Author Archive

c/c reading 002: rob halpern, cj martin, julia bloch

c/c reading 002: (Saturday, 2 April 2011)

Rob Halpern
CJ Martin
Julia Bloch

 

 

Fergie’s Pub
1214 Sansom St. (6:30pm to 8:30pm)
($5 suggested donation)

ROB HALPERN is the author of several books of poetry, including Rumored Place (Krupskaya) and Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2009). He’s also the co-author of the book-length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (together with Taylor Brady, Atticus/Finch Books, 2007), which is currently being reissued in an expanded edition by Displaced Press. A new book of poems, Music for Porn, is forthcoming (Nightboat Books, 2011). His essays appear in a range of journals and anthologies, including Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, Modernist Cultures, ON: Contemporary Practice, and Journal of Narrative Theory.  His work on Georges Perec, including translations of Perec’s early essays on aesthetics and politics, can be found in Chicago Review and Review of Contemporary Fiction. A founding member of the Nonsite Collective, he lives in San Francisco and Ypsilanti, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University.

C.J. MARTIN is the author of Two Books (Compline, forthcoming 2011), WIW?3: Hold me tight. Make me happy (Delete Press, 2009), Lo, Bittern (Atticus/Finch, 2008), and CITY (Vigilance Society, 2007). He is also a contributing editor for Little Red Leaves and LRL e-editions, and he teaches at TX State University-San Marcos.

JULIA BLOCH lives in Philadelphia, where she co-curates the Emergency Reading Series, works as coeditor of Jacket2, and is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent poetry appears in P-Queue, Aufgabe, and Peacock Online Review; her book Letters to Kelly Clarkson is forthcoming this year from Sidebrow Books.

c/c reading 001: dodie bellamy, david buuck & corina copp

c/c reading 001: (Sunday, 20 March 2011)

Dodie Bellamy

David Buuck

Corina Copp

 

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St (700pm to 900pm)

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

DODIE BELLAMY‘s latest chapbook is Whistle While You Dixie, from Summer BF Press. Her Ugly Duckling Presse chapbook Barf Manifesto was named best book of 2009 under 30 pages by Time Out New York. Other books include Academonia, Pink Steam and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. Forthcoming in April is the buddhist by Publication Studio. She lives in San Francisco with writer Kevin Killian and three cats.  She also runs the popular blog, Belladodie.

DAVID BUUCK lives in Oakland. He is the founder of BARGE – the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics – and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. Recently published and forthcoming work can be found in Cannot Exist, Tarpaulin Sky, Sous Rature, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Elective Affinities, With+Stand, and elsewhere. Information and samples can be found at David’s official website.

CORINA COPP is a playwright, poet, and wishful thinker living in Brooklyn. Recent work includes essays on Jean Day, Hannah Weiner, and Sarah Ruhl; and texts that can be found soon or now in Cambridge Literary Review, Cannot Exist, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, SerieAlfa, Wild Orchids, Supermachine, Aufgabe, 6×6, and Antennae. Plays: Tell Only One (Small Press Traffic Poets Theater Festival, Jan. 2011); WALTZ (CSC/E. 13th St. Theater, July 2010, directed by Meghan Finn), and A Week of Kindness (Ontological Incubator/Brick, 2008, co-created with Kelly Kivland). Author of Play Air (Belladonna* 2005), Carpeted (Faux Press, 2004), and Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite (Open 24 Hours 2003), with new chapbooks forthcoming from minutes BOOKS and Ugly Duckling Presse. She’s performed her own work and that of others in London, NYC, and elsewhere. CC is the recent editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-curator of The Twenty-Five Cent Opera of San Francisco.

further landscapes

FURTHER LANDSCAPES, a reading and community discussion

Taking the image of the “urban wasteland” or “third landscape” as a broad conceptual platform, this event will include readings and interactive audience discussion with poets & interdisciplinary writers/artists around the question: What does it mean to be currently engaged in writing around/about ecology while living in an urban/industrialized area?

Featuring: CAConrad, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Brenda Iijima, Patrick Lucy, Hoa Nguyen & Jonathan Skinner

Saturday, 13 November 2010 [400pm to 700pm) @ Fergie’s Pub

For more information contact J Townsend at greybridge@gmail.com

CACONRAD is the author of The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009).  He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006) and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010).  The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.

TINA DARRAGH‘s recent books include Deep eco pré, a collaboration with Marcella Durand freely available from Little Red Leaves, and The Elders Series #8 with Jane Sprague and Diane Ward (belladonna, 2009).  “No Rights Observed” – an opposable dumbs project report – will soon be available from Palm Press.

MARCELLA DURAND‘s recent books include Deep eco pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh (Little Red Leaves, 2009), 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 is the 2010-2011 Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice for the Center for for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania where she will be teaching a course in ecology and poetry.

BRENDA IIJIMA is the author of Around Sea (O Books, 2003), Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press, 2007), revv. you’ll-ution (Displaced Press, 2009) and If Not Metamorphic (Ahsahta Press, 2010) as well as numerous chapbooks and artist’s books.  She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books & Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2010)  Currently she is working on a body of work titled, Some Simple Things Said by and about Humans – a chronicle of how humans have used animals as surrogates.  She is also choreographing ecstatic creaturely movements and gestures.  She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.

