Poetry Center Calendar: FALL 2009
SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER |NOVEMBER | DECEMBER | THE POETICS OF HEALING |
Please note new times & venues
======== FIGHT THE BUDGET CUTS ========
Thanks to the Governor and State Legislature
Nine Unpaid Work Furlough Days for Fall 2009
September 4, 8; October 23, 26;
plus five employee elective dates
Information HERE
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September
Thursday September 10 Poets Write Crime
Summer Brenner and Owen Hill
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
7:30 pm @ the Green Arcade , 1680 Market (at Gough), free
Bay Area poets-turned-novelists Summer Brenner and Owen Hill read from their new noir novels, just published by San Francisco's PM Press. Brenner (who is published in Gallimard's prestigious serie noire) wrote I-5, A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex as "a curse on them that force women and girls into bondage" and focuses on human trafficking in California. Hill's protagonist in The Incredible Double has two jobs. Most of the time he's your average bisexual book scout in Berkeley. Some of the time he's...not quite a private detective. Two terrific new novels... ¿East Bay Noir?
Join us! Things happen in the afternoon at the Poetry Center, and in the evening downtown at the Green Arcade (right where Gough and Haight spill into Market Street, a brief walk west from the Van Ness MUNI stop).
Summer Brenner was raised in Georgia and migrated west, first to New Mexico and eventually to northern California, where she has been a long-time resident. She has published ten books of poetry, fiction, and novels for children (a current project, funded by the Creative Work Fund, initiates a projected series of novels wherein local history gets told through the stories of young peoples’ family histories). Her work includes the recently released noir thriller from PM Press, I-5, A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex. Gallimard’s serie noire published another of Brenner’s crime novels, Presque nulle part, which PM Press will release in 2010 by its English title, Nearly Nowhere.
Owen Hill was born and raised in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles, and after a string of jobs (baggage service at LAX, union rep, warehouse drone, janitor, “paid” political volunteer, icecream maker) landed in the Bay Area where he eventually settled into Moe’s Books in Berkeley as a buyer and events coordinator. After taking a workshop with Tom Clark at UC extension he came to believe that poetry was his calling. He has since published seven slim volumes of poetry and read his poems at various venues around the country. His first mystery novel, The Chandler Apartments, was written in Berkeley, in the building so named. The second, The Incredible Double, is just out from PM Press.
Thursday September 24
Maurice Scully and Tinker Greene
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5
“A lifetime ago Maurice Scully invited me to read in Dublin. Out of the blue he made things happen in a space whence, historically, writers had travelled to breathe. Then there were letters from Lesotho, poems, books, occasional meetings. Maurice is central to poetry in Ireland: a serious (in that he does it) writer with a sharp eye, a keen ear and a wry intelligence. The rare chance to hear him shouldn't be missed.”
—Tom Raworth
Maurice Scully was born in Dublin in 1952 and spent his childhood between Clare, the Ring Gaeltacht, and Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, after which he spent some restless decades between Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Africa.
In a writing career that began in the early ’70s he has published over a dozen volumes of poetry and taken part in conferences and festivals in the UK and US where his readings are prized as key interpretations of his complex, engaging work.
Join us for his first ever San Francisco appearance.
Maurice Scully's recent books include the long poem composed in several books collectively titled Livelihood (Wild Honey Press, Dublin) and Doing the Same in English: A Sampler of Work 1987-2008 (Dedalus), drawing on the extensive 'Things That Happen' project as well as three new books, Several Dances, Humming and Work.
“For me, Scully is one of the very best Irish poets alive today.” —Mike Begnal, Fortnight
“A light for the language indeed.”—Harry Gilonis, The Gig
Originally from New England, where he founded and led Poets’ Mimeo Cooperative in Burlington, Vermont, Tinker Greene is a sometime wilderness traveler and photographic image-maker, as well as a teacher and practitioner of poetry.
After some years in New York (Lower East Side in the sixties) and then Vermont, he relocated to San Francisco more than two decades ago, where he participated in the early years of the New College Poetics Program, and in 1991 married the painter Virginia Arana Greene. A selection of his photographs is currently planned to illustrate a collection of Philip Whalen’s uncollected prose forthcoming from Poltroon Press.
Recently, he has begun issuing a series of chapbooks, which he distributes directly to interested parties: titles include Man Going to His Doom, Solid Smoke, and Funeral Sentences.
Joanne Kyger has characterized these recent poems as “‘right on’ … spare and perfect.” She, as per usual, is herself right on. They are.
October
Thursday October 8
Giancarlo Campagna and Clive Matson
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Giancarlo Campagna is a poet, actor, community worker, and graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at SFSU. He started writing poems in his mid-twenties, and acting in his mid-thirties, and has been active in San Francisco’s writing community organizing readings, teaching poetry to youth, and collaborating on projects interfacing youth with working poets. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and their son Carlo, born May 13, 2009.
