Showing posts with label Events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Events. Show all posts
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Tucson Tonight
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
$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
There are some great, tho short, videos of Marilyn playing here.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
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.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Contact: A Symposium in Memory of
Alexei Parshchikov
(1954 — 2009)
Tuesday, November 10, 4:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Room 402, Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
(click here for map)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
David Bromige reading in Seattle, May 2003
Today is David Bromige’s 76th birthday & it will be the first time in many a decade that I won’t have the opportunity to call or at least email him to wish him well. David’s baritone has long been a touchstone for me, one of those familiars that immediately bring comfort, no doubt because I associate it with love & wit. Thanks to PennSound, I can revisit that voice whenever I need to, as no doubt I will today. The latest addition there, I think, is a talk David gave in Bob Perelman’s talk series in 1977 on “Poetry and Intention.”
Last Friday, I traveled to Manhattan to participate in a memorial service for David at Poets House, now ensconced into its Battery Park City home with something akin to a 70-year lease – the venerable organization has room to grow, but also happens to be in the one place on the island that actually is hard to get to without walking several windy rainy blocks along the Hudson River. Joel Lewis, the bard of Hoboken, joked that it was easier to get to from New Jersey.
The following roster will give you some idea who spoke & what they read. Stephen Motika, who’s just finished working on a Collected Poems for Leland Hickman, was the organizer & moderator.
Kathleen Fraser: taped remembrance of David
Ron Silliman:"First" and "The Final Mission" from The Ends of the Earth
Nicholas Piombino: "Soul Mates" and "The End of The Stranger" from Desire
Gary Sullivan: first two pages of the piece My Poetry
Bob Perelman: from My Poetry
Geoffrey Young: from My Poetry
Charles Bernstein: "My Daddy's at His Office Now" from "American Testament 4"
Laura Sims for Rachel Levitsky: comments and poem (I forgot to note which)
Corina Copp reading from "Joy Cone" from Hills 9 (1983)
Taking Amtrak’s Keystone Special up that afternoon, I’d thought this would be a terrific, joyous event, with no sense of sadness at David’s passing. The work is just so damn great & I’d never had the opportunity to read these two special poems in public before, almost as tho they were my own. But the instant I started to talk, I could hear my voice break – just a little – so I cut my palaver short & dove directly into the joy of the work.
Because we were asked to keep our remarks generally to 7 minutes each (to keep the reading to a reasonable [by NY standards] time – even with nine readers, it ran to 90 minutes – neither Bob Perelman or I were able to read our sections from the forthcoming 9th volume of The Grand Piano, both of which deal with David. It was interesting – and proves a long-held hunch of mine (or at least is evidence for same) – that My Poetry was the work most often cited here. It is, as I note in my piece for the Piano, David’s iconic book, even though it appeared only in an edition of 650 copies and was never reprinted. Geoff Young, who published My Poetry, conceded that he too has just one copy of this great book.
For my reading,I turned to earlier work – the premise of the order that night (at least after Kathy Fraser) was by the chronology of David’s writing – two poems that I heard David read on the night that I first met him in 1968. But since I didn’t get to read it at Poets House, here is my section from the next Grand Piano, which should be out in a week or two.
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Furthest Up the Trail
SOMETIME AROUND late 1967, a then recent graduate of Bard, David Perry, arrived in San Francisco State’s creative writing program & he & I quickly discovered that we shared an enthusiasm for the work of Robert Kelly & the many poets Kelly had been teaching, basically The New American Poetry. David also knew all the recent Bard College grads who either lived in the Bay Area (John Gorham, Harvey Bialy) or were visiting (Tom Meyer, still then a teenager I believe). One day very early in ’68, David convinced me that we had to go to the Albany Public Library to hear Bialy read. It was the very place where I’d first discovered poetry some six years earlier, but I hadn’t set foot in that building on Solano since I’d left home, so for me the reading was already laden with symbolic power before Paul Mariah, who curated the series there, introduced the readers. Bialy was fine, maybe a little quieter than I’d expected, but it was the poet reading with him, somebody I’d never heard of before, who blew me away. David Bromige was tall with a long face, a resonant baritone, a mastery of syntax that I had not found anywhere, even in the work of Robert Duncan, & a ready, almost twinkly wit that gave me the impression that had Charles Dickens been alive and a New American poet, he would have been very much like this fellow. It was a stunning, eye-opening performance & I vowed to get to know this poet.1
At thirty-five, Bromige was a grad student at Berkeley, writing a dissertation on the Black Mountain poets, far more widely read than I & just a little suspicious of the motives of twenty-one-year-olds. He lived in a cottage apartment with his then-wife, fiction writer Sherril Jaffe, just north of the campus, not far from Josephine Miles’s place & a short walk to Serendipity Books, which in those days encompassed not only the rare books business it is today, but a bookstore & the distribution operations that subsequently evolved into SPD. I would meet David at his place or at Serendipity, or we would walk over to a beer & pizza den on Shattuck just off University & have long discussions, part gossip, part theory.
