Jan 12: Ecstatic Monkey Presents Two Iranian-American Women Poets

Persis Karim
Farnoosh Seifoddini

Thu, Jan 12
7:30 pm
Modern Times Bookstore
Valencia between 19th and 20th
San Francisco

FREE

Persis Karim was born and raised in the Bay Area by her Iranian father and French mother and five brothers and sisters. She is co-editor and contributing author to A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans (George Braziller, 1999) and is the editor of the forthcoming Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas Press, spring 2006). She teaches comparative literature and creative writing at San Jose State University and lives in Berkeley.

Farnoosh Seifoddini received and MFA in Creative Writing San Francisco State University. Post graduation, she's adjusting to having a "real job" while attempting to polish her first manuscript. Farnoosh's most recent publications can be found in the North American Review and she has work forthcoming in the anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. In her free time, she fulfills her incurable obsession with salvaging and reviving old furniture. She is a member of Ecstatic Monkey.

Volunteer with Artifact! Grants Researchers Especially Needed.

If you are interested in being involved with Artifact, please email artifact109@yahoo.com. For the Fundraising Volunteer, please email Chana Morgenstern directly at chanamorgenstern@gmail.com.

Artifact is a community-driven venue for innovative writing in the Bay Area, including a monthly reading series, a chapbook press, and high school writing workshops. Get experience in arts non-profit organizing, events production, book layout, book production, and fundraising. Hang out with like minded writers and artists. We are a registered non-profit, so you can get college/grad credit for this.

Volunteer Descriptions:

Reading Series Volunteer:

The reading series volunteer will assist with planning, organizing, and setup for the monthly reading series. Possible responsibilities include:

• Assistance with curating and publicity
• Creating Flyers
• Creating and sending announcements
• Posting to blog/website
• Checking email and responding (every 1-2 days)
• Posting announcements for other events
• Set up/Clean up

Publications Volunteer:

The publications volunteer will assist in layout, production and marketing of Artifact Press chapbooks. Possible responsibilities include:

• Layout/Design- cover and internal
• Meetings with designers
• Proofreading
• Send out orders/Flyers
• Invoicing
• Mailings
• Website/blog updates
• Publicity event planning
• Distribution assistance

Fundraising:

The fundraising volunteer will assist in research and writing grants to fund Artifacts various projects. Possible responsibilities include:

• Web research grant databases such as The Foundation Center and NYFA.
• Identifying grants that could possibly fund the reading series, small press, or classes we provide.
• Phone calls and meeting with grant providers
• Working with a team of writers to complete one or several grants.

Sunday, December 18 New Yipes

New Yipes *Sunday, December 18 Readings and Films 7-9pm, $4 *21Grand416 25th St.Oakland, CA 94612510-44GRAND*

Rachel Levitsky is the founder and curator of the Belladona reading series at New York’s Bluestockings Bookstore and Belladonna small press, that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Bill Luoma, in his 1998 book, “Works and Days,” writes like an anchorman, not so much an "insider" as a glider on the minimalist way of expressing being alive in groups with a purpose (the team). Once the purpose has been established, a tighter focus begins to take over, the love of women, or narrating Douglas, Bill's friend. Not since Bob Gluck and Bruce Boone's camraderie in the 70s have there been such a literary buddy's movie as this. It's sketchy, and knowing and gleeful. Local filmmaker, David Enos, screens several short experimental films.

Brown & Cunningham at SPT this Friday 11.18.05

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present
Brandon Brown & Brent Cunningham
Friday, November 18, 2005 at 7:30 p.m.

Brandon Brown read brilliantly at the War & Peace party last spring and we are
very pleased to have him back for a full reading now. Brown is the author of
the unpublished books Aphorisms Ghosts, Gnomic Utterances, Metaxia, Four 
Pre-Socratic Philosophers, The Bridge Book, Pool, The Laws, My Life As A 
Lover, Kidnapped, 1616, and Odes, in addition to unpublished translations of
Catullus, Horace, Diogenes Laertius, and Euripides' Hippolytus.  His work has
appeared in Mirage / Period(ical), Small Town, Bombay Gin, Shampoo, and
Crumpets.  He co-curates Performance Writing at New Langton Arts.

