes my bourgeois decorum, but it’s more than that.

Last spring, when Ariana was the visiting Holloway Poet at UC Berkeley, I was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. And the Ariana Reines I got to know a little in this class was a revelation.

Ariana Reines, the one in the poems, is superhuman, superhumanly vulnerable, and impossibly cool. She’s the bloody-nosed older sibling every girl and boy wants to be, the one who has a lot of sex and is famous and probably carries a knife.

In the workshop, Ariana was still inalienably cool, but she was also kind, responsive, fanatically well-read, and a talented teacher with expansive tastes in poetry. She encouraged us to break free from the workshop’s mandate of safely-departicularized vagueness. She challenged us to write poems that risked something, poems that made us uncomfortable, poems that made us weep. She fought against slickness, against retreating into jokiness. And she exhibited very good taste in the work she brought in to share with us: I still have most of these photocopied sheets at home. The whole experience was a wonderful treat.

I should get back to describing the reading, though, and here’s a good point for re-entry. Remember the scary surprise Ariana mentioned at the beginning? It turned out to be not all that scary, and sort of wonderful. Last time I saw Ariana read, she was denouncing The Watchmen for injuring Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” by playing it over terrible superhero sex. She called for a moratorium on its use in media. And then I remembered reading, in Cour de Lion, something about listening to Leonard Cohen to feel “the popular emotions.”

Everyone has a special relationship with Leonard Cohen, I know, but I might speculate that, for Ariana, he is linked to an ideal sincerity, a personal emotional register of pain and beauty. Maybe not. Maybe I’m saying more about myself than about her. Either way, the scary thing turned out to be “Hallelujah.” Ariana brought a guitar from backstage, apologized effusively, then sang the haunting song in what one audience-member called “a wonderful quaver” and other audience members described as an honestly good voice. Even her finger-picking was impressive, at least to me. It was really a moving experience. Like Don Quixote calling to his Dulcinea, Ariana was identifying and saving something beautiful from years of abuse.

After the reading, when the audience spilled out to have a weekend night in the city Ariana stayed behind for a long time, talking to the people crowding around. And this was the Ariana that I remember from our workshop, the Ariana who sang “Hallelujah” and in doing so undid a generation of media exploitation and cheapening. She was warm, sincere, and kind — what she is. I walked out and into the misty nighttime, feeling very lucky to have been there.

SPT PRESENTS: NATHALIE STEPHENS: Vigilous, Reel: Desire (a)s accusation

2010-09-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a talk by Nathalie Stephens: Vigilous, Reel: Desire (a)s accusation

Saturday September 25, 2010
event begins at 7:30pm
CCA Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro Street
San Francisco, CA

____

N S (Nathalie Stephens) writes l'entre-genre in English and French. Her books include We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010), Carnet de désaccords (2009), The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (2007), and Je Nathanaël (2003/2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian. There is an essay of correspondence (2009) : Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published (2007) as L'absence au lieu. Also, a collection of talks, At Alberta (2008). Besides translating some of her own work, Stephens has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, John Keene, Édouard Glissant. She lives, she thinks, in Chicago.

This event has been possible in part by the collaborative efforts of the New Reading Series at 21 Grand and the Poetry Center at SFSU, both venues at which NS will be reading next week. Please check http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/ and http://newyipes.blogspot.com/ for more details.

an evening with ARIANA REINES

2010-09-09T10:42:00.001-07:00

You should come to this.

Please join us for an evening with one of the most brilliant.

an eveing with ARIANA REINES
Friday September 10th at 7:30pm
Timken Hall, CCA SF
1111 8th Street, San Francisco 94107

______________

Books by Ariana Reines include The Cow (Alberta Prize, Fence: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007), Save the World (Mal-O-Mar:2010), and Mercury (forthcoming Fence: 2011), and the translations The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal by Jean-Luc Hennig (Semiotext(e): 2009) and My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire (Mal-O-Mar: 2009). Telephone, her first play, was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in 2009, winning two Obies and broad acclaim. During that time she was Virginia C. Holloway lecturer in Poetry at UC Berkeley. In Spring 2010 she lived in Los Angeles and worked as a translator and uncredentialed therapist with trauma clinicians, medical workers, and children around Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Right now she's in New York working on music with members of Psychick TV and Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog.

SAVE THE DATES: the FALL SEASON

2010-08-28T12:30:00.001-07:00

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. We are thrilled to invite you to our upcoming season- filled with tributes and performances and celebrations of community.

Our Fall lineup is as follows:

Sept 10: an evening with ARIANA REINES
at Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco

Sept 25: a talk by NATHALIE STEPHENS: Vigilous, Reel: Desire (a)s accusation
at Graduate Writing Studio, CCA San Francisco, 195 de Haro

Oct 9: community writing itself: conversations with vanguard writers of the Bay Area
with SARAH ROSENTHAL
and contributors MICHAEL PALMER, KATHLEEN FRASER, BOB GLUCK and CAMILLE ROY with a reading of LESLIE SCALAPINO by ELIZABETH TREADWELL
at Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco

Oct 19: an evening with HIROMI ITO (co-presented by Mills College)
at 7:00PM at Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland

Oct 22: the Shakers- a play by KEVIN KILLIAN and WAYNE SMITH
at Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco

Nov 19: a celebration of The Encyclopedia Project with TISA BRYANT, KATE SCHATZ and MIRANDA MELLIS featuring performances from TAMMY RAE CARLAND, GLORIA FRYM, BOB GLUCK, CHRISTIAN NAGLER, JOCELYN SAIDENBERG, SARA SEINBERG, CHULEENAN SVETVILLAS and SARAH FRAN WISBY Music from Jacob Eichert & Co., surprise cameos, and much, much more!
at Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco

Dec 4: a tribute to LESLIE SCALAPINO
at Timken Hall, CCA San Francisco

Dec 10: SPT's Lifetime Acheivement Award: ETEL ADNAN
site TBA

Dec 19: an evening with FIONA TEMPLETON
at Graduate Writing Studio, CCA San Francisco

** all events begin at 7:30pm unless otherwise noted

As we gear up for the Fall, I hope you will take a moment to renew your support of Small Press Traffic, which makes our events possible. Of course, as a member you’ll again receive free admission to all of Small Press Traffic regular events. But you’ll also gain the satisfaction of knowing that you are supporting some of the most exciting and innovative writers of our time.

Please renew your SPT membership today to help us reach our goal of 50 new and renewing members by September 30th. There’s no better time than now! You can visit www.paypal.com and use smallpresstraffic@gmail.com in the “To” field, or drop your renewal in the mail and send to 1111 8th Street, San Francisco, 94107.

Thank you and see you soon!

Samantha

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Poets Theater 2011

2010-08-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

In a few months Small Press Traffic will be celebrating our ten-year anniversary of Poets’ Theater! Poets Theater is an annual festival in which innovative works are performed, enduring avant-garde plays showcased, and the boundaries of theater generally jostled by artists and writers in collaboration to ask questions around and negotiate the possibilities of poetics and – and in – performance.

Each year this event has brought large audiences in appreciation of, and in engagement with, this ongoing and evolving community of writers and performers, and is always one of SPT’s major fundraising events. This year we are delighted to announce two evenings of new plays and performance works and most importantly, we want you to be involved.
We’d like to invite you to consider contributing a performance to this year’s events, slated for January 2011.

Contributions could can range from brief play to improvised performance to participatory instructional pieces to cross-genre collaboration – or anything you might discover between or beyond those suggestions. For example, you could submit a two minute piece with the instruction to have it be performed four different times throughout the night by different performers. Or you could submit a more "traditional" 10 minute play or a set of instructions for the audience. You get the idea, right?

Unfortunately, given this is our big fundraiser, we won’t be able to offer payment for your participation, but the experience of the festival affords communion, conversation, sometimes a little collusion and always a lot of fun. We really hope you'll submit your ideas!

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
1. All proposals must be submitted September 15th to poetstheater@gmail.com.

2. Proposals must be no longer than one typed 8.5x11 page of text.

3. Proposals must be for performances that will not exceed 10 minutes in length.

4. Proposals should include the following: a basic idea (with maybe some lines of dialogue); general technical needs for the performance (music, lighting , props etc.); number of performers; and, if you are unable to attend but would like to send in a proposal for others to perform on your behalf, a suggestion for a director/performers.

5. Proposals should reflect the constraint of the performance space, which has a limited stage area, minimal lighting, and minimal rehearsal access.

We, of course, would love to accept every proposal we receive, but will sadly have to select only 15-20 proposals. We will notify contributors by October 1st regarding their submission, as well as next steps and further details for selected entries.

Please feel free to e-mail with questions and the like. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

David Buuck, Cecil Giscombe, Lauren Shufran, Karen McKevitt and Samantha Giles
The SPT PT ’11 Committee

Reading Report: Aaron Vidaver & Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

2010-06-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

(belated) Reading Notes: Aaron Vidaver & Dorothy Trujillo Lusk @ SPT 17 April 2010

(mishearings/mistranscriptions left intact)

AVid: "Primary Evaluations (1975-95)" — text from twenty years worth of reports from AV's time in the Canadian educational system. Ideologies of institutional & bureaucratic discourses — of the individual, trained in/thru language. A/poetics of the ideological state apparatus.

"Aaron has made good progress this year in reading"

"Aaron's own writings are fluent"

"I would like to see him become a more independent worker"

— 'confessional' in an uncanny, discomforting way — class on display, as framed from 'outside' (the 'individual') & 'inside' (the 'system'). Thinking here too of Dana Teen Lomax's _Disclosure_

"try not to include too many monsters, Aaron"

"When he expresses this information on paper..."

— increasing discomfort, like looking through someone else's personal files. But that's exactly what we're doing? Listening to such? Made yet more discomforting given the subject's reading them to us? (Still — we can keep at bat w/ 'oh, cute, what a precocious child!' - the pre-writer, the not-yet-Vidaver...)

"If you want to enjoy the next level, you'll want to put out more effort"

— effort, what is effort? what is a life? but the accretion of 'effort'? as determined by...?

—Who keeps this data? Where? (esp. pre-digital) (AV as archivist) (what states keep, what families keep)

"capable but erratic"

"failure's likely, unless a radical turnaround in effort"

— so many of these phrases also can be read/heard as commentaries on the text itself, self-reflections or meta-commentary

— and now onto 'post-secondary', here culled from teachers' margin notes on AV's writing:

"I think you get the point"

"Aaron, I *loved* reading your journal"

"Your throwaway remarks about Hegel and Marx..."

— as a teacher, impressed by extent of feedback — so intimate, anonymous (here, now, for/to us), at times seemingly rote/assembly line, yet still — addressed to *me*, when/where does such interpellation spill over into tenderness?

"I learn so much every time I read your journal"

— the archival impulse — q. of what a *self* is, over time, accumulated in language & documents — the 'complete works', autobiography (by other means?) of a writer/intellectual — the coming of age (non-fiction) novel — avoiding easy critique of nationalist educational systems, since foregrounded is the way in which one makes sense of oneself in response to such 'feedback' — & how the feedback develops over time, into what? a reputation? a sense of who/what-one-is? a guage of one's 'effort' (in relation to what norms, what expectations?). State-us updates.

-----

DTL:

The dense, thick, politicized language, at-times-neutered *you* & *my*, soft (?) anger...

"since I'm a whiner, only in person..."

quick — but not spitting — *intensities* — i.e. intimacies are not in and of themselves *positive*/good — abjection w/o cyncism or self-pity

(where my nipples touch yr nipples the political is personal)

"Why do I have a phony English accent?"

— canadian & class identities

"former sonnets all for the plunder"
"froth management"
"collected glut"

— *where* is 'Culture?" she asks — where/how/when does culture live/act?

"I want you all to get up for art"

"But how did I *get* here?"

— then some multi-lingual work — Chinook, Italian, Eastern European, French — purposively clunky prosodies pressing up against the glitch-play -> translations that retain DTL's stuttering pushing-pulsing pressing up against sense/nonsense sense-making/marking, as well as chafing some formalisms of 'pure' language v. tone/sound – 'old english' — "I dreamt as a dog"

"England — bunch of ships"
"Spain — bunch of ships"

("anti-tumblehome / for fallen comrades")

"Is that a penis in your pocket or are you just going to shoot me?"

— Such events as 'bringing the news' — from elsewhere, not just the 'reading' but the context, contrasts, talk, drinks, histories, counter-histories, jokes, gossip, torqued cynicisms, trans-local book-trade, cross-border interrogatives, all that & more ---

— David Buuck

Ending the Season with a Bang

2010-05-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all who came out to support Small Press Traffic at our end-of-the-season RELIQUARIUM, and thanks to all who donated from afar...

Thanks to Thirsty Bear for food, Cassie Smith for drinks, Kit Robinson & Bahia Son for music & dancing (!), Adam Fagin for all sorts of before-during-and-after help, Frank Bash, the SPT board members, all the artists & writers & celebs who donated auction items, and especially ED Samantha Giles, who set everything up - and then tore the house down w her MCing, auctioneering, and dancing...

see our flickr page for more photos & see you in the fall!!

Small Press Traffic needs YOU

2010-05-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends of Small Press Traffic--

As you know, Small Press Traffic has been supporting the innovative writing communities of the Bay Area for more than 35 years. Each year you are invited to enjoy the communal and theatrical pleasures of Poets Theater, to hear a diverse array of writers from the Bay and far beyond read and discuss their work. Now, to help us keep the poetry love and logos happening, we are inviting you to attend and/or make a donation of any size to SPT.

Here's the 411:

On Saturday, May 22nd, SPT is about to host a new, mysterious and exciting event: It's called Reliquarium and will feature an auction of reliquary objects representing the artistic DNA of the smart and famous. You'll be able to bid on UNIQUE items such as:

a hat worn by JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
eyeglasses worn by JONATHAN LETHEM
a tear-stained handkerchief by LEMONY SNICKET
"treated" bound proof of All the Whiskey in Heaven: altered to a one-of-a-kind piece of art by CHARLES BERNSTEIN
a dream journal by JULIANA SPAHR
a skydiving outfit worn by BHANU KAPIL
a shadow box of used pill bottles by DONNA DE LA PERRIERE
a handwritten journal filled in at his grandmother's house by ANSELM BERRIGAN
Leg pendant from Catedral Metropolitana de la Asuncia de Mara in Mexico City worn around after FRANK SHERLOCK's 2007 emergency knee surgery, due to meningitis
the totally un-authenticated upper third molar tooth of GERTRUDE STEIN

and MANY MANY MORE!

PLUS: Kit Robinson's band Bahia Son will be playing Latin Jazz, Salsa and Cuban son!

The Reliquarium will take place at 5:30pm on Saturday, May 22nd at the:

Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

The entrance fee of $20 includes beverages and nibbles graciously provided by ThirstyBear Brewing Company.

Do you live too far away to make the event? Is your social calendar already full? You can STILL help keep SPT afloat.

On of our Board members, Gloria Frym is pledging a matching grant of up to $500. So if you buy a ticket or make a donation as a result of this message, write GF on your check, she'll match the amount, up to $500. Each $ you donate means $2 to Small Press Traffic!

Please address checks to:
Small Press Traffic
California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

OR: just visit PAYPAL at www.paypal.com and make a secure and easy contribution. First, you'll need to take one minute to set up a secure PayPal account if you don't already have one. Then, log into your paypal account and select the "send money" tab and put smallpresstraffic@gmail.com in the "TO" recipient field and make a contribution in any amount. To indicate that you are contributing based on this email, you can include "RTM" in the note field.

No contribution is too small. Really!

Thanks!
Samantha

TOMORROW: Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer!

2010-05-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a conversation and book launch with poets Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer!

Tuesday, May 11, 2010
8:00pm - 9:30pm
Taube Center for Jewish Life
3200 California Street San Francisco, CA

This new collection of essays (from the University of Alabama Press) by Jewish poets and writers (including Paul Auster, Jerome Rothenberg, Marjorie Perloff and others) highlights key issues of identity, and self–representation, and aesthetic practice for Jewish poets in the 20th century. Join two contributing poets, Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer, for a discussion on how being Jewish reflects on their poetics and how the tradition of the avant garde informs their identities as Jews.

Charles Bernstein is the author of 40 books, ranging from large-scale collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, translations, and collaborations. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems ( 2010) from Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Recent full-lengtht works of poetry include Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). He has published two books of essays and one essay/poem collection: My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1999); A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992); Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon Press, 1986, 1994; reprinted by Northwestern University Press, 2001). Shadowtime (Green Integer, 2005) is the libretto he wrote for Brian Ferneyhough's opera and Blind Witness (Factory School, 2008) collects the libretti he wrote for Ben Yarmolinsky.

Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PENNsound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsund); and editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu). He is coeditor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998 - ). He has been host and co-producer of LINEbreak and Close Listening, two radio poetry series.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Norman Fischer has been publishing poetry since 1979. Loosely associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of the seventies and eighties, he maintains close creative and personal relationships with many writers from that movement. Fischer spent five years living at Tassajara Zen Monastery in monastic Buddhist practice where poets Jane Hirshfield and Phillip Whalen were fellow students. He enjoyed a particularly close relationship to Phillip Whalen whom Norman describes in the dedication of his book Slowly But Dearly as a fellow “poet, Zen priest, teacher, friend.” Norman is Philip Whalen’s literary executor.

This Friday! Eileen Tabios and Susan Gevirtz

2010-05-05T13:03:00.001-07:00

Please join us for an evening of awesome.

May 7th
Timken Hall at CCA San Francisco
event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 members and students FREE

Susan Gevirtz's recent books include Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press), Broadcast, and Without Event: Introductory Notes (forthcoming from eohippus labs. Along with teaching locally at various Bay Area institutions, with Greek poet Siarita Kouka she runs The Paros Symposium, on Paros island, an annual meeting of poets and translators from Greece and the United States.

Eileen R. Tabios has released 15 print, four electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, and a short story collection. Her most recent book is Rosary of Thorns: Selected Prose Poems 1998-2009.

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Dana Lomax and Kindergarde!

2010-04-27T10:08:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday found Timken Hall filled with the amazing energy of Kindergarde!

Here is a reading report by Amber diPietra:

“Friends half-medium and medium-half”, I was so excited to go to the San Francisco/CCA performance of Kindergarde. I’ve been trying to write a series of poems about little kids I have tutored over the last few years. Not about them per se, but about our work together, which often requires us to stare into the absurd worlds-propositions that are their standardized test practice booklets. In which we must circle ‘fact’ or ‘opinion’, or a. or b. In which I must pretend that this is not abysmal and they must pretend they are trying, but really they are distracting me with stories about the moon and I am saying yes and then?

I brought stickers and markers and paper to the event so as to beguile some children in the audience and thus get them to collaborate with me on this reading report.

Kindergarde’s actors included Cyril Jamal Cooper, Mandy Khoshnevisan, Caleb Haven Draper, Norman Muñoz, Juliet Heller, Shaye Troha. It was produced by Dana Teen Lomax, directed by Chris Smith and set/costume design was done by Patrick Maloney.

Play and playlets included: “December 16, 2006” by Robin Blaser, The Carpet Square by Sarah Ann Cox, Throat Bird by Camille Roy, “Apricot Madness” by Rosmarie Waldrop, The Night I Walked Into The Jungle by Bhanu Kapil, “Sunday Song” by Noelle Kocot, The Word Play by Douglas Kearney, Streetnamer on the Moon by Susan Gevirtz, Avant-Garde Exrercises by Juliana Spahr, “The Name of Things” by Edwin Torres, Young Willie Wonka by Brent Cunningham, The Jesus Donut by Jaime Corez, “All the Tea in China” by Charles Bernstein, Nakaloo by Juan Felipe Herrera, “8 December, 2006” Robin Blaser.

Things that there were:

a candy robot and “every time you licked it, you would go 2 seconds into the future”.

a sno-cone machine, a very level-headed one that would disturb no one with its delicious rocket because you could “throw a hundred clouds over it to make it quieter.”

an Olga who made the kids in on her street take communion with the glazed donut she bought. “That [donut] drawer was so beautiful, nobody said nothing.”

a galactic boulevard lullaby in which we touched the belly of cat to name streets on the moon. “Familiar as the sound of water out of the faucet calling your name” and “your car on rails sliding through the car wash.” (Upon which I was thinking of me, being 2 years old in a car seat and my mother, at the gas station, letting me stay in the car while it got conveyored through the wash-o-matic and she stood outside, waving. Her face eclipsed by a tsunami of water over the wind shield and the my apple juice flying threw the air, sticky cool and sweet on my face and hands.

also, a girl that lived in a hip hop shoe, a trombonist (Andy Strain) to punctuate with waahmp waahmp and lend a shiny brassy air to the theatrics.

“Precision is not thinking of the future.” said the 9 year old who went into the jungle, said me to myself and took maybe too few notes on so many good lines as I was busy watching the kids in the audience. And so, precision has no written record, which is pure poetry everyone.

At the very end, there came the words “Kiss my ass” in a Robin Blaser poem, I think an edict to anyone who make floating unflotatious. I saw a boy in front of me lunge toward the man next to him and whisper, grinning and scandalized.

Intermission meant a kind of snowstorm of crushed popcorn all around the carpeted area outside somersaults and kids practicing splits.

Here are my three Kindergarde collaborations:

Talk with Savia during intermission.

S: Why are your hands so small?

A: because I am a small person.

This logic doesn’t please her. I offer my hand so we can compare sizing.

S: Can you move them like I this?

Then, we play spider-on-the-mirror.

S: Well, how old are you anyway?

A: Guess.

S: Six

A: No. How high can you count?

S; 21.

A: I am 10 more than that.

S: Well then, I guess you are not very small for that age.

Nascha and her art—between viewings of Kindergarde at the Museum of Children’s Art and at SPT.

