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EVENT CANCELLED: DECEMBER 10th

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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!

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

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!

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!

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.