Author Archive

c/c reading 011: jenn mccreary, paul foster johnson, mel nichols

c/c reading 011:

(Saturday, September 10th)

Mel Nichols

Paul Foster Johnson

Jenn McCreary

 We are very pleased to invite you to the eleventh installment of the c/c reading series, featuring three exemplary writers.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St.

500pm to 700pm (*Note this is an earlier time than the normal c/c events)

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

 

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

 

Mel Nichols is the author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (National Poetry Series finalist) (Edge 2009) and Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha 2008). She curates the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series in the Washington, DC area.

Paul Foster Johnson is the author of Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011) and Refrains/Unworkings (Apostrophe Books, 2008). With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in Jacket, The Awl, Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Fence, and Octopus. He has served as a curator of the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place and as an editor at Litmus Press/Aufgabe. Currently he lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Jenn McCreary is the author of :ab ovo:, published by Dusie Press in the spring of 2009, and of several chapbooks. She lives in Philadelphia where she co-edits ixnay press with the writer Chris McCreary, works for the Mural Arts Program, wrangles twins, & charms snakes.

 

2011
09/05
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Jenn McCreary
Mel Nichols
Paul Foster Johnson
Reading Series
Uncategorized
Write comment

c/c reading 011: brian teare, stacy szymaszek, sarah dowling

****CANCELLED****     Thanks to that old Hurricane we are going to take a breather.  Event will hopefully be rescheduled in the not so distant future.

c/c reading 011:

(Saturday, 27 Aug 2011)

Brian Teare

Stacy Szymaszek

Sarah Dowling

.

We are very pleased to invite you to the eleventh installment of the c/c reading series, featuring three phenomenal writers.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St

700pm to 900pm

(Free – $5 suggest donation)

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

Sarah Dowling‘s work has appeared in journals such as P-Queue, EOAGH, How2, and West Coast Line. Her first book, Security Posture, was published by Snare Books as the winner of the 2009 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Sarah’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GLQ and Canadian Literature, and Sarah is international editor at Jacket2.

Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1969 and grew up there. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009), both published by Litmus Press, as well as numerous chapbooks, including Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005), Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), and from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009). From 1999 to 2005, she worked at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. In 2005, she moved to New York City, where she is the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

Brian Teare is the author of three full-length books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and the Lambda-award winning Pleasure—as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim, Transcendental Grammar Crown and ^. After over a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Assistant Professor at Temple University, and lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

2011
08/19
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Brian Teare
Reading Series
Sarah Dowling
Stacy Szymaszek
Write comment

c/c reading 010: e. tracy grinnell, geoffrey olsen, sueyeun juliette lee

c/c reading 010:

(Friday, 5 August 2011)

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Geoffrey Olsen

E. Tracy Grinnell

We’d like to ecstatically invite you to the tenth installment of the c/c reading series, featuring an outstanding trio of writers.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St.

700pm to 900pm

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

Sueyeun Juliette Lee currently lives in Pittsburgh, where she edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to innovative multi-ethnic writing.  Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Books) and Underground National (Factory School).  She is a contributing editor to the Constant Critic and to EOAGH.

Geoffrey Olsen lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York and works at the Cooper Union in Manhattan.  He is the author of the chapbooks Not of Distends * Address Panicked (minutes books) and End Notebook (petrichord press).

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Helen: A Fugue (Belladonna Elder Series #1, 2008), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks Mirrorly, A Window (flynpyntar press, 2009), Leukadia (Trafficker Press, 2008), Hell and Lower Evil (Lyre Lyre Pants on Fire, 2008), Humoresque (Blood Pudding/Dusie #3, 2008), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks, 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2004) and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 2000).  She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the founding editor and director of Litmus Press.

2011
07/29
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
E. Tracy Grinnell
Geoffrey Olsen
Reading Series
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
1 comment

c/c reading 008: dana ward, thom donovan, joseph bradshaw

c/c reading 008:

(Saturday, 9 July 2011

Dana Ward

Thom Donovan

Joseph Bradshaw

We’d like to gratefully invite you to the eighth installment of the c/c reading series, featuring a brilliant trio of writers.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St.

