Poetry Center Calendar: SPRING 2009
FEBRUARY | MARCH | THE POETICS OF HEALING | APRIL | MAY |
February
Thursday FEBRUARY 5
kathryn l. pringle
and JULES BOYKOFF
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Both Jules Boykoff, who lives in Portland, and has focused his work on U.S. suppression of political dissent and innovative modes of resistance, and kathryn l. pringle, formerly of San Francisco and an SFSU alumnus in writing, and since moved to distant Durham, North Carolina, have new books out in the Heretical Texts series from Factory School .
kathryn l. pringle is a graduate of the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her book, RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY, is just out from Factory School/Heretical Text Series. She is the author of The Stills (Duration Press) and Temper & Felicity are Lovers (TAXT). Her poems can be read in The Denver Quarterly, Fence, 14 hills, 580 Split, and Sidebrow, among others. She is an editor at the literary magazine minor/american, and the co-founder of the minor american reading series in Durham, N.C., now funded by Duke University.
Jules Boykoff is the author of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009), The Slow Motion Underneath (with Jim Dine, Steidl Editions, 2008), and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). His political writing includes Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (co-authored with Kaia Sand) (Palm Press, 2008), Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007), and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge, 2006). Boykoff lives in Portland, Oregon.
ALSO: Head downtown the same evening to San Francisco's terrific new bookstore/cultural destination The Green Arcade, located right at the nexus where Gough Street, Haight Street, and Market Street conjoin. Walk West on Market from Civic Center BART or Van Ness MUNI station.
Subject: Book Release Party: Pringle and Boykoff at The Green Arcade in SF
Who: kathryn l. pringle and Jules Boykoff
When: Thursday, 5 February at 8 p.m.
Where: The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco (415) 431 6800
Thursday FEBRUARY 19
DEREK FENNER and
RYAN GALLAGHER
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center 512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Out of Lowell, Mass., Jack Kerouac's hometown, the bosses of Bootstrap Productions and alumni of Naropa University, poet-publishers Derek Fenner and Ryan Gallagher will visit San Francisco to read from their own works as well as recent books from the press— including, maybe, a preview of John Wieners' A New Book from Rome.
Derek Fenner is an artist/ writer and the author of My Favorite Color is Red and his recently published first assemblage novel, I No Longer Believe in the Sun: Love Letters to Katie Couric. He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and currently resides in Lowell, MA. He is the project director of “Unlocking the Light: Integrating the Arts in Juvenile Justice Education,” a program he designed to incorporate art in the educational classrooms for students and teachers in MA Department of Youth Services residential facilities. He is one of the founders of Bootstrap Press.
Ryan Gallagher lives in Lowell, MA, with his wife and daughter. He is the author of Plum Smash and Other Flashbulbs, published in 2005, and The Complete Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, a project he began at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where he completed his MFA and where he was the recipient of the William Burroughs scholarship. He received his B.A. in Literature from Boston College. He also studied Thangka, traditional Tibetan Buddha paintings, for two years and is an accomplished oil painter. Ryan currently teaches high school literature and is co-founder of Bootstrap Press.
Thursday FEBRUARY 26
JULIA CONNOR and
SHARON DOUBIAGO
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Julia Connor is a poet, teacher, and visual artist living in Sacramento, California with her husband, actor James C. Anderson, and their dog Shakespeare. She studied writing at New College of California under the late poet, Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals worldwide. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently OAR from Rattlesnake Press. In the late '80s she served as instructor and Assistant Director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa University. She is a sought after teacher of workshops and Master Classes in poetry and was named Poet Laureate of Sacramento, 2005-2008. Photo credit: Vicky Sjoberg.
Sharon Doubiago has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem Hard Country (West End Press), the booklength poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh), which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the story collections, El Niño (Lost Roads Press), and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Graywolf Press), which was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list: Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast. Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems has just been published by the University of Pittsburgh, and Volume One of her memoir, My Father’s Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Girl, is due out from Red Hen Press. She’s an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota and a board member of PEN Oakland.