And, an e-collaboration with Thelonious Arjun Rider: How to look at an organ fortress after walking into the jungle.

NOTES ON SQUINTING* (per an email from Bhanu Kapil.)

M-O-M!!!! [Each letter said aloud]. I need glitter! More glitter! Okay, so this is the tower and here are the underground tunnels and this is either the eye or the window. It's the eye. I need red glitter. And, okay, now come down here. And squint. What happens when you squint? Something happens to the glitter. The silver glitter does something and the red glitter goes kind of black. And this is the sea where you swim in to the underground tunnels. And these are the caves [starting jabbing the slab of red clay with a paintbrush] where the skeleton dragons and the sea horses and the regular dragons live. Can you see them? I need more glitter. And macaroni and cheese. Mom, I'm hungry.

*Whilst building with red clay, sea glass, glitter and turquoise paper on the floor of the living room in Colorado , on a Saturday morning. Thelonious, age 9, verbatim.

THIS FRIDAY: Laynie Browne and Lee Ann Brown!

2010-04-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

Please join us for an evening with the Brown(e)s!

Macky Room, CCA Oakland **PLEASE NOTE SLIGHT CHANGE IN VENUE**
5212 Broadway at College
event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 entrance, members and students FREE

Laynie Browne is the author of nine collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Desires of Letters, and Roseate, Points of Gold.

Lee Ann Brown is Assistant Professor of English at St. John's University in New York City. A poet and filmmake, her books include Polyverse and The Sleep That Changed Everything. She is also the founder and editor of the small press Tender Buttons.

In Case You Missed It: Truong Tran and Mary Burger

2010-04-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Truong Tran and Mary Burger were a delightful pair.

Here is the introduction by CAConrad:
"I don't like overt political content in poetry" is a sentence said by an increasing number of American poets. "I don't like overt political," from AWP to the MLA, "I don't like overt," each poet saying the same sentence as though they were the first to say it. "I don't like overt political content in poetry, I don't, no I don't. I prefer political FREE poetry in my poems!" American poets, as complicit as any tax-paying American funding American invasions, occupations, paying for suffering completely impossible to imagine. It's safe to say that Canadian poet Aaron Vidaver doesn't like "overt war" in our world. He witnessed firsthand the brutality of Canadian police against the direct-action housing squatters known as The Woodwards Squat in 2002. His collection of interviews and writings by the squatters were compiled into the book Woodsquat. The everyday bravery for shelter and food on the back of decaying empire. In 2009 at the EcoNvergence Conference in Portland, Oregon, Vidaver read his poems with fellow travelers on the heels of the amazing keynote address by Noam Chomsky, and presented a workshop and talk on his political work with Woodsquat.

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is also Canadian, and channels for us the weird and the weirdest in the face of an angering empire. She said in an interview with Donato Mancini, "Myself I’d like to take back ‘cunt’ as a term of pejorative rage, I want to make it bad again, to call people ‘You fuckin’ cunt!’" She refers to herself as a "contradictivisischist." On the Official Facebook Dorothy Trujillo Lusk Fan Club Page you can find the interview with Rob McLennan, where he asks her how her first book changed her life. She said, "Completely, in that I now had an identity not appended to father, husband, boyfriend or gay male best friend and that it could be verified by reading the cover and body of the book. I had been one of those disposable young women of weak social and class position that are there on sufferance and are casually punted off the field." Later when McLennan asks Lusk what made her write as opposed to doing something else, she said, "I second guessed my sketchbook notes at art school into what I unlaughingly called immaculate conceptualism. I theorized the life and possibility out of every single idea that could have become art. From this disappointment came the apprehension of language’s supple polyvalency and the ability to interrogate that which remained restrictive in visual/conceptual art."

PLEASE WELCOME AARON VIDAVER AND DOROTHY TRUJILLO LUSK

In Case You Missed It: Aaron Vidaver and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

2010-04-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

We were sooo very lucky to have the amazing Aaron Vidaver and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk with us! They both gave a dynamic reading.

Here is the introduction by CAConrad:

"I don't like overt political content in poetry" is a sentence said by an increasing number of American poets. "I don't like overt political," from AWP to the MLA, "I don't like overt," each poet saying the same sentence as though they were the first to say it. "I don't like overt political content in poetry, I don't, no I don't. I prefer political FREE poetry in my poems!" American poets, as complicit as any tax-paying American funding American invasions, occupations, paying for suffering completely impossible to imagine. It's safe to say that Canadian poet Aaron Vidaver doesn't like "overt war" in our world. He witnessed firsthand the brutality of Canadian police against the direct-action housing squatters known as The Woodwards Squat in 2002. His collection of interviews and writings by the squatters were compiled into the book Woodsquat. The everyday bravery for shelter and food on the back of decaying empire. In 2009 at the EcoNvergence Conference in Portland, Oregon, Vidaver read his poems with fellow travelers on the heels of the amazing keynote address by Noam Chomsky, and presented a workshop and talk on his political work with Woodsquat.

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is also Canadian, and channels for us the weird and the weirdest in the face of an angering empire. She said in an interview with Donato Mancini, "Myself I’d like to take back ‘cunt’ as a term of pejorative rage, I want to make it bad again, to call people ‘You fuckin’ cunt!’" She refers to herself as a "contradictivisischist." On the Official Facebook Dorothy Trujillo Lusk Fan Club Page you can find the interview with Rob McLennan, where he asks her how her first book changed her life. She said, "Completely, in that I now had an identity not appended to father, husband, boyfriend or gay male best friend and that it could be verified by reading the cover and body of the book. I had been one of those disposable young women of weak social and class position that are there on sufferance and are casually punted off the field." Later when McLennan asks Lusk what made her write as opposed to doing something else, she said, "I second guessed my sketchbook notes at art school into what I unlaughingly called immaculate conceptualism. I theorized the life and possibility out of every single idea that could have become art. From this disappointment came the apprehension of language’s supple polyvalency and the ability to interrogate that which remained restrictive in visual/conceptual art."

PLEASE WELCOME AARON VIDAVER AND DOROTHY TRUJILLO LUSK

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Charming Hostess and Ammiel Alcalay!

2010-04-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

We had such a great night a few weeks back with Charming Hostess and Ammiel Alcalay.

Here is the introduction, written by CAConrad:
Sandy Hotchkiss's 7 Deadly Sins of Narcissism are: shamelessness, magical thinking, arrogance, envy, entitlement, exploitation, and bad boundaries. The conservative journal The American Thinker's article about Ammiel Alcalay titled "Poetry, terror and political narcissism" has by its very title violated the 2nd Deadly Sin of Narcissism "magical thinking," or, dumping their own shame onto others. A true narcissist will accuse others of narcissism, in fact will probably do so multiple times in a day without fail. Ammiel Alcalay a political narcissist? There's NO DOUBT that The American Thinker is paying close attention to the movements, thinking and writings of Alcalay. You might even say they're avid readers of his work. The accusation of his "overriding need to sympathize with Arabs..." and that in 2003 "he coordinated an anti-war New York poetry event at which he lambasted President Bush, the war in Iraq, and Israel--and implored the audience to advance pro-Arab platforms at future literary and academic events." This is narcissism? The desire for people to live in their homes without bombs and drones flying overhead and clean water and a viable, caring government is narcissistic? The American Thinker must have thought the 6th Deadly Sin of narcissism was ANTI-EXPLOITATION when it is really EXPLOITATION. Although the right to be free of tyranny might be viewed as a Freudian form of healthy narcissism; a hope for autonomy to pursue thoughts and writings which follow thoughts. In a world of disinformation, the sawed-toothed close readers of Alcalay in The American Thinker brutally misinform, "Alcalay and his type draw together extreme leftist sharks and deliberately encourage misunderstanding, misapprehension and anarchy. Is this really the kind of education that public, taxpayer-funded universities and parents should have to pay for?" Please welcome the man who played badminton with Charles Olson when he was five-years-old, and grew up to infuriate those who truly violate the 7 Deadly Sins of Narcissism, the shameless, the arrogant, the entitled, the exploitive and envious oil and war loving neo-cons, Ammiel Alcalay.

And here is a reading report by Robin Tremblay-McGaw:

9 April 2010: Friday night. Rushed from sweaty yoga to pick up daughter, bring her home, swallow food (hello family), and then arrive at Timken Hall at California College of the Arts just in time for Charming Hostess and Ammiel Alcalay. I knew nothing about Charming Hostess and had no idea what to expect. This three person ensemble blew the audience away. Charming Hostess consists of the voices of Jewlia Eisenberg (who also plays harmonium)and Cynthia Taylor, with percussion by Michael (whose last name I didn't quite get and isn't listed on their web site. Sorry Michael!) Charming Hostess performed pieces from Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinović's Sarajevo Blues translated by Ammiel Alcalay and a variety of other work, including a song about gender compliance sung in the Judeo-Spanish language Ladino. They then brought the movingly discrepant girl-group sound to the song "Death is a Job." You can hear a recording of this HERE. Powerful and good stuff. Look for them this summer at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

After a short intermission, Ammiel Alcalay took the stage. Alcalay has been reading in the Bay Area for the last two weeks, with appearances at Mills College and the Poetry Center. On Friday night, Alcalay began by referencing the introduction for him that CA Conrad wrote and Samantha Giles had just read. Conrad's introduction revisited the incendiary American Thinker 2005 article, "Poetry, Terror and Political Narcissism" in which author Alyssa Lappen writes about Alcalay's work and his criticism of the U.S. and Israel, making the claim that Alacalay is pro-Palestinian and therefore, implicitly, pro-terror and a political narcissist! I think it was Conrad in his intro or either Alcalay himself who suggested that in some ways the American Thinker article represented one of the few public engagements with his work. Because Alcalay's writing is overtly political,contestatory, and wide ranging in its hybrid and multiple forms from journalism, academic criticism, poetry, prose, and translation, Alcalay feels as if his work is in a critical vacuum. People, particularly on the East Coast, according to Alcalay, see his various engagements, his multiple points of attack, as separate endeavors. Alcalay said that on the West Coast, people seem to take a more integrated approach to his body of work.

Alcalay read from several of his books, including Scrap Metal and from the warring factions. Alcalay said that "a lot of my work is a response to my work," and he advocated that writers read critically their own body of work. Alcalay's new book, Islanders, contains writing from thirty years ago. This intervention in his own work proves to be a rich and engaging strategy for re-thinking, re-visioning and re-interpreting one writer's interaction with a complicated and fraught world. Alcalay makes an example of himself, and spoke about historicizing the many versions of "I" and "self" that he is, and has been. Here's a sampling of some of his work. These pieces are from the warring factions. * indicates a page break.

Miró is in The Museum of Modern Art.

Miró is in Sarajevo.

A famous playwright is on stage at Symphony Space and over the air on NPR.

The announcer calls me twice during a break to find
out how to pronounce the name Izeta.

Izeta is Miró's wife.

They have a dog.

It is December 1st, 1993.

*

Certain people say we should always go back to nature.
I notice they never say we should go forward to nature.
It seems to me they are more concerned that we should
go back, than about nature. If the models we use are the
apparitions seen in a dream or the recollection of our
prehistoric past, is this less a part of the nature or realism
than a cow in a field? I think not.

The role of the artist has always been that of image maker.
Different times require different images.

Today, when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate
attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint,
our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are
the expression of the neurosis which is reality. To my mind
certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all,
on the contrary, it is the realism of our time.

*

Adolph Gottlieb
1947

*

no pyramids dot the skyline

in the seats of power of

this crumbling empire

*

the ghosts of industry eat
this old half city bridge
of nevermore again
eat Glamoć and
Grahovo
eat these years
(pg s 3-7)

suddenly like shapes of living stone clothed in the light of
dreams I tore the veil the shrouds which wrap the world
the frost of death the flood of tyranny a paradise of flowers
within which the poor heart loves to keep the earnings
of its toil a common home stains of inevitable crime
pride build upon oblivion to rule the ages that survive
our remains violence and wrong an unreturning stream
the grief of many graves snow and rain on lifeless things
this is not faith or law opinion more frail or life poisoned
in its wells that delights in ruin as endless armies wind
in sad procession the earth springs like an eagle even
as the winds of autumn scatter gold in the dying flame
we learned to steep the bread of slavery in tears of woe
these faded eyes have survived a ruin wide and deep
which can no longer borrow from chance or change
what will come within the homeless future that gold
should lose its power and thrones their glory that love
which none may bind be free to fill the world like light
whose will has power when all beside is gone faint accents
far and lost to sense of outward things some word which
none here can gather yet the world has seen a type of peace
some sweet and moving scene returning to feed on us
as worms devour those years come and gone like the ship
which bears me in this the winter of the world (89).

Alcalay's bio from the Small Press Traffic blog here:

Poet, essayist, translator, and editor, Ammiel Alcalay returns to San Francisco to read from his new book --and first published novel-- ISLANDERS (City Lights Books, 2010) and to talk with the audience about the concerns of his work as writer, educator, and literary activist.

Born and raised in Boston, is a first-generation American, son of Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Serbia to the US after the second World War, Alcalay teaches at Queens College, New York, and at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he directs Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

He is the author of *After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture* (U. Minnesota), and *Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays: 1982-1999* (City Lights). He is also the editor and translator of *Keys to the Garden*, an anthology of new Israeli writing, Semezdin Mehmedinovic's *Sarajevo Blues* and *Nine Alexandrias*, and *Outcast* by Shimon Ballas (all published by City Lights).

About Charming Hostess, again, courtesy of Small Press Traffic:

Charming Hostess is a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess. Our music explores the intersection of text and the sounding body-- complex ideas expressed physically, based on voice and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. Explore their awesomeness at their website.

Poetry is a Reading of the World: Ammiel Alcalay, Part Two

Ammiel Alcalay: Part Two
Excerpts from Alcalay's "Local Politics: The Background as Foreward" from his book Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays 1982-1999 publshed by City Lights Books:

"...my experience in presenting unknown or marginalized literatures has taught me that an extremely wide net needs to be cast in order to create the conditions through which such work can find a productive space in Amercian culture, a place where poets and writers can get to it and begin relating to distinctly new forms, idioms, sensibilities and experiences as part of their own vocabulary. Casting such a net has meant turning into a kind of full-service bureau through which I could both help create the conditions for reception of works and then carry those works over in a variety of ways. Within these different roles, my work has spanned a range of cultural, political, and historical concerns. As someone barely born here (in larger historical/chronological terms), much of my work has involved the process of both finding and losing my "self" within the gaps I find in American discourse, gaps primarily having to do with either the lack or the suppression of any tangible global political and historical space or consciousness, however these end up getting defined.

Part of the difficulty of working through such a situation is that I feel as if I have embarked upon an enormous journey only to come back to where I started from: in my case, a distinctly American language and American idiom, only to wonder what happened along the way........

Two crucial geographical areas and states of mind on this map have been the Middle East and the Balkans; involvement in these areas has meant confronting deep pockets of resistance to change of any kind, in both expected and unexpected places.....

Poetry, and language perceived or filtered through the sensibility of poetry's value, still resists the marketplace, no matter how hard some may try. As Jack Spicer wrote: 'A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer....Objects, words must be lead across time not preserved against it...' The connection between words and world, as well as the consequences of such connections, is something we must never lose sight of; as Adonis, one of this century's greatest poets has written:'The writing of poetry is a reading of the world and the things in it, a reading of things charged with words, and of words tied to things....Language, viewed from this perspective, is not a tool for communicating a detached meaning. It is meaning itself because it is thought. Indeed, it precedes thought and is succeeded by knowledge....Poetry, according to this definition, is more than a means or a tool, like a technology; it is, rather, like language itself, an innate quality. It is not a stage in the history of human consciousness but a constituent of this consciousness' (xii-xv).

THIS SUNDAY: KINDERGARDE!

2010-04-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

Small Press Traffic and The Creative Work Fund Proudly Present:

Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, & Songs for Children World Premier
Sunday, April 25th, 2010 5:30 p.m.
California College of the Arts, Timken Hall 1111 8th Street, San Francisco
$5 entrance/noone turned away for lack of funds

What do cutting-edge, experimental writers have to say to children? Don't miss this opportunity to find out! Featuring: Jesus Donut by Jaime Cortez Avant-Garde Exercises by Juliana Spahr Young Willie Wonka by Brent Cunningham The Carpet Square by Sarah Anne Cox Nakkaloo by Juan Felipe Herrera Streetnamer on the Moon by Susan Gevirtz The Night I Walked Into The Jungle by Bhanu Kapil The Word Play by Douglas Kearney Throat Bird by Camille Roy

Also Featuring the Poetry of:
Robin Blaser, Noelle Kocot, Edwin Torres, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Charles Bernstein !!

This is experimental poets' theater at its best! Under the Artsist Direction of Dana Teen Lomax, Directed by Chris Smith and with Sets and Costumes by Patrick Maloney Kindergarde is sure to stir your imagination and open your head! Join us!

THIS FRIDAY: MARY BURGER and TRUONG TRAN

2010-04-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a reading on "bodies" with Mary Burger and Truong Tran.

Friday, April 23rd
Nahl Hall, California College of the Arts
5212 Broadway, Oakland
event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

Mary Burger has spent the last three years or so training as a landscape architect, and learning new meanings for 'form' and 'materiality.' In that time she accumulated a collection of prose writings that will be published by Litmus Press under the title Then Go On. Other books include A Partial Handbook for Navigators, Sonny, and The Boy Who Could Fly.

Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. His publications include The Book of Perceptions, Placing The Accents, dust and conscience (awarded the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Prize), within the margin, and Four Letter Words. Truong lives in San Francisco where he is currently teaching poetry at SFSU and Mills College.

See you there!

THIS SATURDAY: Aaron Vidaver and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

2010-04-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a night of incredible-ness.

Saturday April 17, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is a Vancouver student who was born and raised in the Ottawa Valley of Quebec and Ontario. Her books include Oral Tragedy, Redactive, Volume Delays, Sleek Vinyl Drill, Ogress Oblige and the forthcoming Decorum and Dazzle Camo. Find her at EPC at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/lusk/.

Aaron Vidaver is a writer, archivist, editor and co-researcher with the Pacific Institute for Language and Literacy Studies. His sequences Unsquatted Houses and The Market Prefers appear in the collaborative book 49 19. 47 - W 123 8.11 (with Roger Farr and Reg Johanson) and Parser. Find him at his blog at http://vidaver.wordpress.com/about/aaron-vidaver/

THIS FRIDAY: Charming Hostess and Ammiel Alcalay

2010-04-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

Please join us THIS FRIDAY for a performance by CHARMING HOSTESS and a reading/discussion with AMMIEL ALCALAY! It's going to be amazing!

Friday April 9th; event begins at 7:30pm
Timken Hall, CCA SF
1111 8th Street, SF 94107
$8-15sliding scale; members and students FREE

Charming Hostess is a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess. Our music explores the intersection of text and the sounding body-- complex ideas expressed physically, based on voice and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. Explore their awesomeness at their website.

Poet, essayist, translator, and editor, Ammiel Alcalay returns to San Francisco to read from his new book --and first published novel-- ISLANDERS (City Lights Books, 2010) and to talk with the audience about the concerns of his work as writer, educator, and literary activist.

Born and raised in Boston, is a first-generation American, son of Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Serbia to the US after the second World War, Alcalay teaches at Queens College, New York, and at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he directs Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

He is the author of *After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture* (U. Minnesota), and *Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays: 1982-1999* (City Lights). He is also the editor and translator of *Keys to the Garden*, an anthology of new Israeli writing, Semezdin Mehmedinovic's *Sarajevo Blues* and *Nine Alexandrias*, and *Outcast* by Shimon Ballas (all published by City Lights).

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Jonathan and Cathy!

2010-03-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

An incredible time was had by all last Friday at Artist Television Access for a talk by Jonathan Skinner followed by the screening of Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker by Cathy Cook.

Special thanks to Konrad Steiner (Kino 21), Fara Akrami (ATA) and Steve Dickison (Poetry Center) for helping to make the night possible!

Below is a report from the lovely Laura Woltag:

JONATHAN SKINNER ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF/IN LORINE NIEDECKER //
CATHY COOK’S IMMORTAL CUPBOARD: IN SEARCH OF LORINE NIEDECKER

"Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted."
-Emily Dickinson

On a rain-speckled Saturday night, SPT gathered at Artists’ Television Access at 21st & Valencia for an exploration of Lorine Niedecker’s life in poetry. I arrived early and the theater was already full, seating snaking up the stairs. I was lucky to score a seat in the second row between Carrie Hunter and Stephen Vincent.

Jonathan Skinner began the evening with a presentation contextualizing Niedecker’s work, situating her in a post-Darwinian field of range finding. Skinner states, “She is a poet of ambivalence, for whom the poem is an instrument of balance…[to Niedecker,] the poet is an observer and instrument of place. “

Skinner explored formal aspects of Niedecker’s poems (a Dickinsonian employment of the em dash, poetics of condensing, sound structures) that bled her engagement with her ecological, biological, sonic, social, and political environs.

Tracking movements of consciousness within poems through the lens of natural histories, Skinner played close attention to the sonics of Niedecker’s work. In an excerpt from “Lake Superior”, Skinner’s colored sounds reveal all sonic events have corresponding occurrences, except for a lone ‘H’ in the middle of the poem that Skinner likened to primordial sound:

In Niedecker’s poem, the center is a lone sound.

In Skinner’s analysis of Niedecker’s poetics, he cited Leo Marx’s writings on the “complex pastoral”. Marx states the pastoral is located “in a middle ground somewhere ‘between,’ yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilization and nature.”

*

CIGARETTE BREAK OR BREAK TO ADMIRE THE FUNKY COLORFUL BATHROOMS IN OUR NEW TEMPORARY HOMESITE AND CONTEMPLATE RELEASING FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS FOR A GLASS OF GALLO

*

“LORINE, WHO ARE YOU?”

