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.

In Case You Missed It: Truong Tran and Mary Burger

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

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