Our positions in those days were not at all equivalent. Having already had poems accepted by Poetry, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review & the like, I was full of myself, hyperconscious of my status as a “published poet,” which was somewhat unusual among undergraduates even at San Francisco State. But I was also painfully aware of just how hollow all of that truly was & appalled—daily!—at how little I knew & how much I had yet to learn. Not that I would have admitted that to anyone, least of all myself. Compared with David Bromige, I was an absolute beginner.
As the 60s gave way to the next decade, the grand pooh-bah of poetry in the Bay Area was manifestly Robert Duncan, who was only too happy to remind you of this himself. Of all the poets around him, David was by far the most accomplished, most published, most widely read. David already had four books: The Gathering, The Ends of the Earth, The Quivering Roadway & Please, Like Me. Two of these volumes were from Black Sparrow Press, a “big” small press publisher that aimed to be more to be like New Directions or City Lights than, say, White Rabbit or Oyez.
To read more, pick up the 9th volume of the Grand Piano.
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1. Nor did this prove to be my only important discovery that evening. Hitchhiking back to my apartment by Lake Merrit in Oakland, I caught a ride with someone who recognized me from the reading—David Melnick. Forty-one years later, I’m actively involved in editing the collected works of both Davids.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Today, 7:00pm
Living in Advance:
A Tribute to David Bromige
with Charles Bernstein, Corina Copp, Rachel Levitsky,
Daniel Nohejl, Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino,
Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Geoffrey Young & Others
Poets House | 10 River Terrace | New York, NY 10282
(212) 431-7920 | info@poetshouse.org
Cosponsored by the Poetry Project
Admission Free
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Friday, October 16, 7:00pm
Living in Advance:
A Tribute to David Bromige
with Charles Bernstein, Corina Copp, Rachel Levitsky,
Daniel Nohejl, Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino,
Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Geoffrey Young & Others
Poets House | 10 River Terrace | New York, NY 10282
(212) 431-7920 | info@poetshouse.org
Cosponsored by the Poetry Project
Admission Free
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Toshi Makihara
Jack Krick is an old friend, a one-time colleague of mine at IBM, the primary volunteer these days responsible for updates and expansions to the Electronic Poetry Center, and a resident in a large old craftsman-era masterpiece of a house maybe half an hour south of here. About once every month or two, Jack has evenings with readings & music. On Saturday, Colin & I headed down to Jack’s to hear the latest installment. We didn’t get to stay the entire time, but did get to hear Ryan Eckes & Kim Get Lin Short give great readings. You can read some of Eckes’ Common Sense series, which he read from, by clicking the link under his name.
There was also an amazing performance by master improvisational percussionist Toshi Makihara. Makihara tackles the drums with the inventiveness of a Cecil Taylor or Jimi Hendrix – anything the equipment can do is fair game. He’s played with everyone from John Zorn, Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne (who is to the electric rake what Makihara is to the drums), William Parker, Amy Denio & Thurston Moore. On Saturday he used everything from his feet to blank CDs wedged into a spring (stretched over the drum) to a slinky as he played three, or maybe 3.5 pieces on the little green side drum he uses in his his Solo365 project, about which more below. Makihara explained that while most drummers add drums to expand their range, the sounds they can achieve, he has lately been trying to do so the other way, by expanding what he brings to the drumhead. He also commented that he thinks of the drumhead as a stage and that his work with dancers – he has been collaboraing with the Leah Stein Dance Company for over twenty years – informs how he understands this space.