March
Saturday MARCH 7
A. B. SPELLMAN and WAYNE WALLACE
7:30 pm @ the Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market Street (near 6th St., walk west from Powell Street BART), $5
A. B. Spellman, after laboring long at the National Endowment for the Arts, is back in public with his first book of new poems since the late 1960s. Coffee House Press published Things I Must Have Known last year. His Four Lives in the Bebop Business (a.k.a. Four Jazz Lives) is one of the most satisfying books on music to come out of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and Spellman’s also worked regularly as jazz commentator for National Public Radio.
Tonight he’s joined by Wayne Wallace, master trombonist, band-leader, and one of our finest local musicians. In duo performance with multi-instrumentalist Melecio Magdaluyo (a companion in several ensembles including Grammy Award winning Anthony Brown's Asian American Jazz Orchestra), Mr. Wallace will both open up and close the evening for us.
Photos: Wayne Wallace, by Katy Raddatz, San Francisco Chronicle; A. B. Spellman, Academy of American Poets.
the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
Thursday–Saturday MARCH 12–14
BARBARA TEDLOCK and DENNIS TEDLOCK
Thursday MARCH 12
UCSF Medical Humanities Grand Rounds
"It's the Words You Say That Do It: Indigenous Healing Practices"
5:00 pm @ Cole Hall, Medical Science Building, UC San Francisco School of Medicine, 513 Parnassus Avenue, free
(presented in collaboration with the UCSF School of Medicine Medical Humanities Initiative, and UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine)
Saturday MARCH 14
"Speaking of Healing and
Healing by Speaking"
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street, $5
(park at Sutter– Stockton Garage; walk 4 blocks north from Powell St BART; presented in collaboration with Meridian Gallery)
Barbara Tedlock is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she teaches courses in psychological anthropology, religion, and the arts, as well as holistic health and integrative medicine. Initiated as a daykeeper by the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala, she is on the Board of Directors of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners and is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Shamanic Practice.
Her books include Time and the Highland Maya; Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations; The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Dialogues with the Zuni Indians; and The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. Her new book, forthcoming from University of California Press, is titled Healing Medicine: Ancient Wisdom in Modern Healthcare.
Dennis Tedlock is Distinguished Professor in the Poetics Program and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is an initiated daykeeper, practicing within the divinatory tradition of the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala.
His books include Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller; Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya; Days from a Dream Almanac; and Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice.
He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Now in production at UC Press is 2000 Years of Mayan Literature.
Thursday MARCH 19
HAYAN CHARARA and FADY JOUDAH
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center 512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Hayan Charara, poet and author of The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon University Press), is the editor
of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press).
Fady Joudah, whose book of poems The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Younger Poets Award (selected by Louise
Glück), is also the translator of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s volume of poems The Butterfly’s
Burden (Copper Canyon Press). They will each be reading from their own and from other poets’ works.
Photo: Hayan Charara
April
Thursday APRIL 2
LEWIS WARSH and DENISE NEWMAN
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center 512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Lewis Warsh’s many works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography include, of recent vintage, Inseparable: Poems 1995–2005, Ted’s Favorite Skirt, and The Origin of the World.
Coeditor of The Angel Hair Anthology, and editor/ publisher of United Artists Books, he directs the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Photo by Marie Warsh.
Denise Newman is the author of two books of poems, Human Forest and Wild Goods (both Apogee Press). She has translated two novels by the recently deceased Danish poet Inger Christensen — The Painted Room and Azorno (the latter is forthcoming from New Directions).
An alumnus of SFSU, she teaches in the MFA program in writing at California College of the Arts.
Saturday APRIL 4
BILL BERKSON, KIT ROBINSON and LEWIS WARSH
7:00 pm @ the Unitarian Center 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5
A festive triple-header Saturday evening featuring hometown heroes Bill Berkson and Kit Robinson, with New Yorker Lewis Warsh out west on a rare occasion.
