The (New) Reading Series @ 21 Grand

2010-12-02T09:50:00.001-08:00

We are saddened that Oakland's 21 Grand gallery on 25th St. will close at the end of December. For more information, read this and this.

This series, through its many names and curators, has been generously hosted by 21 Grand for almost a decade, and the venue itself has become a vital part of the series. In recognition and support of this connection, we have decided to take a break until the gallery reopens in a new location. Our hope is that the gallery situates itself in a new spot by the middle of 2011, and that the series resurfaces by the fall. We hope to see you in the next round! Thanks for all your support.

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And now take a trip down memory lane...here and here.

2010-11-29T12:04:00.000-08:00

photos of the Tisa Bryant/Jeff Derksen reading by Erin Morrill, Juliana Spahr, Jen Benka

2010-11-01T13:33:00.001-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents...

An evening with Tisa Bryant & Jeff Derksen
Sunday, November 21, 2010

Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Reading at 7 p.m.

at 21 Grand, 416 25th St, Oakland

Admission is 5 dollars

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature, and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published by AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2010. She is also author of a chapbook, Tzimmes. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the journals 1913 and Animal Shelter. Bryant is currently working on a novel, The Curator. She teaches fiction, hybrid forms, and ethnic innovative literature at the California Institute of the Arts.

Jeff Derksen's poetry books include Down Time, Dwell, and Transnational Muscle Cars, as well as the book of essays Annihilated Time: poetry and other politics (all from Talonbooks). His poetry has been anthologized in The Canadian Long Poem Anthology, The Gertrude Stein Anthology of Innovative North American Poetry, Writing Class, Half in the Sun: an anthology of Mennonite Writing, and in the Portuguese anthology of Canadian poetry, Pullllllllllll. His collection of essays on art and urbanism in the long neoliberal moment, After Euphoria (JRP Ringier), is forthcoming. Derksen is on the boards of the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery (Vancouver), and he works at Simon Fraser University.
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We will be taking a hiatus during the months of December and January while we explore options for the series, given the precarious situation at 21 Grand. Please help 21 Grand if you can! For more information, read this article.

2010-10-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

Photos by Alan Bernheimer.

For videos by Erin Morrill, click here, here, here, and here. Highly recommended.

2010-09-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents

An evening with Mina Pam Dick and Evan Kennedy

Sunday, October 17

6:30 pm

21 Grand, 416 25th St, Oakland

Admission is 5 dollars

Evan Kennedy is the author of a few chapbooks, including Us Them Poems (BookThug), and a video-poem, Voyage by Donkey, with Zbyszek Bzymek. His work has appeared in Try!, The Equalizer, Tight, Poetry Project’s The Recluse, and The Brooklyn Rail. He oversees Dirty Swan Projects out of San Francisco.

Mina Pam Dick (aka Hildebrand Pam Dick, Nico Pam Dick et al.) is a writer, artist and philosopher living in New York City. A native New Yorker, she received a BA from Yale University and an MFA in Painting as well as an MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in Tantalum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Portable Boog Reader 4, Aufgabe #9, The Recluse, and Everyday Genius, and is forthcoming in the online journal EOAGH. Her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria). Her first book, Delinquent, was released by Futurepoem Books in late 2009.

2010-09-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

Photos by Rebecca VanDeVoort & Alan Bernheimer & Andrew Kenower

2010-09-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

Your very own (New) Reading Series featured on SFMOMA's blog Open Space

2010-08-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents...

An evening with Steven Farmer & N S (Nathalie Stephens/Nathanaël)

Sunday, September 19

6:30 in the evening
at 21 Grand, 416 25th St, Oakland
Admission is 5 dollars

Steven Farmer is a southern California native who migrated northward to the Bay Area in the early '80's, where the seeds of his antipoetry sprouted in the Newtonic (Huey) soil of north Oakland. With two English Lit-ish degrees on his wall, he nonetheless works in the IT world (after many years in the restaurant industry). Books include Coracle, Tone Ward, World of Shields, Standing Water, Medieval, and just out from theenk Books , Glowball. Other work appearing in 5 Fingers Review, Try, Crayon, Third Factory/Notes to Poetry, Poetics Journal and elsewhere.

N S (Nathalie Stephens / Nathanaël) writes l'entre-genre in English and French. Her books include We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010),Carnet de désaccords (2009), The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (2007), and Je Nathanaël (2003/2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian. There is an essay of correspondence (2009) : Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published (2007) as L'absence au lieu. Also, a collection of talks, At Alberta (2008). Besides translating some of her own work, Stephens has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, John Keene, Édouard Glissant. She lives, she thinks, in Chicago.

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Please note that N S has two other engagements in the Bay Area. On September 23, Nathanaël will read at the Poetry Center w/ Brian Teare. On September 25, Nathanaël will give a talk at SPT.

2010-08-17T12:13:00.001-07:00

A few photos from our Summertime Cabaret:

Photos by Alli Warren and Alan Bernheimer

2010-07-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents

A Summertime Cabaret

This event is a fundraiser for the series, so we can continue to do what we do!

August 15, 2010
6:30 - 9:00 pm

Performers will include:

Lindsey Boldt (with special guests), The Movie La Bamba in 10 Minutes or Less

Ariel Goldberg & Charity Coleman of Write This Down TV

The Newlywed Game, featuring Stephanie Young & Clive Worsley, Lauren Shufran & Carrie Stone, Samantha Giles & Frank Brash; hosted by Ron Palmer

a Short Piece for Videotheater by Konrad Steiner

Margaret Tedesco

Violets (Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Karla Milosevich, Kota Uetsu)

Lara Durback, Jacob Eichert, and Erin Morrill will be performing refreshments.

Brandon Brown will be your MC.

Admission $10; additional donations will not be refused
Spirits available
Goods for sale

See you at 21 Grand
416 25th St, Oakland

2010-07-20T11:45:00.000-07:00

Catherine Meng & Thom Donovan performed for The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, and here is the photographic evidence to prove it...

Photos by Rebecca VandeVoort & Alan Bernheimer

Robin Tremblay-McGaw's report on the evening can be found here

Michael Cross's photos from the evening can be found here

2010-06-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Please join us at 21 Grand on Sunday, July 18, 2010 as we welcome

Thom Donovan & Catherine Meng

Doors at 6:30pm

5 USD Admission

21 Grand, 416 25th St, Oakland

Thom Donovan lives in NYC where he edits Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) and coedits ON Contemporary Practice. He is a participant in the Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series. His criticism and poetry have been published widely in BOMB, PAJ: performance + art, Modern Painters, The Brooklyn Rail, and at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog. Currently he is working on a book of criticism, Sovereignty and US: Critical Objects 2005-2010, and on the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior (with Sreshta Rit Premnath). His book The Hole is forthcoming with Displaced Press.

Catherine Meng is the author of the poetry collection Tonight's the Night (Apostrophe Books) and three chapbooks, 15 Poems in Sets of 5 (Anchorite Press), Dokument (Perichord Press), and Lost Notebook w/ Letters to Deer (Dusie Kollectiv). She lives in Berkeley unironically and works at a restaurant. Along with Lauren Levin and Jared Stanley she co-edits the poetry journal Mrs. Maybe.

2010-06-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

K. Lorraine Graham

photos by Bernheimer & Spahr

Jeffrey Schrader

(New) Reading Series NOCS

2010-06-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand Presents...

Jeffrey Schrader & K. Lorraine Graham

Sunday, June 20, 2010

6:30 pm, Admission 5 USD

@ 21 Grand, 416 25th Street, Oakland

Jeffrey Schrader’s newest book is Art Fraud (BlazeVOX 2010). This summer his newest work will be gridpattern (www.ErgArts.com). He has previous work in a handful of diy journals & websites. He has some older chapbooks. He’s worked as a factory employee, an outdoor adventure guide for young, urban troublemakers, an arts academy teacher, a bike messenger, a student, an archivist, a recipient of unemployment benefits, and an accountant. He does not blog, but enjoys reading yours. He has occasionally helped out with The Uglyman Collective, Another Thing Books, and (currently) Cricket Online Review. He presently lives in Oakland, CA, but he won’t live there forever. He has received no grants or awards.

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take-Home Project. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. She currently lives in southern California with her partner, Mark Wallace, and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet.

2010-05-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Julian T. Brolaski & kathryn l. pringle read for The (New) Series, and all we got was this t-shirt (crowd shots)

2010-05-04T10:37:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand Presents...

Julian T. Brolaski & kathryn l. pringle

Sunday, May 16
6:30 pm / Admission $5
416 25th St, Oakland

Julian T. Brolaski co-curated the the New Brutalism poetry series in Oakland from 2003-2005 (with Cynthia Sailers) and the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006. Brolaski is the author of several chapbooks, including The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary’s Diary (Cy Press 2005), and Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar 2008). Xe is also the recent co-editor (along w/ E. Tracy Grinnell and erica kaufman) of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards. Xir first book gowanus atropolis is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2010; Advice for Lovers is forthcoming from City Lights in 2011. Brolaski lives in Brooklyn, where xe is an editor at Litmus Press, plays country music with The Low & the Lonesome, and curates vaudeville shows. New work is on the blog hermofwarsaw and @juandenowherr.

kathryn l. pringle is an American poet. She is the author of RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY (Factory School/Heretical Text Series), The Stills (Duration Press), and Temper & Felicity Are Lovers (TAXT). Her poems can be read in The Denver Quarterly, Fence, 14 hills, 580 Split, and Sidebrow, among others.

Photographic Evidence of Stephen Rodefer & Bhanu Kapil Event

2010-04-19T16:33:00.001-07:00

Photos by Rebbeca VandeVoort, Lara Durback, Alan Bernheimer and Alli Warren

2010-04-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand Presents...

Stephen Rodefer & Bhanu Kapil

Sunday, April 18
6:30 pm / 5 USD
416 25th St, Oakland

Carcanet has just published Call It Thought, the selected poems by the American writer Stephen Rodefer. Mr. Rodefer is also the author of One or Two Love Poems from the White World, VILLON by Jean Calais, The Bell Clerk's Tears Keep Flowing, Four Lectures (which was a winner of the American Poetry Center’s Annual Book  Award), Oriflamme Day (with Ben Friedlander), Emergency Measures, Passing Duration, Leaving, Erasures, Left Under A Cloud, and Mon Canard, among other titles.

His essay on canon-formation, "The Age in its Cage: A Note to Mr. Mendelssohn on the Sociologic Allegory of Literature and the Deformation of the Canonymous," appears in the Spring 2006 issue of Chicago Review, and that literary journal published a special issue on his work in 2008.

In addition to Villon, Rodefer has published translations of Sappho, selections from the Greek Anthology, Catullus, Lucretius, Dante, Baudelaire, Rilke, Frank O’Hara, and the Cuban poet Noel Nicola.

He is currently translating Baudelaire for a collection to be published next year, entitled Fever Flowers: Les fleurs du val.

Bhanu Kapil is a dog.

Let me try again.

Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer who lives, industriously, in Colorado. Her industry includes, most recently, a prose work, "Schizophrene," forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2011, and "Humanimal [a project for future children]" (Kelsey Street Press, 2009.) Bhanu teaches year-round at Naropa University and Goddard College. She has also maintained a private practice as a bodyworker since 1998, though is currently taking a year's sabbatical in order to become a novelist. This is not going so well, as she is: a) seeing clients again, and b) is incapable of writing sustained narratives people could read on trains.

2010-03-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

From Silvers/Boykoff, 1/21/10

Photos by Andrew Kenower, Juliana Spahr, and Alli Warren

2010-03-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand Presents...