Cathy Cook’s documentary film, Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker opens with a drive to Black Hawk Island in the dark rural night. And so begins Cook’s journey through fields of Niedecker’s poetics, environment, and personal life. What was, for Cook, to initially be a few minutes of film, resulted in a six-year, 72 minute documentary (and aren’t we grateful!).

The narrative begins in a loose chronology of Niedecker’s life that tightens as it moves forward in time-space. Voices describing Niedecker’s “sparse” childhood on the remote island accompany sounds of splashing carp and the text of her early poems scrolling up-screen.

The film collages voices from a variety of interviews (from members of Niedecker’s local community, her family, the geographically dispersed poetry community, etc.) to piece together a narrative of Neidecker’s life. The voices are never identified, and their corresponding faces are left out of the film, yet “who is speaking” is of little significance to the narrative. Voices of “others” do not overshadow Niedecker’s life; rather, they speak with it—a life in poetics that is just recently receiving the attention it deserves, and the audience who needs it. Like a poem may, the film collages voices to tell a story:

“Lorine was famous.”

“Lorine, who are you?”

“I always thought of a wren. She had a lot of brown things. Brown and blue.”

“Then came the winter of ’54, and we wondered why she never had any heat in the house.”

“When it came to cooking, she was a blank slate…She ate words.”

“You can’t separate her from her place.”

These voices are transposed on the environs of the Wisconsin land/waterscape; the camera tracks movement of light over milkweed silk, cottontails, red dogwood branches, irises, forest fungi, ice fishing holes, etc. This visual narrative is never steady – it operates in a current of motion, disjuncting space and mashing together scenes.

Gaps in dialogue are filled with instrumental music. Mechanical in essence, these sounds exists in relation (at times juxtaposition, at times resonance) with the cacophony of sounds on the island: loon song, Canadian geese calls, cicadas, frogs, insects, lapping water, flapping great blue heron wings, an apple cider crank, etc.

In the film, as with Niedecker’s poems, the visual is dependent on the sonic—no sound is ambient. Both artists’ material arrives from a meditation with place.

And then there are the poems!

Cook intersperses Niedecker’s poems within the visual-vocal dialogue: a poem featuring beer can litter is transposed on an actual beer can litter, the text of a poem appears and then dissolves down a bathtub drain, a poem wavers with the lily pads on the surface of Lake Koshkonog. Above a field of sunflowers:

Along the river
wild sunflowers
over my head
the dead
who gave me life
give me this
our relative the air
floods
our rich friend
silt

Presenting poetry in a film creates the fact of its textual disappearance. Cook uses short poems and extracts from longer work to negotiate the challenge and limitations of the screen. She also layers the poem’s presence once it has left the screen, by installing visual resonances that flicker in the moments following the poem’s passing out of sight.

Cook also includes excerpts from Niedecker’s journals and letters:
“I conceive of poetry as the folktales of the mind and us creating our own memory.”
“Believing as I do poetry comes from the folk if it is to be vital or original.”
And: “Condense…condense…condense.”

The film is a story of it own making – of Cook’s numerous trips to Wisconsin to wade through flooded Black Hawk Island, to wheel open the library shelves that store Niedecker’s archives, to conduct interviews, and to peel away at the layers of Niedecker’s life. A life, as the film highlights, lived largely in necessity and in water. However, Cook works to highlight Niedecker’s connection the (then) contemporary poetry scene, and her correspondences with Cid Corman, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, Jonathan Williams etc. Cook recreates Niedecker’s “immortal cupboard” of books, down to the exact editions, including works by John Muir, Thoreau, D.H. Lawrence, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Lucretius, and haiku collections.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the great song wrote and preformed by Jen Benka (also a Wisconsin native), which anchors the film’s opening and rest. The piece was written before the film was conceived, and it haunts landscape of the screen in its channeling of Niedecker: “You will never know me/ But someday you will hear me.”

& in SF last weekend, we did:

Foreclosure
Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws
Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land
May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace

This Saturday! Leslie Scalapino and Bruce Andrews

2010-03-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Please join us for this phenomenal night with two of our best: Leslie Scalapino and Bruce Andrews!

Saturday March 20, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

American poet, Bruce Andrews was born in Chicago and educated at Harvard. He settled in New York in 1975, where he became a professor of politics at Fordham. He was editor of L-A-N-G-U- A-G-E with Charles Bernstein (1979–81). He is a performance artist and poet whose texts are some of the most radical of the Language school (see Language Poetry); his poetry tries ‘to cast doubt on each and every “natural” construction of language’. Small linguistic units, idioms, phrases, and single words, taken from different, sometimes mutually exclusive registers, especially discourses which are socially sensitive and resonant to contemporary ears, enable the poetry to ‘suggest a social undecidability’. I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) (1990) comes as close as any American poet to fulfilling Whitman's aim of allowing the ‘forbidden voices, voices of sexes and lusts’ to speak, a vast cacophony of urban self-presentational idioms, even when these are in violent opposition to one another. Other works include Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened (1978/1988), Love Songs (1982), Give Em Enough Rope (1987), Tizzy Boost (1993), and Moebius (1993). His influential essays have appeared in The L-A-N-G-U- A-G-E Book (1984) and The Politics of Poetic Form (1990).

Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, prose (new-novel) by Leslie Scalapino, is published by Starcherone, February 2010, 168 pages.
The extraordinary range of imagination on display in this slim gem engages as many wildly disparate and imaginatively scenes and situations as a massive Pynchon novel -- miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more. These narratives or moments of riveting meaning arrive out of inchoate states--an alexia where unknown words create a future--and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's dazzling gifts with language and the seemingly endless paths and potentials she has exploded in Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows. (Starcherone editors)

“This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arps’ poetry, Monkey’s Journey to the West, and Mark Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger.”—and it blows with the elegance of a horse—or a wolf…Virginia Woolf.” —Michael McClure

“A rose is a rose is” not a rose in Leslie Scalapino’s new novel, Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows. “A hartel is occurring.” But what is an event anyway? This is a question Scalapino has explored before, but never quite as she does here. Characters and events in this work are named with the dictionary’s most obscure entries. There is the known world where “one-box-fits-all-words” make “even plants indistinguishable from humans.” And then there is the world Scalapino creates, a world of fresh encounters where the “hartebeest is wandering” and the “vast shimmying fractionation is heard.” This other world isn’t Eden, though it might seem so at first. Like the one we know, this world is filled with disaster and violence. The difference is that here we don’t see it coming; we can’t hide behind dead verbiage; we can’t brace ourselves.

—Rae Armantrout

Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows is an action novel. Using aspects of adventure, science fiction, crime and simultaneous time, Leslie Scalapino presents and represents an interwoven series of stories or vignettes that carry you along, ready or not. Among the many characters are the green fractionators, the people, the Comanche, Violet, powder monkey, Grace Abe, Fujimori, Venus, Serena (yes, that Venus and Serena), bugboy, Alice, infant Emmanuel, Lana Turner, Chrysanthemum, T, Demihunter, cougar, Gonzales and Rove (yes that Gonzales and Rove) and others. In fact, in this writing the sense of the present is the central action for the writer and the reader, as well as for the characters. “No really it’s one thing at a time but all at once…” There are horses and they do float and flow. In fact, there are pictures of this, as well as other photos. The sense of floating and flow is intricately, one might almost say intimately, maintained. There is time travel or, at least multiple times. “To produce the events before the present.” Everyday life enters into it. There is an insistence on life and a love (“No reason except love…) Politics and the war, the many wars, appear. There is a happy ending, a celebration of life. It is a wild ride. —Laura Moriarty

In Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, people, the base runner, the powder monkey—Venus and herself as a young orphan—all, are moved to be in the same place that’s always the different stacked levels and times at once, all the places-levels at-one by being some configuration serially once. In the midst of it is a simulated ‘whole’ (it is the separated Grace Abe, not the Cheshire cat) splintered consciousness occurring only once. As each single place of the simultaneity, each is incandescence. You do it.—signed by Raymond Federman who likes to have the author write their own blurb, and if he approves of it, sign his name.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, poem-plays, and criticism. Her new book is a work of new fiction from Starcherone titled Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows. It’s go in horizontal, Selected Poems, 1974-2006, was published by UC Press, Berkeley, 2008. Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night was published by Green Integer in 2007. Granary Books is publishing a collaboration by Scalapino and Kiki Smith of poetry and drawings titled, The animal is in the world like water in water (May 2010). She has taught at Bard College in the summer MFA program for the last sixteen years; and presently teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Ronaldo!

2010-03-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

Ronaldo Wilson was in beautiful form this past Saturday, when giving a fantasic and generous reading.

Here is the introduction by CAConrad:
Queer activist and filmmaker Marlon Riggs created the documentary COLOR ADJUSTMENT over a decade ago, tracing and exposing white, corporate America's racist template for network television. One of the most telling interviews on this embedded racism was with Esther Rolle, star of, and co-creator of the show GOOD TIMES. She told how network executives tried to convince her that it would be better for the show if she would agree to make her character a single mother. But she had a mission to make the black man visible as father and husband on network TV. Before GOOD TIMES all black women on television were single, or single mothers. On the first day of shooting John Amos, hired to play her husband on the show, had been quietly sent home and removed from the script. When Esther Rolle came to work and found out she REFUSED to allow the cameras to roll until her husband was written back into the script and returned to the set. She finally won the argument, and helped change the history of the disappeared. Such dedication to LIVE RIGHT by this world keeps true to the words of Frederick Douglass when he said, "POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND! IT NEVER DID AND IT NEVER WILL!" The poetry and work of Ronaldo Wilson brings further light to the visible and invisible. Author Wayne Koestenbaum writes, "I applaud Ronaldo Willson's path-breaking movement into what has never, never, in history, been said. About sexuality, in particular, these poems speak with incorrigible and raving clarity." Please help me welcome Ronaldo Wilson!

And here is a link to an audio file of Ronaldo's reading. It starts mid-poem, unfortunately, but is otherwise fantastic

zSHARE - 04 Track 04 4.m4a

and This Saturday: an evening with Ronaldo Wilson!

2010-03-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

Please join us for an evening with the incredible Ronaldo Wilson and a reading and discussion of The Visible Black Body: An Interventionist's Reflection

Saturday March 13, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Claudia Rankine and Poems of the Black Object. He holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, is a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, and currently teaches at Mount Holyoke College.

Find him online here and here.

This Friday: Imortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker

2010-03-10T06:25:00.000-08:00

Please join us for an evening of film and conversation as we present, along with Kino 21 and the Poetry Center, Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker.

Filmmaker Cathy Cook will join us along with Special Guest Jonathan Skinner, who will be presenting his talk: Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories

Friday March 12, 2010
7:30pm
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia Street, San Francisco
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

Filmmaker Cathy Cook takes cues from Niedecker’s work and the Wisconsin heritage they share to explore the poetry and life of Lorine Niedecker (1903 – 1970.) Cook has exhibited her award-winning work extensively in both solo and group shows including screenings at MOMA and the Whitney Museum; she is an Associate Professor of Film/Video in Visual Arts at The University of Maryland – Baltimore County.

Jonathan Skinner’s poetry collections include With Naked Foot and Political Cactus Poems. He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College, in Central Maine.

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Harryette!

2010-03-09T07:37:00.000-08:00

We had a rare treat to enjoy Harryette Mullen last Friday.

Here is the introduction from CAConrad:

On the topic of bodies we have with us tonight Harryette Mullen. We will start by calling on a couple of transformed bodies of poets who have passed on, the missing bodies we honor.

(Samantha lights the half stick of cedar incense)

Cedar is a scent associated with the god Mercury, and is used to close the gap of time and space between us and the ones we wish to contact. This incense was a gift from poet kari edwards a month before she died, incense she brought from India with her partner Fran Blau.

When kari lived in Philadelphia in the 1980's she made friends with poet Gil Ott at the Painted Bride Arts Center. Gil was also friends with Harryette Mullen, and published her books S*PeRM**K*T and Muse & Drudge on his Singing Horse Press. When kari was on a book tour with her book "iduna" she hoped to see Gil Ott when she read in Philadelphia, but he died a few days before her reading. The night of her reading the poets in the room were somewhat melancholy due to the passing of Gil just days before.

The first thing kari did was to talk about Gil and how -- as everyone in the room knew -- he started all of his readings off with the song "The Moon Does Not Run On Gasoline" by San Francisco poet Kush. So kari sang the song, which translated all sorrow in an instant that night, but also transformed the way the room could open that night. We have a recording of Gil Ott singing that song for us to open the topic of bodies by his friend Harryette Mullen tonight, let's listen.

(Samantha plays Gil singing)

Please welcome Harryette Mullen.

SEE TRACK FOUR: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Frequency.html

And a reading report from Robin Treblay-McGaw (which can also be found on xpoetics.blogspot.com)

The Bay Area was treated to two appearances of Harryette Mullen in one weekend. On Friday night Mullen was part of a group reading in Berkeley and on Saturday night, she ignited Timken Hall at CCA in San Francisco. Mullen began the evening by explaining that she wasn't going to be talking about poetry but would talk about what she's been working on for the last couple of years, a project that entails, as Mullen said, finding where the bodies are buried. Harryette Mullen has been engaged in a genealogical investigation to document her family history. This is a fraught project since many of Mullen's ancestors are not well documented. Often there were no birth or marriage records for blacks. Prior to 1870, blacks were not uniformly included in the U.S. Census. As a result, Mullen's project has extended beyond her family alone. She's let this investigation expand sideways, revising her idea of what family is, including ancestral cousins as well.

One of the things Mullen discovers through this process is that in the 19th century, particularly for blacks, it is possible to find documentation of a person's life through death records only. For example there are databases that contain information about black union (and a few confederate) soldiers involved in the Civil War. One such database is the National Graves Registration Project maintained by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Other sources of information include insurance company lists of insured slaves. Slave-owners would often take out an insurance policy on slaves who were expected to die within a year.

Witness the difficulty of tracing family history when a relative is never recorded as someone--someone who was born, married, had children. Officially, they exist only in their dying, and sometimes not even then.

Here the official records--or their absences and omissions--and family history and knowledge rub up against one another, revealing contradictions, social and political histories, and trauma. Mullen discovered that the causes of death listed for some of her ancestors include conditions related to malnutrition and starvation, such as Pellagra.

The complexities and construction of race as a category assert themselves.
A census record might one year record someone as black, at another time, mulatto. The category of "race" and who defines and names and records it is tessellated and troubled. One of Mullen's ancestors was said to be Mexican. While Mullen suggested that this might be true, it seemed more likely an intentional ambiguity for a black family living in a largely white part of town in the late 19th century. Mullen's family tree, like a good deal of American family trees, includes both black and white ancestors. While some white relatives discovered by Mullen in Texas have embraced her, her inquiries have not been met always with such interest. Trying to locate the burial ground of one relative, Mullen contacted a white family in Alabama whose 19th century ancestors owned slaves, including, I believe, one of Mullen's relatives. The family sold one of these slaves (one of Harryette's ancestors) so that one of their white sons could attend medical school. Once they understood Mullen's project--her search for her ancestor's burial site--this family promptly cut off communication.

Names. Starvation. Lives. People owning other People. Resting places.

Harryette said that her project had not produced any writing--poetry or prose--that really satisfied her and she is unclear where the project is going and whether or not it will be more than a family genealogical inquiry, when it will stop. I think many in the audience were hopeful that the project would continue and take a form that we might encounter again. It is heart-breaking and important work.

I find so much of Harryette Mullen's writing to be engaged with history in so many different ways. Mullen has investigated slave narratives in her dissertation and her poetry dives into history and language's troubled archives. In the work collected in Recyclopedia, Mullen enables the sort of “activity of thinking and imagination that open[s] out vast possibilities not just of memory but of counter-memory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” that David Scott describes (vi).* Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen re-makes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its material alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. She interrogates and improvises, and then re-uses them, stretching them to their utmost. In the process, these discursive investigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies.

Past perfect food sticks in the craw. Curdles the pulse.
Coops up otherwise free ranging birds whose plucked
wings beat hearts over easy. Flapping aerobically, cocks
walk on brittle zeros. They make and break and scramble
to get ahead. Whisk the yokels into shape. Use their pecker
order to separate the whites (S*PeRM**K*T).

Harryette Mullen shows us how even "bad" or contaminated, and half-erased traumatic histories might be made to speak volubly and differently. A poetics of history and knowledges. Discrepant interdependencies, crimes, pleasures, sufferings. There are wounds. And words. There are names: Hannah Strange, Flemming Mullen, Horace Dangerfield, Granville Spangler....

While it comes from a different register entirely, a portion of Jacqes Ranciere's The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, seems apt:

...this means nonhistory and history, the power of articulation of names and events that is tied to the ontological indeterminacy of the narrative, but that nevertheless is alone suited to preserving the specificity of a historical science in general. The revolution in historical study is the arrangement of a space for the conjunction of contradictories" (6-7).

I can't stop thinking about the evening.

*Scott, David. “Introduction: On the Archaeologies of Black Memory.” Small Axe 26 12.2 (June 2008): v-xvi.

This Saturday! an evening with Harryette Mullen!

2010-03-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

Please join us for an evening with the amazing Harryette Mullen.

Saturday March 6, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

_________________

from the Poetry Foundation website:

Harryette Mullen is a poet and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and African-American literature. Her poetry has been hailed by critics as unique, powerful, and challenging. Elisabeth A. Frost wrote in Contemporary Literature: "Crossing the lines between often isolated aesthetic camps, Harryette Mullen has pioneered her own form of bluesy, disjunctive lyric poetry, combining a concern for the political issues raised by identity politics with a poststructualist emphasis on language."

Mullen was born in Alabama, but spent most of her childhood in Texas. "I've loved to write from childhood. I wrote to entertain my family, my friends, and myself," she told Emily Allen Williams in an interview for the African American Review. Mullen began writing poetry more seriously in high school, when she had her first poem published in a local newspaper. After receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, she went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on slave narratives. Even when writing essays and fiction, though, poetry continued to be important to her. "I feel that I need to write in order to know what I think and what I believe," she told Williams. "It's a way of keeping in touch with the inner landscape, I guess. And it makes me more alert to the outer landscape."

A key aspect of Mullen's relationship to poetry developed when she began going to poetry readings. "It was through the poetry-[reading] circuit that I began to realize that poetry is not just something on the page, but a community of readers and writers," she told Williams. Mullen's poetry draws on oral tradition, music, and the spoken word. Mullen described her intention to Frost in an interview for Contemporary Literature: "I am writing for the eye and the ear at once, at that intersection of orality and literacy, wanting to make sure that there is a troubled, disturbing aspect to the work so that it is never just a 'speakerly' or a 'writerly' text."

Mullen's first book of poetry, Tree Tall Woman, was published before she went to graduate school; the poems from this first book are included, along with other early poetry, in the more recent publication Blues Baby: Early Poems. Trimmings, her second book, came ten years after Tree Tall Woman. Partisan Review's Stephen Yenser called it "an ebulliently feminist, black and bluesy, bebop, wicked, scatty, addictive sequence of mazy prose poems, ostensibly about wardrobe accessories and the ramifications thereof, and in fact about language and semiotics in general." Mullen's characteristic dense, meaning-packed style is in full play here; Yenser wrote of her poems, "Compact, sometimes no more than eight or ten words, they are as loaded as chocolate truffles and the finest Vegas dice." Drawing much inspiration from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Mullen is unafraid to delve into the racial subtext ignored by Stein; as Molly Bendall noted in Antioch Review, she "brings her own contemporary African-American female voice to these poems." In one particular section, for example, she examines the common representation of femininity as "pink" and "white," inquiring how a black female might interact with these poetic constructions. Frost wrote in Women's Review of Books that "these relationships among femininity, clothes and language are beautifully orchestrated in word-play that dramatizes complex issues about gender and culture without offering easy or predictable answers."

Mullen followed Trimmings with S*PeRM**K*T, published the next year. Like the previous book, it consists of short, fragmented prose poems, this time with the wordplay revolving around the supermarket—both the concept and, as in the title of the piece, the word itself. "Mullen speeds up and down the aisle-like margins of American life spying out those strangest interstices of commodity and racial culture," MultiCultural Review's Aldon L. Nielsen explained. Race, sex, gender, and consumer culture interact in thought-provoking ways as Mullen's poetry comments on the racial and erotic subtexts of our commodified society. "The intertwinings of the commercial and the erotic are the crucial subject of Mullen's slim book—itself 'packaged' in a saranwraplike wrap-around photo of a meat case of packaged beef and interlarded with other photos of stocked shelves," Yenser wrote in Yale Review. Mullen explained to Williams some of the political ideas she explored while writing S*PeRM**K*T: "When I was writing this poem it made me very conscious of what I was doing in the supermarket—how we behave as consumers and define ourselves by the products we purchase. . . . We really are what we eat, what we consume. As a nation, as a culture, as a society, we consume way more than the rest of the world."

Mullen's fourth book of poetry, Muse and Drudge, examines gender, race, and art in an exploration of "the tension and creative possibilities between inspirational, existential, and mundane work," George Yancy wrote in CLA Journal. The title mentions two female roles common throughout the history of art: the idealized muse who inspires the artist, and the laboring drudge whose behind-the-scenes toil supports him (a "him" because of the male-oriented tradition to which Mullen is referring.) An exploration of race also plays a large role in these poems, which, as Yancy pointed out, are "hypertextually and intertextually linked to the lived experiences of being black in America and the religious and spiritual semiotic spaces of Africa and Afro-America." In fact, Mullen told Frost that the book "was written specifically to try to bring different audiences together;" after discovering that her two previous books reached a mostly white audience, Mullen wanted to her work to reach the black community as well. However, she understands that the dense wordplay and numerous references that contribute to her highly intertextual work require every person to read and understand the poem differently. She told Frost: "The reader is getting whatever the reader can get. . . . Black people get certain things particularly, and Spanish speakers get certain other things. There are people who recognize Sappho lines or Bessie Smith lines."

