Sunday, May 18
Robert Fitterman & Jennifer Manzano

Live & in Charge!!
6:30pm

21 Grand // 416 25th St. (at Broadway) // in the Land of Oaks


ROBERT FITTERMAN, born in St. Louis 1959 of cigar-making jewish-Russian lineage, has remained close to the heart of Curt Flood. He has lived in NYC since 1981 working as a bartender, waiter, docket clerk, documentation writer, and, finally, as a Master Teacher of Expository Writing at New York University. Author of nine books of poetry, including three installments of the ongoing poem Metropolis: Metropolis 1 15 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), Metropolis 16 29 (Coach House Books, 2002), and Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books, 2004). His most recent work, War, the musical, coauthored with design artist Dirk Rowntree, is a book-length poem that appropriates online language to compose a "libretto" aimed at reenacting how Americans process war through media.

This Window Makes Me Feel (pdf)

1-800-Flowers, an essay in verse



JENNIFER MANZANO balances her time between Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco, CA. Her affairs with language have driven her to letterpress printing, bookbinding, tactile fixation, urban wildlife, and the sounds of public transportation. She published a chapbook making under this is not a french press in December 2006. More recent work can be found online at Cricket Online Review and The Press Gang.

Cricket Online Review

from (things) like holding a mouthful of

ARTIST STATEMENT
Michael Nicoloff

I’ve been thinking a lot lately—ever since the night when I blurted out to a friend, “I think poetics is stupid”—about words like “doing” (as in, “What Michael Nicoloff is doing in his writing is…”) and “engaging” (as in, “I’m engaging with [fill-in-the-blank politically charged topic]”) and “intervention” (that thing we’re supposedly doing sometimes when we’re “doing” and “engaging,” and a word that seems to imply effecting change). I have some problems with these words, some of which I’m still trying to tease out. I don’t think it’s lost on most people that the zero degree of poetry is that most of it is being read by the same, relatively small group of people, most of whom are writers themselves, and in turn I don’t think it’s lost on most people that any kind of “intervention”—I’m thinking of intervention in that hazy cultural/political sphere—that poetry is participating in is likely going to be small-scale and happening in the minds of an already-primed audience of poets. I know that that’s a point of frustration for some writers sometimes; I know it is for me. And so when I hear poetic work analyzed using those words, discussed in the context of the political work it purports to be doing, I tend to shut off; the proliferation in intros, extended essays, and blurbs of analyses of a work’s politicized literary meaning and the political effect it (potentially) has on that small group always makes me say, okay, but, well, it’s only us in this room who are reading it. And it irks me that more statements of poetics don’t at least factor that into claims they’re making—and maybe that’s why we end up some nights with me and my blurt.

But once you pause for a second and quit yr aggro bad-vibing about the state of the Art, you start to see that maybe all that railing is blinding you to the fact that there’s a whole world of helpful analysis that isn’t really being done. I don’t want to uncritically retreat into conventional disciplinary categories of academia, but I nonetheless think that if we shift our preoccupations and started asking our questions using terms and concepts from the social sciences, and actually follow through by taking advantage of the fruitful methodologies from those same disciplines, we’d end up not just with some critical work that’d make for fascinating reading but also with a better sense of our place and relevance both as individual artists and as artistic communities. Maybe the poems themselves aren’t reaching that wide of an audience, for sure, but reading and writing it is still affecting the poets, changing how they think (in ways too often left vaguely defined—maybe neuroscience needs to join the party, too), and it’s not as though these poets are only interacting with each other, even though it seems that way sometimes. Furthermore, stepping back one level of remove, poetry communities obviously don’t exist in isolation from other institutions and structures—e.g. ([Small Press Traffic] CCA), ([The (New) Reading Series] 21 Grand)—and in turn have a reciprocal relationship. Artist’s statements and literary analysis certainly have their place, but when it comes to the questions of poetry and politics, I’d much rather see a lot more work that historically tracks poetry’s formal institutions and informal bodies, that traces who is talking to whom (non-poet and poet) and in turn how the movements of one in-group alter the trajectory of another, that asks where the grant money and independent wealth that buttresses some of our organizations and small presses is actually coming from. Etc. Because to really understand the ways Poetry (capital P, including the poets, their work, their reading series, their watering holes) does and does not have effects in society, and the ways in which it could refocus, redirect, or, god forbid, increase its own relevance, we don’t need another articulation of what someone’s “doing” or “engaging” with: we need a sociology of poetry.

Sunday, April 20, 2008
6:30 pm // $3


Eileen Myles & Michael Nicoloff

LIVE @ 21 Grand
416 25th St at Broadway

EILEEN MYLES was born in Cambridge, MA in 1949. In 1974, she moved to New York where she studied poetry with Paul Violi, Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. Her latest book is Sorry, Tree in which she describes "some nature" as well as the transmigration of souls from the east coast to the west. Bust Magazine calls Myles "the rock star of modern poetry" and Holland Cotter in The New York Times describes her as "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde." She has been a professor of writing at UCSD since 2002.