An Evening of Performance

with Jules Boykoff and Sally Silvers

Sunday, March 21st
6:30 pm / 5 USD
416 25th St, Oakland

Jules Boykoff is the author of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School (AK Press, 2007), and 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). His political writing includes Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (co-authored with Kaia Sand) (Palm Press, 2008), Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United StatesThe Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge, 2006). His writing has appeared recently in the Guardian, the Nation, and Counterpunch. Poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in 1913 and Wheelhouse Magazine. He teaches politics and writing at Pacific University and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Sally Silvers has been making dances for almost 30 years. She has performed and taught (improvisation, composition, repertory) around the world and across the nation. Her theoretical writing, scores, and poetry have appeared in several journals including The Drama Review, an anthology of new writings by women published by Illinois University Press, and many poetry magazines. Silvers has received support for her choreography from the National Endowment for the Arts six times, twice from Meet the Composer/Choreographer Project for collaborations with John Zorn and Bruce Andrews, from the NY Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. Silvers is a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" winner, has co-directed 2 dance films, Little Lieutenant and Mechanics of the Brain, and choreographed 3 musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival in Utah. Since 2006 she has been dancing in the work of Yvonne Rainer.

Sally Silvers' photo credit: Lois Greenfield

A few Try! Benefit Photos

2010-02-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

Big shout out to Jocelyn Saidenberg for donating her digital camera to The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Thank you, Jocelyn!

2010-02-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

Please join us on Sunday, February 21 at 6 o'clock* as we celebrate the Bay Area's own TRY! magazine. The evening will be a jovial event celebrating the first two years of the magazine's existence, commemorating the tireless efforts of editors David Brazil and Sara Larsen, as well as the release of the thirtieth issue. To mark the occasion, 30 readers will each present a piece of their choice from one of the magazine's previous issues. The gallery space will be filled with an assortment of things to look at, listen to, purchase, and poke. Expect a DJ booth, and libations to imbibe.

Readers will include:

Cedar Sigo

Brandon Brown

Stephanie Young

Suzanne Stein

Bill Luoma

Juliana Spahr

Cynthia Sailers

Colter Jacobsen

Cassie Smith

Patrick Dunagan

Rob Halpern

Taylor Brady

Jocelyn Saidenberg

Lauren Levin

Erin Morrill

Julien Poirier

Michael Cross

Andrew Joron

Alan Bernheimer

Dan Fisher

Scott Inguito

Alli Warren

Chris Chen

Ariel Goldberg

Carol Mirakove

Jen Benka

Jennifer Manzano

Dana Ward

Since Spring 2008, TRY! magazine has been a vital organ of the Bay Area writing community. Each issue of TRY! reflects and inspires various component parts of the Bay Area writing and art scenes. Printed every two weeks and distributed by hand at events in the area, TRY! is an immediate and transitory socio-aesthetic experience. TRY! issues are always free of charge. To read an interview with the editors, click here.

* 10 DOLLARS (this is a fundraiser)
* 6:00 pm (please note earlier start time)
* 21 Grand, 416 25th Street, Oakland

2010-02-02T17:10:00.000-08:00

From Kearney/Bernes, 1/24/2010

2010-01-04T19:02:00.000-08:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents

Douglas Kearney & Jasper Bernes

Sunday, January 24, 2010

6:30 pm | 5 USD

416 25th St, Oakland

JASPER BERNES is the author of Starsdown

(ingirumimusnocteconsumimurigni) and Desequencer (TAXT). He is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and lives in Albany with Anna Shapiro and their son, Noah.

Poet/performer/librettist DOUGLAS KEARNEY’s first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 by Red Hen Press. In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers’ Award and in 2007, the Poetry Society of America named him a notable New American Poet. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena and now living with his family in California’s San Fernando Valley, he earned a BA from Howard University, an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts (where he now teaches) and held fellowships with Cave Canem, Callaloo and Idyllwild. Visit him online at www.douglaskearney.com.

2009-12-06T17:18:00.001-08:00

From Roy/Burnham, 11/15/2009

Photos mostly by Kevin Killian on the disposable camera.

2009-10-28T11:32:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents

Camille Roy & Clint Burnham

Sunday, November 15th

6:30pm | 5 USD

416 25th St, Oakland

Camille Roy is a writer and performer of plays, poetry, and fiction. Her two most recent books are CHEAP SPEECH, a play, from Leroy, and CRAQUER, from 2nd Story Books (both 2002). Her book SWARM (two novellas) was published by San Francisco’s Black Star Series with funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Earlier books include THE ROSY MEDALLIONS (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St Press) and COLD HEAVEN (plays, from O Books). In 1998 she was the recipient of a Lannan Writers At Work Residency at Just Buffalo Literary Center. She is a founding editor of the online journal Narrativity, and an editor of the anthology 'Biting the Error: Writers On Experimental Narrative', drawn from this site, which is forthcoming from Coach House in fall 2004. Her books and selections of her work are available online at http://www.camilleroy.com. She has taught fiction and playwriting at San Francisco State University and at the University of San Francisco, and has conducted a private workshop for six years.

Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia in 1962. In 1965 he moved with his family to Marville, France, and then, when Charles deGaulle removed France from NATO, in 1967 he moved to Lahr, West Germany. He then moved to Chicoutimi, and then Bagotville, in Quebec, in 1968. In 1970 he moved to Edmonton, Alberta, and two years later, after watching the Canada-USSR hockey series in a motel, to Goose Bay, Labrador. In 1975 he moved back to Alberta, to Cold Lake, then, as now, a Norad test site for cruise missiles. In 1978 he moved to Regina, Saskatchewan, and then, two years later, to Victoria, British Columbia, first to attend Royal Roads Military College and then, when he was discharged, to the University of Victoria, where he received a B.A. and an M.A., the latter for a thesis on the postmodern poetics of bpNichol and Robert Kroetsch. Clint then moved to Toronto to attend York University, where he wrote a dissertation on Fredric Jameson and, concurrently, a monograph on Steve McCaffery. Since 1995 he has lived in Vancouver. Other books include Be Labour Reading (poetry, ECW, 1997), Airborne Photo (fiction, Anvil, 1999), Buddyland (poetry, Coach House, 2000), Smoke Show (novel, Arsenal Pulp, 2005), Rental Van (poetry, Anvil, 2007), and The Benjamin Sonnets (poetry, BookThug, 2009). His art writing has been published in many gallery catalogues in Canada and Europe and in print and online venues including fillip, Boo, Canadian Art, artforum.com, and Camera Austria. He teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.

2009-10-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

From Glück/Mirakove, 10/18/2009

Photos mostly by Taylor Brady on the disposable camera. Click for larger images.

2009-10-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

Bob Glück and Carol Mirakove

Sunday, October 18, 2009

6:30pm, 5 US Dollars

21 Grand

Carol Mirakove is the author of Mediated (Factory School), Occupied (Kelsey St. Press), and, with Jen Benka, 1,138 (Belladonna). She released the single "temporary tattoos" with the Dutch musician bates45 and she collaborates with the Lebanese DJ [IN]Head-Kay. Carol recently moved to Oakland from Brooklyn.

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Gluck edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Co-Director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies,The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in bookforum, artforum international, Aperture, Poetics Journal, and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book on the paintings of Frank Moore. Last year he and artist Dean Smith completed the film Aliengnosis. Gluck teaches at San Francisco State University.

2009-09-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Lisa Robertson

it seems unbelievable
as when there is a tree and you try to hear it
and the sensation of behindness
into the midst of which you have been plunged
shows equilibrium as inimical to life

as when you mime what you perceive
like a voluntary intuition
that ripples from body to friend
if the will is a rhythm

as permanent gesticulation in uncertain scale
as reviviscent motor element
into the midst of which she has been plunged semiologically so
my organism hankers

She made her muscles into thoughts:
Especially her facial muscles liked
a well-stacked wood-shed

I do this because it’s more portable than sewing

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Micah Ballard

September 1, 2009

I enjoy cuts and scrapes, a little blood here, some there, but not just an overflow of anything. I prefer the particular in all things as long as there is an entrance out. I don’t like sprains and strains, things that inhibit movement. Those play on the mind too much and there is no escape. I also enjoy elegance, as much as the next, yet it has to be tailored to an alien wit, one unrehearsed, nonchalant and in command, that stays ahead of the notes while behind them. The question lies in the ability to lure and be lured. As in “our bodies give us away” or “when you have ghosts you have everything.” I shall leave out the Tupac Shakurs and David Bowies. Some of us prefer a saxophone to a handgun as others do a brush to a pen. That doesn’t mean we’re not all at the same dinner table. Those of the past remain at play with those present. There are so many rooms in this mansion I can’t remember the few I’ve been in save for what’s left on the page. I do know there have been others before and there will be those who come after, and we are all a part of one another. There are nights, weeks, years, where some of us arrive to the room late and others early, but we always meet for a toast at the crossing. One can’t hold the lantern all the time. Lately, I don’t even care what room I’m in and prefer not knowing how I got there. To be led in the dark, as it were, with only the flashing of this broken lighter. And to find one’s way, unknowingly, through the next wall, or down to the next hall. Whatever the case, someone will be waiting, if not, then it’s your turn.

2009-09-02T15:49:00.001-07:00

Please join us, Sunday, September 20, 2009 as we welcome

LISA ROBERTSON & MICAH BALLARD

416 25th St, Oakland

6:30 pm || 5 USD

LISA ROBERTSON was born in Toronto and lived for many years in Vancouver, before moving to France, and then California. Her first book, XEclogue, was published in 1993 by Tsunami Editions; Debbie: An Epic, and The Weather followed, from New Star (co-published by Reality Street in the UK); then The Men (Bookthug, 2006) and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House 2009). A book of essays, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, was published by Clearcut (USA, 2003) and Coach House. R’s Boat will be out with University of California Press in 2010. She has been the recipient of the Relit Award and the bp Nichol Chapbook Award, and has taught and held residencies at the Kootenay School of Writing, California College of the Arts, University of Cambridge, Capilano College, University of California Berkeley, University of California San Diego, American University of Paris and the Naropa Institute. She is currently working collaboratively on sound and video-based projects.

MICAH BALLARD was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has lived in San Francisco since 1999. Recent books include Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners, Bettina Coffin, Evangeline Downs, Parish Krewes, and the collaborations Death Race V.S.O.P. and Easy Eden. He is co-editor for Auguste Press and works for the MFA in Writing Program at USF. From 2005-07 he curated small shows for the Lew Gallery.

2009-08-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Laura Moriarty

NON TONAL

Dreams a rule
Words not mine
Not a body of beliefs
Melancholic dusty waltzes
But a knowledge of techniques
Technique of knowledge
Imagination overcome
Beautiful nightmare
Opposed to genius
Letters not addressed suggest
New sound or new personality
Deathsick moon
While remaining virtually unperformed
Arousing resistance
Every innovation destroys
What it produces
The bonds of a by-gone esthetic
Floated into the non tonal
Speech becomes music
With no other aim than comprehensibility
Blacks the sun
Textures rent by incompatible elements
Speech versus music
“I feel the air from another planet”
Not a technique but a passing phase
Uncataloged dissonance
Pierrot lunaire
Growing up with the same influences
Emotional revolution
Or a different place and time with the same mind
Having abandoned tonality
We create language not style
With an almost somnambulist sense
Bravely to plunge
“Free” composition and sublime banality
The green horizon
Makes the past accessible to the new feeling
Laughs, spits, hisses, makes animal cries
Maid of the sky
Complains if you do this you are not “free”
To do that
A new geological formation
Serial universe
Obvious musicality
Or universes
Remix ensemble
Not a single thing
Or will be

2009-08-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

Please join us Sunday, August 23 as we welcome...

