Poetry Center Calendar: SPRING 2012
FEBRUARY | MARCH |APRIL | MAY
THE POETICS OF HEALING | POETRY CENTER DIGITAL ARCHIVE
Unless otherwise noted:
All programs free to SFSU students and Poetry Center Members
Reduced low-income admission
No one turned away for lack of funds
• Thursday FEB 2
Kathleen Fraser in conversation
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Join us for a public conversation focused on Kathleen Fraser's tenure as director of the Poetry Center, 1972–75
KATHLEEN FRASER moved to San Francisco in 1972 to work as Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. During her tenure as Director, she founded the American Poetry Archives, to archive and make publicly available the Poetry Center's extensive recorded holdings. She taught within the Creative Writing Program at SFSU for many years, as well as at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Reed College, and California College of Arts, among other places. She was a founding editor of the magazine HOW(ever) — together with associate editors Frances Jaffer, Beverly Dahlen and Susan Gevirtz and contributing editors Carolyn Burke and Rachel Blau DuPlessis — focusing on innovative writing by women. The author of 18 books of poetry and prose, including her selected poems, il cuore: the heart and her essay collection, Translating the Unspeakable, Kathleen Fraser divides her time between San Francisco and Rome. She has translated a book-length poem by Maria Obino, and further work by Italian poets Toni Mariani, Daniela Attanasi, Sara Zanghi, and Giovanna Sandri.
Her inventive new book moveable TYYPE (Nightboat Books) showcases poems from four recent collaborative artist books that exhibit “her longtime love of words as objects into play” (The New York Times). These new poems, many created through her unique collage and hand paste-up techniques, continue Fraser’s ambitious exploration of the boundaries of language and the limits of the page.
• Saturday FEB 4
Kathleen Fraser and Brandon Brown
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $10
KATHLEEN FRASER (biography above).
BRANDON BROWN's first two books were published in 2011, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya). Further poems and prose have recently appeared in publications including Postmodern Culture, Model Homes, Poetry Project Newsletter, Swan’s Rag, Try!, and Art Practical. He has programmed literary series at New Langton Arts, 21 Grand Gallery, several consecutive living rooms, and published small press chapbooks under the imprint OMG! He lives in San Francisco, and is an alumnus of SFSU's MFA in Creative Writing program.
16 (from The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus)
tourists pass on parasails. Bithynia is great? Are you crazy? Great place to lose your toga, have your cares quadrupled. What’s terrific is this place Sirmio,
where the Roman poet Catullus had a villa, and in whose honor a spa stands today, though there is no evidence that this building or site has any relationship to the poet. Lusty, gaudy Sirmio. Gaudy, tantalizing, Sirmio of my imagination. I’ll slip under the lips of your lake. No limb will lack lake on it. My dome has a tinny cache: that’s laughter! Those waves’ laps’ chuckle!
• POETRY CENTER DIGITAL ARCHIVE will be posting several historic recordings from Poetry Center Archives during Kathleen Fraser's tenure as Poetry Center Director 1973–75 over the coming months.
For updates, LIKE us at facebook.
• Thursday FEB 16
Cecilia Vicuña, Open Workshop
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
5:00 pm @ Art History Lecture Hall, Fine Arts 193, SFSU, free preview screening of her film "Kon Kon"
co-sponsored with SFSU Departments of Art and Cinema
6:00 pm @ Cesar Chavez Student Center Art Gallery,
informal reception for the artist, free and open to the public
CECILIA VICUñA's works have for some forty years gravitated between the written word, in multiple languages (she has translated numerous works of poetry from Native South American languages, via Spanish, into English; and her own written/spoken work has been polylingual) and visual media, involving, “earth-works,” installation, a great deal of art made with thread and fabric (often involving the Native quipu tradition), drawing and painting, printed works and book arts, film and video, and live intermedia performance. All of her work has a deep ethical-ecological concern at its heart. She has been active internationally as an artist for over four decades (witness this early 1973 BBC documentary on her and her work). Among recent publications, she coedited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, surveying 500 years of multi-lingual work, presented in original languages with translations into English.
Her very first book, Saboramí, a bilingual multi-media work of poetry originally published in Britain where the author was living, two months after the September 11, 1973 military coup in Chile, was just re-created, with a new afterword by Vicuña, by ChainLinks (Oakland and Philadelphia).
• Friday FEB 17
"Kon Kon" a film by Cecilia Vicuña
WEST COAST PREMIER SCREENING
4:30 pm @ Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, $10, $6.50 *
BUY TICKETS NOW!
