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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
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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.