Brent Cunningham joins us in celebration of his debut collection, Bird & 
Forest, out this year from Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn. Peter Gizzi
writes"the repeated 'awakenings' of Bird & Forest suggest the wonder of
conversion narrative without the ideological baggage. Engaging myriad
rhetorical 'types,' he exhausts their function to disclose the backstory of
creation, romantic love, and the curious permanence of warfare while
gorgeously demonstrating the resilience of the imagination." Since 1999
Cunningham has worked for Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.


Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to current SPT
members and CCA faculty, staff, and students.
Unless otherwise noted, our events are presented in
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th &
Wisconsin)

http://www.sptraffic.org 

11.12.05 Sara M. Larsen reads at Bird & Beckett Books & Records

Tuesday, 11.15.05

Friends and Students of Diane di Prima Reading Series presents:

Jenny Jo Wennlund

Todd Melicker

Sara M. Larsen

hosted by Diane di Prima

7:30 PM FREE

Bird and Beckett Books and Records

2788 Diamond (near Chenery)

(Glen Park BART Station)

Info: 415.586.3733

ARTIFACT: 11.12.05 7:30PM

ARTIFACT reading SERIES


Saturday, November 12th, 7: 30 PM

2921B Folsom Street (at 25th Street)

byob (yes, you please)

readings by

Sara M. Larsen

Laura Moriarty

Cynthia Sailers

bios

Sara M. Larsen lives in San Francisco where she is the co-editor of the literary journal el pobre Mouse, with Kyle Kaufman, and founder of Ampersand Press & Sound. She currently studies with Diane di Prima and writes for the American Book Review. Her work has been published in 3(therefore)2, Bombay Gin, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Combo, el pobre Mouse, One Less: Art on the Range, and Urvox.


Laura Moriarty’s most recent book is Self-Destruction from Post-Apollo Press. A science fiction novel, Ultravioleta, is forthcoming from Atelos. A Selected Poetry is forthcoming from Omnidawn. Depending on the breaks, A Tonalist may be out in 2006. Laura is currently teaching a class at Mills College and is the Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution.

Cynthia Sailers is the author of Lake Systems (Tougher Disguises Press), and the chapbooks Rose Lungs (atticus/finch) and A New Season (Duration Press). She co-curates The New Yipes Reading Series in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Bay Poetics, Involuntary Vision: After Kurosawa's Dreams, Aufgabe, and pom pom. She is currently in a Doctorate program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

Reading tonight: Nov. 8th: From Sam D'Allesandro's The Wild Creatures

Tuesday, November 8, 7:30 pm

Diana Cage, Rob Halpern, Kevin Killian and Camille Roy read from
The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro 
published by Suspect Thoughts Books)

Cody's Stockton Street

2 Stockton Street at Market, San Francisco
Phone: 415-773-0444

http://www.codysbooks.com/calendar/calendar2.jsp

2 upcoming readings: Nov. 4th & the 7th

Friday, November 4th : 7:30pm

Poetry & Pizza (yay) presents readings by

Kyle Kaufman, Sara Larsen, & Melissa Benham

where you ask?

Escape from New York Pizza
333 Bush near Montgomery BART

free pizza (how can you go wrong?)

$5 benefits Zen Hospice

________________________________________________________________________

also join Kyle, Sara, & Melissa again the following

Monday, November 7th at 7pm

at All Poets Welcome Reading Series

followed by an open mike (so so tempting...)

Happy Hour until 7:00

Gallery Cafe
1200 Mason at Washington
SF, (415) 823-1263.

October 2005 is Funding for Arts Month at the Foundation Center

Quick! Get the moolah while it lasts. The Foundation Center is a great resource for finding grants, as well as free classes on the processes of applying & so forth. Click on the title above or go to: http://fdncenter.org/focus/arts/

Laura Moriarty reading at USF 10/19

READING AT USF WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 19TH 7:30

Laura Moriarty will be reading at the University of San Francisco at the Lone
Mountain Campus at 2800 Turk Blvd, at 7:30 on Wednesday, October 19th. She will
be reading new work from A Tonalist, a book of poetry and poetics, as well as
from the recent Self-Destruction.