You can get a great sense of all this by checking out Makihara’s YouTube channel. He’s currently putting up roughly one improvisation every day this year – I haven’t found one yet that didn’t totally transport me – which by now is turning into an amazing body (pun intended) of work! Here’s a piece he recorded earlier last Saturday:
Friday, October 02, 2009
Gray Area
defines new age
of art + technology
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The Gray Area
Foundation for the Arts
officially opens today
55 Taylor Street, SF
(between Market & Turk)
Ribbon Cutting: 5:00-6:00 PM
Reception: 6:00-10:00 PM
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Thursday, September 24, 2009
Today
Fairfax, VA
Ron Silliman: Literary Blogging
Thursday, September 24
4:30 - 5: 30 PM
Johnson Center, Dewberry Hall South,
George Mason University,
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
Fall for the Book
runs thru September 26
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Tonight
Fairfax, VA
Rae Armantrout & Ron Silliman
Wednesday, September 23
8:00 – 9:00 PM
Student Union Building II, Rooms 5, 6, 7,
George Mason University,
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
Photos of Rae & Ron © by Alan Bernheimer & Star Black
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Wednesday & Thursday
Fairfax, VA
Rae Armantrout & Ron Silliman
Wednesday, September 23
8:00 – 9:00 PM
Student Union Building II, Rooms 5, 6, 7,
George Mason University,
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
§
Ron Silliman: Literary Blogging
Thursday, September 24
4:30 - 5: 30 PM
Johnson Center, Dewberry Hall South,
George Mason University,
4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
Fall for the Book
runs from September 21 thru September 26
Photos of Rae & Ron © by Alan Bernheimer & Star Black
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Carol Ann Duffy at the Rylands Library in
On Friday at 10:30, I strode past the Rylands Library in Manchester, knowing full well that in just 90 minutes the announcement would be made there of Britain’s new poet laureate. But I knew that if I paused to take in that announcement I would never make to
(As it was I didn’t have the time to make it to the Tate Liverpool or down to the docks, for which Liverpool is justly famous, though I did take in the Walker Art Gallery and got to see just how the Beatles have become for Liverpool what San Francisco’s more-or-less nonexistent commercial sea trade is to that city’s Fishermen’s Wharf. If anything, the Cavern District, so called, is even tackier, with one bar named Revolution, multiple other pubs making similar (if less creative) claims for association, a converted bank building turned into the Hard Day’s Night Hotel – complete with statues of the Fab Four a couple of storeys up as if they were Italian saints. Across from the original doors to the Cavern Club a busker was dutifully performing “Norwegian Wood.” And the recreated club itself (it was torn down until the city fathers realized what a mistake that was) is indeed a dank place with a tiny stage, albeit when I was there one college-age kid after another was taking turns sitting at the drum set to have their picture taken. Both Rory Gallagher and Mick Taylor are booked to play there on different nights this month & one hopes that they’re doing so for pleasure. I’m told there is a
I was pleased with myself at the moment I strode past the Rylands, having just seen a copy of The Alphabet in the Waterstones on Deaconsgate, and having picked up a copy of Tony Lopez’ Covers there. The poetry section there still suffers from the “furthest from the front door” syndrome so typical of bookstores in the states, but just in terms of pure shelf footage, it was maybe double what one expects to find at a Borders or Barnes & Noble, and with a fair amount of diversity. There were several titles from Salt readily visible, as well as the usual, including a volume (but only one) by Carol Ann Duffy, who soon would be fulfilling the bookies’ predictions when she was named Poet Laureate, the first woman appointed to the position in its 341-year history.
Back at the hotel, as poets, artists & turntablists gathered for the ride out to Bury, one British poet put it to me this way:
She really is the best choice, the only sensible one. She will be an advocate for poetry, and that’s all you can ask from a position like that. She’s smart and accessible, so that helps. Even Andrew Motion, who is not nearly the poet she is, was an advocate, so in that sense he was a good laureate. He was willing to argue for difficulty. I cannot imagine that any poet whose work we liked better would have any interest in taking on the tasks that position requires.