Bill Berkson’s Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems will be fresh off the
boat for this reading (Coffee House Press). Kit Robinson’s The Messianic Trees:
Selected Poems 1976–2003 (Adventures in Poetry) is just in print. And Lewis
Warsh is author to the recent omnibus collection Inseparable: Poems 1995–
2005 (Granary Books). Photo: Kit Robinson and Emma.
Note early start time, so that our poets can stretch out.
the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
Only West Coast Appearances
Thursday & Friday APRIL 9–10
renowned Chilean poet RAúL ZURITA
with translator
WILLIAM ROWE and DR. NURI GENé-COS
Thursday APRIL 9
a bilingual reading and conversation
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Thursday APRIL 9
a bilingual reading, presentation by Dr. Nuri Gené-Cos, and conversation
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street, $5
(park at Sutter– Stockton Garage; walk north from Powell St BART; presented in collaboration with Meridian Gallery)
Friday APRIL 10
a bilingual reading and conversation 12:00 noon @ UC San Francisco School of Medicine, Nursing Building N225, 513 Parnassus Avenue, free (presented in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine Medical Humanities Initiative)
We are very honored to present the first public U.S. readings from Raúl Zurita's book INRI as translated by William Rowe (published 2005 in Chile; English-language edition Marick Press, 2009). Zurita's bilingual reading on Thursday night will be followed by a presentation by physician Nuri Gené-Cos, and a public conversation with the poet.
Raúl Zurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is one of the best known poets of Latin America. His work, as part of a movement that began in the 1970s during the era of Chile's dictatorship, seeks to find new forms of expression, radically different from those of Pablo Neruda.
"During the Pinochet regime, Zurita had the guts to bulldoze a poem into the sand of the Atacama Desert. It read ni pena ni miedo : neither pain nor fear. Long ago, it would have been obliterated by rains and wind, but the people in the nearest village still carry shovels into the desert on Sundays and they turn over the sand of the letters to keep it fresh. . . ." (Forrest Gander)
Dr. Nuri Gené-Cos, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists since 1993, is a trauma therapist, specializing in neuropsychiatry. Based in London, she conducts individual and family therapy for people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, with a special interest in victims of war and violence.
William Rowe, poet, and translator of Raúl Zurita’s INRI (Marick Press, 2009), is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of eight books on Latin American literature and culture.
Translator Will Rowe, on Raúl Zurita's INRI:
"INRI 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. In order to bring this event, that was neither seen nor heard, into language, Zurita invents a form and language capable of bringing it into the present. The one place where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the landscape of Chile: the mountains, desert, and sea. There the event might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are no places from which to speak, ‘the stones cry out’.
Zurita’s INRI works with long breaths and large blocks of meaning: intensities that overrun the usual measures of speech and syntax. To read it is to experience a strange force pulsing through the language, breaking apart its usual channels, and opening unseen and unheard zones. . . .
INRI is distinctive in that it does not speak out of individual sorrow, though this is not missing from the work, but seeks, rather, a new space, out of which love might be asserted as prime human reality, a space which might give birth to a different type of society."
Thursday APRIL 16
JOHN GIORNO
7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5
John Giorno makes a rare, do-not-miss appearance in San Francisco, performing his work an intimate setting. Arrive early! He's in town, coincidentally, just as the de Young Museum's Warhol Live exhibition is making waves in Golden Gate Park.
With the release of Giorno's new book Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007 (Soft Skull Press, 2009), explosive experimental configurations of queer sex and spiritual practice get fused, in powerful works for performance and the page, with close explorations of the nature of the mind and raw fragments of everyday life.
A New York native, Giorno was involved, as writer, performer, scene-maker, and actor, from early on in the fabled New York scene around Andy Warhol and friends. He starred in Warhol’s epic minimal-maximalist film Sleep; he founded Giorno Poetry Systems in 1965; and in 1968 he created the remarkable Dial-A-Poem project, archived for the ages via multiple commerically issued — now near impossible-to-find — audio LPs, cassettes, and CDs featuring dozens of adventurous souls (poets, musicians, painters, performers) at work with words and voice. He founded the AIDS Treatment Project, with decades of work as generous advocate and activist, and has been an important force in the development of Tibetan Buddhism in the West.