Friday, 10/21 Small Press Traffic Reading : Stephanie Young & Melissa Benham

Small Press Traffic

Melissa R. Benham & Stephanie Young

Friday, October 21, 2005 at 7:30 p.m.

at California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 (at Wisconsin St.)

Melissa R. Benham is the author of codeswitching (Subday Press, 2003), as well as the chapbooks repronounceable, surrealist object vs. narrated dream, and recounted. Currently, she curates the Artifact Reading Series, with Chana Morgenstern, and is the publisher/editor for Artifact Press. Her work has appeared in 3rd Bed, el pobre Mouse, How2, Fourteen Hills, Shampoo Poetry, and others. Of codeswitching, Bhanu Kapil writes, "The divinatory act, in Melissa Benham's work, is a movement, as I track it, into the 'dangerous visible'. These are poems written at a location that is constantly disappearing, or burning up."

Stephanie Young is the editor of Bay Poetics, forthcoming from Faux Press, and author of Telling the Future Off, just out from Tougher Disguises Press. She can be found online at http://stephanieyoung.durationpress.com and in person in Oakland, where she hosted house readings from 2003-05. K. Silem Mohammad says of her debut, "in the world reflected by these poems, socio-textual trust is absolutely essential, under the shadow of mercenary workplace ethics as well as the ever-compromised politics of the private."

Free Reading at New College - Oct. 12th

New College of California Cultural Center
766 Valencia St., San Francisco

October 12th, 2005 6:30-9:30

Celebration & Reading for the publication of David Meltzer's David's Copy, edited by Michael Rothenberg, published by Penguin Books.

Special guests readers include

Diane DiPrima
Michael McClure
Joanne Kyger
Clark Coolidge
Gloria Frym
Duncan McNaughton

Free admission and refreshments

el pobre Mouse # 3 : deadline October 15th

CALL FOR WORK
el pobre Mouse #3

el pobre Mouse invites all manner of innovative, electric, and alarming work for our third issue. we encourage you to send in poetry, poetics, prose, hybrid, drama, notes, intvws, essays, sketches, diagrams, flowcharts, love notes, crumpled miscellania. we are interested in work that can provoke further work: conversation, contemplation, response.


submission deadline: october 15


we accept submissions electronically, or by mail:
el pobre Mouse
899 Oak Street #7
San Francisco, CA 94117
or
elpobremouse@gmail.com
www.elpobremouse.blogspot.com

each copy of our third issue will be hand-assembled, and hand-(spray)painted. as always, el pobre is an act of community, and done with love. we look forward to seeing yr work. issue 1 is sold out. copies of issue 2 are available for $5-10 each, sliding scale, from the above address. each copy is a handmade product of our San Francisco collage parties (all are welcome. if you live in the area, contact us if you'd like to come).

thanks for reading, and please forward,
yours, the eds,
kyle kaufman / sara m larsen

ARTIFACT: 10.08.05 : 7:30PM

saturday : october 8th : 7:30 pm

taylor brady

tanya brolaski

dan fisher


bios to come...


2921b folsom street (at 25th/bottom buzzer)

byobeep

for more info: artifact109@yahoo.com
or 415.647.7689


* please note the (permanent?) change from the 3rd sat. to the 2nd sat

this month's flyer comes from a painting by stacy elaine dacheux : cavity

bios of october 8th readers

a r t i f a c t

saturday : october 8th
7:30pm

byob

bios

Taylor Brady is the author of Microclimates (Krupskaya, 2001), Yesterday’s News Factory School, 2005) and Occupational Treatment (Atelos, forthcoming). Recent work as appeared or is forthcoming in Biting the Error (Coach House, 2004), the Faux Press Bay Area poetry anthology, War & Peace, Shampoo, and Eleven Eleven. He lives in San Francisco, and is currently involved in editing/production work on projects including Norma Cole’s CD-ROM, SCOUT (just out from Krupskaya), and a book of Will Alexander’s essays (forthcoming from Factory School).