In Bury, about 100 people turned up for the official opening of the Text Festival, which was fun and totally successful as an event. Geof Huth has already done an excellent job documenting it on his blog, so I will add only that Geof gave a terrific reading in bare feet, proving yet again that visual poets are indeed poets in every sense of the word – he even concluded with a song based on one of his texts that reminded me, more than anything, of Jerry Rothenberg’s interpretations of the Navajo Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell (scroll down here). Geof has also blogged the exhibition itself here, and curator-impresario-wizard Tony Trehy has been doing so throughout. Matt Dalby’s blog is also quite good. I have to note that I really enjoyed the evening of poetry films presented by Tom Konyves on Thursday, and was blown away by Nico Vassilakis’ FoC on the big screen, in a somewhat longer version than the YouTube clip.
By the time you read this there will have been two additional events, an afternoon of readings of works commissioned on the subject of Bury itself, and my own reading last night. I recommend that you check out Geof, Tony & Matt’s blogs for reports of those.
Some Carol Ann Duffy links worth noting:
The Guardian article
Another Guardian article
Guardian editorial
A collection of women poets edited by Duffy
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Jennifer Bartlett & Ron Silliman
TODAY, April 4
4:00 to 6:00 PM
At the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery,
just North of
(F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker )
Friday, April 03, 2009
The forthcoming addition to Lisa Jarnot’s family has told her to lie down & chill, so she will not be at the Bowery Poetry Club on Saturday. Happily, Jennifer Bartlett has come to the rescue and will be reading with me tomorrow. You can read interviews with Jennifer here & here. And you can buy Derivative of the Moving Image here. Or read a review here.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Jonathan Mayhew’s
Apocryphal Lorca
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Modernism is 100 years old
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Language poets
are not superheroes,
we just seem that way
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Geof Huth is ironic
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Geof & I
will both be part
of this year’s
Text Festival,
in
in May
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Journal of British
& Irish
Innovative Poetry
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Aram Saroyan’s
uncollected
minimal poems
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Cole Swensen’s Ours
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Sunday, April 5:
SPD’s 40th Anniversary
Poetry Blow-Out!
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Sean Bonney, Redell
Olsen
& many more
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A tribute to Jack Gilbert
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PBS to air
Polis is This:
Charles Olson
& the Persistence of Place
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Palestinian poetry:
“The
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The Fab Five:
Dodie Bellamy, Roberto Bedoya,
Blossom Dearie & Dusty Springfield,
plus of course
Dario Robleto
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Kay Ryan on PBS NewsHour
It’s not all “unicorns and flowers” with Kay
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Remembering Lisa Ratcliffe
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Dodie Bellamy has
archive fever
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Reading report:
a festival of contemporary immigration writing
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The Consumer Products Safety Commission
bans all books
published before 1984
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Reading report:
K. Silem Mohammad & Paul Stephens
at Bard
with lots of video samples
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Flarf & the poetics
of the Goon Show
LOL: a flarfy word
“Flarf should not exist”
Flarf: “a secret handshake”
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Frank O’Hara
turned 83 last week
O’Hara didn’t know
his birthday was March 27
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Sina Queyras
on Emily Carr
on Mary Ruefle
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What do you look for
in poetry?