Clark Coolidge and Laura Moriarty
with two short films by Brandon Downing

LIVE! ONE NIGHT ONLY!

21 GRAND, 416 25th Street, Oakland

6:30 pm 5 USD

CLARK COOLIDGE is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island. Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects - including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies - often finds correspondence in his work. His books include Alien Tatters, Mesh, Mine, The Crystal Text, The Rova Improvisations, On the Nameways and many more. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills . He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

LAURA MORIARTY’S A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 came out from Omnidawn Publishing in 2007, as did An Air Force, a chapbook from Hooke Press. Her long essay poem A Tonalist is forthcoming from Nightboat Books next spring. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University among other places & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She is findable on-line at A Tonalist Notes and related blogs.

2009-07-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Vanessa Place

Tribunal de Grande || Instance de Marseille la

9 Septembre 77 || Parquet du Pro

cureur de la || République N^o || Le Procureur

de la République près || le Tribunal de Gran

de Instance de Marseille, || à Monsieur Maitre Gou

dareau Avocat au || Barreau de Barsielle

J’ai l’honneur de vous faire || connaître que sui

vant décision de || Monsieur le Président de

la République, || le recourse en || grâce du normé Ha

mida DJANDOUBI a || été rejeté.

En conséquence, l’arrêt de la || Cour d’Assises

des Bouches-du-Rhône qui a || condamné à la peine

de mort Hamida || DJANDOUBI sera ram

ené à exécution le || SAMEDI 10 SEP

TEMBRE 19| |77 à ||4 heures 15

Je vous adress || la présente no||tification

pour vous permettre d’||assister votre client.

Veuilles agréerer, mon || Cher Maître, l’assur

ance de ma par||faite considé||ration. LE PRO

CUREUR DE LA || RÉPUBLIQUE, || Valéry Giscard

d’Estaing

2009-06-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Please join us on Sunday, July 19, 2009 as we welcome

Vanessa Place and Peter Culley

LIVE at 21 Grand
6:30pm | 5 USD | 416 25th St Oakland, CA

VANESSA PLACE is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press.

PETER CULLEY was born in Sudbury, Ontario in 1958 and grew up on RCAF bases in Holberg, British Columbia, Cold Lake, Alberta, Dana, Saskatchewan, Clinton, Ontario and for four years in Ayr, Scotland. He has lived in and around Nanaimo since 1972 and now lives in the former coal-mining town of South Wellington, beside the main line of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway. His books include Hammertown, The Age of Briggs & Stratton and To The Dogs (Arsenal Pulp Press).

2009-06-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

ARTIST STATEMENT
Charles Bernstein

No Hiding Place

I thought language poetry was against emotion in the name of sensation
I thought language poetry was against theory in favor of praxis
I thought language poetry was lots of words making the most of meaning
I thought language poetry was the diehard foe of the massed mediocracy
I thought language poetry was a big tent without roof or floor
I thought language poetry was sympathy without tea
I thought language poetry was ambient sound in serial locomotion
I thought language poetry has branches in Paris, New York, Toronto, and Palm Springs
I thought language poetry was Marxist
I thought language poetry was anarchist
I thought language poetry was the antichrist
I thought language poetry was bourgeois aestheticism
I thought language poetry hated the voice
I thought language poetry was all voicing and never content
I thought language poetry was against realism
I thought language poetry was a new form of realism
I thought language poetry was against dogma
I thought language poetry refused its commissars
I thought language poetry was against closed groups
I thought language poetry was all thought in pursuit of potential action
I thought language poetry was Gertrude Stein all over again
I thought language poetry was trying to make the reader feel smart
I thought language poetry was wary of proclamations of sincere expression
I thought language poetry was a lot of nonsense packaged to look important
I thought language poetry was the possibility for freedom
I thought language poetry was the major precursor to word-salad email spam
I thought language poetry was short for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry
I thought language poetry favored style over manner
I thought language poetry was too intellectual
I thought language poetry was too difficult to ignore
I thought language poetry was the cat’s scratch
I thought language poetry was neither a school nor a movement but a transient moment
I thought language poetry was a chimerical constellation
I thought language poetry was tendencies and investments not rules or orders
I thought language poetry was minor literature with a vengeance
I thought language poetry was a collective figment of a collective imagination
I thought language poetry was an illusion
I thought language poetry was over
I thought language poetry resists the authority of language poetry

2009-05-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Charles Bernstein & Judith Goldman

(LISTEN TO THIS READING here and here)

6:30 pm || $5 USD

416 25th St, Oakland, Calif.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN's books include Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School), libretti for Ben Yarmolinksy's music; Girly Man (University of Chicago Press), now in paperback; Shadowtime (Green Integer), libretto for Brian Ferneyhough’s opera on Benjamin; Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moor Press), Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Northwestern), and Controlling Interests (Roof). He lives in New York and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs PennSound. More info: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/.

JUDITH GOLDMAN is the author of Vocoder (Roof Books 2001) and DeathStar/Rico-chet (O Books 2006), as well as a chapbook, "The Dispossessions" (Atticus/Finch (forthcoming June 2009)). Her work appears or will appear in recent issues of Wig, Parameter, 580 Split, onedit, model homes, and cannot exist. She was a coeditor in the Krupskaya Collective from 2002 through 2004 and coedits the annual anthology War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino (#4 due out in June). Currently, she teaches as a professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow in the arts humanities core and the creative writing department at the University of Chicago; at her home in Chicago, she has started an inter-arts performance series combining music, sound art, visual art and installation, and performance poetry.

2009-05-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

ARTIST STATEMENT -- David Buuck

I had the Dizziness

I had the Double vision

I had the Coordination problems

I had the Blurred vision

I had the Nausea

I had the Vomiting

I had the Drowsiness

I 11had the Irritated or runny nose

I had the Sore throat

I had the Cough

I had the Abdominal pain

I had the Insomnia

I had the Back Pain

I had the Headaches

I had the Shakiness

I had the Weakness

I had the Fatigue

I had the Flu-like Symptoms (such as body aches or chills)

I had the Indigestion

I had the Painful menstrual cramps

I had the Diarrhea

I had the Bronchitis

I had the Fever

I had the Dry mouth

I had the Constipation

I had the Chest pain

I had the Weight Loss

I had the Worsening of seizures

I had the Depression

I had the Anxiety

I had the Suicidal Thoughts

I had the Unusual Bruising

I had the Bladder infection

I had the Concentration problems

I had the Joint pain

I had the Loss of appetite

I had the Neck pain

I had the Sinus infection

I had the Sensitivity to the sun

I had the Nervousness

I had the Vertigo

I had the Memory loss

I had the Dry Skin

I had the Signs of Liver Damage, such as yellow eyes or skin

I had the Frequent Infections

I had the Signs of a dangerous allergic reaction

I had the Hives or any rash

I had the Swollen nodes

I had the Severe Muscle Pain

I had the Painful sores in or around the Mouth

I had the Swelling of the Lips or Tongue

I had the Suicidal Thinking or Behavior

I had the Vaginal infection or irritation

I had the Bloody nose

I had the Sweating

I had the Increased sex drive

I had the Speech problems

I had the Collaboratives

ARTIST STATEMENT -- Juliana Spahr

I frequently felt dizzy.

I lost my coordination.

I felt confused.

I felt restless.

I had memory loss.

I sweated a lot.

I had vivid dreams, vision changes, and fainting.

I had unusual feelings of well being.

I had blindness and low vision, visual disturbances, eye edema and swelling, eye irritation and itching, and conjunctivitis.

I had uncontrolled movements.

My eyes and skin were yellow.

I had gas.

I had nausea and vomiting.

I was shaking the entire time.

I had diarrhea and gastric symptoms.

I had constipation, dysphagia, and gastroesophageal reflux.

My urine was very dark.

I had an increased incidence of malformation, such as a short tail/short body and also vertebral disorganization.

I had the signs of infection.

I had a fever and persistent sore throat.

I was unusually pale.

I was unusually tired.

I had nipple discharge, breast swelling, and primary malignant breast neoplasm.

I had decreased inhibition, e.g., aggressiveness and extroversion that seem out of character, similar to that seen with alcohol.

I had bizarre behavior, agitation, hallucinations, and depersonalization.

I had complex behaviors such as “sleep-driving” (i.e., driving while not fully awake after ingestion of a sedative-hypnotic, with amnesia for the event) or I had other complex behaviors (e.g., preparing and eating food, making phone calls, or having sex).

I was rashy.

I had an itch and it swelled.

I had severe dizziness and trouble breathing.

I had drowsiness.

I had confusion.

I had coma.

I had respiratory depression.

I had hypotension.

I had hypovolemic shock.

I renally excreted 60% of this collaboration.

The additional 40% I excreted in my feces.

Whenever I got up from collaborating, I had to remember to get up slowly to minimize falls.

2009-04-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

Please join us at 21 Grand

Sunday, May 17th @ 6:30 p.m.

Juliana Spahr & David Buuck

$5 USD
(liquids provided, BYOB encouraged)

JULIANA SPAHR was born in Buffalo; she was raised in Oakland; she went to school in Chillicothe; she retired in New York City; she died in Hawaii. Single children always read more. There were always places where the more natural, undeveloped areas surrounding the city would butt up against the outlying post-industrial sections of the city, and she'd find herself walking through these border zones, she'd silently name the plants to herself, the sages and the shuttered auto plants, the scrub brushes and the old rubber factory, the oaks and pines and the timber plant, the poison oak and ivies and vines and seasonal weeds and the plastic jewelry plant, and she'd name these things to herself and then take the pedestrian bridge across the river or turn down the dirt road that led to the parking lot behind the bar where she'd go for Thursday afternoon reading group, or back home to a heated kitchen, where she would take off her combat boots, pull on an extra pair of wool socks, and settle down on the rickety old couch with her notebook and pens.

There are many things that one can say about David Buuck and I will take this time to say some of them. When he danced as a child, he danced in agroup but he distinguished himself by gyrating his right foot up and down and around and at the same time raising his hands in the air over his head, his head bent back, shaking back and forth, a model of abandonment. He has deep emotions that he keeps in his eyes and sometimes these emotions leak out and project kindness and generosity and this might cause someone near him at those moments to say, oh how I love this guy, more than anger and jealousy, although he has those other emotions also. Many years ago, he went to many a sleepover where everyone had their own sleeping bags and they all piled them on top of one another in a sort of slippery, static-y sleeping bag bacchanal, sweating, screaming, writhing and this moment felt so good to him, oh how happy he felt at this moment, and he has never been able to recapture this feeling of contained and warm and slippery thrashing with and near others and somemore schooled in the psychoanalytic arts might begin their analysis of David Buuck’s sexualized relations with other humans with this feeling of loss.

2009-04-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

STATEMENT FOR 21 GRAND -- CHET WIENER

Take the privilege of being asked or any decision

Given the transforms along with the privilege of

Being asked or take any opportunity or any time

Between the granted and the granting as if saying

Pieces of language lean one way or another or

One could pick the path scour or disperse or as

If we all could pick etc and discern or derive

Looking forward to the next step calling on

Notions of step and or about leaning one or

Another and or who picks or experiences what is

Experienced or changed when it is potentially

Who as the what makes or in choices modes

Illustrate foreground partaking if you stop

Another ripple gauging feel from repetition or

Divide including from the confidence of going on

Notwithstanding any abundance or echo makes

Goes gauges why anyone would poised in leaning

Balance recognize an ancillary rank step whether

Back or otherwise mutual give and take sense one

Or another already however much you grant along

ARTIST'S STATEMENT -- TAN LIN

SOM Heath by Tan Lin by Kristen Gallagher by Wikipedia

I think of Tan Lin as someone who tries to bring reformat art practice the systems of reading & writing and also to outsource the space of the book. When you read Tan’s new book Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource –it helps to LOOK at it. You’ll see a lot of obvious cut and pasted stuff from the web, and a lot of unformatted text. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of the typical student plagiarized paper, the way a chunk of prose copied from an ASCII environment and then pasted into Word produces odd line breaks and shows up in courier, the ugliest of all fonts.