The filmmaker will be present to talk with the audience
KON KON (HD video, 54 min., Chile, 2010)
In this documentary poem, Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Con, the birthplace of her art in Chile, where the sea is dying and an ancient tradition is being destroyed.
Con Con is located at the mouth of the Aconcagua River whose source is the glacier of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Western hemisphere. Named for the oldest deity of the Andes, the god Kon, it may have been a sacred oracle site for millennia, associated with the most renowned oracle site in the Americas: Pachacamac, on the coast of Peru.
The word Con (Kon) alludes to the sanctity of the cycle of water—from glacier to ocean to cloud—a circularity intensified by the repetition: Con Con. In the sacred Valle del Aconcagua, the “bailes chinos” created a powerful mystical sound: the “sonido rajado” (torn sound), a multiphonic music of the pre-Columbian Andes. Based on dissonance, the “bailes chinos” are ritual dances dedicated to increasing the life-force. Continuously performed throughout colonial times, the dance is now dying along with the sea.
Exploring the forgotten meaning of the ancient names, the artist recovers an erased cultural memory. In this hybrid work, part poem, part documentary, Cecilia Vicuña creates new bridges between the ancestral and the avant-garde.CECILIA VICUñA (biography above).
* We are not able to offer free admission for Poetry Center members or SFSU students to this special event. Discounted tickets (senior and SFSU students) are available only at the Roxie Theater.
More about Kon Kon
More about Cecilia Vicuña
• Tuesday FEB 21
Pamela Z
solo performance of works for voice, electronics, and video
5:00 pm @ Knuth Hall Theater, Creative Arts Bldg, SFSU, free
in celebration of the exhibition
"SmARTspace" opening FEB 21 @ Fine Arts Gallery, SFSU
PAMELA Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampling technology, and video. One of the pioneers of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers in her solo works that combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. In her current performance work, she uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures.
She has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She's created installation works and has composed scores for dance, film, and new music chamber ensembles. Since 1986, she has been producing “Z Programs”, an ongoing series of interdisciplinary events in which her own work has been featured along with that of other experimental artists in various genres. She has collaborated with a wide range of composer/performers, media artists, and choreographers including Miya Masaoka, Joan Jeanrenaud, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Momo Koga, Leigh Evans, and Jo Kreiter.
Pamela Z's new interactive web-based work Baggage Allowance was officially launced in summer of 2011 at baggageallowance.tv where it remains permanently available.
More about Pamela Z
Photo courtesy Ars Electronica
• Thursday MAR 8
Sawako Nakayasu
reading & talking on translations from contemporary Japanese poetry
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
co-sponsored with the Dilena Takeyama Center for the Study of Japan and Japanese Culture, SFSU
SAWAKO NAKAYASU was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books of poetry include Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press, 2005), and So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press, 2004).
Her books of translations of Japanese poetry include Time of Sky//Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata (Litmus Press, 2010) and For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions, 2008) — which won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent — as well as Four From Japan (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2006) featuring four contemporary poets, and To the Vast Blooming Sky (Seeing Eye Books), a chapbook of poems by the Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa. Her translation of Sagawa’s Collected Poems is forthcoming in 2013 from Canarium Books. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese.
More about Sawako Nakayasu
• Saturday MAR 10
Sawako Nakayasu and Michael Cross
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell Street, $10
SAWAKO NAKAYASU (biography above).
MICHAEL CROSS is the author of In Felt Treeling (Chax, 2008) and Haecceities (Cuneiform Press, 2010) and editor of Compline and On: Contemporary Practice (with Thom Donovan). He also edited and published the Atticus/Finch series of chapbooks. Other projects include Involuntary Vision: after Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (Avenue B, 2003) and Building is a process / Light is an element: Essays and Excursions for Myung Mi Kim (Queue Books, 2008). He lives in Oakland where he studies 21st century poetry.
Little Red Leaves has published a group review of Michael Cross's Haecceities, originating as a chain of emails between David Brazil, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, C.J. Martin, Kyle Schlesinger, and Jamie Townsend, that resulted in an 80-page book, including Cross's essay “Notes on Labor and Regeneration.”
Go to The Disinhibitor
• Thursday MAR 15
Dodie Bellamy and Alan Gilbert
Open Workshop
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
ALAN GILBERT (biography below).