Muse and Drudge contrasts to her previous free verse and prose poems in that it is written in fairly regular quatrains; yet, as American Book Review's Mark Scroggins noted, she still "manages to keep her readers consistently off balance, surprised by a rhyme or disappointed at its absence." Mullen explained to Frost the meaning of this style: "It is very much a book of echoes. Some of the fragments rhyme and some don't, and that is basically the principle of the book—the recycling of fragments of language." At the same time, Scroggins noted, she "makes it all seem so easy: the language here dances, shakes, and splits itself into puns, allusions, and double-entendre, all the while maintaining a jaunty funkiness."

Mullen's wordplay becomes even more structurally avant-garde in her next book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Carol Muske-Dukes wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that "poetic expression here springs from a formal device, a game, a premeditated romp: a little like the Muse playing Scrabble"; many of these devices, such as replacing nouns with ones found seven entries away in the dictionary, were developed by the international literary group OuLiPo. "More diverse" than her previous books, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Sleeping with the Dictionary is filled with styles ranging from "exhaustive alphabetical language salads" to "strange rewrites of classics" (two poems that rework a famous Shakespeare sonnet). "Many of the poems' titles are careful twists on dead metaphors and other commonly used phrases," noted Hoke S. Glover II in Black Issues Book Review; "This is her art: to reconstruct, redefine and create out of splicing and stitching back together the pieces of meaning in language."

UCLA Today's Meg Sullivan felt that Sleeping with the Dictionary assumes "a more playful posture" than Mullen's previous works, but other critics felt the opposite, that the work is more serious. With Mullen's poetry these binaries of play and work, comedy and tragedy, coexist. "For me the comic is the other side of the coin of tragedy or oppression. They work together. I know people sometimes have a problem when the tone shifts abruptly. Some people find that disturbing, but for me it feels right," she told Frost. Mullen's poetry continually challenges the reader, and does so on many levels. As Yancy wrote, Mullen is "a word warrior. She preaches, poeticizes, and raps us, indeed, envelops us, into a tropological maze. She invites us to enjoy the logic of discursive possibilities, emotional entanglements, and the force of language."

Mullen told CA: "Writing became important to me when I was very young. It was the only way I could communicate with my father after my parents were divorced. My mother believed in educating 'the whole child.' She made sure my sister and I always had books to read, and she somehow found money to pay for music and dance lessons. She also encouraged us to draw and write. My sense of poetry was awakened by the formal and informal, written and oral rhymes and rhythms of family, church, and school.

"In all of my books, I try to find a balance between serious work and humorous play. At the moment, Sleeping with the Dictionary is my favorite because I enjoyed experimenting with different ways of creating poetry."

CAREER
Poet and educator. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, professor of African-American and other ethnic literature; University of California, Los Angeles, professor of African-American literature and creative writing. Also worked in Artists-in-Schools program sponsored by Texas Commission on the Arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
POETRY
Tree Tall Woman, Energy Earth (Galveston, TX), 1981.
Trimmings, Tender Buttons (New York, NY), 1991.
S*PeRM**K*T, Singing Horse (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Muse and Drudge, Singing Horse Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Blues Baby: Early Poems ( "Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry"), Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 2002.
Sleeping with the Dictionary, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2002.
Contributor of essays to periodicals and journals, including American Book Review, Callaloo, Chain, Diacritics, Light Work Annual, Antioch Review, and MELUS. Fiction and poetry published in numerous journals, magazines, anthologies, and textbooks.

FURTHER READINGS
PERIODICALS
African American Review, winter, 2000, Emily Allen Williams, "The Queen of Hip Hyperbole" (interview), p. 701.
American Book Review, May, 1997, Mark Scroggins, review ofMuse and Drudge, p. 17.
Antioch Review, winter, 1993, Molly Bendall, review of Trimmings, p. 154.
Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2002, Hoke S. Glover III, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary, p. 63.
Callaloo, summer, 1996, Calvin Bedient, "The Solo Mysterioso Blues: An Interview with Harryette Mullen," pp. 651-669.
CLA Journal, June, 2001, George Yancy, review of Muse and Drudge, pp. 522-527.
Contemporary Literature, fall, 2000, Elisabeth A. Frost, "An Interview with Harryette Mullen," pp. 397-421.
Georgia Review, fall, 1996, Fred Chappell, review of Muse and Drudge, pp. 584-600.
Los Angeles Time Book Review, March 31, 2002, Carol Muske-Dukes, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary, p. 6.
MultiCultural Review, March, 1994, Aldon L. Nielsen, review of S*PeRM*K*T, pp. 72-73.
Partisan Review, Volume 61, 1994, Stephen Yenser, review of Trimmings, pp. 350-355.
Publishers Weekly, September 25, 1995, review of Muse and Drudge, pp. 51-52; December 17, 2001, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary, p. 85.
Sulfur, fall, 1992, Juliana Spahr, review of Trimmings, pp. 265-266.
Women's Review of Books, February, 1993, Elisabeth Frost, review of Trimmings, pp. 11-12.
Yale Review, April, 1994, Stephen Yenser, review of S*PeRM*K*T, pp. 161-181.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets Web site, http://www.poets.org/ (August 1, 2001), biography of Mullen.
Arras, http:// www.arras.net/ (May 30, 2003), review of Sleeping with the Dictionary.
Bucknell University Press Web site, http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ_Press/ (May 30, 2003).
Center for African American Studies at UCLA Web site, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/caas/ (May 30, 2003), biography of Mullen.
New York Times, http: // www.nytimes.com/ (December 29, 2002), Mary Park, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary.
UCLA Today online, http:// www.today.ucla.edu/ (May 30, 2003), Meg Sullivan, review of Sleeping with the Dictionary.
University of California Press Web site, http://www.ucpress.edu/ (May 30, 2003).

In Case You Missed It: Thanks Taylor and Lasana!

2010-03-02T16:44:00.000-08:00

Here's the intro (written by CA Conrad) for these two fantastic readers! It was a pretty spectacular night!

Flying surveillance robots the size of insects will have prototypes completed in 2010at the University of Waterloo, Wright State, and Harvard.

The four-winged Wright Dragon-Flyer boasts impressive speeds and state-of-the-art maneuverability, and is said to be the size of an actual dragon fly. Our ability to hide and escape will soon become the new fiction.

Poets Lasana Sekou and Taylor Brady enter the magnetic fields of empire's rancor and tyranny, their poems signaling through the new killing fields and sedated living room walls, defying the ranks of death-as-cure. Millions of years of evolution have formed the minds of poets to counter the leaders and allies of empire: corporate, academic, governmental, etc.

At Harvard they are hard at work perfecting flying surveillance robots the size of common house flies which operate on optical and chemical sensors, and have communication systems which will allow them to exist in colonies and create autonomous flight patterns together to optimize their skills for locating programmed targets.

Sekou and Brady are poets who experience the same gravitational pull as any spy, human or robotic. They operate their own optical and chemical sensors, and have communication systems which also conduct autonomous flight patterns.

Please help me welcome the addressing of empire from poets Lasana Sekou, and Taylor Brady.

This Friday: Taylor Brady and Lasana Sekou on Empires!

2010-02-24T09:09:00.000-08:00

Please join us for a reading with Taylor Brady and Lasana Sekou on Empires.

Friday February 26, 2010
7:30pm
Timken Hall/CCA Campus San Francisco
1111 8th Street
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

____________________________________________

Lasana M. Sekou is the author of 13 books of poetry, monologues, and short stories. He is a leading St. Martin writer and is considered as one of the prolific Caribbean poets of his generation. Reviewers have compared Sekou’s poetry to the works of a range of poetic giants, from Aimé Césaire to Oswald Mtshali, from Kamau Brathwaite to Dylan Thomas, from e.e. cummings to Linton Kwesi Johnson. However, writes literary critic Howard Fergus in his book Love Labor Liberation in Lasana Sekou, “The voice that reaches us is sui generis, unique and Sekouesque.” Sekou can be heard reciting his poetry to music on the The Salt Reaper Audio CD. His books, such as the critically reviewed The Salt Reaper – poems from the flats, along with 37 Poems, Nativity and monologues for today, and Brotherhood of the Spurs have been required reading at Caribbean and North American universities. He is the editor of National Symbols of St. Martin – A Primer and producer of Fête – The first recording of Traditional St. Martin festive music by Tanny & The Boys. Sekou’s poetry and reviews about his work have appeared in Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, Del Caribe, De Gids, Das Gedicht, Prometeo, Revue Noire, World Literature Today, Caribbean Quarterly, Postcolonial Text, Caribbean Review of Books, Boundary 2, Harriet, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Daily Herald, Calabash and Repeating Islands. His poems have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Turkish, and Chinese. A graduate of Stony Brook University (BA/Int’l. Relations) and Howard University (MA/Mass Communication), Sekou has presented papers and recited his poetry at cultural and literary conferences and festivals in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. Awards and honors include an International Writers Workshop Visiting Fellow, a James Michener Fellow, a knighthood (The Netherlands), Recognition for literary excellence in the service of Caribbean unity (Dominican Republic), Conscious Lyrics Artist of the Decade, and the CTO Award of Excellence. Lasana M. Sekou is an advocate for the independence of St. Martin, which is a colony of France and the Netherlands. The new edition of Nativity/Nativité/Natividad will appear in 2010 as the author’s first title published in English with French and Spanish translations in one volume.

Find work online by Lasana Sekou here.

Taylor Brady lives in San Francisco. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently Occupational Treatment (2006), and Yesterday's News (2005), and is the co-author with Rob Halpern of Snow Sensitive Skin (2007). Recent poems, beginning to accumulate under the title Pamphlets, Rants, Tracts & Ballads, attempt a series of extrapolations, re-readings, and polemics with and against the grain of the writers and musicians who instruct him. He is active in the Nonsite Collective, and has recently edited the collected essays of Will Alexander for 2010 publication.

Listen to him read with Rob Halpern here.

In Case You Missed It: Thank you Spring, Jen and Erica!

2010-02-22T20:10:00.001-08:00

It was an unbelievable night! Thank you so much to Spring Ulmer, Jen Hofer and Erica Hunt!

With introductions by CAConrad:

Empires cycle and pile themselves into the shelves of historical scholarship for a view of our making. We have been filtered, and are ourselves now the new filters of the dreams of the cycle of Empires. H.P.Blavatsky has said the Akashick Records suggest our names have small codes to understanding where our feet might fall. The registries of the clerks and clerics hold no bond on our sentencing in this world, but yet they do have insight into the origins of Empire's tone and hue.

Ulmer is renowned, a strong passage, Ulmer means THE WHOLE SEA. Spring Ulmer, THE WHOLE SEA in the NEW SEASON where new ideas sear through the folded veils of the world.

Hofer is High Middle German, a farmstead, a world where the magic is in the loam, a place where what is fed will feed, and be fed, a rebirthing of the senses. Jen Hofer, where the calligrapher puts ink to bark.

Hunt is hunt. Hunt by day, dream to find the world by night. Erica is the Latin word for heather, an herb whose compounds strengthen the heart and her blood vessels. Erica Hunt, finding strength, exposing the bullshit and intrigue of the world.

Today's poets will speak of Empire, they're here to enrich and embolden our place in Empire, and to catapult our understanding for existing in Empire. Please welcome Spring Ulmer, Jen Hofer, and Erica Hunt.

And a reading report by Ariel Goldberg:

The Buffers of In Living Handwriting with Spring Ulmer, Jen Hofer and Erica Hunt:

The weather system of this reading started with the possibility of interruptions in order to get amplification. I think technical difficulties are exciting. Can you hear me back there? Do you mind not having a microphone? Words plus electricity was hard to find. Other built in parts as well. MC backslash ED Samantha Giles transported us to the acoustic feeling, perhaps this can join the list of Performances inspired by the [MTV] "Unplugged" format (actually a subheading of a Wikipedia post for the said show).

The challenge arrived: how do you get a voice to go outward? In the situations of jetlag, a podium to separate you from the obedient listeners, vocals strained, leaning over book, typed single spaced, the unpublished, and or laptop feeding a projection--this can be tough. Do they have this memorized?

It is important to note, there was quite a turnout for this reading. I do think this is because poetry can be the news or poetry that is drunk on news starts reclaiming a rebuilt empire of woman brains that were both physically present and transmitting outward in all directions of time. The brains were talking to those involved in empires so everyone had a stake in it. There was the evidence of broken systems for the few winners. There were the artists as marginalized figures. There was the Guantanamo torture from different distant views.

ULMER: "I study the photograph taken of you before you were detained"

A confrontation with an inventor of a torture device, not just a chair. Traveling for research. Not turning away. Longing for connection.

“I pretend to read the paper, but really, I’m eavesdropping.”

The reading simulated going through piles of drafts, documents, probably overwritten and maybe for good reason.

Unveiled first was the writing in the book then there was the writing that was just written. We got two essays. Both owing to the one sided epistolary: a loaded stranger and then a former lover.

Do we need to know which is which?

On display, at the admissions table, was Ulmer’s Essay Press The Age of Virtual Reproduction including the cover of that book--Eduardo Kac’s The Telepresence Garment, “designed as an interactive piece to be worn by any local participant willing to allow his or her body to be engaged by others remotely. Walking is impossible, since a knot at the bottom of the Garment forces the wearer to be on all fours and to move sluggishly.” (http://www.ekac.org/telepgarm.html)

HOFER: as known in an online bio as a, “public letter-writer”:
We had time in between for set up and the question, will the plan work? Suspense
We have to turn it on it has to warm up.
At this reading on empire we saw a poet pressing a remote button with arm muscles in superwoman pose.

And then back to the poetry: Intonations that go down every word read from came from her body, syllables were counted internally. I was very interested in the pacing, which always seemed fast, but I deserved it. I was trying to hold on to fast winds.

I heard about "answers that never asked"

And then more detainees. These Palm Press One poems are intermediaries between closing dates. What isn't finished lurks. I think we have a lot of lurking ahead of us in these empires. "Formerly measured in a fracture of news"

A mention of bumper stickers. They speak to me, too.

Ultimately we went to lights off--her goal in life, for the reading--switching to Benshi of On the Beach (1959) whose clips were edited by Konrad Steiner. The narration was timed and dense and fast pace, full of submarine spouts and nuclear threat actualized but fictionalized. Stills from film repeated meanwhile: a newspaper blowing on a desolate street.
There was NO BREAK for schmoozing or bathroom or cookies or wine. This was because of a show of hands voted to keep going with the reading.

HUNT: As quoted for saying, “I like poetry that disturbs the surface…avoids neat closure” (Close Listening show: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hunt.php)

We were guided by the wise: "My conversation on Empire will take two forms: dread and possibility."

There are moments where I feel I am at a religious service but I am at a poetry reading.

Engine this: "typewriter keys that change the subject when no one is looking"

Logic down. "proof that we learn to live with the unthinkable"

Then there was an adaptation from a talk on Feminism and Poetics with a physical refrain of a blindfolded and then blind mother boxing, performed by Hunt with pauses in the text for fists swarming in the orbit of how far they could reach. This was fantastic. It was only in the air, meaning harmless, representative fists that were decidedly nonviolent. The mother was in conversation with a daughter who was thinking the boxing is silly with responses always questioning effectiveness to varying degrees of trust all located in tone of voice. There was more than one generation of mothers.

"She takes a picture of what she loves" and the “she takes a picture” began as a refrain that I couldn’t copy down fully. It switched at one point to: "I take pictures of the gap where there is no closure."

I left this low-tek-voice-from-the-body-reading thinking about words spoken as the most cost effective and inevitable imagination facilitator tool in the empires.

In Case You Missed It: Thank You Angela and Evelyn!

2010-02-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

In case you you missed the fantastic reading on Empires, please check out the following reading report by Carol Mirakove.

In addition, we've been lucky enough to engage the amazing CA Conrad to write our introductions this season, which are too lovely not to post.

CA Conrad's intro for Evelyn Reilly and Angela Carr:

(on podium have two little bowls, one with blueberries, one with shavings of papaya)

WELCOME!

Angela Carr, our first poet this evening lives and writes in Montreal. Our second poet Evelyn Reilly lives and writes in New York City. It is 333 miles between Montreal and New York City. 3, 3, 3, added together make 9, the perfect, indestructible number 9. The energy rises up the stem and circulates in the crown chakra, 9 is the home of the poet. 9 is the brain stem, lifting us into speech, into awareness, opening poems to epiphany.

The sugars which feed the brain stem of these two poets when writing their poems are as various as any thinking, creative being. In Montreal, one of Angela's favorite sources of natural sugar are blueberries, a local fruit feeding off the same sunlight where Angela walks and writes her poems.

(SAMANTHA GILES PAUSES TO EAT A BLUEBERRY, AND TO SAY, "Mm, Angela's poems!")

In New York City, one of Evelyn's favorite natural sugars is papaya, a fruit native to the tropics of the Americas, the equatorial light finding its way through her blood, into her mind, and poems.

(SAMANTHA GILES PAUSES TO EAT A BIT OF PAPAYA, AND TO SAY, "Mm, Evelyn's poems!")

We are fortunate to have these two poets with us today. Angela traveled 2,543 miles, Evelyn traveled 2,905 miles.

PLEASE HELP ME WELCOME ANGELA CARR AND EVELYN REILLY!

Reading Report by Carol Mirakove
Clementines & valentines & wine. CA Conrad was present this night by way of writing introductions for Evelyn and Angela: “9 is the home of the poet.” Samantha Giles paused to eat a blueberry.

Evelyn Reilly read from her book Styrofoam, informed largely by Industrial Specification Sheets from Dow Corning’s website.

Ankle bracelets on birds are made of PVC. A world of faux construction: “inter-pseudo kindess.” Plastic comes to life. X X X

As Reilly reads I experience a flow and ebb of judgment of plastics. It’s hard to imagine not judging plastics. But, experience trumps imagination: her language hit beauty, poetry.

Most of us are at our best when we submit (to love, in art). Is it even possible to be beautiful without giving in to beauty?

Reilly says her engagement with plastics began with an encounter of Rudolf Stingel’s art at the Whitney Museum. She cites a “human joy of fake materials.” Styrofoam is “not just an eco-rant.”

“We invented this word ‘nature’ as other. Language is part of the ecology problem.”

We can intellectually know that plastics are bad for the environment, they epitomize our greed, we may allow ourselves to be seduced by language.

It’s hard to keep up resistance. We long to make connections. Happiness is a survival tactic. Denial can feed contentment.

If this pattern is true, take care in choosing surroundings.

Angela Carr read from The Rose Concordance a translation of “Roman de la Rose,” a 13th-century poem by Guillaume de Lorris. Carr’s poem includes “allegorical figures like love, luxury, feeling.” Her reading was thrilling. Language was exceptionally alive:

“eating light or eating fountain”

“is this the critical substance of ‘drank’?”

“don’t wait for me to choose preciously between meaning and coincidence”

“our language is less in motion than motion”

Not that night. It wasn’t.

This Friday: Ulmer, Hofer and Hunt on Empires

2010-02-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

Please join us for a reading with Spring Ulmer, Jen Hofer and Erica Hunt on Empires.

Friday February 19, 2010
7:30pm
Nahl Hall, CCA Oakland Campus
5212 Broadway Avenue, Oakland, CA
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

____________

Spring Ulmer grew up off the grid in the backwoods of Vermont. The author of Benjamin's Spectacles and The Age of Virtual Reproduction, she currently teaches at John Jay College and Fordham University. Find reviews and samples of her work here, here and here.

Jen Hofer’s most recent publications include a series of anti-war-manifesto-poems titled one (Palm Press, 2009); The Route, an epistolary and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin (Atelos, 2008); and a translation of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008); She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches and works as a Spanish-language interpreter, and writes letters for people in public spaces at her Escritorio Público. Find reviews and samples of her work here, here and here.

Erica Hunt works at the forefront of experimental poetry and poetics, critical race theory, and feminist aesthetics. Her books include: Arcade, with artist Alison Saar, Piece Logic, and Local History. She is currently president of The Twenty-First Century Foundation which supports organizations addressing root causes of social injustice impacting the Black community. Find reviews and examples of her work here, here and here.

This Friday: Evelyn Reilly and Angela Carr on Empires

2010-02-09T09:50:00.000-08:00

Please join us for a reading with Evelyn Reilly and Angela Carr on Empires.

Friday February 12, 2010
7:30pm
Nahl Hall, CCA Oakland Campus
5212 Broadway Avenue, Oakland, CA
$8-15 entrance/members and students FREE

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

Evelyn Reilly’s most recent book is Styrofoam. She is currently working on Material Science, an exploration of the language of siteless architectural forms. Other works include Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces and Hiatus. Find examples of her work here and here .
And more information about Evelyn on her website.

Angela Carr is a poet and translator who lives in Montréal. Her books include The Rose Concordance, Ropewalk, and Risk Accretions, part of a set of chapbooks called Handwerk.
Find examples of her work here and an interview with her here.
Find an audio sample of her work in textsound here.

There is no better time to become a member of SPT. As we push to make it through another year with its own set of unique funding challenges, and hear of a different arts organization each day that closes its doors, we are heartened by the fact that it is our community that will sustain us.

If you value SPT and the incredible writers we showcase, show your support by becoming a member (or, if you already are, by making an additional donation) today.

See you there!

In Case You Missed It: Thank you Cedar and Brenda!

2010-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

In case you were, ahem, out of town when Cedar Sigo and Brenda Coultas came to give their brilliant reading on Communities, the following reading report by Stephanie Young and Suzanne Stein should help to fill in some gaps.

