Poetry Center Calendar: SPRING 2013
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
• POETRY CENTER DIGITAL ARCHIVE will be launching circa 100 rare archival recordings from the 1960s during SPRING 2013.
For updates LIKE us at facebook.
NOTE: THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION: UPDATES COMING SOON
• Tuesday FEB 5
Fukushima/Tanka/San Francisco: The Voice of NOW in an Ancient Poetic Form
4:30–6:00 pm @ César Chavez Student Gallery, SFSU, free
co-sponsored by the Dilena Takeyama Center for the Study of Japan & Japanese culture, Foreign Languages and Literature Department, César Chavez Student Gallery, and the Poetry Center
a student reading and exchange, featuring SFSU graduate students in Japanese and Creative Writing
in conjunction with the exhibition
Voices from Japan: TANKA—After the Tsunami
Each week in Japan, new poems appear in newspapers. Following the disaster of March 11, 2011, thousands of readers submitted tanka poems to Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest daily newspapers. The poets: fisherman, housewives and loved ones testified to the physical and emotional damage left in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The earthquake measured magnitude 9.0, the most powerful ever to hit Japan. The resulting waves reached up 10 stories before rushing six miles inland, collapsing homes, shops, schools and temples. The Fukushima nuclear power plant was devastated. This exhibition seeks to remember the over 15,000 lives lost and to recognize the recovery and healing that continues today. More than a year after the devastating events, Isao Tsujimoto, director of Studio for Cultural Exchange, assembled and selected a collection of 75 poems, 29 of which are on display, along with photo collages and Japanese calligraphy from Voices from Japan: Despair and Hope from Disaster, in New York. These works convey the resiliency of the Japanese people and are being paired with photographs, live calligraphy, video, cultural literary exchange, and a storytelling performance.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke,
with John-Carlos Perea & Jimmy Biala
Thursday FEB 7: 4:30 pm
@ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
a reading by renowned poet, editor & Native American activist
accompanied with live music by multi-instrumentalist/ ethnomusicologist John-Carlos Perea, from SFSU’s American Indian Studies faculty, and his frequent collaborator, drummer/percussionist Jimmy Biala
CAConrad and Kazim Ali
Thursday FEB 21: 4:30 pm
@ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
a reading & conversation with two celebrated contemporary poets
Rosa Alcalá and Roberto Tejada
Thursday FEB 28: 4:30 pm
@ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Rosa Alcalá and Roberto Tejada
Friday MAR 1: 7:00 pm
@ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell St., San Francisco
$10, $5 student/low income
two appearances by remarkable poet/translator/scholars
The Last VisPo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998–2008
with editors Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis, and guests
Thursday MAR 14: 4:30 pm
@ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Friday MAR 15: 7:00 pm
@ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell St., San Francisco
$10, $5 student/low income
two events celebrating 21st century international
visual poetry anthology
Andrew Levy and Julie Ezelle Patton
Thursday MAR 21: 4:30 pm
@ The Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
two poet-performers reading and in conversation
Mark Wallace, Andrew Levy,
and Julie Ezelle Patton with Paul Van Curen, guitar
Saturday MAR 23: 7:00 pm
@ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell St., San Francisco
$10, $5 student/low income
an evening of poetry and performance
* * *
* * *
• POETRY CENTER DIGITAL ARCHIVE will be launching circa 100 rare archival recordings from the 1960s during SPRING 2013.
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
Home | Return to Top | San Francisco State University © 2007
Valid XHTML, CSS.