DODIE BELLAMY’s most recent books include the buddhist (Publication Studio) and the chapbook Whistle While You Dixie (Summer BF Press). Time Out New York named her chapbook Barf Manifesto (Ugly Duckling) “Best Book Under 30 Pages” for 2009. 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.
A novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor, known for her non-traditional use of sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, Dodie Bellamy is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. She lives in San Francisco with writer Kevin Killian and three cats, and teaches, among other places, at the California College of Arts and in SFSU's MFA in Creative Writing Program.
Her blog is Belladodie
More about Dodie Bellamy
• Friday MAR 16
Dodie Bellamy and Alan Gilbert
7:30 pm @ the Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street (at Gough), free
DODIE BELLAMY (biography above).
ALAN GILBERT is the author of the poetry book, Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem, 2011), and a collection of essays and articles entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press, 2006). A second book of poems, The Treatment of Monuments, is forthcoming from Split Level Texts in the fall of 2012.
His poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and The Nation, among other places. His writings on poetry and art have appeared in a variety of publications, including Artforum, The Believer, Bookforum, Cabinet, Modern Painters, Parkett, and the Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn.
Photo of Alan Gilbert by Nina Subin
• Wednesday MAR 28
Osvaldo Sánchez and Omar Berrada
with Tarek Elhaik
7:00 pm @ Art History Lecture Hall, Fine Arts 193, SFSU
vocation(s): a discussion about interdisciplinary practice
with poet and translator Omar Berrada and Mexico City Museum of Modern Art Director Osvaldo Sánchez, moderated by SFSU Cinema Professor Tarek Elhaik
co-sponsored with SFSU Departments of Art and Cinema
Osvaldo Sánchez, artistic director of inSite 05 and curator of Interventions, served as co-curator of inSITE2000–01. Between 2000 and 2001 Sánchez acted as director of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo and, from 1997 to 2000, he was director of the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. He has also served as art columnist for Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper, and director of the International Forum of Contemporary Art Theory. Sánchez has lectured extensively at numerous institutions, including Bard College, the Guggenheim Museum, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and University of Texas, Austin, He has written for publications such as Third Text, Grand Street, Sulfur and Art Nexus.
Omar Berrada was born and raised in Casablanca and has lived in Paris for the past 10 years. He has translated, into French, works from several English-language poets and is active in the collective Double Change. He has translated or attempted to translate, alone or in company, texts by Jennifer Moxley, Rod Mengham, Mark Ford, Lisa Jarnot, Steve McCaffery, Sarah Riggs, Kathleen Fraser, Abdessalam Ben Abdelali, Stanley Cavell, Robert Glück, Kristin Prevallet, Joan Retallack, Avital Ronell, Adrienne Rich, Forrest Gander, Marie Borel and Jalal Toufic. He has hosted shows on French national radio and curated lectures and conferences at the Pompidou Center. He was the curator of the Tangier International Book Fair in 2008. Today he runs the library and translation program at Dar Al-Ma’mûn in Marrakesh.
Photo of Omar Berrada
• Thursday MAR 29
Khaled Mattawa and Ravi Shankar
Poetry Center Book Award Reading
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
"As Alexis de Tocqueville, referenced in Mattawa’s title, has written, 'history is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.' Mattawa's book is one of these true originals that substantially deepens our notion of what a poem can do and what shape it might take.... This is a book of extraordinary courage, that helps give voice to the voiceless and that sees, even in those we would demonize as terrorists, a shared destiny. For all of its ambition, innovation, and empathy, Khaled Mattawa's Toqueville is a stunning collection of verse that by utilizing the tools of modernity helps us construe where we are, how we arrived, and where we can go from here."
—Ravi Shankar, from judge's statement, Poetry Center Book Award
KHALED MATTAWA was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in 1979. He received an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University and a Ph.D from Duke University. Mattawa is the author of four books of poetry, Tocqueville (New Issues Press, 2010), Amorisco (Ausable Press, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable Press, 2003) and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). He has translated nine books of contemporary Arabic poetry by Adonis, Saadi Youssef, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Hatif Janabi, Maram Al-Massri, Joumana Haddad, Amjad Nasser, and Iman Mersal, and has co-edited two anthologies of Arab American literature.
Mattawa’s latest volume of poetry Tocqueville (New Issues Poetry and Prose, Western Michigan University, 2010) won the 2011 Poetry Center Book Award, selected by Ravi Shankar, as well as the Arab American National Book Award. His translation of Adonis’s Selected Poems won the PEN USA Center annual poetry in translation prize. He is a currently associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
RAVI SHANKAR is the founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat, one of the world's oldest electronic journals of the arts. He has published or edited seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including the 2010 National Poetry Review Prize winner, Deepening Groove. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond, called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared as a commentator on the BBC and NPR, received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong and an Associate Professor of English at CCSU.