Also, you can find thoughts by Sara Larsen here and some photos here.

Reading Report by S. Young and S. Stein
When Samantha Giles sent out a call for volunteers interested in writing reading reports on the Spring 2010 season, we each responded wanting to write about the Brenda Coultas and Cedar Sigo reading on communities. We decided to report via dialogue, wherein we’d meet up for a gchat conversation the following Monday night. We agreed not to do any research before this conversation but to each write a short reflective note to the other to spark the conversation, aiming to send by Monday morning,. As work and life will have it, these initial texts were completed & exchanged moments before our gchat date Monday night.

Subject: Cedar Sigo+Brenda Coultas "On Communities"
Date: February 1, 2010 8:29:40 PM PST

Hi Stephanie,

I'm not sure if my subject line carries the right title of Saturday's event. Here's some of what I've been thinking and thought we might touch on some of this when we g-chat later:

Before we got to SPT, we'd gone to a bar for a drink, because we were quite early, and partly because I was feeling unusually anxious. We were talking there, among other things, about the nature of encounter---of intimate relational encounter (not necessarily or specifically sexual) between people, the natural violence of that mutual crashing, and the mutual growth or change of that, that the nature of all *intimate* (which would of course include being in a community) encounters is a continuum of, and continual stream of, psychological, emotional adjustment. But so violent, and we were puzzling out the balance of that, how to do it, love and not 'be killed' and a phrase you were using which you were borrowing from something you're currently reading I remember very well was 'spontaneous recovery'. Then we realized we were late, we rushed to CCA, it was ten after eight but the reading not only had not yet started, everyone was still in the foyer drinking wine and saying hello.

Cedar began his reading by reminding us all that it was Jack Spicer's birthday and then by talking about the changed (to his mind for the better) nature of the bay area poetry community over the last several years---that it seemed to him more open, more aesthetic-boundary-crossing, more kinds of poets together in more kinds of places exchanging work and conversation. He also said something quite specific about the way that, with the world's going to hell in a handbasket, the poets of the last few years have been in the face of that throwing these fantastic house reading/parties, where 'it even seemed as though everyone was invited to stay the night'----there was a long pause and a late and pretty raucous and long burst of laughter, since indeed at many of those parties everyone was invited to stay the night. In a conversation the next day David Brazil said to me he thought that the point Cedar was making was not that this insistence on the life-giving party was a kind of bacchanalia but an insistence on---despite everything---our possibility and potential as creative, social animals. I wonder what you think of that? I remember saying to you in the car after we split via French goodbye that I thought Cedar a kind of ideal reader of/commentator on community, as he's always seemed to me to float easily between social groups/aesthetic arguments+environments and never wavering from anything other than his Cedar-ness, one of the many things I adore about him. Something else Cedar said I'd be interested to get your take on is that, in looking over the many issues of TRY! magazine, he thought 'the group' more characterized by its similarities than its differences, and he named the similarity as a desire to capture or record the language that surrounds us. I think I disagree with the 'more same than different' although I thought his example of the similarities not untrue. What do you think of this? Then he quoted---John Wieners?---"O blessed plain. O pointed chasm!", and began to read some writing. I want to mention three pieces I remember, because of their difference (and also, that they each had a different tempo and duration, and I thought this contributed to a quality of not being able to reckon accurately the passing of time, ie, how long his reading was). The first was a prose piece about Kenneth Anger, that he'd written for a friend who'd asked him to do something at PS1. There was what he called his 'only Flarf poem', and he said he'd been pressed into service for that by Alli Warren---they'd both googled the same words and then compared the poems they wrote from that. And the last piece he read was a very long one, which he said had been composed a bit under the duress of having been writing for the SFMOMA blog---that he'd found it hard to write poetry the way he normally does, and the long poem was an aggregation of daily bits and pieces---not to belabor this in a gross way, but it seemed to me he'd described a compositional method not totally unlike the aggregative shifting terrain of a conversation or a community.

Then, Brenda Coultas. She started with a piece in a columbarium, a cemetery, is librarium the word? I asked you later in the car and your answer was Have you been to that place? By which I could understand she was writing about a real environment, is it both a cemetery AND columbarium? is this the place where sometimes there are music and film shows? and there are a lot of gardens or something? And it's very big inside? I wasn't listening very carefully at that point in the reading, and in the car, the line you remembered as an excellent descriptor of this place I've never been to was, "I could get raped in here". A bit later there was a story within a story, a ghosts and ghost story, where three women friends of a friend go on a tour of the famous
Winchester mystery house built and built and built into (184?) rooms with staircases and doorways leading nowhere, by the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, who believed she was being haunted by the dead killed by those rifles. The three women separate themselves from the tour group, and one of them becomes even further separated/lost when she lies down in the---false/replacement/stand-in---bed of the dead woman. Some terrible frightening things happen to her, including being drenched with something disgusting like spit, from nowhere; later all three fall terribly ill for thirteen days, and *everyone they tell their story to also falls terribly ill for thirteen days*. (Did you, like me, momentarily wonder if we were all about to fall terribly ill for thirteen days?) Now I come to the point of needing much filling in about what else we heard, since for the last 15 minutes or so I had to pee really terribly. The last poem, as I remember it, was a meditation on being alive, on recognizing oneself as living, as measuring a number of ways by which one might understand oneself as alive (drinking tea, for example, the cup and the drinking of tea), but especially as adjunct to what is not alive, in this case, one's friend? I do remember very well Brenda's final refrain, possibly I am slightly misquoting, 'We want to write an elegy, without sadness. We want to write an elegy, without sadness'. I had a lot of difficulty with those lines, do we want to write an elegy without sadness? do we? why would we? who's the we? I must have missed something important ("I saw something important I can not remember", I know that line so well, from Kevin K).

Subject: "short" reflective text 1
Date: February 1, 2010 8:27:22 PM PST

So I've been thinking a little bit about the form of the reading report; I don't want to make this too much about myself or even necessarily the form, but definitely noticing myself considering how I used to write such reports, or mini-reports, a lot (on blog), and realizing in retrospect that when this was a somewhat regular practice, I often went to readings with the report in mind. Thinking about how that changed my quality of attention then (not sure I entirely know or can remember) but definitely noticing how it changed my quality of attention on Friday. I took notes, for starters, something I haven't been doing regularly.

Also seeing how I approach the form now with a sort of blank mind, or a mind that isn't sure of anything (what is a reading report? who is it for? what can it do?)

I've also been thinking about this report/dialogue we're engaging in light of the frame around Friday night's reading: community. The reading report has something to do with the group's experience of itself, and as such, fraught with various anxieties. I'm noticing. A vexed relationship with, uh, audience? As I say a lot when teaching, esp. when attempting to contextualize/historicize a writer or a scene of contemporary writing (for a group often unfamiliar with the writers I'm presenting): there are a lot of ways to tell a story and the way I might tell it is only one. Someone else would tell a different story; I might tell a different story (or report on a reading) differently today than tomorrow. I know it's a kind of given with the reading report, but feels important to remind myself (and maybe as a way to proceed).

Also, duh, the dialogue helps. I'm talking to *you*. Whatever my report might be is immediately brought into relationship / conversation / unsettled by the process of our experiences and ideas coming into contact.

So, the reading. I've been thinking about that great quote from John Wieners which Cedar closed the first part of his reading/talk with: "Oh blessed plain / Oh pointed chasm". How that quote served as a hinge, between the talking he did around poetry community stuff, and the reading of his own poems. How he was going to give a talk on community but also wanted to read his work. (I simultaneously wished very much to hear the full talk Cedar would give on community, and was very glad he chose instead to read his own work.) How those two impulses - to address the idea of community, to read one's own work - point towards what has been for me, and I know you and I have discussed at various points over the years, an ongoing tension between attending to the group and attending to one's own work. Maybe something like: the group as blessed plain, one's work as a pointed chasm. (?) But also one's friends as the pointed chasm? One's enemies or frienemies, too, as a pointed chasm. (A tangent coming to mind here: Lisa Robertson's writing on "friends" v. "community" - I think she wrote on harriet about this during the first few months of that blog's inception?) Anyways I love the way that Wieners quote brings these tensions btwn group/individual into relationship. Or the context in which Cedar quoted it did that, brought these tensions into relation in a way that's been generative for me over the last few days.

The reading report then as one pointed chasm? Or is it a blessed plain? A pointed chasm addresses itself to the blessed plain?

Also thinking about how Cedar valorized a certain breakdown between camps/factions/splits, I wrote down in my notes "dividing lines want to be erased", I'm not sure if that's Cedar, or my paraphrase. He spoke particularly about attending one of the first artifact readings and his surprise at seeing people he associated w. an SPT scene at a reading where he'd expected mostly a New College crowd.

I was also thinking about how sweetly Cedar intersected with / engaged the eros of the group. Talking about the earthworm series and both both: "it seemed like when we were there we were almost invited to spend the night". Something lovely about how that also invokes a kind of slumber party scenario. There was laughter when Cedar said that in the room, but it didn't feel to me like closed laughter. (i.e. one needn't have been privy to any particular gossip or sense of local community history to share in that laugh; it was gentle in so many directions.)

As an audience member on Friday, I experienced 2 sort of uncanny things I wanted to, I don't know? what to say about?

1 - I noticed for the first time that there must be some kind of red light on the podium that sometimes will reflect on a reader's hand (and perhaps this reflection is only visible if one is sitting in one part of the room? for whatever reason I hadn't noticed before) and watching how all three people at the podium had a moment of their hand or arm passing through or reflecting this light. Something there thinking about community as simply (? obviously not "simple") a shared investment in sometimes passing through a shared place, sometimes reflecting a light which is consistently placed but every body reflects slightly differently. Everyone looks different with a red palm.

2 - During Brenda's reading the ever-present saws in the woodshop upstairs started, well, sawing. For a moment they sounded like a spooky organ. Like music. They've never sounded that way to me before. Thinking about Brenda's reading and its attention to the paranormal. Her reading felt very unobtrusive or almost quiet to me in some way and yet, it seems quite likely, shaped my experience of the room. I heard music in the electrical saw.

I keep wondering about the relationship between Brenda and Cedar's work and not being able to figure it out. I was thinking how a community of the dead or unseen show up in Brenda's work. And this quote, I think from Cedar's last poem, I seem to have written down that it has to do with death or (a father?) "the place all have gone before me and that's what makes me human".

I was also thinking about an intersection of the uncanny in both readings - but I'm not entirely sure what I mean here -

One thing that unexpectedly remained with me and came to mind over the weekend was the story of a creek catching fire in Brenda's work, specifically a creek in Oakland (again, if I am remembering correctly). And how someone in Brenda's poem/narrative explains the burst of flame as a patch of oil on the surface of the creek catching fire in the summer heat with a whole host of materialist explanatory gestures for the fire itself, for the weird sounds that issued from a tunnel/under a bridge just before the flame, and most eerie of all, a human form identified inside the flame - "it must have been a shadow." (This whole sequence came to mind yesterday afternoon, at theater first's production of rosenkrantz & guildenstern are dead. Rosenkrantz has a moment of desiring the entrance of the uncanny as such, which he locates in the figure of a unicorn, how when it appears, it's always reduced into something "real", by way of observation - the more observers, the more "thin" the appearance of the uncanny becomes). But then the figure in Brenda's story who is explaining the flame away seems to reverse things, and recounts a moment of the air itself catching on fire. The uncanny again, despite or outside of explanation.

I appreciated Brenda "beginning in Oakland and winding up in Kentucky". I loved that she was beginning with Oakland. I felt addressed, or felt my neighborhood addressed, when I was least expecting it. And thinking of Kentucky's location next to Ohio, something I've only recently learned in the last few years, I wrote in my notebook, Hi Dana! Like we would end up near Ohio and thus near Dana by way of - geography? writing? distance? nearness?

Also thought about the writers who were variously evoked by Brenda and Cedar. Mayer especially in Brenda's work, Cedar talking about Spicer's birthday. (what a gift to be told that.) Again a community of the dead / ghosts along with the living - Brenda talking about knowing that Bernadette is going on because she eats eggs at her desk. The person who is elsewhere is hard to keep in one's mind.

But also with all these evocations and shout-outs and quotations, I find myself wondering again with a kind of blank mind, despite having thought about it for ages, you and I both, as you pointed out - what is community? And how is it constructed or operative differently from friendship, or lineage, or conversation, or even influence?

Somewhere in here between work and yoga and arriving home, I left at work my pink notebook with the sparse notes I took Friday night. This seems right, that now I don't have my notes any longer, along with our agreement to not research before talking more.

"A few short paragraphs". Stephanie! Sheesh!

Also I remember from my notes: "Oh my god suzanne stein"

That's sarah larsen commenting on your boots and black and white tie die jeans-leggings, ok, jeggings! God I love jeggings, they are one of my favorite things of the last two years. I remember that every reading report should include some fashion.

Or it may have been that Sara said: "suzanne stein oh my god".

suzanne.m.stein: so, what should we do?
krbygrip: Have we already written a report?
suzanne.m.stein: ha ha (um, LOL stephanie young)
i was wondering the same thing
krbygrip: Can I do a quick emotional checkin?
suzanne.m.stein: yes, do you want to do it by phone?
or here?
8:40 PM krbygrip: Here
suzanne.m.stein: listening
krbygrip: I just wanted to say that wow I had to fight through so many waves of feeling like I'd written this "wrong" somehow. Like I really appreciated how you set the scene of our arrival, and I especially appreciated that you asked me questions
I mean while I was reading it. I had to surf all these waves of thinking I'd done it wrong. it was really interesting. But then I came out the other side.
8:41 PM suzanne.m.stein: what's on the other side sweet one?
krbygrip: I feel curious
and that the reading report we've written is interesting in its points of intersections and departures and similarities and differences.
8:43 PM suzanne.m.stein: there was something you said at the near beginning of yours that was so important for me, which was that we were writing this to each other
it made it so much easier for me to float around and say what i was thinking without trying to do it right
just get it out as fast as i could
8:44 PM and i wanted to do some justice to our bar conversation, because you were saying so many interesting things that on later reflection totally set the scene for how me/i/we come to a reading
as a group
8:45 PM krbygrip: oh, that is great. that it was easier to float around and just get it out as fast as you could.
8:46 PM suzanne.m.stein: this thing about wrongness
krbygrip: no kidding! it's nuts. it just goes on and on.
suzanne.m.stein: it's where difference becomes 'bad'
(tell me about it)
i live half my life 'in wrongness' feeling
8:47 PM i couldnt'' write the first report sg asked me to do
because all i could do was feel i was doing it wrong, then i quit
krbygrip: "krbygrip is nodding"
suzanne.m.stein: you have a relationship also to reading reports
(ha ha ha krbygrip you've never told me what on earth is a krbygrip
8:48 PM krbygrip: a krbygrip is slang in the UK for "bobby pin"
suzanne.m.stein: omg.
krbygrip: but while we're on the subject of words like that:
suzanne.m.stein: because that's what they were called!
that is so cute
krbygrip: I think a columbarium is the thing inside the cemetery a building where ashes are contained
suzanne.m.stein: wait, do you and clive have a pet name related to the bobby pin
8:49 PM krbygrip: yes, he called me krbygrip for a long time when we first got together.
suzanne.m.stein: yes, that is a columbarium
and you call each other bobby?
krbygrip: actually it is spelled "kirbygrip" but when I first made my yahoo name a million years ago that was already taken.
oh, yes, you're right! he calls me bobby.
suzanne.m.stein: how do i recall that?
krbygrip: I don't call him bobby, though. What in the world.
I was just wondering the same thing
suzanne.m.stein: call him bobby, lass!
krbygrip: krbygrip is laughing
8:50 PM but also I think librarium is a word too but I don't know what it is.
suzanne.m.stein: I didn't think so much about that, about the ashes, in the way that you would have
krbygrip: what are the gigantic tombs - buildings on the hills inside a cemetery called?
we should go to that cemetery sometime.
suzanne.m.stein: ok, i did one bit of research, which is, i tried to google librarium and liberium
krbygrip: ????
suzanne.m.stein: the mausoleum
krbygrip: I'm glad we're figuring it out. This gchat would be a kind of hilarious document with the long emails withheld.
8:51 PM suzanne.m.stein: let's go to the cemetary
krbygrip: I mean redacted. Is that the word?
oh, she didn't talk about the mausoleums.
suzanne.m.stein: withheld and redacted
i;'m not sure the provenance of mausoleum or what they are for
but there are the buildings that the caskets slide in and out of
ie, they are not in the ground
krbygrip: There are buildings on the hills there, like miniature tombs, with families of bodies inside.
suzanne.m.stein: (this is like ten year old's speech)
8:52 PM ah, crypt
?
krbygrip: it is a good poem
suzanne.m.stein: so, there is no 'libarium'
or librarium
or, not in the first ten google hits
krbygrip: I always think of the buildings where caskets are slid in and out as being "modernist" if there are a lot of them. caskets. what is that about.
suzanne.m.stein: (lazy researcher with no time)
'suzanne.m.stein: is laughing'
krbygrip: I feel sure she said librarium??
suzanne.m.stein: she did! she did!
8:53 PM listen, i made a mistake early on in writing the "short" email
which is, instead of saying emotional, psychological adjustments
i said, i really wanted to say, and i said instead, 'morphological'
but not thinking abt language at all
duh
thinking about the body
8:54 PM our violent librarium
where one is dead, raped, and alive all at once
in a creepy house
covered in spit
krbygrip: with a red light
suzanne.m.stein: on hand
8:55 PM krbygrip: but - wait - chat gets confusing - did you actually use "morphological" or not?
and why can't I remember what morphological means just this minute?
suzanne.m.stein: i used it, and then took it out
krbygrip: !
suzanne.m.stein: because i didn't want to be wrong
krbygrip: but it was the word you wanted to use.
8:56 PM suzanne.m.stein: why are you offline, krby grip?
yes, structure of body and of language
8:57 PM krbygrip: whoa I don't know what happened; I went to look up morphological and the chat screen disappeared.
suzanne.m.stein: i want to go re-read your email
krbygrip: yes, same here. what to do? Should we come back in 15 minutes? 20? I need to be done at 10 but next hour is totes free
8:58 PM suzanne.m.stein: i also now want to drink wine. but that will be bad for reporting. but i want to first before anything else read your email more closely. what should we do?
krbygrip: but I just lost the beautiful poem you wrote on chat
do you have the whole thing
still?
being alive and dead and raped all in the same place
8:59 PM the body
i kind of want a glass of wine too the chatting makes me giddy
suzanne.m.stein: let's drink wine and chat
9:01 PM krbygrip: let's take 10-15 to pour glass of wine and read each other's email closely.
suzanne.m.stein: ok, sounds perfect. see you in a few minutes. xo
14 minutes
9:15 PM suzanne.m.stein: I don't know if you're back yet, maybe you are smoking a cigarette just outside your kitchen door, in that light where often there'd be a place to stand if there was an outdoor poetry reading, or where we'd all go to smoke if there was an indoor poetry reading
9:16 PM krbygrip: Aww. You need to come see my new house. We painted the living room green!
I'm back. I did go out there and smoke.
suzanne.m.stein: but at any rate, i really love your reading report. and I realized while i was reading it that i had a very similar initial reaction the first time reading, as you did reading mine, which was that i'd done mine wrong
I want to come see your new house! "new"
and so i raced through yours the first read, because it was going to stick too much/hurt if i could see how i did mine wrong
9:17 PM so going back to read, i could spend better time that second round listening to you
krbygrip: Oh so interesting. I was also thinking about how the first sentence of your report registers a concern over not being sure if the subject line is "right"
like you immediately place your hand on the fear of not getting it right. and then proceed, so beautifully.
suzanne.m.stein: and as usual, really appreciating things like your passage that includes the description of the fire, the uncanny, and takes into account, by reversal, what happens in the play
9:18 PM and that you evoke community--the real, not reading-reportish kind
by returning to one of the most effervescent modes in your old form of reporting
ie, the fashion report
which is how we present to each other
9:19 PM and acknowledge recognition,
krbygrip: I loved that you finished with the Kevin K. quote.
suzanne.m.stein: now we can't just fawn over each other, dear
or is it 'faun'
, dear
9:21 PM krbygrip: Actually your ending point and mine, taken together, seem to get at something of the impossibility of a reading report, or of being able to "report" on a reading "correctly" - there's the combined presentation and acknowledgment moment which fashion occasions: Suzanne Stein, Oh my God! And then the reading, wherein something important has happened but it cannot be remembered
Or it can, but not completely, and also something happens which is mysterious
suzanne.m.stein: i want to end our reading report just there,
9:22 PM but keep chatting
krbygrip: long sentence which amounts to Yes

[suzanne wishes to note for the record that those were JEANS, not JEGGINGS, and they are navy blue & white, not black & white]

Poets Theater Wrap-up

2010-01-28T19:46:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all the writers, directors, performers, volunteers, board members, and generous audience members who helped make this year's Poets Theater Fest a rousing adventure---

some photos here & here

Robin Tremblay-McGaw's reports here & here

& some video here & here (the latter filmed from POV of Kevin Killian as James Bidgood)

THIS SATURDAY 1/30: Sigo and Coultas

2010-01-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

"Please join us this Saturday for a reading and discussion on communities with Cedar Sigo and Brenda Coultas!

This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our reader's work. Season conversations include: bodies, communities and empires. Dialogues are intended to engender discussions around the themes of bodies, communities, and empires, putting each reader's writing into broader contexts and ongoing debates around poetics, politics, and practice.

Saturday January 30th; 7:30pm
Timken Hall, CCA Campus,
1111 8th Street, San Francisco
$8-15 sliding scale/members and students free

Brenda Coultas is the author of The Marvelous Bones of Time and A Handmade Museum, both published by Coffee House Press. She has most recently served as a visiting poet at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY.