700pm to 900pm

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

Thanks and look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

 

Joseph Bradshaw was born in Idaho and spent an itinerant childhood along the west coast. He was a founding editor of FO(A)RM Magazine, and for several years co-curated the Spare Room reading series in Portland, OR. He is the author of two chapbooks, The Way Birds Become (Weather Press: 2007), and This Ocean, or Oppen Series (Cannibal Books: 2008), and the book In the Common Dream of George Oppen (Shearsman Books: 2011). He now lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he works as an archivist.

Thom Donovan is a writer, curator, editor, and archivist. He edits the weblog Wild Horses Of Fire, now in its 6th year! Co-edits ON Contemporary Practice, a print journal for critical writings and conversations about one’s contemporaries. He also edits the web archive, Others Letters, featuring correspondence about contemporary practices across the arts, and co-curates The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior, a live interview series and video archive concerning the immanence of possible futures. His work has appeared widely in print and online and includes critical works in Afterall, BOMB, PAJ, and The Brooklyn Rail. His first full-length book, The Hole, is forthcoming with Displaced Press. He is currently at work revising and editing a book of essays and statements, Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010.

Dana Ward is the author of, most recently, The Squeakquel (Song Cave 2011). His book This Can’t Be Life is coming out this fall from Edge Books. He’s currently writing a long work that will be published by Futurepoem Press late in 2012. He lives in Cincinnati where hosts the Cy Press Poetry reading series at Thunder Sky Gallery.

 

2011
06/29
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Dana Ward
Joseph Bradshaw
Reading Series
Thom Donovan
Write comment

c/c reading 006: david wolach, eleni stecopoulos

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.

2011
05/31
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
David Wolach
Eleni Stecopoulos
Reading Series
Write comment

c/c reading 004: marcella durand, pattie mccarthy, h.b. irwin

c/c reading 004:

(Saturday, 21 May 2011)

Marcella Durand

Pattie McCarthy

H.B. Irwin

 

We’d like to convivially invite you to the fourth installment of the c/c reading series, featuring a trio of outstanding writers.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St

530pm to 730pm

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

Thanks and look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A DeBoer

 

H.B. Irwin grew up in rural Arkansas.  She has lived in Philadelphia, studying at Temple University for 3 years.  She is an absurdist, a nihilist and an all-around negative-nancy.  She currently lives and works in Fishtown.

Pattie McCarthy is the author of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (2010), Verso (2004) and bk of (h)rs (2002), all from Apogee Press.  A new chapbook, L&O, if forthcoming from Little Red Leaves.  Poems from her in-progress book-length poem Marybones have recently appeared or are forthcoming in 20012, Elective Affinities, and Lana Turner.  She is a lecturer in the English Department of Temple University and lives in South Philadelphia.

Marcella Durand‘s recent books include Deep eco pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh (available as a PDF from Little Red Leaves here), AREA (Belladonna, 2008), and Traffic & Weather, a site-specific book-length poem written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in downtown Manhattan (Futurepoem Books, 2008).  She was the 2010-2011 Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice for the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught a course in ecology and poetry.

 

2011
05/10
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
H.B. Irwin
Marcella Durand
Pattie McCarthy
Reading Series
Write comment

c/c reading 003 introductions

It was such a privilege to host Rachel Levitsky and Valerie Mejer for c/c003 on Saturday May 7 to discuss issues of translation around Rachel’s essential book NEIGHBOR. Below is a transcription of the intro I gave toward the event’s focus:

(OPENING REMARKS) J: Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR came to me at the perfect time: I had recently moved from a very entrenched suburbia (Boulder, CO) to a very particularized urban setting(Philadelphia). Growing up in the suburbs of Massachusetts, and really having very little experience with city-living until I moved Philadelphia in my late 20s, I feel as though the intertextuality of relationship that the city necessitates - and indeed, the place of poetry to pile on experience, perspective, conditional difference, was in a large part, lost on me. Initial writing interests drifted towards Olson’s expansive spatial claims; the cities I imagined were Calvino’s invisible ones, one’s made in the mind; distant, shining, idealized.
 