As a matter of fact, on the 2nd or 3rd page (it’s hard to say which page because in a book like this the front matter and the colophon are as much poetry as the rest of it) you see a close up of what looks like a description of an electronic book from Project Gutenberg, referring to ASCII as the format in which the following text will appear.

ASCII means no font specified: a “plain” code for the appearance of the western alphabet on computers. It’s what came with the original email environments: unix, pine, etc, where there was no choice of font or style by the user—just text as it is defined at the root level of the operating system. Flavorless, unstyled text.

ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Exchange, is a coding standard. And this is important for thinking about Tan’s work, plagiarized and outsourced as it is. In a recent inteview on Pennsound with Charles Bernstein, Tan says of his forthcoming book Seven Controlled Vocabularies that he’s interested in creating “not a book, but a reading environment” I think you can see that tendency in all his publications. Heath: Plagiarism Outsource constantly makes it clear that it is playing with ignoring or maybe even disrespecting the conventions of the book. Some text copied and pasted from a Google search result for an article “The Arts of Contingency” runs right through the margin, into the fold of the book.

BlipSoak splays single lines of text across facing pages and works with varying font sizes in a way that suggests less a book-object than a video game that moves through words, or some other immersive environment—something you zoom in on or gradually “rez” into.

These textual strategies make it clear that Tan Lin is interested in ambient language, a transitory area of language practice, rather than the more typical avant-garde move of challenging the reader/listener to hang closely at the edge of the word or the line. In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. He wants you to be bored, perhaps like you are sitting at your computer taking in the news feeds on Jessica Simpson’s latest boyfriend, or in the presence of (but not exactly watching) a long, slow movie in the late night hours. Tan says, “I want people to relax, and if you fall asleep, that’s ok too.”

In Heath: Plagiarism Outsource we are in an environment of what, most of the time, feels like an RSS feed—a syndication format that gathers content from blogs, online news sources and other frequently updated web sites and pulls it into a single location, allowing you to, as you “surf” the web, also “build your own newspaper.” The foreground of the book presents a series of Project Gutenberg descriptions of the etext of Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, while the main character who pops up throughout is Heath Ledger—the ultimate absent subject—whose death and “troubled life” appear as a series repetitions from news feeds and blog entries.

Speaking of “absent subjects,” here the “self” is present only through rumors, reports, data sets, and standardized consumer choices. The content is sometimes described as being "pulled" to the subscriber, as opposed to "pushed" with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some "pushed" information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed. The subject becomes more like a quadrant of the ocean--porous, saturated, clearly marked off but strangely indefinite—not internal experience, but an atmospheric condition produced by wavelengths, repetitions and redundancies.

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates. Towards the front of the book, a reader will find this text: “Heath: or Samuel: was not “something inserted into the video: they were watching on You Tube “ “ (ie storage) but something taken away or outsourced (dissemination), i.e. the process was more like erasing each other (plagiarism) rather than viewing.”

Though the art data [environment] of this book is not entirely about viewing, rather about re-distributing observing texts and the meta data component construction of authors, there is something theatrical about the project. Today, RSS and BitTorrent based broadcatching provides a web based distribution channel capable of delivering broadcast media to a large group of consumers at a low cost. BitTorrent provides the low cost method for distributing large files to a large group, and RSS enables a website to easily provide a subscription to a series of BitTorrent files. The book opens with a series of ambient, half-heard language you get entering a theatre, “tickets for film programs in theatre 3 are available at the Museum lobby information desk,” alerting the reader that there’s a bit of a show [observation] being put on here, but the show will not be spectacular, it will be filled with the banal stuff no other poet would ever put in his or her writing.

“like a descriptive catalog of 40 or 50 different sweaters in an American Apparel or J. Crew catalog that are the same except for their colors, and // [they] [you] are beautiful pop ups”

THIS INTRODUCTION WRITTEN BY KRISTEN GALLAGHER AND DELIVERED AT THE SEGUE READING SERIES AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB APRIL 11, 2009, WITH ENTRIES FROM WIKIPEDIA AND EMENDATIONS ENTERED LATER, FOR A READING SPONSORED BY 21 GRAND AND SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC. EOM

2009-03-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

Saturday, April 18

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand and Small Press Traffic present
Tan Lin & Chet Wiener

6:30 pm
5 USDollars

(refreshments provided; BYOB encouraged)

416 25th St. (at Broadway), Oakland

TAN LIN is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01, Ambience is a Novel with a Logo, and Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource). 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Conjunctions, The Boston Review, Artforum, Cabinet, Hambone, the New York Times Book Review, New American Writing, Tripwire, The Voice Literary Supplement, Artforum, the World, Art in America, and Purple. His video, theatrical and LCD work have been shown at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, the Yale Art Museum, the Sophienholm Museum (Copenhagen), the Ontological Hysterical Theatre, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Soundcheck Series.

Lin is the recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant. He has taught at the University of Virginia and Cal Arts, and currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey City University. He is completing a book on the writings of Andy Warhol.

He has just completed a sampled novel, entitled Our Feelings Were Made by Hand.

CHET WIENER writes poetry in English and French. He is the author of a book of poems in French, Devant l’abondance (P.O.L 2003) and the chapbook WalkDontWalk (Potes and Poets 1999). He has translated Félix Guattari, Pierre Alferi, among others, into English, co-edited, with Stacy Doris, the collection of translations: Christophe Tarkos; Ma Langue est Poétique (Roof Books, 2000), and his poems, translations and essays on translation have appeared in publications in the United States and France. He is a specialist in 16th-century French literature and philosophy, translates for the French Ministries of Culture and European and Foreign Affairs and writes medical filing documents for review by the FDA and other regulatory agencies internationally. He lives in San Francisco.

2009-03-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

STATEMENT FOR 21 GRAND -- BARRETT WATTEN

Putting together a reading is always a matter of rethinking a range of formal strategies in my work in terms of the space in which I present it, and the time of presentation . For 21 Grand, I wanted to make a frame of the current section of The Grand Piano 8 I am writing, as it is my most recent work. It will go out to the printer by the end of the month, and then I will be on to the next and last sections, to appear by the end of 2009.

The focus of that section is "West"--oceanic feelings I associated with San Francisco as liminal site, and the interstellar space between sites (San Francisco and Detroit, and elsewhere) I also know and experience. The section connects the desiring space of open form and no boundaries with the empty space of no community, and interrogates the relation between them. I'm negotiating a poetics desire in two forms, in that sense.

To introduce my project, I read three short, occasional poems from the recent past. They are poetic anecdotes; one begins with the story of a forebear pouring several gallons of out-of-date human blood onto a compost heap, somewhere in the repressed suburbs, during some oppressive decade, in Oakland. After the reading, a friend suggested this was a trope for the question of representability throughout. It is a negative poetics.

In between the opening and closing sections of The Grand Piano I read sixty one-to-ten-line poetic overwrites of samples from William Carlos Williams's Paterson, book 1. I see a connection between Paterson as a site and Oakland, and between the Passaic Falls and the ocean. In adapting the samples of Paterson to my purposes, I was thinking of the relation between knowledge and information; democracy and the crisis of representation; parataxis and hypotaxis; the poetics of the "genius" and modernity (Henry Ford); basketball and sentences. In the overwrites, I tried to write "knowledge sentences" that would represent "a complex state of affairs"; in the course of the work, a centripedal tendency of the fragment interacts with the centrifugal dynamics of meaning.

I wanted to perform the Paterson overwrites in a voice of "not me." Somewhere in the background are the samples of Williams, like the roar of the falls. I wanted to speak of the beyond to what is beyond. There is a connection both to place and to oceanic feelings/interstellar space. At the bottom of it all is a question of representation, both canceled out and constructed. I see this intersection/canceling of forms as generative.

Barrett Watten
March 2009

__________
audio here (thx andrew)

ARTIST'S STATEMENT -- ARIANA REINES

hi

i guess i don't know how to write this statement; it seems like an opportunity to say what one's life is like and also what one is working on, a generous opportunity. a person like me might overdo it: speaking for oneself usually includes, like, getting over the anguish of speaking for oneself, i think. right now i'm translating baudelaire and putting together (designing and editing) a book that is actually two books by two friends. i'm making something called MERCURY and something called PURCHASE and the possibility that PURCHASE will end up inside MERCURY. the feeling of something converging, and trying to align with an energy like the sense for an end of a world. last year was very full and difficult. somebody i love died, i fell in love, and i wrote a play that took a year to write. as i write this, i think, 21 grand, it's so nice of you to ask. and i feel sorry for saying all the wrong things, which ultimately turn out to have been right, isn't it always that way with the errors one makes of one's own accord. as i write this, i need a place to live. it occurs to me that there is more space between objects and, thereby, more space, which is the same as the possibility of more space, between ideas-- in california. have you read the case of california by laurence rickels? i haven't. i'm totally listening to ein deutsches requiem. i enjoy to read what a person thinks and feels, i always find it self-indulgent in the encouraging way that's like a gesture toward deferring suicide: i want to know what grooming products a person uses, what she eats when she feels complicated, what she becomes when she's alone, like in the bathroom, or what it's like for her to wake up in the morning. like amy goodman or kathy kelly. what i love right now is the care and slowness in gentle commentaries that do not, will not intoxicate themselves upon the energy of their own proceeding: that go slowly. i bought gold hightops at the thrift store today: they don't really express my personality is the feeling i have about them; nevertheless something happens when i have them on (as i write this i have them on) that, though not wholly convincing, produces a mild sensation of erroneousness that i guess i find stimulating. i don't know what poetry is; i almost typed anymore, i don't know what poetry is anymore, that's an antique, or vintage, statement that used to carry real emotion around on my behalf when i employed it back in the day, but now i'm too far away to know. once and a while there's a twinge. see you soon.

xxariana

______________
audio here (thx andrew)

2009-03-03T15:59:00.000-08:00

Sunday, March 15, 2008

The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand presents

Ariana Reines & Barrett Watten

6:30 pm
5 USDollars

(refreshments provided; BYOB encouraged)

416 25th St. (at Broadway), Oakland

ARIANA REINES is the author of THE COW (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006) and COEUR DE LION (mal-o-mar: 2007). Two translations will come out in 2009: MY HEART LAID BARE by Charles Baudelaire (mal-o-mar) and LITTLE BLACK BOOK: DAYS AND NIGHTS OF A REVOLUTIONARY WHORE by Grisélidis Réal (Semiotext(e)). Ariana's first play, TELEPHONE, just ended its run at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Right now she's Holloway Lecturer at UC Berkeley.

BARRETT WATTEN is the author of two long poems, Progress (1985), and Under Erasure (1991); Frame (1971-1990), a collection of eight previous works. He is also the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003), Bad History (1998); former editor of This and publisher of This Press, and author of Total Syntax (1984), essays on modern and contemporary poetics. He teaches modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University, Detroit.