Ravi Shankar served as judge for the Poetry Center Book Award, and will join Khaled Mattawa, whose Toqueville was selected to win the award, in a reading for the Poetry Center.
• Thursday APRIL 5: Ghassan Zaqtan and Fady Joudah
rare U.S. visit, premier Palestinian poet and poet-translator
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan on a rare U.S. visit
with award-winning poet-translator Fady Joudah
on the publication of Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me
In this inspired translation of Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, Ghassan Zaqtan's tenth and most recent poetry collection, Fady Joudah brings to English-language readers the best work by one of the most important and original Palestinian poets of our time. With these poems Zaqtan enters new terrain, expanding the vision of what Arabic poetry in general and Palestinian poetry in particular are capable of. Departing from the lush aesthetics of such celebrated predecessors as Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, Zaqtan's daily, fragile narrative, and at times austere aesthetics represent a new trajectory, a significant leap for young Arabic poets today.
In his preface to the volume, Joudah analyzes and explores the poet's body of work. "Ghassan Zaqtan's poems, in their constant unfolding," Joudah explains, "invite us to enter them, exit them, map and un-map them, code and decode them, fill them up and empty them, with the living and non-living, the animate and inanimate, towards a true freedom."
Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of ten collections of poetry. He is also a novelist, editor, and filmmaker. Born in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, he has lived in Jordan, Beirut, Damascus, and Tunis. He returned to Palestine in 1994 and now lives in Ramallah.
Ghassan Zaqtan on the PBS Newshour
Fady Joudah is a practicing physician of internal medicine and an award-winning poet and translator. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry, The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press/Bloodaxe) won a TLS/Banipal translation prize from the society of authors in the UK in 2008. His second translation volume of Darwish's lyric epics, If I Were Another (FSG) recieved a PEN translation award in 2010. Fady Joudah's first book of poetry The Earth in the Attic was selected by Louise Gluck for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2007. His second poetry collection, Alight, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2013. He lives with his family in Houston, where he works as an emergency room physician. He has been a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001.
Fady Joudah on translating Ghassan Zaqtan
and at the Poetry Foundation
For Stacy Doris
a day in celebration of the poet's life and work
• Thursday APRIL 19: Double Change collective in honor of Stacy Doris
featuring members of the Paris-based poetry collective Double Change: Abigail Lang and Sarah Riggs,
with Norma Cole and Cole Swensen
4:30 pm @ Humanities Symposium Room, HUM 587, SFSU, free
• preceded by a Tribute to Stacy Doris, 1962–2012
from the SFSU community
3:30 pm @ Humanities Symposium Room, HUM 587, SFSU, free
Please join us in celebrating the life and work of Stacy Doris
Stacy Doris, internationally acclaimed poet, translator, and teacher died in San Francisco, California, on January 31, 2012. She was 49 years old. Doris was an Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where she taught since 2002. She was the author of six books of poetry in English, and three books in French (one of poetry and two fictionalized memoirs). She had battled cancer (eventually diagnosed as leiomyosarcoma) for the past three years.
Her books of poetry include The Cake Part (Publication Studio, 2011; released with a set of video adaptations by friends, available on Vimeo and as video mash-ups); Knot (University of Georgia Press, 2006), Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book (Roof Books, 2006), Conference (Potes & Poets, 2001), Une Année à New York avec Chester (P.O.L., 2000), Paramour (Krupskaya, 2000), La vie de Chester Steven Wiener écrite par sa femme (P.O.L., 1998), and Kildare (Segue Foundation, 1994).
A new book of poetry, Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit is being published this month by Nightboat Books. The Poetry Center is hosting a Book Party April 19, 7:30 pm, at the Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street (see details below) in San Francisco.
Several recordings of her reading her work, 2001-10, are available online at PennSound, including her sound piece, Water Oracle (2007).