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The Bedford Poets
of Minneapolis-St. Paul
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Seth Abramson
is more concerned
with the characterization of Quiet
than with a pragmatic history
of the phenomenon
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Talking with Howard Junker
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A new kind of poetry
demands a new kind of critic
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Habib Tengour
at SUNY
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Happy 90th, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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A profile of Dunya Mikhail
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There goes Small Press Book Month
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Anne Charnock, “Uncertainty Series, no. 10” (PDF)
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Books on the Nightstand podcast:
Michael Schiavo
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Rupert Loydell’s
“A Few Thoughts About Blogging”
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Michelle Naka Pierce’s
10 Good Reads
10 good books by people she knows
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Rattle e.6 (PDF)
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“the smell of formaldehyde in the morning”
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The Benedictine monk
who counted
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac & William Burroughs
among his correspondents
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Jeff Hansen’s
series on Nate Mackey’s
Songs of the Andoumboulou
is a wonderful examination
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Walter Mosley:
from Easy to Leonid
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Menachem Begin & the poet
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Once a pun a time
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Poetry & inspiration
(in Italian)
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Neruda’s World’s End
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Cecile Franking Wu has died
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Going after that old left-winger,
John Ashbery
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Remembering Michael Donaghy
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Seamus Heaney: the early years
An extended (and annotated)
version of
“The Dissembling Poet:
Seamus Heaney and the Avant-Garde”
Check out all the responses thus far
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from a laureate than it got from
Andrew Motion
Motion appears to have
hated the job
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Christopher James
wins the “
of UK Quietude
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Charlotte Currier’s “poem-box”
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A rare far-from-Shepherdstown W. VA
reading for Georgia Lee McElhaney
April 1 in
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Avi Sharon
wins the Harold Morton Landon
Translation Award
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PEN
World Voices
Festival of International Literature
NYC, April 27 – May 3
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Obama quotes the poet Saadi
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Leonard Schwartz:
“The New
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Fady Joudah’s
The Earth in the Attic
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Updike’s
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Brad Leithauser on Anne Carson’s
An Orestia
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Cheever’s bio
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A bio of Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The New Yorker reviews
Beckett’s life in letters
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Talking with Orhan Pamuk’s translator
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Jill Bialosky’s Intruder
& an interview
§
Northern California Book Award
short lists
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What blurbs don’t tell you
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42 of the “20 books”
that caused Michael Lally
to fall for poetry
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“the real language of men”
& other fictions
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Frederick Seidel’s Poems: 1959-2009
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Fiction thrives when times are bad
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Joyce Carol Oates
on Flannery O’Connor
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Fictioning Frost
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Did Sylvia Plath
kill her son?
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The next fiction class I teach
will require students
to work only in forms
of 140 characters or less
Ben Okri
is using Twitter
for his poetry
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Five things to look for
in a Quietist poem
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Horrors!
Poets writing in prose
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Michael Collier on his poem
“An Individual History”
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“Holler Poets don’t shout”
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A profile of Mary Jo Bang
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A little travel
to get through a writer’s block
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Stephen Berlin Johnson:
“Old Growth Media
& the Future of News”
§
The single best news source
on the collapse of traditional media
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Ann Arbor’s daily dies
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Ads in the NY Times Book Review dwindle
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How Kindle changes the world
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Transforming the “UX” of libraries
A blog for public libraries
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Court orders
stolen book returned
60 years later
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This week’s death-of-a-bookstore
lies in Chappaqua, NY
§
The last defense against
political corruption
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Kindle & the problems
of ownership vs. access
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Impact of the recession
on the most successful
retail bookstore in the USA
How the indies are faring
in
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“Somewhere up in poet heaven,
Roque Dalton is a happy man”
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Christian Book Expo flops
An insider’s view of why
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The fate of the humanities article
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The artist as critic,
the critic as artist
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Watching Ian McKellen
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Don’t blame the recession
for an arts crisis
§
Could street art rescue the world?
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Among Bernie Madoff’s victims:
Arakawa & Madeline Gins
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The Bernie Madoff of art dealers
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Zoe Strauss’
annual I-95 show
will be May 3rd
Front & Mifflin Streets
right here in
Phil-EYE-delphia
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An alternative Turner shortlist
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Mira Schor at Momenta
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Jackson Pollock’s
family’s Depression letters
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Lawrence Weschler’s conversations
with Robert Irwin & David Hockney
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‘Tis it a crime
to paint the Taoiseach naked?
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Picasso, old
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Galaxy in
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The future of the true Barnes Foundation
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“New York is surface”
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Architects take up Lego challenge
(Legos do poetry too)
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Julie Dill
blogs the SLSO
at Carnegie Hall
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ARG’s Animali –
an Ashbery for the ear?
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Yet another genre
for Wynton Marsalis to muck up
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The Decembrists’ Hazards of Love
is here
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SF Dance Award
goes to trapeze artist
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New York Times
on Sally Silvers
And another
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The brouhaha over
Battlestar Galactica
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Are computer games literature?
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Archie Green,
one of the giants of folklore,
has died
§
“The humanities have no purpose”
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As has
John Hope Franklin
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“The Black Studies Intelligentsia Crowd”
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