2009-02-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

POETICS STATEMENT -- BRIAN KIM STEFANS

It would be absurd for me to write an artist's statement at this point in time as I've not been making much art lately. I suppose, if anything, I am exercising a certain patience that some of my favorite artists -- Carl Dreyer and Scott Walker, for example -- have exercised in the long, though never "empty," time between bursts of creative activity. There's no drama here -- I've merely been busy, moved around quite a bit over the past years, and have had some highs and lows. I've wanted to make a change in the way I do things anyway (hence the title of my recent book of essays) -- more disciplined, less frantic in that New York School manner (though you can't take New York out of the boy -- or is that New Jersey?)*. My work has also been divided between "digital" and "proper" print poems for some years now, and I'm trying to take both sides of the project up a notch, which requires a sort of concentration I've not had recently. So I guess I'm excited to see what will happen next; I hope someone else out there is too! Could happen in half a year, or right after I hit "send" on this e-mail.

* Or is it just Mickey Rourke?

Postscript: I can say that my "research interests" -- which is code for what I hope to see in my poetry -- have veered off into all sorts of quasi-academic concerns such as video game narrative studies and the role of algorithm in the creation of cultural objects, the Rabelaisian aspects of internet culture before and after Web 2.0, and the somewhat vanquished poetic tactics of the "90s," trying to acquire some substantial sense of what's happening now and why (as Juliana Spahr seems to agree) a whole gamut of discourse from that time seems to have disappeared. On that last note, I'm hoping to take advantage of my newly minted status as an academic to take a closer look at a range of poetry that I more or less experienced as a writer and reviewer in the New York scene up until 2005, when I left for Providence; of course, I wish to situate myself again in the community of poets from my lofty perch above La Brea Avenue, with no bets on how that will play out. In a phrase: I'm in a transition.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT -- LAURA ELRICK

Dear Kaia,

Sounds like you have a busy weekend ahead of you...leafblowers and bell-chimes and talks poems texts walks! I feel my imagination of your current projects like a foreshadowing delay or something utopian on the cusp of becoming concrete. Well, in any case, you're already there, in SF!

I read your talk on the B48 bus last night, as it made its slow way from Greenpoint to Lefferts Garden in the gleaming Brooklyn night, on my way to a meeting at the Belladonna office. I like what you're saying about tactics, and will be trying to think about that more in the coming weeks, between the jerk and grind. In terms of the difference between framing and distancing, my gut tells me there is something about the kind of space one is in that must co-determine the tactic. I mean, the high-density sign grove of the suburb/highway median or the grove of signs that has become the city itself, stretching its plastic bubble-time controlled-climate over the isle of Manhattan. Distance=Brooklyn? Is this distance aesthetic?

Questions I have—what is or is not possible "here" (for me I mean, my here) in this monstrosity of global finance in the middle of free-fall. The jumpers against a 15 second duration of laced steel. (I mean, maybe the compressed urban daily experience simply is NOT the focal point of progressive possibility right now. I am trying to consider what that might mean for my nonetheless very located, daily praxis. How to contend with the mediation.) Another question might be: How is dailiness (and the distancing from it) different in different space-times? Distance is relief here sought after, hard to achieve, and can feel like warm lovely rain, this interval on a city bus (distance in time and through space). Or, and I take this possibility seriously, might my longing for the lull be a retrogressive clinging to a by-gone mode of being. I don't know, I really don't. My exact dilemma is that it feels like frames are obliterated as soon as they are formed in New York. That for a frame to establish even a momentarily fructive register, an interval of distance must be briefly constructed from the detritus that gets dropped by all that movement… then move on.

Could Katz's concept of the contour help me here, in thinking about this? (And I really really love the reference to Cindy Katz's concept of the topographical contour! I'm so glad you reminded me of her important work.) Contour might actually be a really interesting and useful way of bridging poetic thinking to a spatial plane that allows for both a located grounding and a sufficiently theoretical engagement with the abstraction of global social relations. In her 2001 essay “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement,” Katz discusses topographical knowledge as “a means to develop a politics that works the grounds of and between multiply situated social actors in a range of geographical locations who are at once bound and rent by the diverse forces of globalization.” And further, in defining topography she writes, “The thing itself as much as the description of it are produced, and unraveling the processes of how they came to be can reveal the powerful interests vested in topography and topographical knowledge.”

I would like to think of Stalk as a step toward the creation of an oppositional topography of post 9-11 New York. The June 17 act, a poem without words, was a “framing” intervention (an irritation to the slick skin of the naturalized polis). The text which mediates the visual record of that act tries to come to terms with the always-already aesthetic distance between what Katz calls “a local that is constitutively global but whose engagements with various global imperatives are the material forms and practices of situated knowledge.”

Anyway, these are just some of my initial thoughts. Thank you so much for sending me your talk! This quickness of the blood all around. This groping toward something sensed, but only vaguely known.

Hope you are having a brilliant time. And that I will hear more from you after the dust settles.

With love,

-L

2009-01-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

Please join us on Sunday, February 15 at 6:30pm as we welcome...

Laura Elrick and Brian Kim Stefans

LAURA ELRICK lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her books of poetry include sKincerity (Krupskaya 2003) and Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005); some audio pieces and an interview can be heard on the Ceptuetics radio show here. She has been a contributing editor to Future Poem Books and is currently on the organizing committee for the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism conference to be held in New York next Fall. On Feb 15, Laura will be performing her video/poem Stalk, which includes documentation of a recent spatial-poetic intervention into several prominent Manhattan commercial districts.

BRIAN KIM STEFANS' recent books include Kluge (Roof Books, 2007), What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006) and Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2006). Recent digital projects include the interactive Kluge and a series of digital projections called "Scriptor" that are intended for gallery and environmental settings, one of which appeared in the shown "Contranym" in New York City's ABC Gallery in September, 2008. He is presently Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA and lives in Los Angeles half a block away from Scarlett Johansson ('s face on a billboard).

2008-12-16T10:17:00.000-08:00

On January 18, 2009 at 6:30 in the evening, The New Reading Series at 21 Grand and Oakland's TAXT press invite you to a very special evening of readings & performances, gala in spirit and cozy at heart.

In the intimate manner of carnival coin toss or old-school tents-of-wonder, a dozen poets will present their work fairground style, with all performances happening at once around the space. Expect real-time twitter feeds, sultry slide shows & other sweet surprises! Listen in on headphones, have a poem whispered in your ear, observe in groups of two or three, or all at once or all alone. There might even be a REAL KISSING BOOTH.

Our star-studded TAXT cast of contributors and performers includes:

Stefani Barber
Jasper Bernes
Lindsey Boldt
David Brazil
David Buuck
Geneva Chao
Del Ray Cross
Chris Girard
Michael Nicoloff
Eleni Stecopoulos
John Sakkis
Jerrold Shiroma

This event is a TAXT FUNDRAISER. All proceeds will go towards the printing, stapling, & mailing of the 2009 series of TAXT chapbooks. TAXT appreciates your support!

About the press:

"TAXT works to make visible the work of contemporary Bay Area poets, writers, & artists previously under-represented in publication. The chapbooks are produced at home in Oakland, on an irregular but consistent basis & will continue to appear thus until I get tired of folding pages. This editor's role is to provide a physical space in which writers & artists may do whatever work they choose: the site is always 24pgs, in the 5.5 x 8.5 framework. This publisher's desire is to work with each contributor to produce a simple book that makes its consideration as both object and container.

TAXT chapbooks are ALWAYS FREE. Keep yours or pass it on. Share the wealth; there will never be more than 100 copies of each book. Sorry."

If you can’t come to the KISSING BOOTH, but would still like to support TAXT, or would just like more information about the press, please visit http://www.taxtpress.blogspot.com/ or email the press directly: taxt@mindspring.com

2008-11-21T11:53:00.000-08:00

Please join us on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 as we welcome

Kevin Killian & Stephanie Young

celebrating the release of their in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni books

Action Kylie and Picture Palace

With special guest appearances by Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover, this book release party is taking no prisoners. Bring your party hats. $5

KEVIN KILLIAN, born 1952, is an art writer, poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer(1996), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), two books of stories Little Men (1997) and I Cry Like a Baby (2001) and a collection of poems, Argento Series (1997). With Lewis Ellingham he has written a biography of the poet Jack Spicer—Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). For the San Francisco Poets Theater he has written 37 plays, including Stone Marmalade, with Leslie Scalapino, and Often, with the late Barbara Guest. His most recent book, from Hooke Press, is a volume of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham, and now there is Action Kylie.

STEPHANIE YOUNG lives and works in Oakland. She edited the anthology BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2006) and is currently at work on the collaborative website DEEP OAKLAND. Hey, you should propose a project for DEEP OAKLAND! Her books of poetry are Picture Palace and Telling the Future Off. She is here very sometimes: www.stephanieyoung.org/blog.

2008-11-17T14:51:00.000-08:00

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
The Perfume Recordist (Lisa Roberton & Stacy Doris)

The Feast

All honour to the anal cavity.

All honour to mighty pungent couplings of the rose of political imagination.

All honour to the entrails of language.

Someone took a turd to a sage and said: “Look, he is being corrupted by women.”

And the turd said: “Women are always actresses, no matter what they do.”

And the sage said: “Truly, a hard law buggers you.”

The Perfume Recordist butts right up to the edge of the rose of waste to strut in the sewer of womanhood. Where the rose becomes turds and cacophony, we hurl ourselves into the putrid bouquet.

There, we lift our complicated indivisible arses and breasts like complaints and discharge an expanse of rotting petals. Oh, disagreeable Master! Here is our rosy manure.

Perfume’s history is the record of shit.

We have been excrement, filth on opulent paper, ecstatic quiddity of defecation judged profitable.

Perfume is matter out of place, aka shit: a revolt against the exorbitance of boundaries. Waves of roses flow though the sewers. We’re out in more than we can need. We’re matter out of place.

The rosy waste increases, migrates, vomits, beseeches, refutes, despairs, invades, carries us in a flatulent rose tide of spontaneous imitation, ah we are sub-rosa fishermen of spasms, our little skiff afloat in the fetid fervor.

Shit protects one from the moral majority within.

Eight-o-clock at night. Let us now examine the eighteenth century, our cunt. It let loose an extreme jollity and extreme impertinence. It poured out erudition, filth and boredom. Not a pavement in the place, and everything gutters for miles and miles, and a stench to it that plucked us by the knick-knacks. And we were twenty leagues out.

To return to pollution behaviour, avoidance is a process of tidying up. The essential ingredients of our poetry will be revolting.

O rose the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to prayer, the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot.

And the turd said: “I’m a fart in a mass of wind, a humble bud under a cow-pad.”

Roll on in shit, traverse this absurd age.

The coming musk rose started excreting fell upon our ear and started excreting like the sweet south stealing and giving odor fell upon our ear and started excreting the murmurous haunt of flies started excreting.

With perfume too the excremental juice applied to body and garments is carried across wild trajectories. We are all invasive species.

All value is waste.

Oh, and thank you for your virginity.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Jaime Cortez

(aka, my Five Commandments)

Worry about the truth but do not sweat the facts.

Humor that floats atop dark, horrible, curdled stuff is the best.

Look at the world around you and take dictation. This saves you the trouble of inventing stuff.

Write cleanly and directly. Avoid formal sleight of hand. Be simple, but hopefully not easy.

Know that your greatest artistic strengths and weaknesses are usually the same thing.

That’s all, folks!

2008-10-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

Jaime Cortez & The Perfume Recordist (Lisa Robertson & Stacy Doris)
NOV16.08 @ 6:30pm
@21 Grand

JAIME CORTEZ is a cultural worker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His writing has appeared in a dozen anthologies. Jaime’s visual art has been exhibited at numerous California galleries. He was the editor of the anthology Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas. Cortez has worked as a high school teacher in Japan and at the AIDS Memorial Quilt and Galería De La Raza. Jaime has lectured on art and activism at Stanford, Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He is currently preparing a manuscript for The Jesus Donut, his first collection of short stories,slated for publication in 2009 by Suspect Thoughts Press.