Matson co-edited, with the late Allen Cohen, the anthology An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind - Poets on 9/11 (Regent Press, 2002), which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs (2007), a passionate, erotic and spiritual voice evolved from the Mainline poems. On Mainline to the Heart:
“… in Matson’s poems, so many of which are truly exposed, bare of any protection (including that, still, of good taste), the horror is real. Joy is real too, in this work, but horror is more commonplace, in part because these poems speak about desire with an exactitude too excruciating to be pornographic. The power of their eroticism has not diminished, unaffected by time or the vagaries of style.” —Peter Weltner
Thursday October 15
Renee Gladman and Susan M. Schultz
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
Renee Gladman is the author of four works of prose, most recently Toaf (Atlelos, 2008) and Newcomer Can’t Swim (Kelsey Street, 2007), and a collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling (Roof Books, 2005). Event Factory, the first installment of her Ravicka trilogy, will be published in Fall 2010 by Dorothy, a Publishing Project. She teaches in the Program for Literary Arts at Brown University, and edits Leon Works, an independent press for prose and other thought-projects based in the sentence.
Susan M. Schultz is a poet, critic, and publisher. Author of four books of poetry, Aleatory Allegories (Salt, 2000), Memory Cards and Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001), And Then Something Happened (Salt, 2004), and most recently Dementia Blog (Singing Horse, 2008), she edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 1995), and wrote A Poetics of Impasse (Alabama, 2005). She edits Tinfish Press and teaches at the Univerity of Hawai`i-Manoa.
Thursday October 29 The Year Before the Flood
Ned Sublette reading and singing
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
7:00 pm @ the Green Arcade , 1680 Market (at Gough), free
Ned Sublette is not to be missed! Take our word for it. Live in person, like they say, direct from New York via New Orleans, he’ll be reading from and talking about his great new book, The Year Before the Flood (Lawrence Hill Books), and will follow up with a short set of terrific, original songs.
As a musician, Ned Sublette has been active for three decades, writing and performing. Willie Nelson recorded his "Cowboys Are Frequently (Secretly Fond of Each Other)"; there are two CDs of song collaborations with conceptual "word artist" Lawrence Weiner, that feature The Persuasions, Junior Mance, et al.; and his terrific alternative Latin CD, Cowboy Rhumba, will be followed very soon by a new recording of irresistible original songs, Kiss You Down South.
His books are brilliant, original, necessary reading, sure instance of "the right work at the right time." On The Year Before the Flood:
“Ned Sublette sees the edgy magic of New Orleans with the eyes of both an insider and outsider. From race to music, from Parasol’s bar to the Mardi Gras Indians, he really gets it.” —Walter Isaacson
“Ned Sublette is the rarest of writers. He possesses the empathy of Studs Terkel, the ambition of John Dos Passos, the ear of Mannie Fresh, and the fire of Joe Strummer, a mind that is restlessly capacious and a heart large enough to match.” —Jeff Chang
Wary of accolades? Show up yourself and get on board. The Year Before the Flood follows The World That Made New Orleans and what has swiftly become the book in English on the subject, Cuba and Its Music (both from Lawrence Hill, both excellente).
Head's up! At the Green Arcade, rumor has it the party will feature a new cocktail in his honor, The Sublette. Photo by Jennifer Kotter.
November
Thursday & Friday November 5 & 6
Ana Božičević and Amy King
Thursday, November 5, 3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
HUM 512, SFSU, free
Friday, November 6, 7:00 pm @ the Green Arcade
1680 Market (at Gough), free
. . . the stain of poetry is on the world . . .
—William Carlos Williams
Ana Božičević emigrated to NYC from Croatia in 1997. Her first book of poetry is Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, Fall 2009). She's also the author of new chapbooks The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn (Dusie Press) and God, Sebastian, Amy (Flying Guillotine Press), as well as Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). For more, visit nightcommute.org.
Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), and forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things and I Want to Make You Safe. She moderates the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), and the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO), and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. For more info, amyking.org.
Saturday November 7 PAMLA Conference Reading
Linda Russo and Robin Tremblay-McGaw
3:15 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
co-sponsored by Pacific Ancient & Modern Languages Association
Join us for this rare Saturday afternoon reading at the Poetry Center, in conjunction with the annual PAMLA Conference, hosted this Fall, November 6 and 7, by San Francisco State University. Poet-scholars Linda Russo and Robin Tremblay-McGaw, both participants in a panel the previous day (Bay Area Writers: Beyond the "Beat Thing," chaired by Steve Dickison, Poetry Center Director), will be reading their own poems this afternoon.
Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999). Her essay “Precious, Rare, and Mundane” serves as preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). A graduate of the Poetics Program, at SUNY Buffalo, she lives and teaches in Pullman, Washington.
Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s poetry and other writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and in the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press, 2004). Her chapbooks include: after a grand collage, and making mARKs, and a full-length collection is forthcoming from Ithuriel’s Spear. She edits the poetry blog xpoetics.blogspot.com, and lives in San Francisco.