More on Stacy Doris at the Electronic Poetry Center
photo: Stacy Doris & friends, June 8, 2009, rue Mazarine, Paris
Abigail Lang is an associate professor at the University Paris-Diderot where she teaches American literature and translation. Her research focuses on modernist and contemporary American poetry and increasingly on contemporary French poetry as well. She is the author of Le monde compte rendu. Lectures de Louis Zukofsky (ENS editions, forthcoming) and the co-author, with Thalia Field, of A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, 2010). With Andrew Zawacki she co-edited a special triple-issue of Verse on French poetry and poetics (2007). One of the curators of the Double Change reading series, she has been co-editing Double Change’s film archive of poetry readings, as dvds and now online. Recent translations include David Antin, John Cage sans cage (with Claire Delamarre, MMM|Presses du réel 2011), and Rosmarie Waldrop, La Route est partout (l’Attente, 2011); forthcoming are translations of Thalia Field and Lorine Niedecker.
Sarah Riggs is the author of the forthcoming Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, spring 2012), as well as Waterwork (Chax Press, 2007), Chain of Miniscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street Editions, 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), and 36 Blackberries (Juge Editions, 2011). Her book of essays, Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, and O’Hara was published by Routledge in 2002. She has translated or co-translated from the French the poets Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and, most recently, Oscarine Bosquet. Several of Riggs’ works of poetry have appeared in French translations by Françoise Valéry and others, with the publishers Éditions de l’attente and Le Bleu du ciel. A member of the bilingual poetry collective Double Change, and founder of the interart non- profit Tamaas, she divides her time between the U.S. and Paris, where she is a professor at NYU-in-France.
Norma Cole’s recent books of poetry include Natural Light, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 and Spinoza in Her Youth. A new book, WIN THESE POSTERS AND OTHER UNRELATED PRIZES INSIDE, will come out from Omnidawn Press in the fall. A book of essays and talks, TO BE AT MUSIC recently appeared, also from Omnidawn. Her translations include Jean Daive’s A Woman With Several Lives, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writers on Writing From France. Cole has been the recipient of awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2008 she was a Regents’ Lecturer at UC Berkeley and in 2011 was a columnist at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.
Cole Swensen's most recent books are Noise That Stays Noise, essays on poetics (University of Michigan Press), and a volume of poetry and graphics, Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse), and, forthcoming in April 2012 from the University of California Press, Gravesend. A translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism, she is also the founding editor of La Presse, which publishes contemporary French experimental writing. She teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University and divides her time between Providence, Rhode Island, and Paris. Photo by Anthony Hayward.
• Thursday APRIL 19:
Stacy Doris’s Fledge:
A Phenomenology of Spirit
Book Party and Reception
7:30 pm @ the Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street (at Gough), free
Please join us for a celebration to help welcome into the world this remarkable work of poetry
This book stands for:
a) a close translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
b) a mainly at arm’s length appropriation of some poems by Paul Celan
these being two extremes in language of
c) a log of disasters
d) a register of miracle
e) also this is a bunch of love poems of undying love
Where the sky launched this thrush
to my call, a cat strikes
rocks to my call I name
strands through your song I-know
I-know I-know I point
and name myself not tookto be rocked, then sweep me
if not mouthed you flood with
yourself but I need to
sound each particular
—Stacy Doris, from Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit (Nightboat Books, 2012)
“Poetry and the world of imagination meant everything, were everything for Stacy. Her innovative writing was different from anyone else’s, and different from herself. In other words, every book was a different experiment in poetry. And yet these experiments are all chapters from the book of Stacy Doris.”
—Norma Cole
• Thursday April 26: Aaron Shurin, Open Workshop
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Join us for an Open Workshop focusing on Aaron Shurin's new book, Citizen
Aaron Shurin is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Citizen, a collection of prose poems (City Lights Books, 2012) and King of Shadows, a collection of personal essays (City Lights Books, 2008.) His writing has appeared in over thirty national and international anthologies, and has been translated into seven languages. Shurin’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. He has lived in San Francisco since 1974, where he is a Professor in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.
• Thursday April 28: Aaron Shurin and Craig Santos Perez
reading their poetry
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $10
Aaron Shurin (biography above).
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing.
• Thursday MAY 3: Chris Vitiello and Brent Cunningham,
Open Workshop
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Two poets and friends present an afternoon of poetry and conversation involving the world of one another's work.
Chris Vitiello lives in Durham, NC with his two daughters. His most recent poetry book is Obedience (Ahsahta, 2012), a doubled aphoristic series within two front covers. Other books include Irresponsibility (Ahsahta, 2008) and Nouns Swarm A Verb (Xurban, 1999). When he’s not putting on poet’s plays in spaces around town or writing custom poems as the Poetry Fox, Vitiello is a freelance arts, performance, and hockey writer for various newspapers, magazines, and blogs.
Brent Cunningham (biography below).