The Perfume Recordist was born from the confused and wildly charged encounter of waves and molecules, a tardive yet opulent (voir peonylike or Venutian) offshoot of early twentieth century Quantum Physics, her roots winnowing back to the great Physic of Avicenna, foundational to Well Being as one would wish to know it, yet in coyest contradiction to the contradiction of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In other words, in a flagrant refutation of what’s commonly known as logic, the Perfume Recordist finds it her vocation to be beaten and burned until she demonstrates that to be beaten has indeed much in common with being burned, and to be burned has much in common with beating. These beatings and burnings join in layers of raptures, though the Recordist assiduously attempts to avoid both alchemy and redemption in her ecologies of (re)constitutions. The forging of senses entails forgeries? Ha !

2008-10-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Jocelyn Saidenberg (& Co.) and Ara Shirinyan
LIVE Sunday, October 19th
@ 21 Grand, 6:30pm

JOCELYN SAIDENBERG is the author of Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series), CUSP (Kelsey St. Press), Negativity (Atelos), and Dispossessed (Belladonna). Born and raised in New York City, she lives in San Francisco where she works as a catalog librarian for the public library.

Jocelyn will be performing "Wild Analysis!" a play co-written with Cynthia Sailers, starring Chris Chen, David Brazil, Bob Glück, Stephanie Young, Cynthia Sailers, and Ms. Saidenberg. Not to be missed!

ARA SHIRINYAN was born in 1977 in, what was then, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. Since 1987, he has lived in Los Angeles, where he writes, teaches, and is editor of Make Now Press. His first book Syria Is in the World was published by Palm Press in June, 2007. Speech Genres1-2 is available as an electronic download from Ubuweb. Handsome Fish Offices was published earlier this year by Insert Press. He is also the author of Your Country Is Great, also published in 2008 by Futurepoem Books. With the group Godzik Pink, he released two CDs (Es Em, Ekel Em and Black Broccoli) on Kill Rock Stars/5rc. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Ways, UBUWEB, Greetings, Trepan, Combo, Area Sneaks, Tuli & Savu among others.

2008-09-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Karen Weiser

Artist Statement, expiration date upon reading

I can only gesture what standing in your bedroom felt like, bed shortened to your century and big enough for only one. In the boudoir, stuffed birds flap and flop against domed glass. Each object refines away to a solid state of ornate—recreates a never before dear departed world—hangs up our compiled day as minor memento.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Dana Ward

More Than Anything in the Whole Wide World

"the world equal to x
or any letter which may stand for the unknown
a great loss, a damnable mystery
sold for a mess of pottage"

--Beverly Dahlen
(A Reading 18)

“The World”, is it there or not? A presence/absence hybrid sort of deal? I always thought of this as a divinely sophisticated question, & wanted to be preoccupied by it in some unnavigable way. It seemed it would be productive, expansive, and that no matter where one came down on the question (if one indeed did), there’d be an enormous amount of space created by considering it. Maybe it was some Zen sort of thing I picked up on in the foamy edges of Beat infatuation I’d floated on in high school? I’m not sure. But then I remember sort of ‘forgetting it’, or finding it complaining at the edges of my radar, only to have it go silent again while I worried over other things. Then one night I was in DC at Kaplan Harris’s house and he said something to me about my poems “bringing the world back in” in some particular way. He said some other poets around my age were doing similar things. I was confused as I’d intended no such thing. Whatever he’d keyed into, that seemed so explicit in the poems (& I trusted Kaplan immediately because he was convincingly brilliant) was not at all there for me, certainly not as some kind of program. Well this was obviously philosophical negligence on my part. I had to re-consider. Before I fell asleep that night in a deliciously large & soft guest bed I did remind myself that 'the World' as it once had been known had been disappeared under the banner of 'commerce' (this is the Potemkin village argument right?, not so much an erasure as a 'cloaking device'--Kevin Davies: "the papier-mâché potemkin/village we've spread like/ spreadable cheese over the surface of/ what we call earth"). At least from my privileged vantage I could see that quite clearly. I knew that. I thought that knowledge was an operative part of my poetics! So I guess I could see it but my work didn't perform it (show don't tell?) My thoughts went to Watten--"the world is everything that is not the case", (still a compelling inversion), & to Beverly Dahlen's A Reading 18 where she examines his arguments, Watten's, and others, in illuminating and glorious fashion. What of that elemental mysteriousness Dahlen speaks to in the passage quoted above, I certainly could not let that drift from the frame, that gripping uncertainty seemed (seems) the ground of my existence. & Creeley, Duncan, they'd use the word 'world' decisively but with a different sort of turn. The poet Stan Apps had written a poem called 'the World' that puzzled and thrilled me: "The whole idea/of something called a/'world'/is really reductive,". But there I was, tying my shoes or whatever. Where did I locate my body in this vexed apparitional zone? I needed to know because I wanted to examine more explicitly the license and ease of movement my white middle-class male body had permitted me all these years. My sexuality. The surfaces of bodies, what those enabled, prevented, what burned up upon contact. Was I attractive, & what in the hell did that mean, so contingent! & too, to stay game to those "neverthelesses". Nevertheless, the endurance of terror and ecstasy, which I always found at any site that commingled mortality and pleasure amid the enforced stratification that dominated existence. So there was 'the World'! It was that place, not the body, not the sensations or feelings, but some overlapped zone of all of it! "Too fucking easy" I told myself, rightly. But at least a place from which to begin. & there were still other concerns--was this an impossibly antique argument? If I'd been attending the requisite conferences and involved in more strenuous discourse with my peers would I have cleared this hurdle long ago, a blue and white hurdle I'd see now behind me, laughable and easy to clear. Perhaps not. I'm speculating wildly at this point and being maybe, just a little bit, paranoid? But I'm saying that only because what matters to me most is that my writing have some vitality in other's lives in the present, & maybe I was wrestling tediously with an angel from the past. Not in some intense way of arguing with tradition, as we're all in dialog with this or that writer long gone. No, just simply rehashing something that was settled long ago, in some comment box or symposia I'd never wandered into? All of that anxiety was nurturing because it gave the poems a life and a lot of nervous energy. There is a good deal more I could say--about the reading I did, and the thinking, but I don't want to explain the whole reading away. Some of us will be going out afterwards I can totally see myself clinging to what I've written here like some security blanket & not wandering down untrodden paths--and really y'all, what fun is that? I also discovered that writing is a total extravagance because people can read each other's MINDS.

2008-09-02T11:08:00.001-07:00

Sunday, September 21, 2008

LIVE and IN CHARGE @ 21 Grand

Karen Weiser & Dana Ward

KAREN WEISER is a poet and doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in English now writing her dissertation on early American novels. Her chapbooks include Eight Positive Trees (Pressed Wafer, 2002), Placefullness (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), and Pitching Woo (Cy Press, 2006). She has had poems appear in The Chicago Review, The Hat, The Germ, The Brooklyn Rail, The Recluse and other journals and zines not beginning with "The." She teaches at Barnard College when not caring for her baby daughter.

DANA WARD lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where he edits Magazine Cy Press and publishes chapbooks under the Cy Press imprint. He has a recent chapbook, "Goodnight Voice" from House Press.

2008-08-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

ARTIST STATEMENT

Yedda Morrison

The artist’s statement can be a moving testament to creativity and integrity. The expression of this commitment will vary, but the potential effectiveness of my statement stems from the authority with which I write.

Our words "author" and "authority" come from the Latin root "augere," which means "to increase, to create, to promote." This implies that the notions of creation and promotion are compatible. The more I muse on the meaning of working from my authority, of being the author of my work and of my conduct, the more I understand that your authentic communication about my work is a powerful tool for creative growth as well as for business success.

The following exercises will get you centered and in touch with my authority. When I write promotional materials for myself (or any kind of business) I always ask myself to do these exercises first. I use the words and phrases I generate to compose compelling artist's statements on my own behalf. This way my creative authority is incorporated in the finished product.

Now, think of the statement as a nourishing stew. The rich flavors and inviting aroma will feed my spirit and summon wonderful people to my table. You’ll want to make sure the stew is made from the freshest, finest ingredients and that it has been simmered and seasoned with care. Do this, and you will be proud to share my creative vision – my authority – with others.

You'll need pencil and paper, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.

STEP ONE: Assemble the Ingredients.

1. Take five minutes and think about why I do what I do. How did I get into this work? How do you feel when my work is going well? What are your favorite things about my work? Jot down short phrases that capture my thoughts.

2. Make a list of words and phrases that communicate your feelings about my work and my values. Include words I like, words that make me feel good, words that communicate my values or fascinations. Be loose. Be happy. Be real.

3. Answer these questions as simply as you can. Your answers are the meat and potatoes of my stew. Let them be raw and uncut for now.

· What is my favorite tool? Why?
· What do you like best about what I do?
· What do you mean when you say that my piece has turned out well?
· What patterns emerge in my work? Is there a pattern in the way I select materials? In the way I use texture or light?
· What do I do differently from the way you were taught? Why?
Look at your word list. Add new words suggested by your answers to the questions above.

4. Write five sentences that tell the truth about your connection to my work. If you are stuck, start by filling in the blanks below.

When she works with__________ I am reminded that___________.

She begins a piece by______________.

I know her piece is done when__________________.

When her work is going well, I am filled with a sense of _____________.

When people see her work, I'd like them to ________________.

STEP TWO: Filling the Pot.

Write a three-paragraph statement. Be brave: say nice things about me. If you find that you falter, write three paragraphs about an artist whose work you do admire. Then write about me as though you were an admiring colleague. Write three to five sentences per paragraph.

STEP THREE: Simmering the Stew.

The artist's statement is a piece of very personal writing. Let it simmer overnight before your reread it. This incubation period will help give you the detachment necessary to polish the writing without violating my sense of integrity and safety. While the statement simmers, allow yourself to experience the truth of my creative experience. Marvel at the wealth of seasonings and abundance of vegetables I have at my disposal. Enjoy the realization that my work is grounded in real values and experience.

STEP FOUR: Taste and Correct the Seasonings.

Read the statement out loud, some phrases will ring true and others false. You may find that the truth is a simpler statement than the one I made. Or your internal censors may have kept you from making a wholehearted statement of my truth lest it sound self-important. Risk puffing me up as long as your claims are in line with my goals and values.
Keep reading and revising the statement until you hear a musical, simple, authentic voice that is making clear and honest statements about my work. In other words, you alone are the authority for what is true about my work.

STEP FIVE: Summon the Guests.

There's little point in concocting a fabulous stew if you don't invite anyone to dinner. Every time you use the statement you extend my circle of influence and build new branches of support for my work. Enclose a copy of the statement whenever you send a press release, letter of interest to a gallery or store, or contact a publisher. Send it to promoters and curators. Enclose a copy with shipments of my work. The rest of this manual will suggest many opportunities for using the statement to express my truth and support my presentations.

STEP SIX: File Your Recipe!

You'll want to revise and update the statement from time to time to reflect changes in my work. Still, it is likely that many of the underlying expressions of my authority will remain the same. Having access to the "recipe" of your original statement will help you generate better revisions and will give me a sense of creative continuity. Whenever you need a copy return to your warm-up exercises. The words and phrases there will help you write openly and honestly about my work. And repeating the exercises will help me chart new creative territory.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Samantha Giles

FIRST: I understand, and I ...

AND: No, wait. No, wait. Don't tell me this — you asked me why didn't I do more to improve my writing. There was not a living soul. All the people who now criticize me wanted to leave the next day.