Cedar Sigo is a poet and sometime teacher, active in the art and literary worlds since 1999. He studied writing and poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of seven books and pamphlets of poetry, including two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse , 2003 and 2005) and most recently, Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008).

You're not my Father! come tmrw & be a star!

2010-01-23T17:18:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder that as part of our final installment of Poets Theater 2010, tomorrow afternoon's events will include a live video-shoot of Paul Slocum's "You're Not My Father" - audience members are invited to jump in a play a role, which will be directed and filmed by our own Lauren Shufran & friends. No rehearsal or costumes necessary - but here's the video if you want to prepare!

And then this final installation of POETS THEATER 2010

2010-01-17T21:20:00.000-08:00

In our final installment of Poets Theater 2010 we will hosting a series of performances and theatrical installations by:

Lindsey Boldt
CA Conrad
Ariel Goldberg
Katrina Lamb
Dana Teen Lomax & family
Yedda Morrison
Julie Patton
Paul Slocum

Jessica Tully
Matt Timmons
Dan Thomas-Glass
Julie Patton

Wafaa Yasin

Brent Cunningham
and many more!

Sunday January 24th
event begins at 1pm- rain or shine

California College of the Arts, Graduate Writing Center
195 deHaro Street, San Francisco

$10-20 sliding scale for this annual fundraiser

Come back for MORE: POETS THEATER 2010 continues!

2010-01-17T21:09:00.000-08:00

Please join us this Friday for a celebration of the new Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater by our own David Brazil and Kevin Killian!

The program of plays include:
The Gay Way by Joe Brainard (directed by Sara Larsen)
The Corpse by Russell Atkins (directed by Kevin Killian)
xSong #3 by Bruce Andrews (performed by Erika Staiti & David Brazil)
The Origins of Old Son by Robert Duncan (directed by David Brazil)

plus the following new work:
Interview written and directed by Cassandra Smith
Monkey Talk by Tonya Foster (directed by Taylor Brady)

Friday January 22nd
Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street, San Francisco
event begins at 7:30pm/ $20 admission for this annual fundraiser ($10 for students)
refreshments provided in part by Citron

In Case You Missed It

2010-01-17T20:57:00.000-08:00

Congratulations and THANK YOU to all the performers, directors, writers and volunteers who helped make Poets Theater 2010:Night One a great success!

To get a report of the night visit Robin Tremblay-McGaw's report here.

To see a few photos of the plays visit Alli Warren's flickr site here

And to see Kevin Killian's film of the performance "Life on Mars" by Stephen Boyer visit here .

This Friday! Poets Theater 2010!

2010-01-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

Join us for a night of costumed ribaldry, artistic blasphemy, and cultural craziness, along with drinks, food and other wonders! As part the first night of SPT's annual fundraiser we will present performances, and surprises including plays by:

Dodie Bellamy, "Turn on the Heat, by A.A. Fair" (directed by Kevin Killian)

Rodney Koeneke, "The Impertinents" (directed by Lauren Shufran)

Stephen Boyer, "Bidgood Opening - Life on Mars" (directed by Stephen Boyer)

Brent Cunningham, "The Event" (directed by Brent Cunningham)

Audience Participation Encouraged!

All events take place at:

California College of the Arts, Timken Hall

and the festivities begin at 7:30pm

Tickets are $20 for this annual fundraiser.

Questions? email smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

see you there!

SAVE THE DATES: Spring 10 Season!

2009-12-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

For over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we continue to present a multi-pronged conversation that highlights some of the concerns of our readers’ work. These conversations include: bodies, communities and empires.

Our Spring lineup is as follows:

Jan 15: Poets Theater
Jan 22: Poets Theater
Jan 24: Poets Theater

As part of SPT's annual fundraiser, we will be staging several works from the anthology, along with new plays, performances, and surprises by Julie Patton, Dodie Bellamy, Tonya Foster, Brent Cunningham, Cassandra Smith, Stephen Boyer, and a celebration of the release of the epic Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil. . In addition, on Sunday the 24th we will present the first ever off-site Poets Theater event, with multiple simultaneous performances staged in and around the CCA campus. Please check out the SPT website and blog in January for details!

Jan 30: Brenda Coultas and Cedar Sigo on communities

Feb 12: Evelyn Reilly and Angela Carr on empiresat Nahl Hall

Feb 19: Spring Ulmer and Jen Hofer and Erica Hunt on empires

Feb 26: Lasana Sekou and Taylor Brady on empires

March 6: an evening with Harryette Mullen on bodies

March 12: on communitiesImmortal Cupboard in Search of Lorine Neidecker with filmmaker Cathy Cook
and a lecture on ecopoetics by Jonathan Skinner: Thoughts on Things:Poetics of the Third Landscape

co-sponsored by Kino 21, Artists Television Access and Poetry Center

March 13: an evening with Ronaldo Wilson on bodiesa reading and discussion of The Visible Black Body: An Interventionist's Reflection

March 20: Bruce Andrews and Leslie Scalapino on bodies

April 9: an eveing with Ammiel Alcalay on empires
with special guest Charming Hostess singing Sarajevo Blues

April 17: Aaron Vidaver and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk on empires

April 23: Pamela Lu and Mary Burger on bodies

April 25: Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems, Plays, Stories and Song for Children on communities

April 30: Laynie Browne and Lee Ann Brown on bodiesat Nahl Hall

May 7: Eileen Tabios and Susan Gevirtz on empires

May 11: Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer on communities Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture Co-sponsored by Taube Center for Jewish Life

May 22: SPECIAL EVENT: the Relequarium (a fundraiser and party for SPT)

It should go without saying that there is no better time to become a member of SPT. If you value SPT and the incredible writers we showcase, show your support by becoming a member (or, if you already are, by making an additional donation) today at sptraffic.org.

I am grateful and honored to be a part of Small Press Traffic. I hope you are too.
Happy New Year!Samantha

This Friday: an evening with Renee Gladman

2009-10-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

Please note this event has moved to
NAHL HALL, CCA CAMPUS, OAKLAND
5212 Broadway, Oakland

event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 sliding scale; members FREE

Renee Gladman is the author of one collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling (Roof Books, 2005), and four works of prose, Juice (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), The Activist (Krupskaya, 2003), Newcomer Can't Swim (2007), and most recently Toaf (Atelos, 2008). She is the publisher of Leon Works, a press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches at Brown University.

see you there!

in case you missed it: The Smith Family review

2009-10-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

here!

and: Join us on Saturday for Dialogues with Anne Tardos!

2009-09-21T11:19:00.001-07:00

Come back for more with Anne Tardos in this one day only experience:

Saturday September 26th
Classroom 101, CCA San Francisco
1pm-4pm
$25 admission/$20 members and students
sliding scale entrance available- please email smallpresstraffic@gmail.com
Class limited to 20.

In this workshop the participants will compose new texts, using voice, pen & paper (or electronic device). We will address monolingual, multilingual, and neolingual aspects of literary composition. Using certain techniques, we will illuminate the creative process by voicing our works as we compose them. If there is time, we will perform and discuss the works we have just created.

This Friday! Anne Tardos and Amina Cain on the Inverted I

2009-09-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

Join us for these dynamic writers as they consider the Inverted I and narritivity.

Friday September 25th

Timken Hall, CCA SF

1111 8th Street

San Francisco, CA

event begins at 7:30pm

Anne Tardos, a 2009 Fellow in Poetry form the New York Foundation for the Arts, is a poet, performer, visual artist, and composer. She is the author of several books of poetry and the multimedia performance work and radio play Among Men. A selection of her readings and performances (many with Jackson Mac Low) can be heard on the University of Pennsylvania’s web site : PennSound and on UbuWeb Sound. Her book of new poetry, I Am You, has appeared from Salt Publishing in 2008, and she is the editor of Thing of Beauty, by Jackson Mac Low, University of California Press, 2008. See also author page on EPC and http://www.annetardos.com/.

Amina Cain is the author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), a collection of stories that revolve quietly around human relationality, landscape, and emptiness. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as 3rd bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, Dewclaw, Encyclopedia vol. 2, La Petite Zine, and Sidebrow and has been translated into Polish on MINIMALBOOKS. She is also a curator, most recently for When Does It or You Begin? (Memory as Innovation), a month long festival of writing, performance, and video that took place at Links Hall in Chicago last January. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Thank you Brandon and David! That was great!

2009-09-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

In case you missed these fantastic performances, you can get thoughts and reading reports by Robin Tremblay-McGaw here and by Stephen Vincent here.

Thanks Robin and Stephen!

Frank Sherlock and CAConrad on Voicebox

2009-09-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

If you missed their reading, go listen here.

Thank you Andrew Kenower for providing this awesome public service!

David Larsen and Brandon Brown! This weekend!

2009-09-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

Don't miss this stupendous weekend of awesomeness:

David Larsen and Brandon Brown read and perform works in conversation with Translation:

September 18, 2009: Event begins at 7:30pm

Timken Hall at CCA San Francisco

1111 8th Street, San Francisco
$8-15 admission

members free!

Then: join us for a Dialogues event with David Larsen where he presents his talk: Translation as Conceptual Writing Practice

September 19, 2009: Event begins at 1pm

Classroom 101 at CCA San Francisco

1111 8th Street, San Francisco

$10 admission/$5 for members

David Larsen returns for his first Bay Area reading since leaving San Francisco last summer. For a time, he was a co-curator of the New Yipes poetry and video series at Oakland's 21 Grand. He now lives in New Haven, where he is writing a book on historical semiotics. His translation of al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khalawayh's treatise on the Names of the Lion appeared this year from Atticus/Finch (Seattle). Find discussion about this new work here.

Brandon Brown is a poet. In 2008, TAXT press published Camels! In 2009, Mitzvah Chaps will publish Wondrous Things I Have Seen. He co-curated the Performance Writing series at New Langton Arts, The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand gallery, and publishes small press books under the imprint OMG!

Thanks Frank & Conrad!

2009-09-14T22:34:00.001-07:00

Thanks for a wonderful first weekend to kick off the 09-10 SPT season - from the fab reading Friday night to Saturday's workshop (co-hosted by the Nonsite Collective).
(keep an eye out on the Nonsite website for follow-up texts and other media that come out of the workshop)

CACONRAD and FRANK SHERLOCK!

2009-08-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

We are bursting at the seams with giddiness to open our Fall 2009 season with this incredible pair!

READING:CAConrad and Frank Sherlock on Class/Warfare

September 11, 2009: Doors open 7:30pm/Reading begins at 8:00

Timken Hall at CCA San Francisco/1111 8th Street/San Francisco

$8 admission

CAConrad

CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online at http://caconrad.blogspot.com/ and also with his friends at http://phillysound.blogspot.com/

Also, find him online

here and here and here

Frank Sherlock

Frank Sherlock is the author of Over Here (Factory School 2009) and the co-author of Ready-To-Eat Individual (Lavender Ink 2008) with Brett Evans. A collaboration with CAConrad entitled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems is forthcoming from Factory School later in January 2010. He currently works with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program on Journeys South, a public art project that documents immigrant/migrant experiences in South Philly.

check him out:

here and here and here and here

THEN, join us for a Dialogues writing lab, co-sponsored by Nonsite collective, where Frank Sherlock and CAConrad discuss poetic interventions into the present, past and future life of the city.

Saturday September 12, 2009

at 935 Natoma Street in San Francisco

(btwn. 10th and 11th and btwn. Mission and Howard)

Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni) or Civic Center (BART)

admission $25/$20 for SPT members and students

This from the leaders:
The City Real & Imagined project is a collaborative documentary of both concrete and psychic place, exercising imaginations that are shared in the commons. It is at heart a working of public space in a time of post-9/11 hegemonic decline. Preparations for the death of Baghdad's children had begun, and the displacement of the working poor in Philadelphia was already underway. Two poets with very different experiences within the same city they share wandered together to let the streets shape the form of the poem with its histories and possibilities. CAConrad and Frank Sherlock will discuss their influences and approaches to the project, the collaborative process, and the mutual impact on their re-imaginings of the Philadelphia they live in.

For further investigation, visit the Nonsite Collective website for this: http://nonsitecollective.org/CAConrad/Soma(tics)

Spaces are limited for this Dialogues event, so please reserve your seat by emailing smallpresstraffic@gmail.com.

Save the Dates and Grab your Checkbook!

2009-07-31T12:15:00.000-07:00

While somewhat nestled in our foggy beds for the summer, SPT has been working diligently to once again create a season of programming to amaze, mystify, inspire and delight you.

As you well know, for over 35 years SPT has been at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season we are excited to present what we're thinking of as a multi-pronged conversation. Components of this conversation include: class/warfare; translation; performance, and the Inverted I (which addresses memoir, lyric, identity). In addition, this season will feature the launch of Dialogues, talks and writing laboratories presented by visiting readers. Our hope is that a heightened sense of debate and investigation will ensue. You don’t want to miss it.

Our lineup is planned as follows:

Friday, September 11, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock on Class/Warfare

Saturday September 12, 2009 at 1p.m
Dialogues with CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock: The New American Hybrid (co-sponsored by Non Site Collective)

Friday, September 18, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Brandon Brown and David Larsen on Translation

Saturday September 19, 2009 at 1p.m.
Dialogues with David Larsen: Translation as Conceptual Writing Practice

Friday, September 25, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Anne Tardos and Amina Cain on the Inverted I

Saturday September 26, 2009 at 1 p.m.
Dialogues with Anne Tardos: Mono- multi- and neolingual aspects of literary composition

Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
THE SMITH FAMILY: a play by Kevin Killian and Craig Goodman on Performance

Friday October 16th, at 7:30 p.m.
An evening with Renee Gladman on the Inverted I

Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Kate Greenstreet and Brian Teare on the Inverted I

Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Mark Nowak, Reid Gomez and Rachel Loden on Class/Warfare

Friday, November 14, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Norma Cole and John Sakkis on Translation

Thursday November 19, 2009
Dialogues with Gail Scott: A Talk on Narrative and Identity
Co-sponsored with University of San Francisco

Friday, November 20, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Gail Scott and Bruce Boone on the Inverted I

Friday, December 4, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Carla Harryman and Alan Bernheimer on Performance

Saturday December 5, 2009 at 1p.m.
Dialogues with Carla Harryman: Language and listening in performance

Friday, December 11, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Fred Moten and Steve Dickison on Performance

Our Fall 2009 season will, of course, will begin after you've been wow-ed by the brilliance of Bill Luoma's Oakdish (held before and during an Oakland As game at the Oakland Coliseum) on August 22nd, for which there are still spaces. Visit oakdish.blogspot.com for more information or sign up at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com.

It should go without saying that there is no better time to become a member of SPT. As we push to make it through another year with its own set of unique funding challenges, and hear of a different arts organization each day that closes its doors, we are heartened by the fact that it is our community that will sustain us.

If you value SPT and the incredible writers we showcase, show your support by becoming a member (or, if you already are, by making an additional donation) today at sptraffic.org.

I am humbled and honored to be a part of Small Press Traffic. I hope you are too.

See you soon!
Samantha

Hey Batter Batter!

2009-07-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

Bill Luoma has been working hard in preparation for his August baseball writing laboratory at the Oakland Coliseum.

Check out what's in store for the workshop at http://oakdish.blogspot.com/.

There is still room available for this event, so sign up today at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com.

and Don't Forget about August!

2009-06-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

The title of the workshop is Oakdish.

Oakland A's /White Sox 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.

read:
* Beyond A Boundary, C.L.R. James, Duke Up 1993

* The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonialization, World Domination, and Baseball, John D. Kelly, Prickly Paradigm Press 1996

* The Basketball Article, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman, Shark Books 2005
bring:notebook, pen, binoculars, short poem that will fit on a baseball, some phrase, collage on 4x6 baseball card, hat

get:
* 1 baseball
* 1 copy (facsimile) of Yo-Yo's with Money, Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff, United Artists 1977
* 1 copy (original) of the proceeds of whatever we do published by subpress if there is enough work/interest
* 1 bleachers ticket to Oakland vs Detroit

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

REMINDER: WORKSHOP NEXT WEEK!

2009-06-29T12:36:00.001-07:00

***Please not the change of length and cost for this amazing workshop. You don't want to miss this one, do you?***

Conceptualism and Craft with K. Silem Mohammad
CCA San Francisco Campus
WEDNESDAY JULY 8TH ONLY
Time: 6pm-9pm$40 / $30 students and members

This one-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?

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of three books of poetry: Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004, Bay Poetics, and A Best of Fence, as well as the forthcoming Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, which he is co-editing with Sharon Mesmer, Nada Gordon, and Gary Sullivan. With Anne Boyer, he edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln. He is Associate Professor of English and Writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.

Class is limited to 20 participants.Sign up online by using paypal from sptraffic.orgor make arrangements through email at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

Photos of Site Based Practices on Flickr

2009-06-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

Check out a few documents from our fantastic Site Based Practices workshop led by Jessica Tully and David Buuck here and here.

SPT Presents: SUMMER WORKSHOPS!

2009-05-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

NEXT Friday 5/15: Gardner and Treadwell!

2009-05-06T09:49:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-05-04T13:08:00.000-07:00

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.

This Friday! Lau and Vincent!

2009-04-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Friday, May 1, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
CCA- Timken Hall

Stephen Vincent’s most recent poetry books include Triggers, a Shearsman ebook (http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_home.html), a faux ebook, Sleeping with Sappho (http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/), and Walking Theory (Junction Press: 2007), the latter of which Ron Silliman wrote: “... these are the poems Stephen Vincent has been preparing to write his entire life. They definitely pass the “take the top of your head off” test. I went cover to cover without even sitting up…” Recent poems have appeared in the current issues New American Poetry, Crayon, Jacket and the forthcoming Vanitas. A visual artist, his show Haptics will open at the Braunstein-Quay Gallery from January 22 through February 21, 2009.

A noted teacher and publisher, in the 1970’s and early 80’s, his Momo’s Press published Beverly Dahlen’s first two books, Out of the Third and A Reading 1 – 7, as well as early volumes by many other then locals, including Victor Hernandez Cruz, Jessica Hagedorn, and Hilton Obenzinger, and Shocks, a critical magazine. A longtime San Franciscan, his popular blog of poems, walks, photographs, haptics and occasional political commentary is found at http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

David Lau's first book of poems is Virgil and the Mountain Cat. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fourteen Hills, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Pool, Willdlife, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion. He teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College

A new video awaits you!

2009-04-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

Check out Claire Chafee on the Small Press Traffic youtube channel here

Saturday April 18th! Tan Lin and Chet Wiener

2009-04-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

Please join us!

Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 6:30 p.m.

Co-Sponsored with The New Reading Series at 21 Grand At 21 Grand

416 25th Street in Oakland

Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, and Plagiarism/Outsource: Heath. Lin is the recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book on the writings of Andy Warhol. He has recently completed a novel, Our Feelings Were Made By Hand. He teaches English at New Jersey City University.

photo by Chet Wiener

Chet Wiener writes poetry in English and French. He is the author of a book of poems in French, Devant l’abondance (P.O.L 2003) and the chapbook WalkDontWalk (Potes and Poets 1999). He has translated Félix Guattari and Pierre Alferi, among others into English, co-edited, with Stacy Doris, the collection of translations: Christophe Tarkos; Ma Langue est Poétique (Roof Books, 2000), and his poems, translations and essays on translation have appeared in publications in the United States and France. He is a specialist in 16th-century French literature and philosophy, translates for the French Ministries of Culture and European and Foreign Affairs and writes medical filing documents for review by the FDA and other regulatory agencies internationally. He lives in San Francisco.
Please note special time, day, and location for this co-sponsored event!

Small Press Traffic goes LIVE on YouTube

2009-04-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

Our fearless intern Alex Vikmanis has been up to some crazy hijinx after our readings. Check out his deep investigative journalism into the psyche of our readers. Go watch his charming and nervous movies on our new youtube page here .

Thanks Alex!

FRIDAY APRIL 10TH: Donna de la Perriere and Claire Chaffe

2009-03-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

Please come join us for this fantastic night!

Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Agni, American Letters and Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, First Intensity, The New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, Talisman, Volt, Xantippe, and other journals, as well as in Faux Press’s 2006 Bay Poetics anthology. She teaches in the MFA creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, co-curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series, and lives near downtown Oakland with poet Joseph Lease and cat Little Sister.

Claire Chafee’s plays include: Whisper from The Book of Etiquette, Why We Have a Body, Even Among These Rocks, 5 Women on a Hill in Spain and Darwin’s Finches. Her plays have been produced by The Magic Theatre, The Women’s Project Off-Broadway and received productions in L.A., Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis and Seattle. She has received the Dramalogue Award, Critic’s Circle Award, New York Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award and a Princess Grace Special Projects Grant. Her plays have been published by Dramatist Publishing, Smith and Krauss, Penguin and Alexandra Street Press, a database of 20th Century Women’s Drama. She is a graduate of The Drama Studio, London and holds an MFA from Brown University. Claire has given readings from her own work at A Different Light in NY, Dixon Place and Chaptre Arts in Cardiff, Wales.

Friday, April 10, 2009
California College of the Arts- Timken Hall
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA

$5-10 sliding scale/students and members FREE!

Thanks Stephen Vincent!

2009-03-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

For your thoughtful report here

Check this out!

2009-03-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Robin Tremblay-McGaw : the best.

Thanks Robin!

In Case You Missed It: A reading report from Francois Luong

2009-03-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

The room is surprisingly empty. Maybe thirty people at most. This is quite a contrast from Rae Armantrout’s previous reading in the Bay Area at the Artifact Reading Series, with Alli Warren and G.S. Giscombe. Joe Massey is also reading this evening in Oakland, while Rae Armantrout is reading with Lisa Robertson at Moe’s the following evening. All relatively known quantities for the poets I know. I am not quite sure how well known Laura Sims is here. For that matter, I am not very familiar with her work either. I have seen her first book from Fence and the work Flim Forum had published in their anthology a sing economy.