• Friday MAY 4: Chris Vitiello and Brent Cunningham
reading their poetry
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell Street, $10
Chris Vitiello (biography above)
Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist living in Oakland, California. He has published two books of poetry, Bird & Forest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and Journey to the Sun (Atelos, 2012). He currently works as the Operations Director at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. He and Neil Alger are the co-founders of Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. He has been working on a novel since at least the Clinton administration.
• POETRY CENTER DIGITAL ARCHIVE will be launching rare archival recordings from the 1960s during Spring 2012.
For updates LIKE us at facebook.
Unless otherwise noted:
All programs free to SFSU students and Poetry Center Members
Reduced low-income admission
No one turned away for lack of funds
NOTE: No free or reduced admission to the NOV 7 Ferlinghetti-Snyder Poetry Center Benefit Reading. Tickets as announced.
Poetry Center programs supported by San Francisco State University and College of Humanities, the Creative Work Fund, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and Friends of the Poetry Center. BECOME A MEMBER
the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art,
medicine, and somatic practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
POETICS OF HEALING BLOG
Every disease is a musical problem; every cure a musical solution.
—Novalis
Poetics: theories of creation. The art of how things are composed. Healing, too, an art of composition, the art of making whole — which may yet lie in asymmetry, fragmentation, chronicity, disability.
The Poetics of Healing began with a desire to re-examine the therapeutic dimensions of poetry and other art, and to explore the uses of poetic language, sound, and imagery in a wide range of medical and somatic practices, across different cultural traditions. Through the diversity of our participants — who include poets, physicians, ethnographers, historians, psychotherapists, diviners, disability activists, visual and performance artists — the series has evolved to ask questions about how healing is imagined, created, and performed on multiple levels, from the subtle body to the body politic. Our intention is to foster a public forum where different perspectives and practices can be put into conversation, to make possible an interdisciplinary exploration of method, scientific and creative, somatic and scholarly, in ways that might be unexpected and mutually generative.
Some highlights of past programs:
- Psychologist Eric Greenleaf presented “Balinese Healing of the Visible and Invisible Worlds,” showing original films of Ayurvedic healing with interior mantram, trance healing in ancestors’ voices, and community trance ritual.
- Poet and builder Robert Kocik presented plans for a “Prosodic Building” based on the ancient Greek Asklepion or dream-healing clinic, an architectural space that would function as healthcare.
- Anthropologist, linguist, and diviner Dennis Tedlock performed Mayan incantations used to treat illness.
- Anthropologist and diviner Barbara Tedlock gave a reading of her initiation into Quiché Mayan shamanism and spoke about facilitating the integration of indigenous modalities into medical schools.
- Historian and emergency medicine physician John Tercier presented scholarship on the Royal Humane Society and 18th century poems of instruction for resuscitation.
- Professor of international studies, historian, and ecologist Mutombo M’Panya spoke about pain and exile, and sang a song from his home village in Zaire.
- Composer and sound therapist Silvia Nakkach led us in singing healing melodies (ragas).
- In Listening to Listening, a colloquium co-sponsored by the UCSF School of Medicine, a group of poets and physicians talked about the parallels between their work, meditating on the act of listening across poetic composition, the taking of medical histories, diagnosis, poetry therapy, and the teaching of medical humanities to foster what Guy Micco, director of the Joint Medical Program at UC Berkeley and UCSF, calls the “empathic imagination.”
- The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita and translator William Rowe gave bilingual readings from Zurita’s INRI, which “responds to the need to find a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of volcanoes and into the sea.”
- Psychiatrist Nuri Gené-Cos presented cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in refugees and survivors of state violence, and spoke about the use of drawing, fragrance, and poetry in her practice.
ni pena ni miedo
Above: Raúl Zurita, phrase etched in enormous letters into the earth of Chile's Atacama Desert, 1990s.
During Spring 2010, we invited philosopher Alphonso Lingis to explore with us the relationship between “wounds and words” (The First Person Singular), pain and time, touch and response; how we recognize and address the suffering of the other, how we live and work within “the community of those who have nothing in common.”
We also invited artists and disability culture activists Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, and Sadie Wilcox, of the performance collaborative The Olimpias, to lead us in exploring the rich poiesis each of our embodiment affords. To rethink and create collaborations between and across art, healing, and somatic practice. To work, as Neil Marcus writes, “with this key idea: disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity, disability is an art.”
And during May 2010, a special group event was held showcasing work in progress by participating artists.