PATRICK LUCY lives and writes in Philadelphia, where he is a member of the New Philadelphia Poets.  Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Corduroy Mtn, Elimae, Elective Affinities and more.  He is the author of two chapbooks, LIVE FIELD: GROWTHS 1-5 (_Catch/Confetti press, 2009) and WILLIAM (con/crescent press, forthcoming).

HOA NGUYEN was born in the Mekong Delta, grew up in the DC area and studied poetics in San Francisco.  She is the author of 8 books and chapbooks, most recently Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey, 2009), Kiss a Bomb Tattoo (Effing Press, 2009) and Chinaberry (Fact-Simile, 2010).  Based in Austin, Hoa curates a reading series and leads a creative writing workshop.

JONATHAN SKINNER‘s poetry collections include With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Press, 2009) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005).  He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics, which features features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology.  Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics, his essay “Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape” appeared recently in the eco language reader (ed. Brenda Iijima).  Skinner teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College, in Central Maine, where he makes his home.

phillysound: david wolach feature

CAConrad recently asked Jamie Townsend to contribute some thoughts to the PhillySound David Wolach feature issue.  You can read the entirety of all the wonderful contributions, including community commentary from Rob Halpern, Brenda Iijima, Thom Donovan and Jules Boykoff, an interview with David by CA, and new poetry by David as well.  The post was on the 30th of August 2010.

Here is Jamie Townsend’s contribution:

“David Wolach’s writing enacts a radical mode of re-figuring, in the sense that it is deeply concerned with the necessities of body in a vacuum of cultural & economic violence (as in the repetition of the prefix ‘re’ in ‘Transit’ from Occultations:

 

 

 


we will have had to learn to surface, exhale in a burst of pre

fixes

rename, relearn, re

trace, redraw what hasn’t been

that it imagines a place of trapdoors, hidden expanses, of potentiality in the figure re-claimed). Attuned to the patterns of insistent consumerism, and the politics of comingled sensuality and destruction, David locates cultural sinkholes, points of negative force that bifurcate, exposes collective experiential fault-lines. It is work that maps the field of “commerce” and the fusing of its dual meanings; as an interchange of ideas between people, and as a pervasive, widespread exchange of commodities. How does the body (self and collective) become a commodity, become effectually dis-embodied (this place will have dreamed it was a body again)?  How is it rendered (as a poem can be: as a political prisoner)?  In what capacity can it re-emerge? (when emergency broken the body / defies occupation).  David’s work disintegrates the ease of our categorization: the aesthetic and social borders within the pome, the conditions of resistance, ritual, & disease – all simultaneously generative and depletive modes of physicality.

What I find most valuable here is David’s allowance for the vulnerable (an opening to attack), itself a practice of dissent, to reenter the poem and form a basis for communal exchange.  Occultations and David’s ongoing Hospitology series present a multivalent lyric that splinters the ‘I’ into an interpenetrated ‘We’ by invoking a sense of society’s increasing disequilibrium of power.  What ultimately constitutes this ‘We’ in all of it, the backwash of economic exploitation, pop ephemera, endless war?  In a poetic laying-bare David answers by encouraging all of us to become whole again through active, embodied struggle, through an intimate re-connecting.”

the new year

Starting a new year with thoughts of the poetic forward. What’s really been occupying my attention lately is Brenda Iijima’s new book If Not Metamorphic, particularly the expansive space it creates for plotting a/series of biological structure(s) on the page. And not just biology in a limited sense, a sort of revisionary approach to the “biosphere” blend of cellular and non-cellular based structures in collective movement (Iijima’s previously released book-length project, appropriately titled Animiate, Inanimate Aims, suggests this space as well). Where language can become soft and malleable, or rock hard, abutting, but sensous and generative (from the poem “Tertium Organum”… “When she / began a sexual relationship with the earth”). “Metamorphic” : “of a rock” in the process of life, of which the inanimate is a part, cycled through a process of birth, shaping, and decay. Brenda’s work has always startled me in its intensity and integrity; it is a poetry that snowballs, expands in cystalline blocks of atoms, grows antennae, and consumes itself; all the while the author is there but never directing, forcing, or packaging the language. Witnessing the process is delightful (for me, and, I’m thinking, for Brenda as well).

I am eagerly awaiting the release of the Iijima-curated eco language reader, a book of essays dealing with the intersection of global ecological disaster and contemporary forms of poetic thought and practice. What is, in part, suggested by these two new works marked shift in focus for contemporary poets concerning themselves with the natural world (that albatross the “nature poem”), both perceived by and shaped by humans; less observational/meditational & more enactive; language mirroring and marking whats beneath, a shimmering laketop and beneath the surface, a roiling organic soup. Anyways, sounds like a real treat to read and contemplate in this cold slow boil of a Phila winter.

If Not Metamorphic: out now from Ahsahta Press.

eco language reader: out now from Nightboat/Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs

also: Brenda’s book of poetry Revv. You’ll–ution came out in November of last year from the excellent “Displaced Press; a beautiful combination of photography and writing that seeks to revisit sites of waste, violence, obscured history and the wild (stuffed) animals living among us.

pps: Check out Brenda’s amazing art/textual pieces featured in con/crescent1