Samantha Giles starts the festivities with the introduction, mentioning the shortness of each reader’s poems and the amount of white space on the page. The importance of the visual aspect in their works. Hence the question about the function of poetry reading, of the oral performance. Poetry readings do not make a good spectacle. They are formatted like a rock concert, with the more prestigious poet getting the top billing in a way to help promote a lesser known one. But they are not as performative, at least in the United States. But like rock concerts, they function as celebration of the guests’ egos. We go because we want to be seen caring.

So the act of listening is a transaction, except that Laura Sims’ new book has not arrived, we are told. But Laura Sims is still glad to be reading with Rae Armantrout, who is described as one of her heroes. So the reading also as the creation of influence and lineage coming forth.

These are the words
used to describe

the world grows
thin
her world

Laura Sims’ voice is uninflected, making pauses after each line break. There is an hesitancy to her words. She explains her project as being the attempt to write “both a memoir and the impossibility of writing such.” Perhaps because of the monotony of her voice, what is made apparent is the complex syntax of the first few poems (from Another Country) she reads, which might not be so as they appear more fragmented on the page.

skew-eyed

But going back to the visual aspect of the poem on the page, is the typography playing the role of a scoring? But some words also gain more weight in their repetitive utterance. Again, this might be lost otherwise in the architecture of the book. And despite the monotonous delivery, there is something precious in Sims’ use of “you,” “dear,” “we,” “darling” and the notion of weeping.

The Murder and Serial Killer poems seem more problematic, not because of its subject matter however. Although those poems are found texts rewritten in what seems to be homomorphic lines, are they doing anything interesting to the dramatic monologue? This is not really an interesting question. Anyway, it seems that only serial killer poems could be written in the United States. They are very much part of its mythology.

Rae Armantrout is introduced with a joke on Ron Silliman. Another joke (this time from Armantrout) about how her book is actually available. Her delivery reminds me of Kathleen Fraser’s: crystalline, ludic, enthusiastic. There is nothing of that purported flattened tone of the Language poets. For that matter, I have never heard any language poets read in this manner. It is dense, yet, with each word uttered, I can see the poem materialize on the page. And despite their shortness, they are almost baroque with their multiple references to internet speak (“click here”) and other mass media (“Anna Nicole,” “Fallujah” and “Pirates of the Carribeans”).

This density in Versed also blurs the line between mass entertainment and the real (cf. Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum), while the poems from Dark Matter (the second half of Armantrout’s new book) mediate the discourses of representation (mass entertainment vs. scientific language).

This is followed by Armantrout’s new manuscript, Moneyshot, where the language of finance is mixed with that of the service industry, the more bellicose aspect of Bushspeak, and CNN.

The poem as channel surfing.

Friday March 13th: Szymaszek and Santos Perez

2009-03-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus, 2005) as well as many chapbooks, most recently Orizaba: A Voyage With Hart Crane (Faux, 2008), and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Stacy S: Autoportraits which features her self-portraits with texts written in response by Lisa Jarnot, Renee Gladman, Kevin Killian and others was also published in 2008 by OMG!. The complete Hyperglossia will be published by Litmus Press in spring of 2009. She is the editor of Gam and the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). His poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared (or are forthcoming) in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others.
-- Samantha GilesExecutive DirectorSmall Press Traffic Literary Arts Centersptraffic.orgsmallpresstraffic.blogspot.comg

Friday March 6th! Armantrout and Sims!

2009-02-25T10:19:00.001-08:00

Rae Armantrout’s most recent book of poetry, Versed, was published in Feb. of 2009. Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007), was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times. Other recent books include Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in anthologies such as American Hybrid (Norton, 2009), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2008.. Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

Laura Sims is the author of two books of poems: Practice, Restraint, winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and Stranger, forthcoming from Fence Books in 2009. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and she has recently published poems in the journals Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, CAB/NET, and Crayon. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at Baruch College in Manhattan.

Follow Up to Poets Theater: Installation for Letting Go By Lara Durback

2009-02-25T10:06:00.000-08:00

To those that participated in letting go of something in my Ritual for Letting Go Tank installation on the first night of Poets Theatre, here is an update.
(If you did not know what this was, people wrote on a paper something they wanted to let go of and forcefully threw it into the tank after thinking about it for a while, walking on the concentrating path, as I played irritating tones on my toy keyboard.)
I had all the items sitting in a bag for a few weeks gathering strange energy with very strong magnets that were originally in the bottom of the tank. On one spooky night, (called Burns' Night in Scotland, I later found in my roommate's witchy calendar, but it was for Robert Burns though. I thought it had much witchier intent than that) I snuck into my favorite parking lot/backyard where the lines from the fences make plinko shapes on the pavement in the moonlight. I removed the slips of paper that were rubber-banded to the objects in complete darkness, then burned all these pink papers in the dark without reading them. I did see one that said "Peepee Poopie" which made me laugh, and also made me mad, but I'm glad I did not see any of the serious ones. I put the pink papers in this lovely metal bowl thing as they burned. I took pictures of myself with my Photobooth on my Mac and I smelled like campfires all night.
I felt deliciously high after doing this, but completely depleted the next day. This is what happens when you're dealing with everyone's shit, but it is all for the better.
So if you dropped something in there, it's really gone now.
Oh, and did I mention, it was also the night right before Chinese New Year.
So, my people, you are healed now. For this whole year, you have been.
And to those who tripped and fell on my installation, esp. Erika Staiti and Morgan, I apologize. I didn't have time to fix it.
Sasha Spahr played with the pathway like legos. This was good.

In Preparation for Tonight!

2009-02-20T09:53:00.001-08:00

Rachel Zolf's current project, The Neighbor Procedure, is title partly for the Israeli army policy described in this haunting testimony.

To read more about her work visit here and here and here.

Christian Bök will read from a variety of projects.

To read more about his work visit here and here.

See you tonight!

SPT PRESENTS: BOK and ZOLF 2/20!

2009-02-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

What would the Iliad look like if rewritten using only one vowel? What happens to political poetry when channeled through the waste of corporate language and search engines? On February 20, Small Press Traffic presents Christian Bök and Rachel Zolf, two celebrated members of the Canadian avant-garde, who will read from their landmark, award-winning books.

Christian Bök's Eunoia was an instant bestseller in the U.K., where it was just released in the fall of 2008. First published in Canada in 2001, Eunoia is a univocal lipogram (using only one vowel per chapter), which achieves its full impact when performed live by Bök. Charles Bernstein has called it 'an exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' Bök will be reading from the Griffin Prize-winning Eunoia, among other recent works.

Rachel Zolf's Human Resources is a writing machine in which poetry and ‘plain language’ collide. At the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, refuse, culture, work and communication. With the help of online engines that numericize language, Human Resources explores writing as a process of encryption. Zolf will read from Human Resources and her current work-in-progress on competing knowledges in Israel-Palestine, The Neighbour Procedure.

Small Press Traffic Presents Christian Bök and Rachel Zolf
Friday, February 20, 7:30 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
$10 suggested donation

In Case You Missed It: A Reading Report by David Brazil

2009-02-11T13:48:00.000-08:00

[[SPT READING REPORT, 2/6/2009]]

[[transcribed from [future] notebook No. 9049]]

[[KEY :

*** = page break
[ ] = transcribed brackets (written at time of composition)
[[ ]] = brackets subsequently inserted (editorial brackets)]]

[[***]]

At the reading, SPT.
Kaia & Yedda & Kim.

Brownies in the hallway

I'm sitting in the back row
with

[[drawings of cubes]]

Sara me Konrad Erika Buuck

***

Kaia, "Remember to Wave"

Directions read by
Samantha for how to get
to the poem.
Japanese
"civil control

from
Portland

"personal
effects of the living"

"to that which can be carried"

"pods transform the hassle"

divagation into PODs,
commodified
nomadism,
if secularity proceeds
out of uprootedness,

"Podzilla"

***

"it may prove useful in a time
of emergency"

"alteration therefore are
not allowed"

"portable on-demand shelter"

"We Refugees" (Arendt)

people were living in the
shelters
during Katrina

David Buuck, Stephanie Young,
Konrad Steiner.
=
"uptick"

"free speech ends when
you shout fire in a crowded theatre
-- *but there is a fire*"

slides from Oregon Historical
Society

dialectical tercets

liquidity --
profitable disaster -- what
happens when capital comes
to town --

rewrite gemeinschaft

only language from
NAFTA
starting *now* --
(maintaining)

"with fine animal hair"

at lunch I was reading
Kit Robinson on the Dolch
Stanzas --
restricted vocabulary
which is also our
restricted common.
possibility of transfer --

but also with Jules & Taylor
was talking about
Marcus Rediker's "Slave

***

Ship," which made me think of
Zong!, composed from a
restricted vocabulary (from
court records relating to the
jettisoning of cargo from
the Zong, cargo which
happened to be human
beings) --
and whose
method's spectral, corrosive,
or brings elements into
relief, composes another
song out of the known one
as Radi Os
(Johnson says, "I composed
the holes," on the
model of Lukas Foss' Baroque
Variations, which turns
repertory warhorses into
compositions
reminiscent of Webern) --

why anyway now is redaction &
erasure a
crucial tactic,
why do we all know

***

what redaction means.

"skywriting"
"the NAFTA"

"The President Probably Talks"

"who the president is
is shifting"

"my [[illegible]] voices are still talking"

litany of commodity,
commodity litany, & what
cant wedge into that grammar --

"somehow ... hears this"

Yedda.
Samantha's email to Yedda.
Yedda's email back.

Steven Farmer :
"I have no idea what's going on here."

PCFOREST.JPG

***

[revisit Girl Scout Nation since the
lights were out during Yedda's
reading] [[see below]]

She had a vest & read by
the light of a Coleman
lantern, & wore a
hood for the middle segment of
the reading --

"I am burning like fire.
I am burning right now."
--Tiffany, age 8,
Troop 64.

Kim Rosenfield.
A scent she's
crafted is wafting its way from
the front of the audience,
back.

"I am not only my
brother's keeper, I am
my brother"
--Samantha's introduction [written by Kim I understood later]

***

Sure, echolocation, sure.

Kim dedicates her reading to
Abraham Lincoln &
Charles Darwin,
who share a Feb. 12 birthday.

Landscapes of Dissent
of Man,
joked Konrad, earlier.

"sex organs
buried in the earth
beneath a living tree"

"every blank's like the
setting sun"

"the I would go so far as
to reinvent all language"

"economy as waste product"

"ontological and essentialist
he-whore"

"the lake of knowing"

***

lago di cor

"genderlicious genderbars"

"Vermont frogs
will never meet Florida frogs"

(as I'm writing this
the perfume baton
entitled
"The Other Me"
is handed to me by
Konrad & I
pass it on to Sara.

"People, are they different from
stones?"

"Gender is datum and
we suffer for it."

"Almost the last thing
that keeps people together
is the law."

***

the vertigo of disgust.
(spittle)
"Sex is nature's trap."

"a creature properly known
as homo apien"

"saintly variants"

"Impulse is the most beautiful force
in human nature,
when it is."

[[codicil to 2/6/09 reading report, transcribed 2/10/09 --
some lines I remember Yedda reading, transcribed out of my copy of Girl Scout Nation,
and in the order of the book & not the reading :

"The unprecedented violence of human power has its deepest roots in (the)
structure of language." --Giorgio Agamben [[not, however, read as an epigraph to the
reading, but rather amidst it, as though it were poem, which perhaps it is?]]

"this goddamn exquisite Winnebago"

"and soft in the Locust we clammy do sing"

"like the moving hairs of the drowned"

"There are these two girls named Fawn"

"Dr. Phil would like to see Fawn H. return to Meadow Haven. Fawn H. is skeptical."

"Oh to be an image
maker!"]]

Inter-Media Follow-up & Links

2009-02-06T14:08:00.000-08:00

Due to a little hiccup in last Friday's program, Linh Dinh's video got skipped, so here's the link for those who'd like to check it out, plus some other fun "poets-video" links...

Linh Dinh's A Smooth Life

Henry Hill's Money

Eirikur Örn Norðdahl's Kreppusonnettan (IMF! IMF! OMG! OMG!)

Laura O'dell's Unmaking Whoopee, or the Text is Thus a Gas

Helen Adam's Cheerless Junkie Song

Paul Chan's Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law, and Poetry

Ivor Cutler's Shoplifters

Dylan Morgan's Rejection Letter

Rives' De(a)f Jam

In Case You Missed It: A Reading Report from John Sakkis

2009-02-04T19:30:00.000-08:00

A full house, a fundraiser, questionable wine, minimal ventilation and 2.5 hours of inter-media work. Thus was the Poets Theater 09 Inter-Media night. Typically my favorite SPT night of the season.

Karla Milosevich:"My Past Life" and "29 Palms"
I think what they said was "I was a horse" and then there were two women, one of them Karla, standing next to each other off of I-5 looking at the sky maybe, or making big Tai Chi circles with their arms, I think the other women, Paula Pereira, was miming Carla's movements but I could be wrong, and I kept waiting for Karla to turn into Steve Martin and pipe "What the hell is that?" and for the other woman to morph into Bill Murray and say "I don't know, what the hell is that?"

and then Karla: Hey, you kids! Get away from there!
Paula: I would not mess with that thing..
Karla: Don't put your lips on it!
Paula: [ ever curious ] What the hell is this?
Karla: Well.. get a photo of me with it, anyway!

But none of that last part happened...but it looked like it might have.

Dillon Westbrook:"pan(Oa)ic(k)land"
This one featured Westbrook on drums and Woodcock on bass. I think they were both wearing Oakland A's jersey's...but then Westbrook put on a jacket, so I could be wrong...and then a video by Nao Nakazawa driving around Oakland (quick zooms, slow pans, landscapes, architecture, people, signs, OAKLAND, mirrors) with live jazzy musical accompaniment by Westbrook and Woodcock. David Harrison Horton's dubbed voiceover reciting poetry things but I forget what and I couldn't take notes even though I brought a notebook because it was pitch black in the theater...and then suddenly it wasn't Horton's voice anymore (Westbrook's?) and it reminded me of Jim Morrison's post-humus spoken word album An American Prayer esp. that track where he says something like "Did you have a good world when you died? enough to base a movie on...?"

Heriberto Yepez:"Voice Exchange Rates"
Probably my favorite of the night, anti-fill-in-the-blank iconography a la Hot Topic and the AK Press Catalog (at a slant) (I think...)) as moderated by a 4bit robot-voiced human skull...super funny and charming. The part where the robot-voiced human skull repeated glitchy variations of the phrase "Americans rule the world" made me laugh and then feel ashamed of laughing in the same way that Nate Fisher's (Six Feet Under) first AVM (arteriovenous malformation) seizure in the Chubby's drive-thru where he ordered his food all "I'd like a chubb-chu-ch-ch-ch-cubbbbb-FUCK!!!-chchchchch-Chubby's Burger" made me laugh and then feel ashamed. And then something about Gertrude Stein and Nazi's and a big black dildo.

Bill Luoma:"The Concept of Ass"
A blooper reel! A baseball blooper reel! A baseball blooper reel Benshi Particle Physics cut-up delivered by a baseball-cup-wearing-baseball-shorts-sporting Bill Luoma. Bill "Homer" Luoma. Everyone laughed. A Dragon Fly on a pitcher's cap. Bill and David Hadbawnik used to show up to Poet's softball in SF in full uniform. David's uniform really annoyed me, Bill's didn't. Success!

Claudia Rankie & John Lucas:"Provenance"
Zinedine Zadane headbutts Marco Materazzi in slow motion with a Terminator 2 Brad Fiedel like sound design. Compelling. Materazzi got "owned" but so did Zinedine. I love Claudia. I love soccer. There was a rumor going around Naropa in 06 that I loved Claudia. Which was true but besides the point. Naropa's only sports team is a soccer team. I was in Claudia's workshop during the 06 World Cup.

Paolo Javier:"FYEO"performed by Dennis Somera
I have never met Paolo (or seen a photo), and I had never met Dennis (or seen a photo). And I didn't read my program closely enough, so the whole time I thought that Paolo was the one on stage performing his piece, not so, it was Dennis. A slide show, lot's of Filipino puns, drawings, comic book erasures, poetry, quotes, mis-ques and National Anthems.

Intermission:Henry Hills's "Money" (1982)"feat.
John Zorn, Abigail Child, Bruce Andrews, Sally Silvers, Charles Bernstein, Arlo Lindsey and dozens more..."like, a young Jack Collom!!! and then LRS remarks "poets seemed a lot less inhibited back then..." and then says "I think my wine is bad..." and then buries his face in his contributor's copy of Mrs. Maybe handed to him earlier by Lauren Levin. Hills's "Money" was the best piece of the night that nobody saw. We were either smoking, or eating cookies, or drinking 2-buck Chuck, unfortunate. Have you ever seen that rare 1979 Graf documentary Stations of the Elevated? "Money" is like the "innovative poetry" version of that.

Amanda Davidson & Cassie Riger:"A-Verbal"
This was a super cute piece (by "cute" I mean "fun" and by "fun" I mean "not bad"). And pseudo-interactive! I kept thinking "where do I know Amanda Davidson from?"...I still don't know. Great choreography and interaction between their video piece and their stage performance. I don't know, this piece just sort of "worked" really well. A refreshing way to start the second half of the night. They looked like they were having fun (a relief), and they took the "inter-media" theme to heart incorporating audience, video and set design, bully to you guys! And then those scenes that were shot in an SFSU classroom (burgundy chairs!) reminded me of having one of those dreams where you flunk your 9th grade pre-Algebra quiz and then you wake up and realize that you're 29 years old and never have to take a math class again...

Linh Dinh:"A Smooth Life"
I think Linh was a no show. I thought Ariana's piece was Linh's piece the whole time I was sitting through it. It wasn't. I think Lindsey Boldt told me Linh was a no show. Is that correct? Boldt is also the one who told me that Dennis Somera was in fact NOT Paolo Javier. Egads.

Ariana Reines:"Father"
Lot's of adorable Emo boys on stage reading a huge text in synch over an intermittent sound-scapey Macbook Pro score. Hmmm...Father talking to progeny about Mother on Father porn. About Mother's vagina, I think. I thought this was Linh Dinh. And it kind of made sense. But it seemed a little conceptual (or something) for Linh. I don't know, I was confused. I think I tried closing my eyes to concentrate better. But then Buuck (I think) turned on the air which suddenly ventilated the entire theater (ahhhh, sweet air...) which kind of distracted me which for some reason made me check my phone where I learned that it was 10:07pm which made me panic a little because I realized that I was already 15 minutes late for a date at Mission Hill Saloon down the street with 2 more pieces still to go after Reines's piece which was just now winding down. So after the boys left the stage I grabbed LRS and bee-lined to the bar, where my date showed up 15 minutes later than I did.

So, I missed Konrad Steiner's "Suite for Face" and the raffle drawing. Sorry Konrad! Sorry Raffle!

Addendum: Formally Sadies, Mission Hill Saloon is steadily becoming the new Gino & Carlo's. They love poets there. Not sure if Gino & Carlo's ever "loved" or just tolerated poets, but anyway, Mission Hill loves poets, just ask for Cesar!

In Preparation for Friday's Reading

2009-02-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

Read Yedda Morrison here and here.

Read Kim Rosenfield here and here

Read Kaia Sand here and here
and these links show a bit of what Kaia's been up to lately--The "econ salon" (last link) is a project she's launched in Portland since the Economic Crisis became clear--
http://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/kaiasand/index.html
http://www.pen.org/members/sand
http://www.thetangentpress.org/econsalon.html

This Friday 2/6: Kaia Sand, Yedda Morrison, & Kim Rosenfield!

2009-02-03T00:39:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic Presents: Yedda Morrison, Kim Rosenfield, & Kaia Sand

Friday, February 6, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
CCA- Timken Hall
1111 8th Street, San Francisco

Writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Morrison's books include; Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Editions, 2008), My Pocket Park (Dusie Press, 2007), and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Morrison has exhibited her work in the US and Canada and is currently represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC. She lives in Montreal.

Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of three books of genre/blurring language; Good Morning—Midnight—(Roof Books 2001), which won Small Press Traffic's Book of the Year award in 2002, Tràma (Krupskaya 2004), and re: evolution (Les Figues Press 2008). She lives in NYC with her husband, poet Robert Fitterman, and their daughter, Coco.

Kaia Sand is the author of the poetry collection interval (Edge Books 2004), selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year, and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space. Dusie Press published her wee book, lotto, and Sand has participated in the dusie kollektiv for three years, making the chapbooks heart on a tripod and tiny arctic ice. Jim Dine created two artist book based on Sand's poems, lotto and tiny arctic ice. Remember to Wave, multi-media investigations of political histories lodged in Pacific Northwest of the United States, is forthcoming with Tinfish Press. The NAFTA, a chapbook of collages, is forthcoming with Duration Press e-chap series. Sand co-edits the Tangent Press.

Kaia will be also giving a presentation with Jules Boykoff on Landscapes of Dissent on Sat. 2/7 at the nonsite collective.