Join us in the communal experiment that is The Poetics of Healing.
Image: Sadie Wilcox
Supported by a two-year project grant from the Creative Work Fund, the Poetry Center presents throughout 2009–2010 a series of programs under the title The Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice. Curated by San Francisco poet and scholar Eleni Stecopoulos, the project brings together innovative writers, artists, and medical practitioners doing parallel work within altogether different traditions and practices.
Guest participants read, perform, and discuss their own work, talk with each other, and engage with audiences. Throughout the project, Eleni Stecopoulos is writing an original book on the subject, incorporating material by other participants and as arising out of the public forum.
An originating Spring 2008 program, The New Asklepion, guest curated by Eleni Stecopoulos for the Poetry Center, set the prototype for the project as a whole. Portions of our Spring 2009 program series were presented in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine Medical Humanities Initiative, the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, and Meridian Gallery.
Programs in the series include:
Saturday March 15, 2008
Eric Greenleaf and Robert Kocik
Wednesday–Saturday March 12–14, 2009
Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock
Thursday & Friday April 9-10, 2009
Raúl Zurita, William Rowe and Nuri Gené-Cos
Friday May 8, 2009
Listening to Listening
On the words of medicine and the medicine of words
Joan Baranow
Mellody Hayes
Guy Micco
David Watts
Saturday May 9, 2009
a symposium on the Poetics of Healing
Afternoon program, 4:00–6:00 pm
John Tercier
Elise Ficarra
Amber DiPietra
Mutombo M'Panya
Evening Program, 7:30–9:30 pm
Robert Gottesman
Robert Kocik
Silvia Nakkach
Monday–Thursday November 16–19, 2009
Morris Berman
Wednesday–Thursday March 3 & 4, 2010
Alphonso Lingis
Thursday April 29–Saturday May 1, 2010
Olimpias Artists Residency
Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, and Sadie Wilcox
Thursday May 20, 2010
Margit Gallanter, Bhanu Kapil, Beth Murray, Eleni Stecopoulos
POETICS OF HEALING BLOG
SOME PAST EVENTS
Wednesday–Thursday March 3 & 4, 2010
The Poetics of Healing
a series of programs featuring special guest
philosopher and writer Alphonso Lingis
curated by Eleni Stecopoulos
Wednesday March 3, Dominion of Shadows
a lecture/performance by Alphonso Lingis
• 7:30 pm @ Subterranean Arthouse
2179 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, $10 ($5 student/low income)
Thursday March 4, a public conversation with
Alphonso Lingis and Eleni Stecopoulos
VENUE HAS BEEN CHANGED TO
• 3:30 pm @ the Green Arcade, 1680 Market (at Gough), free
The Poetics of Healing project, with its program series curated for the Poetry Center by poet Eleni Stecopoulos and supported by the Creative Work Fund, continues March 3 and 4 with two programs featuring philosopher and writer Alphonso Lingis.
Body Modifications. Dangerous Emotions. Trust. How the body knows itself. What I have to imagine. Wounds and words. Alphonso Lingis has written some of the most compelling and visceral recent work on the intimacies and estrangements of being in the world: what it’s like to live in a body, to speak with others, to join “the community of those who have nothing in common” but our mortality. Montaigne wrote that to philosophize is to learn to die. For Lingis, to philosophize is to learn to live in this community in death, to speak in a form that is “destined for all…that subjects whatever it says to the contestation of anyone from any culture or history or latitude, accepts any stranger as its judge” (Abuses). Whether writing about the strategies of a torturer, or caring for an ill parent, or on body fluids and the divine, or about the joy we feel on the dance floor as the most accurate measure of reality, Lingis fulfills the promise of a philosophy where bodies are actors intelligent with hope, lust, pain, dishonor, mourning, jealousy, rage. In dialogic writing utterly alive with the risk of meditation and poem, letter and anecdote, the embrace of the mundane and the extraordinary in equal measure, “Alphonso Lingis has single-handedly created an entirely new genre of thought, art, and emotion” (Michael Taussig).
"Our voice is a wave rising and being moved across the rumbling and rustling, pounding and chattering earth and city. It relays and responds to the voices of things." (The First Person Singular)
"It is not in elaborating a common language and reason, in collaborating in transpersonal enterprises, that the human community takes form. It is in going to rejoin those who, fallen from the time of personal and collective history, have to go on when nothing is possible or promised." (Abuses)
"Then what is distinctive about philosophy is not a certain vocabulary and grammar of dead metaphors and empirically unverifiable generalizations. One's own words become philosophy, and not the operative paradigms of a culture in which one is a practitioner, in the measure that the voices of those silenced by one's culture and its practices are heard in them."