In NEIGHBOR Rachel writes:   
 
“I am a collection / of desire // precariously / housed” (2)
 
The condition of “precarious housing” has particular importance within the currently global community, a community shot through by paranoia, violence, inequality, but also one holding an amazing well of sustaining desire — the wish, the longing for something else (or the universal scope the Latin root desiderare suggets: “(to) await what the stars will bring”) – that thing which causes suffering but also allows us to continue existing. And desire’s precariousness, it’s “likeliness to fall or collapse” has something to say about that troubling autonomous “I” as well; that is, how to approach living in the thick of it, where the conditions of “individual space” collapse due to the sheer volume of life. Apartments resonate with the sounds of other people – singing, fighting, fucking – to the point where the mineral fact of a living space becomes super-saturated with the pressing physical presence of multiplicity. Here the ”I” has no choice but to engage with the “we”, moment by moment. This becomes the test of NEIGHBOR‘s art.   
 
The appropriateness of this book in regards this event’s focus on translation lies in the act of “translation” as a central concern of NEIGHBOR‘s prosody itself. NEIGHBOR deftly navigates within the spaces of the ineffable, testing and questioning these limits – the distance that comes from extreme closeness, physical closeness that abuts extreme isolation. This world of extremes, of overlapping noises and sound-sources poses an important model and questions for thinking about relationship. That is: how do we explore this space of ontological translation down new avenues? – to write a local space in a way that then transcends its own limited culture, and instead addresses core issues of what it means to be a NEIGHBOR in the global sense? This global NEIGHBOR, including the all the positive and negative connotations of this label, is always the local neighbor as well. I am very excited to hear Valerie discuss the act of translating such a text, as well as exploring the questions of how we navigate global neighborhoods that will inevitably arise. Thanks so much to both for coming here today to share — our neighbors to the north Rachel and Valerie.    

2011
05/09
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Jamie Townsend
NEIGHBOR
Rachel Levitsky
Reading Series
Valerie Mejer
Write comment

a response to lunar natatorium

Recently Greg Bem was kind enough to post a response to Nick’s poem “Lunar Natatorium” (currently up at Apparent Magnitude); you should check it out, you should. Click here for his response.

2011
04/20
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Apparent Magnitude
Greg Bem
Nicholas A DeBoer
Write comment

a poem by nicholas a. deboer @ apparent mag

Nicholas A. DeBoer has a great poem, “Lunar Natatoriam”, from his project The Singes, published at James Curley’s epic Apparent Magnitude.  Mr. Curley’s press houses a variety works across genres, creating a space for ‘literary speculative writing…[in] science fiction, horror, paranormal, and etc., writing which fights the notion that genre writing is formulaic’. Hell yeah, I say.  You can visit the magazine here, and Nick’s poem here.

2011
04/14
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Apparent Magnitude
James Curley
Nicholas A DeBoer
Write comment

c/c reading 003: rachel levitsky and valerie mejer

c/c reading 003:

(Saturday, 7 May 2011)

Rachel Levitsky

Valerie Mejer

 

We’d like to enthusiastically invite you to the third installment of the c/c reading series.  This bilingual reading from Rachel Levitsky’s book NEIGHBOR, and it’s Spanish translation Vecino by Valerie Mejer, will present a specific focus on the process of translation in regards to site-specific details, and the particular intimate challenges of translating a given locale.  This event will also feature a reading of the poets play within NEIGHBOR and will conclude with an opportunity for discussion/Q&A.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

Fergie’s Pub

1414 Sansom St (5:30pm to 7:30pm)

($5 suggested donation)

 

Poet and painter Valerie Mejer was born in Mexico City.  Her book of poetry De Elefante a Elefante, was awarded the Spanish International Prize “Gerardo Diego 1966″.  She is also the author of de la ola, el atajo (Amagord, Spain 2009) Geografías de Niebla (2008) and Esta Novela Azul (2004).  Her poems in English have appeared in England in Poetry London and in the U.S. in the Hunger Mountain Review, Nimrod and The American Poetry Review among others.  She has translated poetry collections by C.D. Wright, Charles Wright, Forest Gander and Pascale Petit and is currently working on an anthology of selected poems by the Australian poet Les Murray.

Rachel Levitsky‘s second poetry collection NEIGHBOR was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2009.  Her first novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours will be published by Futurepoem in 2011.  Levitsky teaches Writing and Literature at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, Bard Prison Initiative and Pratt Institute.  She is found and member of Belladonna* Collaborative–a hub of feminist avant-garde literary action.

2011
04/12
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Rachel Levitsky
Reading Series
Valerie Mejer
1 comment
Creative Commons License
con/crescent press is published by Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A DeBoer and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.