You brought this up, so you'll get an answer, but you can't ...

FIRST: I'm perfectly happy to.

AND: All right, secondly ...

FIRST: He says ...

AND: He may have said ...

FIRST: ... He says that it showed the weakness of your poetics.

AND: But it would've shown the weakness if I’d just written nothing, but he wasn't involved in that. That's just a bunch of bull. I was there on a humanitarian mission. I had no mission, none, to establish a certain kind of aesthetic or to keep anybody out.

FIRST: But,...

AND: ... there was no poetic ...

FIRST: ... with respect, if I may, instead of going through and ...

AND: No, no. You asked it. You brought it up. You brought it up.

FIRST: May I ask a general question and then you can answer?

AND: Yes.

FIRST: The poetry community, which you've talk about — and this is what they did say, not what they pretended they said ...

AND: Yes, what did they say?

FIRST: ... they said about you and I quote, "That poetry took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront writing of the first, second or even third rank."

AND: First of all, that's not true.

FIRST: Well, I'm telling you that's what the poetry community says.

AND: All right. Let's look at what the statement said. Do you think the statement has a vigorous attitude about aesthetics?

FIRST: Yes, I do.

AND: You do, don't you?

FIRST: I think it has a variety of opinions and loyalties, but yes, there is a vigorous ...

AND: Sure, a variety of opinion and loyalties now, but let's look at the facts: Now, look what it said, read the whole thing and read its factual assertions — not opinions — assertions.

FIRST: But ...

AND: No, wait a minute.
(CROSSTALK)

FIRST: ... cruise missiles.

AND: No, no. I authorized to get groups together to work on a statement of active poetics.
The country never had a comprehensive poetics until I came there.
Now, if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: The poetry community and the public refused to certify that the statement was responsible to forging something in the writing while I was there. They refused to certify. All I'm asking is, anybody who wants to say I didn't do enough, you read the statement.

FIRST: Do you think you did enough?

AND: No, because I didn't get the statement to the right people.

FIRST: Right.

AND: But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the poets who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive strategy and the writing I could do in the time I had.

So you did your nice little poetic hit job on me. What I want to know is ...

FIRST: Well, wait a minute...

AND: No, wait. No, no ...

FIRST: I want to ask a question. You don't think that's a legitimate question?

AND: It was a perfectly legitimate question, but I want to know how many people in the poetry community you asked this question of. I want to know how many people you asked ...

FIRST: We asked — we asked ...

AND: I don't ...

FIRST: We ask plenty of questions of ...

AND: You didn't ask that, did you? Tell the truth.

FIRST: But if you look at the questions here, you'll see half the questions are about writing. I didn't think this was going to set you off on such a tear.

AND: You launched it — it set me off on a tear because you didn't formulate it in an honest way and because you people ask me questions you don't ask the other side.

FIRST: That's not true. That is not true.

AND: And the poetry community made it clear in testimony...

FIRST: Would you like to talk about poetry?

AND: No, I want to finish this now.

FIRST: All right. Well, after you.

FIRST: And ...

AND: And so ...

FIRST: I just want to ask you about poetics, but what's the source? I mean, you seem upset, and I ...

AND: I am upset because ...

FIRST: And all I can say is, I'm asking you this in good faith because it's on people's minds. And I wasn't ...

AND: Well, there's a reason it's on people's minds. That's the point I'm trying to make. There's a reason it's on people's minds: Because there's been a serious lack of material on the statement to create that impression.

2008-08-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday** August 16, 2008

LIVE at 21 Grand
$3--$infinity sliding scale

Samantha Giles & Yedda Morrison

SAMANTHA GILES recently received her MFA from Mills College where she was also managing editor of the literary journal 580 Split. Her work has appeared at/in Deep Oakland, Vert, Work, The Press Gang, and Cricket Online Review.

YEDDA MORRISON
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Montreal based writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison joins us for the launch of Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Editions, August 2008). Her other books include; My Pocket Park (Dusie Press, 2007), and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Yedda was a founding editor of Tripwire: a Journal of Experimental Poetics and Visual Art and has exhibited her work in the US and Canada, most recently at Republic Gallery in Vancouver and at the McCord Museum in Montreal. She is currently working on a multi-media project entitled How Flora Became an Ornament.

** note this is not the usual-third-Sunday-of-the-month-thing, but a Saturday, the day before our usual slot.

2008-06-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 20 2008

Anna Moschovakis and Dennis Somera

LIVE! // 6:30PM

21 Grand
416 25th St
Oakland CA 94612

$3--$infinity sliding scale

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS works with the Ugly Duckling Presse collective as an editor, book and web designer, and letterpress printer. She also translates from French, and has published translations of Gautier, Michaux and Cendrars, among others. Her first full length collection, I Have Not Been Able To Get Through To Everyone, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2006. Anna is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at CUNY's Graduate Center, and currently teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
from Six Nights
from The Human Machine: 30 Chances

DENNIS SOMERA has been published in Tinfish, Chain, and Pom Pom and anthologized in Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 20006). He lives in Oakland and works with kids in San Francisco. He is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program at Mills College.

in 2nd Ave Poetry

in Cricket Online Review

2008-06-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

ARTIST STATEMENT
Gina Myers

Not more deep, more shallow. You take what you can. Monday morning: pot of coffee. It's a dead kid who rats on another kid. New media schizophrenia. Dear cloud free from moral guilt. Pigeons. Sometimes I walk down the street and something happens, or nothing happens. No parents no rules. March 23, 1987, game three: Bird drives the lane & Bill Laimbeer lays his ass down. Five dollar pitchers of Blatz; Sam Cooke on the jukebox. A door leads to a door leads to another door. Deepinsnow. Living in a city. Eepinnow. To live in a city. I get good advice from the advertising world. For example: this & this & this. An obsession w/the morning news. Ten cent wing night. He do the policemen in different voices. Rust Belt restlessness. Post-industrial Michigan. Telling the same story over & over. Can’t slow down. Won’t stop. This doesn’t explain anything.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Brent Cunningham

June 4, 2008
My mind, I’ve observed, seems to spend a lot of time looking for a chance to doubt, deny or contradict what is presented to it. Maybe as a result, it also used to be ridiculously sensitive to even the faintest odor of sanctimoniousness, hypocrisy, or just poor reasoning in others. While this has all gotten rather better in recent years, in some ways it’s also gotten worse. Such crankiness and lack of insouciance doesn’t come from disillusion exactly, which is what most people think, as much as it comes from a broad feeling of instability, the suspicion that even the most solid structures can be toppled by shadows and the desire to have that fact recognized. Subtleties and gradations that, to me, make real thing actually real, are everywhere daily smothered in the name of intelligibility, and it can make even a happy person sort of irritable and combative.

While its difficult to reliably reconstruct something so embryonic , I suppose I must have sensed early on, in poetry and in writing, a fellow traveler to these experiences of skepticism, mistrust, and general negativity. The affection I have for the artform still has to do with the way it tests the extremes of value reversal, even to the truly futile point of valuing the anti-value. It’s maybe that old love for what reminds us of ourselves: poetry also seems confused to me, also seems unwilling to hold a consistent worldview for very long, and also seems to fluxuate between the belief it has some world-historical importance and the equal certainty it’s irrelevant. I rather like that it can be so elusive and, supposedly, subjective. I like that it can be perverse, obscene, and grotesque, and then suddenly turn all earnest, wondering, and vulnerable.

Recently I was describing to Laura Moriarty how my writing is trying to work its way into some kind of destabilized collapse. She said, “Yeah, right: ‘negative capability’.” But I think I’m thinking of something different from what Keats describes. “When man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Well, sure, maybe…but I have in mind the way the mind recalls painful moments more sharply than pleasurable ones, or the way stories about stable, successful protagonists bore pretty much everyone. It’s not a matter of developing a capacity for existing in such contradictions, as if you could master and harness those traumas “for the powers of good,” but just that they are. They’re like other beings living among us. You might deny they exist, and avoid them for awhile, but eventually you’re going to walk right into one. I frankly don’t think it’s possible to honestly value destability, change, mystery, or a lot of things people claim to value, and I certainly don’t think our reliance on fact and reason is an irritable quality. It’s more that in poetry, or the kind of poetry I care for, there’s a vivifying act of acknowledgement: the pieces genuinely don’t fit, we’re small & limited, and a terrible amount doesn’t add up. I don’t know exactly how to let such actualities exist within any given poem instead of quashing them, but I think the ability to do so isn’t so much a capability as an act of admission: something is happening here and I don’t know what it is.

2008-05-28T10:44:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Brent Cunningham & Gina Myers

21 Grand

416 25th St. (at Broadway), Oakland

$3-$infinite sliding scale

BRENT CUNNINGHAM is the owner of the following facts: "Despite being 6 foot 4 as a high school freshman, I was cut from the basketball team. My hair once reached the middle of my back. My first publication was when I was 18, in Penthouse magazine, in a section call "College View." In my early twenties I made fairly serious plans to stop speaking for awhile. My goal was to stop speaking for one year. I had the idea I was too chatty and this might help me learn to listen, and anyways I was an intense person and wanted to do something peculiar, monumental and difficult. I even made some cards that tried to explain that I wasn't actually mute but had decided not to speak. For a few years I was always going to do it in just a few months from then, but then I started to think it was maybe offensive to actual mutes. Plus I had a girlfriend by then who basically forbade it."
Twenty Thousand Thousand

3 Poems in Shampoo

An interview

GINA MYERS currently lives in Saginaw, Michigan where she makes books for Lame House Press and co-edits the tiny with Gabriella Torres. Her new chapbook Behind the R is forthcoming from ypolita press later this year. Recent poems have appeared in Coconut and Cultural Society.

An interview

Dodo Fest Travel Diary

On Three Chapbooks

2008-05-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

ARTIST STATEMENT
Robert Fitterman

“Because comparatively few poets today write in meters, rhymes, and stanzas, my use of these has resulted in my being labeled a "formalist." But I find this term meaningless and even objectionable. It suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutually vital in any successful poem. I employ the traditional instruments of verse simply because I love the symmetries and surprises that they produce and because meter especially allows me to render feelings and ideas more flexibly and precisely than I otherwise could. This preference is personal and aesthetic, however; I have never imagined that it provided me with access to cultural or spiritual virtue.”

My last five books of poetry, including the Metropolis series, have been constructed mostly with pirated text—web language, classical literature, mass culture language, etc. And over the past few years, I’ve been writing about why. At first, I was interested in the possibilities of de-stabilizing language beyond the strategies I already knew, such as disjunction and minimalism. By simply taking a chunk of language and reframing it in another context, I found that something new and relevant was happening not only to my writing but also to my experience as a reader. These new experiences were being validated also in the art that I saw and the music that I heard. In fact, by using pirated texts and reading the critical work that contextualizes these strategies, I have been able to explore my own possibilities for writing in a larger cultural frame that is fluent in notions about sampling and cataloging.

For me, using appropriation--either wholesale or in smaller collage units (no hierarchy here)--intersects several current conversations about consumerism, art and technology, readership, etc. By culling and then composing with the language around me, I aim to highlight the disparity between the object and the object consumed. This is my participation—not to replicate or exploit the original, but highlight its difference as we try to carve our paths through the informational morass. Benjamin Buchloh draws the parallel between language/found language and object/commodified object: “The allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluating it for the second time in allegorical practice.” I could tell you how much you’ll pay for a pear here, or I can refer you to the information below:

Variety Hardiness Ripens Description

Cabot E September Medium size fruit. Extremely winter hardy. Flesh is melting, sweet, aromatic and good for fresh eating.