John Giorno last read and performed his works for the Poetry Center on November 4, 1974, when he appeared on a double-bill with William S. Burroughs, that time as this visit, at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco. The program was co-sponsored by Gay Sunshine magazine. After an unbelievable 35 years, we are more than eager to welcome him back.
Be there, or be subdued.
Co-sponsored by City Lights Bookstore and Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press
Thursday APRIL 23
LETTERS TO POETS
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center 512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Bay Area Celebration of Letters to Poets:
Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community
Edited by Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax, Letters to Poets (new from Saturalia Books), is a collaborative experiment conducted over approximately one year's time, which brought together 28 poets from various backgrounds, aesthetics, and geographical locations and asked them to write letters to each other. The letters are uncensored: the only condition was that the writing spoke to the poets' most urgent concerns.
Please join Wanda Coleman, Leslie Scalapino, Paul Hoover, Claire Braz-Valentine, Traci Gourdine, Albert Flynn DeSilver, plus the editors, reading excerpts from what Cornel West calls "a courageous and visionary book."
Jennifer Firestone is from San Francisco and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her latest chapbook, from Flashes, is forthcoming from Sona Books. She is the Poet in Residence at Eugene Lang (The New School), and her work has recently appeared in How2, Fourteen Hills, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Dusie, moria, MIPOesias and others.
Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006) and Room (a+bend press, 1999). Her writing has been supported by the California Arts Council, the Academy of American Poets, and the San Francisco Foundation. Currently she is making Q, a series of “home movies” about raising a daughter on the grounds of a state prison. Recently interim Director at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, she teaches at San Francisco State University.
Photos: Jennifer Firestone; Dana Teen Lomax.
Thursday APRIL 30
Poetry Center Book Award Reading
NOAH ELI GORDON and SESSHU FOSTER
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center 512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Noah Eli Gordon’s Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Books, 2007), a National Poetry Series winner selected by John Ashbery for publication, was also selected by Sesshu Foster to receive the Poetry Center Book Award.
The annual Poetry Center Book Award has been given by The Poetry Center, based at San Francisco State University, since 1980 to a single outstanding book of poetry published in the previous year. The Poetry Center Book Award carries a cash prize and an invitation to read, along with the award judge, at The Poetry Center in San Francisco.
The author's other works include Figures for a Darkroom Voice (in collaboration with poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson and artist Noah Saterstrom) and A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues). Noah Eli Gordon writes a column on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: Review of Books and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.
Sesshu Foster, East Angeleno author of the realist masterpiece City Terrace
Field Manual (Kaya Books), the experimental novel Atomik Aztex, and his new work of poetry, World Ball Notebook (just out from City Lights Books), among other works, served as judge for the Poetry Center Book Award, and will join Noah Eli Gordon, reading from his own work.
"As happa, mixed Anglo/Japanese American, growing up in the mestizaje of Chicano barrios of East L.A. during the Vietnam War, one of the first things I had to recognize was that my identity was not “ethnic,” per se, that is, my identity is not cultural (or sub-cultural — as the hyphen between ethnic-and-American, such as Italian-American or Armenian-American or Arab-American would suggest), it is historical and political. That is to say, my ID is American — my diverse heritage is that of America; this heterogeneous character to each of our identities goes back to Manifest Destiny, to the frontier and the genocide of American Indians, to an expanding American empire through the contemporary era of SFFTA, CAFTA and globalization today."
For recent comments on Sesshu Foster's writing, look here.