All Things Myles

CA Conrad talks with Eileen Myles



MICHAEL NICOLOFF is the author of the chapbook "'Punks'" which was put out in print form by Taxt Press in 2007 and can now be found on the website Deep Oakland. His poetry and reviews have appeared in such fine publications as The Recluse, Mirage #4/Period(ical), The Orgasm Zine, and Traffic. Born and raised in Olympia, WA, he has hopped between coasts for the last several years. Right now, though, he lives on Alcatraz--the street--in Oakland, CA.

"Punks" (pdf)

I HOPE YOU DIE

ARTIST STATEMENT
Lyn Hejinian

Any artist’s statement is also a misstatement, not because artists don’t know what they are doing but because what they are doing will generally end very far from where it began.

Actually—at least according to Viktor Shklovsky, and why not trust him as well as anyone else—no good art work has an end. It stops, but abruptly, as dreams do. You wake up.

The birds are singing, but it’s not yet light.

What can one learn from dreams? Unconsciously, one’s mind was working.

What I am reading at the inaugural event of the yet-to-be-named literary series curated by Alli Warren and Brandon Brown is a set of pieces from a work that I’ve given several names. It is a night work, though not always a dream work. One thinks many things at night, picks up many different nocturnal languages, without being asleep.

I’ve been working on this project for many years. When it’s finished, it will be called The Book of A Thousand Eyes. Relatively short pieces intended as additions to it have several times turned into projects of their own. My book A Border Comedy was supposed to be a part of The Book of A Thousand Eyes; forgetting was to be incorporated into it and last for about a page.

The Book of A Thousand Eyes is an homage to Scheherazade, who knew everything of importance in her time. It’s addressed to knowledge, then, but it sits on very shaky epistemological grounds. Whatever knowledge is contained in (or obtained by) insomniac perseverations, fairy tales, lullabies, ideational feedback, erotic fantasies (or actualities), etc. is suspect.

The nocturnal terrain is uncertain. It’s also frightening, albeit sometimes funny.

There are a few poems in the work that I can’t read without laughing. I won’t read those, because my laughter gets out of control—it verges on hysteria, overt grief.

According to the ancient story, over the course of one thousand and one nights, Scheherazade re-educates a vicious ruler, and under her tutelage he learns to be just, benevolent, and kind; he becomes almost as wise as she. Nothing any of us can do today can have quite that impact. Perhaps this is because we don’t have access to the ruler.


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ARTIST STATEMENT
K. Silem Mohammad

All you retards deserve to burn in hell. I would like to see you get crushed by a motherfucking bulldozer.

Go fuck your syphilis-infected mother. Take your motherfucking ass and cry to your fucking pedophile slut. Go finish killing yourselves, you little pussy fucking liberals. Get it through your head: your government doesn’t give a fuck about you.

We have to “get behind the president in wartime” my fucking ass. Think wisely because the motherfucker can’t keep most his life. In 1987 he stomped his mother to death to the tune of kids running around screaming “BALL HAIR FUCK PENIS.” “Fuck me harder bitch” and “lie to me” are examples. It is just a stupid concept and really needs to be syndicated immediately.

My father and mother have recently been arrested for growing and selling a stickman Apollo Creed who makes cups of tea without fucking your wife first. Continue groping as her Washington Monument slips. The split is clean and the two halves fit nicely into the mother mold. She had a big ass then, she’s got a big ass now.

To the farmhouse, fuckboys! Prepare to have your ass laminated yet safe sex and overall self-fulfillment. Two men show up claiming to be poets. “Are you my Caucasian?” “My mama buys me the motherfucking undies.” “Fuck these old bitches,” my sister barked, just because her mother’s gone nuts.

I’m glad you like mocking Christians because they really blow heavy ass. We’re gonna speak up through this art form because it’s fucking powerful. Thank you. I would like to see you get crushed by a bulldozer.

March 30, 6:30 pm = HOT FUN

Lyn Hejinian & K. Silem Mohammad

21 Grand / 416 25h St / Oakland CA / 3 dollars


Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, translator, and publisher. She has been publishing works since 1972, and most recently, The Beginner was published by Tuumba Press. Hejinian is a professor at University of California, Berkeley.


Reading from "My Life" (1979)

An Interview with Lyn Hejinian

“Continuing Against Closure”

from "The Fatalist"




K. Silem Mohammad is the author of the poetry collections Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises); A Thousand Devils (Combo Books); and Breathalyzer (Edge Books); Mohammad is an associate professor at Southern Oregon University.



An Interview with K. Silem Mohammad

4 Poems in Coconut Three

4 Poems in Fascicle