(Abuses)
Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, is a philosopher and author. He has translated works by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty into English, and has held positions at Duquesne (Pittsburgh) and Penn State University. He is well known for the performative nature of his public lectures. Lingis travels the world with especial bases in Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, and Africa. He has a penchant for exotic animals and plants and has retired on a property in Baltimore with his menagerie of creatures.
His books include: Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984), Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), Phenomenological Explanations (1986), Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994), Abuses (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994), Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995), The Imperative (1998), Dangerous Emotions (1999), Trust (2003), Body Modifications: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (2005), The First Person Singular (2007), and Violence and Splendor (forthcoming 2009).
Alphonso Lingis photo by Jefferson Jackson Steele, Baltimore City Paper; book cover photos by Alphonso Lingis
Thursday April 29–Saturday May 1, 2010
The Poetics of Healing
a series of programs with special guests
Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus,
Sadie Wilcox • Olimpias Artist Residency
curated by Eleni Stecopoulos
Thursday April 29, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story
a reading/performance by Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus
• 3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Friday April 30, Embodied Poetics:
Visual Arts–Performance Arts
Olimpias Artist talks
with Petra Kuppers and Sadie Wilcox
• 7:30 pm @ Subterranean Arthouse
2179 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, $10 ($5 student/low income)
Join us for a three-day residency with Olimpias Artists Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, and Sadie Wilcox — part of our ongoing collaborative POETICS OF HEALING project, guest-curated by poet Eleni Stecopoulos, and supported by the Creative Work Fund.
POETICS OF HEALING BLOG
• Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community artist, Artistic Director of The Olimpias (www.olimpias.org) and Associate Professor of English, Women's Studies, Theatre and Dance at the University of Michigan. Her books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007), and, together with Neil Marcus and photographer Lisa Steichmann, the poetry collection Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (Homofactus Press, 2008). http://www-personal.umich.edu/~petra/
Who is Neil Marcus? Neil is an icon in US disability culture. In the 1980s and 90s, he performed his stage show Storm Reading over 300 times all over the US, the UK and Canada. Parts of it were on Maria Shrivers Sunday Today Show. Neil has also written and performed other plays in the SF Bay Area, and is a frequent guest in Butoh and Contact Improv Festivals. His poetry has found its way to many people, on the back of fridge magnets, policy statements for NGOs, university reading lists, and many peoples private stash of important things to know about life. Neil is still recognized in the street for his role in an episode of ER. Mainly, though, Neil engages in his own street theatre show, singing, clowning and performing in the everyday. http://www.olimpias.org
Sadie Wilcox is an artist and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. Her video work has been included in screenings at Harvard University's Carpenter Center for the Arts in Cambridge, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, and Extravagant Bodies Film Festival in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. She was recipient of the Best Documentary Award at the XII Black International Cinema in Berlin, Germany. Sadie currently serves as Program Manager for BayKids, a nonprofit organization that provides filmmaking opportunities for hospitalized youth. She teaches art in the Community Education Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and works as a teaching artist at the Asian Art Museum. http://www.sadiewilcox.com
ARTIST STATEMENT :: Sadie Wilcox explores the convergence of physical injury, illness, rehabilitation and recovery. Her artwork takes various forms including drawing, painting, video and multimedia. Sadie’s interdisciplinary approach incorporates multiple vantage points, including the first-hand perspective of the hospital patient, the supporting role of the caregiver, and the clinical analysis proposed by medical professionals. Visual metaphors related to memory fragmentation are a central theme in Sadie’s artwork. Her previous work in multimedia video installation reconstructs traumatic memory fragments associated with the impact of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on human physiology, brain function, and memory formation. Her recent artwork investigates the relationship between cancer, environmental pollution, and landscape.
Saturday May 1, BURNING workshop and performance
@ Subterranean Arthouse, 2179 Bancroft Way, Berkeley
• Workshop 2:00–5:00 pm, $10-20 sliding scale ($5 student/low income)
• Performance 7:00 pm, $10 ($5 student/low income)
SFSU students free, no one turned away for lack of funds
Image: Sadie Wilcox.
THE POETICS OF HEALING
project supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
POETICS OF HEALING BLOG
Poetry Center programs supported by San Francisco State University and College of Humanities, the Creative Work Fund, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and Friends of the Poetry Center. DONATE
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