May
Saturday MAY 2
ANNE WALDMAN and AMBROSE BYE
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery 535 Powell Street, $5
(park at Sutter– Stockton Garage; walk north from Powell St BART)
Anne Waldman’s new investigative hybrid poem Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets)
explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. To be performed Saturday May 2 with composer-musician Ambrose Bye, the poet’s son, this rich new work — they’ve recorded sections as the duo Matching Half, for Fast Speaking Music — draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power.
The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.
Among the most prolific, adventurous, and dynamic writers in the USA, Anne Waldman has authored and edited dozens of books of poetry, anthologies, collections of essays, recorded works, video, besides co-founding with Allen Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
She is a model of the activist poet in our times. We welcome her to San Francisco from her hometown of New York City. Salute!
Friday MAY 8
Listening to listening an afternoon colloquium
in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine Medical Humanities Initiative
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
Friday MAY 8
12:00–1:30 pm @ UC San Francisco School of Medicine,
Toland Hall, Room U-142 in UC Hall,
533 Parnassus Avenue, free
LISTENING TO LISTENING
On the words of medicine and the medicine of words
Featured participants
Joan Baranow
Mellody Hayes
Guy Micco
David Watts
speaking and in conversation with Eleni Stecopoulos
Joan Baranow, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at Dominican University of California. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and the anthology Women Write Their Bodies: Stories of Illness and Recovery ( Kent State University Press). Her book of poetry, Living Apart, was published by Plain View Press. With her husband, physician and poet David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine, airing nationally in 2008-2009.
Mellody Hayes Founder of the UCSF Student Writers Group, Mellody Hayes is a fourth year medical student interested in ethnographic research and narrative medicine.
Guy Micco Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Berkeley, and at UCSF, Guy Micco directs UC Berkeley's Academic Geriatric Resource Center, is Co-Director of the Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law, and a member of the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program. He works as a Hospice physician at Bruns House (Hospice of the East Bay) and is a member of the Ethics and Social Justice Committee for Elder Care Alliance. His published writings include "Listening to the Story of Medicine," "When Disability is in Question," and numerous articles and reviews on death and dying. He has taught and lectured on subjects including "Death and Art," "Death, Suffering, Spirituality, and Medicine," "Imaging and Imagining Pain and Suffering," and "Narrative and Medicine."
David Watts’ second book of stories from the practice of medicine, The Orange Wire Problem, is just released from the University of Iowa Press. This book, following his Bedside Manners (Random House, 2005), is a collection of short stories which focuses upon the intricacies and surprising complexities to be found within the doctor-patient relationship. He has published four books of poetry and a CD of “word-jazz.” Watts is founder and director of Writing The Medical Experience Conference and Workshops held alternately at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and in the San Francisco Bay Area, an NPR commentator on All Things Considered, a producer of the PBS program Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine, a gastroenterologist at UCSF, a classically trained musician, an on-camera television host, and a medical columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Mill Valley, California with his wife and sons.
Eleni Stecopoulos is a San Francisco poet and independent scholar. Co-recipient, with The Poetry Center, of a Creative Work Fund grant for 2008-2010, she is curator of "The Poetics of Healing" and is writing a creative-critical book on the topic that draws on program events and the conversations they generate. Stecopoulos is the author of a poetry chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006) and the forthcoming collection Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2009). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and has taught writing and literature at these schools as well as Bard College, St. John's University, and San Francisco State University.
