Marilyn Crispell & Ron Silliman
An evening of poetry & improvised music
Saturday, January 30, 7:30 PM
Recital Hall, Pima Center for the Arts
Pima Community College West Campus
2202 West Anklam, Tucson
$10 for tickets at Bentley's & at Antigone Books,
or $8 from Chax Press
(if purchased from Chax Press directly, before the night of the event),
$15 at the door.
Seating is limited to 120 people!
Phone 520-620-1626
Presented by Chax Press
with cosponsorship by
The University of Arizona Poetry Center and POG
Marilyn Crispell has more than two dozen albums of music and has long been one of our great innovative performer/composers on the piano; John Pareles, in the NY Times, writes, "Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." Crispell is a rarity in that she's not interested in hard bop, jazz/hip-hop, or fusion. Her style, with its slashing phrases, percussive mode, clusters, and speed, pays homage to Cecil Taylor (whom she reveres) but isn't merely an imitation...and her use of space, African rhythms, and chording also recall Thelonious Monk and Paul Bley, two others she cites as influences, along with Leo Smith.
Ron Silliman, it says here, is one of America's most consistently challenging and rewarding poets, with more than 30 books to his credit, most recently The Alphabet. The Times Literary Supplement opines, "Ron Silliman's ongoing long poem The Alphabet... mingles quotidian observation, linguistic-philosophical reflection, and street-level social critique to produce as vivid, systemic, and cumulatively moving an account of contemporary life as any poet now writing." Silliman's Blog, a weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics, has had over 2.5 million hits since its inception in 2002.
