c/c reading 006:

(Wednesday, 8 June 2011)

David Wolach

Eleni Stecopoulos

***Note:  this event will be held at Higher Grounds Café instead of at Fergie’s Pub**

We’d like to warmly invite you to the sixth installment of the c/c reading series. This reading will present the creative work of two fantastic poets, David Wolach and Eleni Stecopoulos, and will also feature a collaborative talk/presentation under the rubric of pain management. How are bodies, especially the bodies of the injured, sick, or disabled assigned value or “managed” in a free-market-first society? How can poetry subvert economies, function as a form of social therapy, or siphon power across entrenched socio-economic systems to promote healing and connectivity? These questions and others examining the contemporary body in pain will serve as points of reference for the event, which will conclude with an opportunity for discussion/Q&A.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

Higher Grounds

631 North 3rd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19123 (7:00-9:00 pm)

($5 suggested donation)

Eleni Stecopoulos’s first book, Armies of Compassion, came out from Palm Press in 2010, and poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in VIZ Inter-Arts, Somatic Engagement (Chain Links series), Encyclopedia (F-K), Ecopoetics, XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, The Capilano Review, and other venues. From 2008-2010, she curated a program series for the SFSU Poetry Center called “The Poetics of Healing,” whose participants ranged from poets, physicians, and bodyworkers to dancers, historians, and ethnographers. She’s currently working on two books: a poetic-critical book on healing and a book-length poem which investigates ecology via kinship and ritual landscapes, including the island village where her grandfather came from and its long history of hydrotherapy associated with cults of Apollo and Herakles. Eleni currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and Bard College, and will be teaching a class called “Dreaming in the Fault Zone” at Naropa this summer.

David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. Wolach’s first full-length collection, Occultations, has just been published by Black Radish Books. Other books include the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook of the same title forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2011), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Recent work appears in or is forthcoming from Jacket, Aufgabe, P-Queue, Try Magazine, No Tell Motel, and Little Red Leaves. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, co-curating the PRESS Text Arts & Radical Politics Series there, and is visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking. Wolach is currently touring with the experimental music-sound text ensemble Performance Research Group, performing Kenneth Gaburo’s opus Maledetto, as well as original works.