Saturday MAY 9
a symposium on the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
Two interrelated programs, with a break for dinner
Saturday MAY 9
4:00–6:00 pm AND 7:30–9:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street, $5 admittance per program
(park at Sutter– Stockton Garage; walk 4 blocks north from Powell St BART)
in collaboration with Meridian Gallery
THE POETICS OF HEALING a symposium
"Our desire is to create a dialogue between artists whose work has somatic and therapeutic dimensions; healers and healthcare practitioners attuned to words, sound, imagery, and creativity in their practice; and others (scholars, ethnographers, activists, community workers, patients) who study or work toward healing. Some topics of interest include: the medicine of words and sound; healing the social body; listening and empathy; indigenous traditions; medical humanities. . . ." –Eleni Stecopoulos
Afternoon program, 4:00–6:00 pm
John Tercier
Elise Ficarra
Amber DiPietra
Mutombo M'Panya
Dinner break, 6:00–7:30 pm
Evening Program, 7:30–9:30 pm
Robert Gottesman
Robert Kocik
Silvia Nakkach
Symposium bios:
Amber DiPietra is a poet who lives and works as a member of the Bay Area disability community. In perpetual cartilage deficit, her interests include tracking the orthopedic body in real time, personal fossil records, translating the phantom kinetic self, ¡accion mutante! politics, and warm waters. By day, she proffers information about talking books, tactile maps, and more at the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. You can read more from her in a recent issue of Tarpaulin Sky or at adipietra.blogspot.com
Elise Ficarra is a poet, writer, editor, arts administrator, Buddhist practitioner, yogi, and Zen Hospice volunteer. Swelter, her first book of poems, won the Michael Rubin Chapbook Award in 2005. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and she is co-editor of the journal minor/american and Associate Director of The Poetry Center at SFSU, where she has also taught Creative Writing and English Composition. She is interested in the recuperative and restructuring capacities of language and listening and how writing and mindfulness practices inform one another.
Robert Gottesman "I am a 61 year old 4th generation physician who was trained at the University of Chicago. I spent five years doing full time emergency room work and twenty five years as a generalist in a small community North of Santa Barbara, California. Working, at times, with 3 and 4 generations of a single family I would provide comprehensive cradle to grave care to my patients. I have a master degree in depth psychology and I took a two year sabbatical to study Eastern philosophies. I am
interested in the relationship of healing and language and have used poetry and my own essays as adjunctive therapeutic modalities."
Robert Kocik is a poet and architect living in Brooklyn, NY. He has developed an experiential science called The Prosodic Body. "For the Prosodic Body, medicine is as intrinsic to poetry as music; speech signals hormonal secretion; inequity is treatable by tone; and our susceptibility to words is infinite." His publications include Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2001), Rhrurbarb (Field Books/Periplum Editions, 2007) and the 2009 All Peoples Calendar.
Mutombo M'Panya, PhD, is originally from Congo/Zaire; he received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Planning and Management of Natural Resources, and was an instructor in their School of Public Health. As a Fellow of the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, he also was coordinator of NGO projects. He has had more than 20 years of experience working with NGOs and has served on various boards, including the International Development Exchange, World Neighbors, and the Center for Global Health. M'Panya worked on USAID projects in Africa involving health planning, nutrition, and manpower training. He also worked as a consultant with UNDP and the World Bank, and with health and nutrition projects for the Community Systems Foundation, and has consulted on maternal health projects in Ecuador and Nicaragua. Currently, he is the director of the Science and Humanities Integration Project at Sonoma State University, where he teaches in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies. He teaches and lectures in epidemiology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. One of his courses there deals with issues of music and healing, including pain management.
Silvia Nakkach M.A., MMT, was named by Utne Reader "one of forty cutting-edge artists that will shake the art world in the new millennium." A pioneer in the field of sound and transformation of consciousness, she is an award-winning composer, a psychologist, a music therapist, and a voice-culturist. She has created The Yoga of the Voice, a ground-breaking curriculum of vocal therapeutic techniques that have become landmarks in the field of sound and music therapy. Her interest in indigenous cosmology and spirituality has led her to collaborate with legendary teachers from Indian and South American shamanic traditions, and for 27 years she has studied Indian classical music with maestro Ali Akbar Khan. She is on the faculty and is the academic advisor for the Sound, Voice, Music Healing Certificate at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Nakkach is the founding director of the Vox Mundi Project & School of the Voice, an international organization devoted to the preservation of sacred musical traditions combining music, service and spiritual practice, with school sites in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Barcelona, Spain, New York, and the Bay Area. She has released seven CD albums; her CD Ah, The Healing Voice is widely played in health care centers to create a healing atmosphere during radiation and surgical interventions. She is a contributing author to various books, including Music and the Human Process, Music in Human Adaptation, Transpersonal Consciousness, and Music Therapy at the End of Life, and is presently working on her latest book: Yoga of the Voice. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
John Tercier received his MD from the University of Alberta and PhD in Humanities from the University of London. He practices as an emergency medicine specialist in Canada and has taught history of medicine and cultural studies at universities in the United Kingdom and United States. This symposium, The Poetics of Healing, provides an opportunity to explore from yet another point of view his interest in the intersection of the arts and medicine. His work on the cultural significance of resuscitative protocols/rituals, The Contemporary Deathbed: The Ultimate Rush, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. His current research focuses on the trauma of representation.
