Philadelphia Progressive Poetry Calendar

Version 1.1

Updates, this version: times & details on readings by Erica Hunt, Norma Cole, Eileen Myles, Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

October

27, Sunday, 3: Singing Horse Press presents *Poet-Publishers Take the Stage* -- readings by Rosmarie Waldrop (*Split Infinites*), Lewis Warsh (*Touch of the Whip*), and Chris McCreary (*The Effacements*) at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street. $10, $5 for members. Visit www.paintedbride.org or call 215-925-9914 for more information.

30, Wednesday, 7 PM (eastern time) A reading and conversation with CARL RAKOSI via live audiocast. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT or see the special website: www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html.

November

6, Wednesday, 5:00: John Norton, author of an experimental novella Re: Marriage (San Francisco: Black Star Series) was published in 2000. A book of prose poems and sketches The Light at the End of the Bog (San Francisco: Black Star Series, 1989, 1992) won an American Book Award. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

7, Thursday, 7:30: Award-winning poets and fiction writers Michael Ondaatje (*The English Patient*, *Anil's Ghost*, *Running in the Family*, *In the Skin of the Lion*, *The Cinnamon Peeler*, *Handwriting*) and Fanny Howe (*Selected Poems*, *One Crossed Out*, *The End*, *Nod*, *Indivible*, *Robeson Street). Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center, 2nd & Cooper Streets, Camden NJ, 1-856-964-8300 or wwhitman@waltwhitmancenter.org. $6; $4 to students and seniors; free to members.

12, Tuesday, 5:00: Forrest Gander, the author of five poetry books, including Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower, both from New Directions. He is the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women and the translator, most recently, of No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome and (with Kent Johnson) Immanent Visitor: The Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

13, Wednesday, 7:30: "Not To Be: Poetical Parody, Mock-Ups, & Outright Lies": the Rosenbach Museum and Library sponsors "an evening of poetic riffs and rip-offs" in conjunction with their *Making Shakespeare* exhibition, including William Henry Ireland's infamous forgeries. This panel of poets, reading both historical parodies and their own more seriously allusive work, will feature Nathalie Anderson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Daisy Fried, Paul Muldoon, and Bob Perelman. Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2008 DeLancey Place. For more information, call 215-732-1600, or see www.rosenbach.org.

14, Thursday, Nathaniel Tarn & Toby Olson, 6:00: Two veteran poets & authors who really need no introduction here. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

14, Thursday, 8: Pierre Joris (*Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999*, *4x1: Tzara, Rilke, Duprey & Tengour translated by Joris,* translotor of Celan, Picasso, Blanchot, Kerouac and Abdelwahab Meddeb, co-editor with Jerome Rothenberg of the two-volume *Poems for the Millennium* anthology, *Toward a Nomadic Poetics*), Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple University Center City, 1515 Market.

18, Monday, 7: George Economou & Rochelle Owens. Two of the younger poets associated with the New American poetry and around such journals as Caterpillar. Both have recently moved to Philadelphia. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

December

3, Tuesday, 6:30: Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Among her books are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001), part of her long poem project, and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge, 2001). She is also the author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990), a book of experimental essays. She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), and the co-editor of three anthologies: The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Alabama, 1999), The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (Three Rivers/Crown, 1998) and Signets: Reading H.D. (Wisconsin, 1990). Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

4, Wednesday, 2 events with Michael Ondaatje at Penn. 1:00 PM: Lunch with author Michael Ondaatje sponsored by Women's Studies, and co-sponsored with the Kelly Writers House. RSVP to wh@english.upenn.edu.  4:30 PM: Michael Ondaatje will read at a Penn location TBA, sponsored by Women's Studies.

9, Monday, 6:30 – 8:30 PM. Celebration of the 2002 Pew Fellows in the Arts. Includes poets Rachel Blau, DuPlessis; Mytili Jagannathan; Teresa Leo; & Trapeta B. Mayson; plus performance & visual artists: Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel, Dan Rothenberg, and Dito Van Reigersberg; Candy Depew; Lonnie Graham; Whit MacLaughlin; Caden Manson; Thaddeus McWhinnie Phillips; and Mark Shetabi. Arden Theater, 40 N. 2^nd Street, Philadelphia. For information, write pewarts@mindspring.com or call 215-875-2285.

January

30, Thursday, 8 PM, Erica Hunt. Author of Arcade and Local History. Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

February

20, Thursday, 8 PM. Eileen Myles, poet, novelist, former presidential candidate, author of Chelsea Girls, Skies, Not Me & other books, reads in the Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

26, Wednesday, 4:30 PM: The Poet & Painters series presents poet Ron Padgett. Cosponsered with the Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Creative Writing Program. Padgett is also the author of New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 1995), The Big Something (1990), Triangles in the Afternoon (1979), Great Balls of Fire (1969), and other collections. Two new volumes are forthcoming: Poems I Guess I Wrote and You Never Know. ). Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

27, Thursday, Time TBA, Norma Cole, poet & translator, author of Mace Hill Remap, Moira, Mars, will present “The Transparency Machine” at Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

27, Thursday, 8 PM, Norma Cole will read in the Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

March

27, Thursday, 8: Symposium on Blues, Jazz, and American Literature, with Pew Fellows Sonia Sanchez (so many books, including *Does Your House Have Lions?* and *Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems*) and Major Jackson (*Leaving Saturn*), with critics Robert O'Meally (Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, editor of the anthology *The Jazz Cadence of American Culture*, biographer of Billie Holiday etc) and Farah Griffin (*If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday*). Scheuer Room Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College. For further information, contact Peter Schmidt at pschmid1@swarthmore.edu.

April

8, Tuesday, 7:30: Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott (*Omeros*, *Tiepolo's Hound*, *The Bounty*, *The Odyssey: A Stage Version*, *What the Twilight Says*), in a reading sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, Thomas Great Hall, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr. For further information, contact Helene Studdy at the Bryn Mawr College Office for the Arts, 610-526-5210.