Clark+ E Early Sept. Fruit is small, good for canning, fair quality eating when ripe. Ripens all at once; not a keeper. Tree vigorous, fireblight and scab resistant.

David E September Thin-skinned, with flesh that holds its firmness and is good for cooking and processing. Fireblight resistant.

Golden Spice E September Good pollinator. Vigorous grower. Sweet and aromatic. Good for eating fresh when ripe and for home processing. Not a keeper.

Herman Last+ V Mid Sept. Medium to large-size fruit ripens on the tree. Good for eating and cooking. Resistant to fireblight.

Hudar+ E-V Late July, Early Aug. Yellow pear with sweet, juicy flesh. Good eating. Good size, about equal to Bartlett.

John E September A Pyrus ussuriensis/P.communis ussuriensis cross, John is very hardy and fireblight resistant, but only fair quality eating. Quality better if grown in the far north and eaten when perfectly ripe.

Jubilee E September Small to medium size fruit. Very hardy and fireblight resistant. A Pyrus ussuriensis/P.communis ussuriensis cross. Good for canning, and fresh eating when ripe. Does not keep.

Leonard V Late Sept. A medium-size, hard, green pear which ripens yellow to a smooth, melting, flavorful fruit. Brought to our attention by Clarke Nattress.

Luscious V Mid to late Sept. Large, very juicy, sweet and firm yet melting pear. Ripens in storage 7-10 days after harvest and remains excellent for fresh eating for about 2 weeks. A South Dakota E31 X Ewart cross, Luscious has proven hardy in many northern states.

Nova+ V Mid Sept. Our best pear, named after our daughter, Nova. Large, round, melting and juicy. Can be used green or ripe. Hangs well without premature drop. Precocious and self-fertile.

O'burg+ V September This medium to large pear ripens to a smooth, very fine quality fruit. Excellent canned. The original tree grew just south of Ogdensburg, NY for 50 years.

Olia E Early Oct. A Pyrus ussuriensis/P. communis cross. Small, flavorful fruit. Tree vigorous and productive. Fireblight resistant. Not a keeper.

Parker V Mid Sept. Introduced by the Univ. of MN in 1934. Medium to large fruit, yellow with red blush, fine-grained, tender, juicy.

Patten E Late Sept. Very large fruit. Should be picked about 1 week before ripe and then allowed to ripen. Good for eating, fair for canning.

Pepi E September Fruit small, good for canning. Like other P.ussuriensis crosses, it is very cold hardy and immune to fireblight, but lacks the eating quality of European pears.

Sauvignac+ V Sept. Very sweet juicy pear with few grit cells. Originated near Quebec City, Canada, in a very cold area. Brought to our attention by Henri Bernard.

Southworth+ V Mid-late Sept. Good-flavored, Bartlett-sized sweet pear with juicy flesh that is firm becoming melting. Self-fertile. Tree is a strong, vigorous grower. Originated in Northern NY.

Stacey+ E-V Mid-August Fruit is small but sweet. Should be picked in mid-August before fully ripe then allowed to ripen in a cool storage space. The original tree is at least 250 years old and is growing near Stacyville, ME. Very vigorous grower. Brought to our attention by Clarke Nattress.

Summercrisp V Mid Aug. Our second earliest pear. Introduced by the Univ. of Minnesota, this pear is best utilized as a crisp juicy fruit similar to the well known Asian pears. It is hardy in Grand Rapids, MN, withstanding nearly minus 50 degrees F. Tree vigorous and a good pollinator for other pears.

Tyson* M Early Sept. Known since 1794, Tyson is a medium-sized conical pear. Fruit quality very high, especially for fresh eating. Keeps only a short time in storage. Tree is large, vigorous and productive.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Jennifer Manzano

It starts with a blank dance card.

The answer, in part, is that a term (any term, really) labels a great variety of phenomena, asks questions about the validity of asking and what sense it makes beside sensory experience.

Instead dancing continues until sundown until someone starts playing the piano in the building next door.

This creates intersection.

“It’s what classical music could have been if it didn’t suck ass.”
-Jeffrey Schrader

A label or a statement is trying to say something, but it would be helpful also to not say it. Just pick up and dance (any dance, really). Walk up a ladder and look. A statement is a conditioning of representations by context, by where sounds come from, or by gauging the height of the tree while standing under it.

You try it.

Experience attunes to certain information or regularities or artifacts which can be exploited in the present, or to certain rarities which are good for gauging the height of the tree while standing under it. A dance card is good for this, for taking lists shorter than trees, for taking lists of things that are inside something else, for thinking about creating movement and actually going with it.

Physically, the new poem starts from First and Mission Streets in San Francisco, of walking out of the transient space of the transbay bus terminal into the plaza with a huge pine tree full of birds on the far left, then a green shack of a flower stand, then newsstands, and above, a web of electric MUNI bus lines. There are generally several taxis on the right, but I ignore them.

This creates intersection.

And the title, Yes.

There’s an intersection in climbing a ladder and coming back down again, a slight burp. You may learn how high something is. You may have a different view for a while. But you’re put back where you started. You’re put back where you started, but there are differences.

There are different lines overheard on the bus. “So that’s how you learned about (pause) life?”

There are different senses of things.

In Yes, I’ve thrown a bunch of stuff at it to see what sticks—advice well given & well taken. As a result, there are several unappropriated quotes, dialogues, speakers, repetitions, and lists, each creating types of juxtaposition that beg for interaction, that ask about the validity of placement, both in the poem and in general, that confront the intersections and question the connections, both between the things themselves and between the lines as they’re written.

Yes.

Questions create vulnerability and mean that there’s a lot hanging out there. I don’t mean that I’m sitting there dancing and playing and looking like an ass, but that you’re there too, or someone is there. We’re there with our blank dance cards and we are dancing. We are dancing together. We are embracing it, dealing with it.

There are different senses of things.

We examine intersections as they come up and maybe we don’t care how tall the tree is and we keep on dancing. And maybe, somewhere in the process, we’ll even piece together something that’s worth a damn.

2008-05-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-03T09:22:00.000-07:00

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.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

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.

2008-03-03T09:46:00.001-08:00

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

NEW YIPES WAS LIKE

2008-02-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

9/18/05
Cedar Sigo, Kathleen Fraser and films by Kelly Sears

10/16/05
Nada Gordon and Rodney Koeneke

11/20/05
Norma Cole, Darin Klein and the films of Cathy Begien

12/18/05
Bill Luoma, Rachel Levitsky, David Enos and his films

1/29/06
Bruce Andrews and Brandon Downing

2/19/06
Films by Jose Rodriguez, readings by Nico Vassilakis and Geraldine Kim

3/19/06
Stefani Barber, Aaron Kunin and the films of Mandy Brown

4/16/06
Bruce Boone, Alli Warren and Amy Lockhart's animated films

5/21/06
Bay Poetics launch and release

6/18/06
Tanya Brolaski and Brandon Brown

7/16/06
Suzanne Stein, Haleh Hatami and films by Thad Povey

8/20/06
Yuri Hospodar, Erika Staiti and the films of Sarah Enid

9/17/06
Stan Apps, Elizabeth Reddin, Kirthi Nath and her films

10/29/06
Stacy Doris, Tyrone Williams and video by Karla Milosevich

11/19/06
E. Tracy Grinnell, Erin Morrill and films by Erik Bluhm and Steven Brown

12/17/06
Kevin Killian, Lauren Shufran and the music of Aero-Mic'd

1/21/07
Melissa Benham, Sean Labrador and the films of Glenn Wait

2/18/07
Vanitas #2 premiere

3/18/07
Dodie Bellamy and Armand Capanna with video by Sarah Lockhart

4/22/07
Anne Boyer and William Moor with videos by Anne McGuire

5/27/07
Cynthia Sailers, Jeff Clark and films by Alfonso Alvarez

6/17/07
Conduction in the Catacombs by Will Alexander

7/29/07
Stephanie Young, Tao Lin and films with music by Ri Crawford

8/26/07
Lara Durback, Stephen Beachy and films by Martha XIV

9/16/07
Anselm Berrigan, Catherine Meng and videos by Craig Goodman

10/21/07
Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Dolores Dorantes and video by Katie Edmonds

11/11/07
Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern, Garrett Caples and films by Gregg Biermann

12/16/07
Rachel Zolf and Robert Grenier

1/20/08
Carla Harryman and Lauren Gudath with video by Kota Ezawa and David Berezin

2008-01-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

2008-01-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

THAT WAS FUN

2008-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

2007-12-24T12:52:00.000-08:00

2007-12-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

2007-11-30T21:19:00.000-08:00

2007-11-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

2007-10-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

2007-10-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

Circa 1973

2007-10-04T08:48:00.001-07:00

2007-09-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

2007-09-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

2007-08-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

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2007-08-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

2007-08-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

2007-07-31T12:59:00.000-07:00

2007-07-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

2007-06-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

2007-06-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

2007-05-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

2007-05-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

2007-04-28T09:23:00.002-07:00

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2007-04-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

2007-04-07T03:19:00.000-07:00

2007-03-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

2007-03-01T00:38:00.001-08:00

2007-02-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

See http://www.vanitasmagazine.com/
//////for Vanitas #2 ordering information

2007-02-06T22:39:00.000-08:00

2007-01-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

MELISSA BENHAM//////////////////// SEAN MANZANO LABRADOR

AT THEIR JANUARY 21 2007 READING AT 21 GRAND

STILLS FROM HOG TIDE BY GLENN WAIT///////////////////

NEW YIPES READER no. 16 ////////////////

COVER BY BRENT CUNNINGHAM //////////////////

///////////////////////////////////////////PHOTOS BY JENNIFER DEARINGER

STILL FROM DREAM OF A PORTUGUESE BY GLENN WAIT//////////////

2007-01-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

////////Without KRISHNA COPY

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////2595 Telegraph Ave (@ Parker) Berkeley CA
/////////////////////////////////////no NEW YIPES would there be

Krishna sign modeled by Michelle and Monica/////////////

2007-01-08T23:32:00.000-08:00

December 17, 2006

2006-12-31T17:55:00.000-08:00

LAUREN SHUFRAN//////////////////////////////KEVIN KILLIAN

//////////////////////////VUES PAR LRSN

STILL FROM WAYNE SMITH'S VIDEO FOR "ROLLING RIVER" BY AERO-MIC'd
L-R: CLIFF HENGST, KEVIN KILLIAN, WAYNE SMITH, SCOTT HEWICKER

/////////////////////////////////////////////PHOTO BY STEPHANIE YOUNG

REMEMBERING KARI EDWARDS (1954-2006)

2006-12-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

2006-12-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

2006-11-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

NOVEMBER 19, 2006/////////////////
////////////////////////ERIN MORRILL

E.TRACY GRINNELL/////////////////PHOTOS BY KEVIN KILLIAN

Angelica Kauffmann The Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting (1794)

Still from WELCOME WIZARDS/////////////////Still from HIGH CALEDONIA
by ERIK BLUHM/////////////////////////////////////////by STEVEN BROWN

2006-11-08T18:20:00.000-08:00

/////////ALSO SHOWING: WELCOME WIZARDS BY ERIK BLUHM

2006-10-31T12:59:00.000-08:00

TYRONE WILLIAMS////////////////////////////////////////////////STACY DORIS

///////////////////////////////OCTOBER 29, 2006///////////////////////////////

////////////////STILLS FROM "IKREA" (ABOVE) AND "TO THE PATH" (BELOW)

///BY KARLA MILOSEVICH (2006)///////////////////////////////////////////////

////////////////////////////SNAPS BY SUZANNE STEIN//////////////////////