Eleni Stecopoulos is a San Francisco poet and independent scholar. Co-recipient, with The Poetry Center, of a Creative Work Fund grant for 2008-2010, she is curator of "The Poetics of Healing" and is writing a creative-critical book on the topic that draws on program events and the conversations they generate. Stecopoulos is the author of a poetry chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006) and the forthcoming collection Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2009). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and has taught writing and literature at these schools as well as Bard College, St. John's University, and San Francisco State University.
the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
—Novalis
"We associate the myth of Orpheus with poetry, yet Orpheus also symbolizes the wounded healer. A rich field of correspondence lies between creative and medical practice—in the ways we name, respond to, and treat our conditions, individual and collective. In the Asklepion, the ancient Greek health center, patients were treated with dreams, words, and songs. Poetics refers to theories of making, the art of how things are composed. Healing, too, is an art of composition—the art of making one(self) whole. I look at poetics and healing as sympathetic arts: they both have to do with relation, or how things are connected. They’re both arts of the whole.
"Healing my own illness provided me with an extraordinary context in which to explore the body’s poiesis, affording me the gift of having to “enter [my] own experiment” (Morris Berman.) Now, with The Poetry Center, I want to create a collective experiment, a public forum where different practices can be put into conversation, to make possible an interdisciplinary exploration of method—scientific and creative, medical and poetic—in ways that might be mutually generative and unexpected.
"What might happen if we asked doctors to look at the art of their practice? What might happen if we asked poets to consider the somatic and therapeutic dimensions of their art? to talk to each other about the words of medicine and the medicine of words?"
–Eleni Stecopoulos
Supported by a two-year project grant from the Creative Work Fund, the Poetry Center will be hosting throughout 2009 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 will bring together innovative writers, artists, and medical practitioners doing parallel work within altogether different traditions and practices.
Guest participants will read, perform, and discuss their own work, talk with each other, and engage with audiences. Throughout the project, Eleni Stecopoulos will be writing an original book on the subject (incorporating material by other participants and as arising out of the public forum) to be published late 2010 by Factory School.
Portions of our Spring 2009 program series are 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. For details on these programs:
Wednesday–Saturday MARCH 12–14
Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock
Thursday & Friday APRIL 9–10
Raúl Zurita, William Rowe and Nuri Gené-Cos
Friday MAY 8
Listening to Listening
Saturday MAY 9
a symposium on the Poetics of Healing
Under the heading The Poetics of Healing, our project seeks to cultivate an important dialogue that rarely happens across disciplinary borders; to highlight the role of poetic language, sound, and imagery in somatic practices, medical treatment, and patient experiences; to explore the therapeutic and somatic dimensions of poetry and other art; and to acknowledge and encourage a conversation that is already occurring among writers and in various academic medical humanities and healthcare fields, but has not yet been formally established as a field of artistic and intellectual inquiry.
With the recognition that poetry and medicine share the sense of engagement in a practice, or calling, and work within multiple historic traditions, we’ll highlight the progressive, experimental communities that have been conspicuously prominent in San Francisco in the arts and medicine.
Programs supported by San Francisco State University, the Creative Work Fund, Grants for the Arts/Hotel Tax Fund (City of San Francisco), National Endowment for the Arts, and Friends of the Poetry Center.
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