In Case You Missed It: A reading report from Ariel Goldberg

2009-01-30T07:25:00.000-08:00

A Mummer's Play, by Vanessa Place, directed by Yedda Morrison, was perhaps the funniest play of the night with extravagant gender baffling costumes accessorized with plastic toy sword knives that must have been hoarded, with incredibly foresight back in October 0h eight from the Halloween superstore. A theme of all the plays though, thanks to the aura of PoetsTheater as a place to see your friends or friend's friends on stage or seeing, forgivable via charm, scripts in actor's hands, I enjoyed a clear recognition of the audience by the actors. This wall between performer and viewer that the pros build so stoically and only destabilize in the most post modern moments was virtually mocked when Samantha Giles as actor, not ED, turned away from her fellow actors to wave to the audience in her grand entrance as an honest to be your swindler doctor. The actors in a Mummer's Play, when "offstage," walked in some creepy circle ritual, as if to tell the spotlight, I can hear you over there so don't talk smack too loud now. The plot thickened accordingly with duels and teeth pulling, mutually exclusive. When the hollow Chinese weaponry got a little bulky, all-star player of the Poets Theater, Jocelyn Saidenberg initiated a pencil fight, complete with a strobe light. Writers got fiest! Cinematically hailing the kid scissor aesthetic of sprouting tree dioramas meets pillory for some minor offense, Jocelyn's head inside a tree and fake money being exchanged, or was it real money, was a most pleasing ending. Apologies for more plot details being excluded. The visuals were too intoxicating.

The News from Zimbabwe: a re-enactment, "conducted" by David Buuck brought not only the events of playwrights tortured in Zimbabwe in 2007 to our San Francisco consciousness, but challenged the role of citizen as spectator. How does censorship and torture happen I often wonder, however decontextualized? Why, by the participation of the audience as non participators, of course. Buuck casted the audience as the lead of this play, under the influence of our lights out look forward to the stage costume, rendering our predictable passivity, individually, greatly disturbing. What would have happened if I, unplanted, ripped off the duct tape from Buuck's stomach before he was scheduled to bow? It would have looked planted. Unlike the distance the perpetrators of torture rationalize, with the "I was just following orders" explanation, as the Abu Ghraib photos continue to loom over this warring superpower I share a nationality with, this play took people we recognize, it took our local artists and put them into the task of horrific events, of too many plays within plays. Buuck’s knee jerk joke at the U.S. of repetition of "Mugabe, Zimbabwe" (it's Harare, stupid Americans, not the 29 year and counting president). Or can we put people as place names? And then say something? For the board of Dateline producers and the routine of a new staff member walking into the room to repeat the script of "following orders" resulted in escalated abuse onto the Poets Theater organizer, by far the most haunting pivotal role in this piece were the narrator, Lara Durback. She was positioned center stage as gatekeeper between the News media evil doers drinking their booze and the caged playwrights. Durback stood over kitchen appliances like a Martha Rosler reincarnate, hailing semiotics of the kitchen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA) as a model for the execution of our everyday objects as having potential harmful uses. Durback condoned the torture repeatedly with "I don't see anyone stopping you." I was struck with how Buuck's piece helped me understand the hot in the art world re-enactor Mark Tribe who says the goal of his re-staging of famous protest speeches is to point out "how much has changed, yet how much has stayed the same." Tribe hires actors to create replicas. After volunteering as a (film) photographer for his Loretta Scott King speech, he asked me if I think he should get more famous people do the re-enactments. I was baffled at the time. Because Tribe's crowds don't have a personal connection, either with a local arts community or with the actors themselves, it seems he is barely attacking the passivity we as audience members are capable of. Buuck was not afraid to do this.

We were back from intermission with Flow — Winged Crocodile by Leslie Scalapino, where stepping up on low to the ground furniture to rub rhino dung off balanced out palpable lines of poetry. The Patty Hearst character seemed to mock the hyphenated air pauses of Scalapino's verse with a blow up gun only blowing away the tilt of her beret. The minimal activity on the stage made every gesture powerful, particularly the slow-it-down-running man movements of M. Mara-Ann, whose somersault, in full bubble wrap, was hilarious.

Coming to the end of the night, I was thinking: What's more funny in Poets Theater, when an actor laughs on stage or the play executes a joke, literally written into the script? Only the Money is Real, by Raymond Pettibon and directed by Kevin Killian had plenty of put on your making fun of art school hat jokes. Monet got confused with Manet in the cloud of a faux joint and gays were the real playas, as the womanizing hetero professor laments. The backdrop at the beginning, middle and end of this play's first act debut were Pettibon drawings that set some mysterious linking at work. How does one manage a cross-genre regiment? Much needed playfulness set up dialogues between business and art, the authority of academics, and the farce of authenticating artwork. Suzanne Stein gave a vigorous defense of Joyce Carol Oates at folding chair dinner table of rich people before throwing down her napkin. She was the only cast member graced with a napkin to throw. Dodie Bellamy moderated awkward conversations with complete precision of notifying the professor of his inappropriateness, yet tolerating it, with intrigue, at the same time.

I have to say, I love this stuff. Every moment of it. I can't wait for more and more.

This Friday 1/30: Poets Theater Inter-Media Night!

2009-01-26T20:02:00.000-08:00

POETS THEATER FEST CONTINUES WITH INTERMEDIA PROGRAM

Please join us Friday Jan 30th for the last night of PT09, with several inter-media works from local & national writers, artists, musicians, & filmmakers, along with our huge raffle & other festivities! Program includes:

Karla Milosevich: "My Past Life" & "29 Palms" (video)
two new videos by Bay Area arts legend & Poets Theater starlet!

Amanda Davidson & Cassie Riger: "A-Verbal" (video & performance)
The Doctors Feelings present preliminary research on the emerging averbal condition.
( see the preview at http://partedinthemiddle.com/averbal )

Paolo Javier: "FYEO" (text & images), performed by Dennis Somera
live cross-cultural de(tour)nement & comix!

Linh Dinh: "A Smooth Life" (video)
The unconscious of online visual culture whispers its (per)verses into our ears.

Ariana Reines: "Your Mother & I" (audio & performance)
"Now son, you know we are not perverse individuals..."

Heriberto Yépez: "Voice Exchange Rates" (video)
What happens when our machines begin to translate us back into the feedback loop.

Bill Luoma: "The Concept of Ass" (speech & video)
baseball bloopers meet diamond gem poetics...

Henry Hills: "Money" (film)
a classic cut-up featuring John Zorn, Abby Child, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Sally Silvers, and dozens more....

Dillon Westbrook: "pan(Oa)ic(k)land" (video, text & live music)
A multi-media investigation of Oakland & its hidden rhythms.

Claudia Rankine & John Lucas: "Provenance" (video essay)
On the head-butt heard 'round the world...

Konrad Steiner: "Suite for Face" (video & live music)
Improvising movie musicians pull the masks of actors into new affective directions.

Friday 1/30, 730 pm. $10 donation.
Timken Hall, CCA
1111 8th Street, San Francisco

From the Blogosphere

2009-01-24T13:23:00.000-08:00

A great take on Poets Theater from Robin Tremblay-McGraw at X Poetics here.

Poets Theater Night 1 Photos

2009-01-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

click here and here and here for more photos

In Case You Missed It Last Week: A Poets Theater Report from Brandon Brown

2009-01-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

Ah, Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic. There’s really nothing like it, socially or otherwise, that happens in the Bay Area all year. The first clues and cues a sudden decrease in social availability on weeknights, given over to rehearsal, and before you know it it’s opening night in Timkin, the room afroth with strange (and beautiful, don’t worry) faces, more of them than usual, and a buzz that this commentator found a little overstimulating. What makes Poets Theater (Alli reminded me: no apostrophe) different from regular Theater? Ostensibly the plays (such as they are) are written by poets (but this isn’t hard and fast) and played by poets (though this is even less hard and fast). What seems to me to be the fundamental difference is that the adding of POETS to THEATER entails a redrawing of the rules of the spectacle. Fourth wall? Why yes, please, and I’m working on my fifth. And before the spectacle can even commence onstage, it’s buzzing outside the doors. Players are vacillating between the theater and the crowd, half in costume half out, sometimes wielding un- or semiwieldy props; small camps might be crouching on their haunches for one last, desperate rehearsal, or just as likely passing a flask in the dim hallway behind the stage (just kidding, no drinks in Timkin!). I suppose what I suggest by this is that the performance starts as soon as you break the seal that leads to the hall, and this was overscored by David Buuck’s amazing vaudeville introduction, sung to a recorded track on his IPOD, even as he wore Joy Division eyeliner and did his best Fred Astaire.

The program on Opening Night 2009 was pretty representative of Poets Theaters past. You had your world premieres written by contemporary extra-Bay Area poets with strong Bay Area ties (Stan Apps’ Elsa In Berlin, Bhanu Kapil’s Rabbit Butoh, Bunny Butoh), your local talent new to PT (Tetra Balestri’s Perverted Virtue), your veteran PT alumna (Wendy Kramer’s Trademark Girls), and the reprise of neglected Russian avant garde plays translated by Matvei Yankelevich (er…three short plays by Danii Kharms).

If there was any trope common to this very diverse program of plays, it might be the (very broad) one of desire thwarted by the interference of an other (the Spinozan definition of jealousy—a comment on poets writing poets theater?). But specifically for the plays Friday, the interfering other often took the form of a more or less arbitrary orneriness rather than a hubristic challenge or fatalistic intervention. Take Elsa in Elsa In Berlin, a role brilliantly delivered by Erika Staiti. Victor Shlovsky loves Elsa, and sends her the “genius” but overtly insulting “love letters” to prove it—the crisis in the play is not the one you might expect, according to Aristotelian categories, that Elsa fails to recognize the genius of Shlovksy, thereby spurning him for a lesser intelligence. Rather, Elsa recognizes Shlovsky’s genius perfectly—and this becomes the reason for her disavowal. Aristotle’s like WTF? Similar interferences are run by the steroid-dealing, mouse-befriending housewife in Perverted Virtue, the medical stenographer or perhaps the Pepsi machine in Rabbit Butoh, Gogol and Pushkin in Kharms—if such a blatant figure fails to appear in Trademark Girls, let that not imply that the desires of the trademark girls are fulfilled necessarily (though their story might be the most redemptive of the night, and thus served as an appropriate closer).

If the plays express frustrated desire, the activities at the intermission express frustration’s opposite. For there not only could one drink plentifully, for free, but Lindsey Boldt’s Human Jukebox provided song, my Dessert Storm provided dessert, raffles provided prizes, and I leave it other commenters to chime in on Lara Durback and Ariel Goldberg’s intermezzo performances as I was occupied sweetening cream and whipping it with air, thus creating a colloid roughly doubly the volume of the original cream, as air bubbles are captured in a network of fat droplets.

To close, I would like to start a partial list of the terrific outfits everyone was wearing and impart some miscellaneous highlights.

The outfit list is necessarily partial, as there were so many well-dressed strangers to me, and also I had like a thousand drinks and can’t possibly recall what, say…okay, to be honest I can’t remember what anyone was wearing except for Stephanie Young’s amazing boots and Alli Warren was wearing suspenders, Erika Staiti was in drag, Brent Cunningham was in a salmon blazer that I loaned him a year ago and need to recover, Brent, just so you know, Lara Durback was in drag, Stan Apps was wearing his “Bill Luoma” shirt, Bill Luoma was wearing his “Stan Apps” shirt, just kidding, he was wearing his candy color blazer, David Buuck was wearing eyeliner, Taylor Brady was wearing an Executive Director blazer and then became Lil Debbie, Rob Halpern was wearing clothes for a while.

Miscellaneous highlights: Sasha Berkman Tupac Spahr is a born Poets Theater participant, and also his outfit was spectacular. Massive rabbit head on Lara Durback’s neck during Bunny Butoh and then in people’s hands and arms for photo taking. Fake blood. Stas Feldman emerging from a bed in Elsa in Berlin. Oh, and at the end we all threw our shoes at David Buuck.

Poet's Theater, Part the 2nd: This Friday Jan 23rd!

2009-01-20T18:26:00.000-08:00

Please join us for night two of Small Press Traffic's annual Poets Theater Fest & fundraiser - this Friday Jan 23rd, at 730pm.

featuring:
Flow — Winged Crocodile
by Leslie Scalapino

Only the Money is Real
by Raymond Pettibon
directed by Kevin Killian

A Mummer's Play
by Vanessa Place
directed by Yedda Morrison

The News from Zimbabwe: a re-enactment
conducted by David Buuck

and come again the following Friday 1/30 for video & intermedia works by Linh Dinh, Ariana Reines, Heriberto Yépez, Konrad Steiner, Henry Hills, Paolo Javier & Dennis Somera, Dillon Westbrook, Karla Milosevich, Cassie Riger & Amanda Davidson, Bill Luoma, Claudia Rankine, & more!

and look to this blog soon for a Poet's Theater Night One Reading Report by Brandon Brown!

Small Press Traffic's Poets Theater 09, night 2
Friday Jan 23, 7pm.$10-20 donation
- refreshments will be served

This Friday 1/16: POETS THEATER FEST, NIGHT ONE!

2009-01-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

Please join us for a full night of theater, performance, and other delights, at the first night of our annual Poets Theater Fest fundraiser. Featuring:

WORLD PREMIERES OF:

"Elsa in Berlin" by Stan Apps (directed by David Brazil)

"Perverted Virtue" by Tetra Balestri (directed by Milenko Skoknic)

"Rabbit Butoh, Bunny Butoh" by Bhanu Kapil (directed by Erin Morrill)

"Trademark Girls" by Wendy Kramer (directed by the author)

plus:
* three short plays by Daniil Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich (directed by Brent Cunningham)
* intermission performances by Lindsey Boldt, Ariel Goldberg, Brandon Brown, Lara Durbeck, & others
* as well as a huge raffle, with artworks, signed broadsides and more, from a variety of poets, artists, and presses.
* wine & refreshments will be served.

And: come back on the 23rd for longer plays by Leslie Scalapino, Raymond Pettibon, Vanessa Place & more, & again on the 30th for inter-media & video works by Linh Dinh, Heriberto Yépez, Konrad Steiner, Henry Hills, Paolo Javier & Dennis Somera, Ariana Reines, Dillon Westbrook, Karla Milosevich, Cassie Riger & Amanda Davidson, Bill Luoma, Claudia Rankine, & more!

see you then & there!
Show starts promptly at 730pm. $10
Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 8th St., San Francisco

sptraffic.org

Photos from SPT's offsite MLA reading

2009-01-11T21:29:00.001-08:00

from top: Bill Luoma, Steve Farmer, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Scott Ignuito, Rob Halpern, Oscar Bermeo, Alli Warren, Erika Staiti, Stacy Doris, Chet Weiner, Alan Bernheimer & Brandon Brown. Thanks for coming out to the Hotel Utah for a great event. & check out some video at Oscar Bermeo's blog (thanks Oscar!)

Photos from Bev Dahlen Tribute

2009-01-11T21:22:00.001-08:00

above: Bev with outgoing ED Dana Teen Lomax. below: Dana with Kathleen Fraser.
Keep an eye on this space, as we will have presenters' statements, as well as a link to the audio recording of the talks and Bev's reading over at PENNSOUND soon!

Ron Silliman on Bev (12/08)
Bruce Boone on Bev (12/08)

Spring 09 Season - Save the dates!

2008-12-22T09:56:00.000-08:00

SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC'S
2009 SPRING SEASON:

JANUARY 16, 2009 Poets' Theater: plays by Bhanu Kapil, Stan Apps, Daniil Kharms, Wendy Kramer, Tetra Balestri & more!

JANUARY 23, 2009 Poets' Theater: longer plays by Leslie Scalapino, Vanessa Place, Raymond Pettibon, & more

JANUARY 30, 2009 Poets' Theater: Inter-media work & videos by Linh Dinh, Heriberto Yépez, Konrad Steiner, Henry Hills, Paolo Javier & Dennis Somera, Ariana Reines, Dillon Westbrook, Karla Milosevich, Cassie Riger & Amanda Davidson, Bill Luoma, Claudia Rankine, & more!

FEBRUARY 6, 2009 Kaia Sand & Yedda Morrison & Kim Rosenfield

FEBRUARY 20, 2009 Christian Bök & Rachel Zolf

MARCH 6, 2009 Rae Armantrout & Laura Sims

MARCH 13, 2009 Stacy Szymaszek & Craig Santos Perez

MARCH 27, 2009 SPT Presents: Bay Area Student Writers (CCA Oakland Nahl Hall)

APRIL 10, 2009 Donna de la Perriere & Claire Chafee

APRIL 18, 2009 Tan Lin & Chet Weiner (21 Grand 416 25th Street, Oakland 6:30 pm)

APRIL 25, 2009 Julie Patton & Kit Robinson

MAY 1, 2009 Stephen Vincent & David Lau

MAY 8. 2009 Eleni Stecopoulos & Maggie Zurawski

MAY 15, 2009 Susana Gardner & Elizabeth Treadwell

SPT ANNOUNCES NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

2008-12-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic is pleased to announce Samantha Giles as the organization's new Executive Director.

Samantha Giles was born in Oakland and raised in Santa Monica, California. She returned to the Bay Area in 1996, to complete her Bachelors of Social Work at San Francisco State University. From 1999 to 2004, she was the Community Arts Program Director for Central City Hospitality House, providing artistic access for homeless people in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Her extensive administrative, programmatic and curatorial work during her tenure there helped stabilize and grow a program of disparate, often unheard voices. In 2008, she received her MFA from Mills College, where she also served as Managing Editor for 580 Split. Her work appears in numerous journals and webzines.

Samantha will serve as the Director beginning January 1, 2009.

We look forward to working with Samantha and to seeing you all in the year ahead!

The Small Press Traffic Board of Directors
David Buuck, Jessica Wickens, Lauren Shufran, Chris Chen, Gloria Frym, Scott Inguito, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Cynthia Sailers

"Locals" MLA Reading 12/30 @ Hotel Utah

2008-12-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

For those of you San Francisco for the MLA, please come join us for this companion reading to the big MLA reading on the 28th, this one featuring over 30 Bay Area poets. The reading will start promptly at 7pm, at the nearby club Hotel Utah. Featuring: Melissa Benham, Alan Bernheimer, Brandon Brown, Xochi Candelaria, Norma Cole, Sarah Anne Cox, Del Ray Cross, Brent Cunningham, Donna de la Perriere, Steve Dickison, Stacy Doris, Steve Farmer, Gloria Frym, Susan Gevirtz, Rob Halpern, Javier Huerta, Scott Ignuito, Andrew Joron, David Lau, Joseph Lease, Dana Teen Lomax, Bill Luoma, Laura Moriarty, Stephen Ratcliffe, Barbara Jane Reyes, Cynthia Sailers, Leslie Scalapino, Lauren Shufran, giovanni singleton, Suzanne Stein, Chris Stroffolino, Elizabeth Treadwell, Stephen Vincent, Alli Warren, Chet Weiner, Rob Wilson & more!
hosted by David Buuck & Small Press Traffic.

Tues Dec 30, 7pm, $2
Hotel Utah
500 4th St. @ Bryant, SF

see you there!
David Buuck
Small Press Traffic

This Saturday 12/13: Bev Dahlen Reading & Tribute!

2008-12-09T00:33:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present:

A Beverly Dahlen Reading & Tribute
Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 3 pm
Timken Hall, CCA
Refreshments will be served

Please join Small Press Traffic in recognizing the work of Beverly Dahlen. This community event includes statements about Beverly's writing from:

Ron Silliman
Stephen Vincent
Lauren Shufran
Charles Alexander
Jocelyn Saidenberg
Bruce Boone
Elizabeth Robinson
Rob Halpern
Kathleen Fraser

Beverly Dahlen will read a selection of her work, along with pieces that haven't been made public previously. This retrospective/fete honors one of the Bay Area's foremost writers. Please join us!

A native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived in San Francisco for many years. Her first book, Out of the Third, was published by Momo's Press in 1974. Two chapbooks, A Letter at Easter (Effie's Press, 1976) and The Egyptian Poems (Hipparchia Press, 1983) were followed by the publication of the first volume of A Reading in 1985 (A Reading 1—7, Momo's Press). Since then, three more volumes of A Reading have appeared. Chax Press published A Reading 8—10 (1992); Potes and Poets Press: A Reading 11—17 (1989); Instance Press: A Reading 18—20 (2006). Chax Press also published the chapbook A-reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets in 2004. Ms. Dahlen has also published work in numerous periodicals and anthologies. A forthcoming issue of Crayon will publish poetry and her essay on beauty.

Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to
current SPT members and CCA faculty, staff, and students.
There's no better time to join SPT!

This Friday 12/5: Scott Inguito & The Sonneteers (Ben & Sandra Doller)

2008-12-02T15:27:00.000-08:00

BRING A BOTTLE OF WINE & GET SCOTT'S NEW CHAPBOOK!

Friday, December 5, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall
Refreshments will be served

Scott Inguito lives in San Francisco, teaches in San Jose, and paints in his garage. His most recent project is called PANDAFUCK, a suite of poems inspired by the pointless, the ill-tuned yet well-intentioned, the black and white of it all. Dear Jack (2008), a book of poems, is out on Momotombo Press. You can find his paintings at scottinguito.com

Sandra Doller (née Miller) has a new name. Her first book Oriflamme was published by Ahsahta Press in 2005, and her second collection Chora is forthcoming from Ahsahta in 2010. Sandra Doller is the founder & editrice of a fancy magazine & press, the curiously named 1913. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and lives way out west with her man, Ben Doller (né Doyle) and their pup Ronald Johnson.

Ben Doller (né Doyle)'s first book of poems, Radio, Radio, was selected by Susan Howe as winner of the 2000 Walt Whitman Award. His second book, FAQ:, will be published by Ahsahta Press in 2009, and his third book, Dead Ahead, is forthcoming from Fence Books. He co-edits the Kuhl House Contemporary Poets series and teaches in Antioch's Low-Res MFA program. Wherever he lives, he lives with his lady, Sandra Doller (née Miller) and their boxador, Ronald Johnson.

Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to
current SPT members and CCA faculty, staff, and students.
There's no better time to join SPT!
Check out: http://www.sptraffic.org/html/supporters.htm