Monday-Thursday November 16–19 Poetics of Healing
Eleni Stecopoulos and Morris Berman
"It is the truth itself that is healing, not New Age dreams or populist fantasies. And the truth is that real change is historical..."
— Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture
Monday November 16
7:30 pm @ Moe's Books
a poetry reading by Morris Berman and Eleni Stecopoulos
2476 Telegraph, Berkeley, free
Wednesday November 18
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center
"A Question of Values"
a talk by Morris Berman addressing the poetics of healing
1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5
Thursday November 19
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
a conversation between Morris Berman, Eleni Stecopoulos, and you, the audience
HUM 512, San Francisco State University, free
Morris Berman's expertise spans the history of science, heretical movements, spiritual and somatic practices, philosophy and esoteric literature, political economy and globalization, American "exceptionalism"and beyond. His work bears witness to the twinned legacies of bodily repression and capitalism in the West, the “ideologies [that] arise when people feel they have no real somatic anchoring” (Coming to Our Senses), the symbiosis of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Berman’s books stand as uniquely holistic critiques of the institutions and mentalities that took over long ago, and his recent work focuses on the decline of American empire.
Want to think and talk together about our contemporary pathologies and what “healing” might mean at this moment? (including whether talk of healing is misplaced, and why we use organic metaphors to talk about culture)? Want to talk about where heterodox energy locates today and what we can do in “dark ages America?”
Come listen to Morris Berman and take part in the dialogue.
This week-long residency with celebrated cultural historian and social critic Morris Berman, together with poet Eleni Stecopoulos, extends the Poetry Center's ongoing program series The Poetics of Healing, begun during Spring 2009 and continuing into Spring 2010. The Poetics of Healing began with an inquiry into relations between language, healing, and the efficacy of art. Through the diversity of its participants — who include poets, physicians, ethnographers, therapists, diviners, disability activists, and performance artists — it has evolved into a series that asks questions about healing on multiple levels, from the individual body to the body politic.
Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. In 2000 The Twilight of American Culture was named a "Notable Book" by the New York Times Book Review. His other work includes Dark Ages America (2006) and his noted trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness: The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000). His volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, will be released in 2010.
Morris Berman won the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. During 2003-06 he was Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Visiting Professor in Humanities at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, during 2008-9.
Eleni Stecopoulos's first collection of poetry, Armies of Compassion, is being published this year by Palm Press. In 2008, she received a Creative Work Fund grant to curate an interdisciplinary program series for the Poetry Center (The Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice) and to write a creative-critical book, now in progress and forthcoming from Factory School in 2010. Eleni Stecopoulos is on the faculty of the Language and Thinking program at Bard College. She lives in Berkeley.
THE POETICS OF HEALING
Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND
December
Thursday December 3 Black Nature
Camille Dungy, editor, with anthology contributors
C. S. Giscombe, devorah major, Indigo Moor
and Patricia Spears Jones
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
8:00 pm @ the Green Arcade , 1680 Market (at Gough), free
Two readings to celebrate this brand new historical anthology, hot off the presses.
"Black Nature expands the horizon of black poetry from the frequently anthologized themes of blues, social commentary, and urban pastoral, and demonstrates that black is also green." —Robert Chrisman, Editor-in-Chief, The Black Scholar
"The timing could not be better for such a comprehensive look at what black poets have contributed to our understanding of nature. What excites about this anthology is that it is not only the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems by black poets I have read, it is the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems about nature that I have read." —Alison Hawthorne Deming
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy, and due December 1 from the University of Georgia Press, is the first anthology to focus on nature writing —a genre that until now has not been commonly counted as one in which Black poets have participated— by African American poets. While Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of "nature poetry" is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.
Camille T. Dungy, who teaches at San Francisco State University in the Department of Creative Writing, has selected 180 poems from 93 American poets —Phillis Wheatley to our younger contemporaries. These readings will feature anthology contributors reading their own poems as well as work by others unable to be present.
Saturday December 12 George Oppen Memorial Lecture
Rosmarie Waldrop
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $10
The Poetry Center’s annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture will be given this year by celebrated poet, translator, essayist, novelist, and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop.
Her own recent books of poetry include Curves to the Apple, Blindsight (both New Directions), Splitting Image (Zasterle), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn), with Driven to Abstraction forthcoming. Her essays were collected in the volume titled Dissonance (U. Alabama).
She has translated the prose of Paul Celan, and most of Edmond Jabès’s work (The Book of Questions, The Book of Resemblances, etc.), and authored a memoir/study, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès (Wesleyan). She has also translated, from the German, books by Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht and, from the French, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Jacques Roubaud — most recently, Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan. She lives in Providence, RI, and co-edits with Keith Waldrop Burning Deck books. Photo by Ursula Binetti.
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 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) to be published late 2010 by Factory School.
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 so far include:
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
Monday-Thursday November 16-19
Morris Berman and Eleni Stecopoulos
Future programs to be announced.
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 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.
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