Tanya Brolaski is the author of Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003), The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004) and Madame Bovary’s Diary (Cy Press, 2005). She studies Medieval and Renaissance poetry at UC Berkeley and writes the blog Swimming for Dummies http://tanyabrolaski.blogspot.com.

Dan Fisher is a sometimes publisher and printer of poetry broadsides and chapbooks, some of which have been published under his press, Flotsam, all others for Eucalyptus Press. He also writes and makes poems too. Some of them have appeared in Magazine Cypress, Boog City, and Bay Poetics (forthcoming). Recently, Sea.Lamb.Press published his chapbook Fugue Report. He’s been in the Bay Area for three years now and can be seen at readings drawing childlike portraits of other poets.

here's yr chance to give us mad props

artifact is in the middle of applying for grants & things in hopes of one day being capable of 1) paying our readers a little something (other than booze), 2) putting out more books, including a lovely review of all our past readers, and maybe an anthology of critical writing, 3) unveiling our master plan of creating workshops where innovative writers teach poetry, fiction, hybrid, collaboration, etc. to teenagers (thus opening up the spoken word only education they primarily get when it comes to contemporary poetry & literary outreach programs), also fulfilling kathleen miller's dream of teaching gertrude stein to 7th graders.

so what we would like from you, dear readers and audience members, are quotes, blurbs, shout-outs, what-have-you, on what you think makes artifact different from other reading series. what, in your humble opinion, is valuable about it. we're thinking, dialogue, community, etc. as marginalized artists inside the literary world of ted kooser and open mics. please feel free to leave quotable comments here or send them to artifact109@yahoo.com.

thank you much & see you on october 8th.

kyle tells all

mr. kaufman of the werdenfield times has written a bit on the last ARTIFACT reading (which was fabulous). thanks to alli, lauren, and brandon for reading their astounding work, thanks to all who came & enjoyed themselves, and to those who didn't come: I feel a little sorry for you.

www.werdenfield.blogspot.com

TOMORROW!!! ARTIFACT: 8 : 20 : 05

artifact nove

brandon brown
lauren shufran
alli warren

saturday, august 20th 7:30pm (we mean it slackers)
byoblah

2921b folsom street (at 25th street)

415 647 7689 artifact109@yahoo.com

bios

Brandon Brown is a poet and translator from Kansas City,

Missouri. He is the author of Kidnapped, an unpublished work

which deals with translation, abduction, love, sex, and Marx.

His previous book, E PODES, was a faulty translation of the

Latin poet Horace which dealt with translation, meter, terrorism,

love, and lunch. With Jocelyn Saidenberg, he co-curates

Performance Writing at New Langton Arts.

Lauren Shufran received her B.A. in Buffalo, New York where she

helped found House Press and the Saucebox forum for women writers.

Her previous, and now very old, chapbooks are 'Day is a Flatland'

and 'A Study of Distance,' both out of House Press, as well as a c.d.,

‘Sound Bytes,’ co-recorded with Sandra Guerreiro. She's currently

at San Francisco State for her M.F.A., and also studying and

sometimes very slowly translating Arabic poetry.

Alli Warren is nordic champion in pace twin competition. She

is a pagan jack certified quality auditor under the auspices of

the american society of quality control and has expertise in the

development of quality. She is so excited she jumps right out of

bed as 3 year olds do at 4. Despite her plans to open an auto

dealership, Alli mostly just publishes "poems" in Magazine Cypress,

The Hat, Shampoo, etc. All in all, Alli is the architect of a rowdy and

iridescent system of astrology that has produced Schema ('04), Yoke

('04), and HOUNDS ('05).

Shampoo 5th Anniversary Celebration : Thursday 8.18.05

shampoo!

Thursday, August 18
6:30pm

GalleryOne San Francisco
One Embarcadero Center, Mezzanine Level
(same building as Embarcadero Cinema)
on the corner of Battery and Clay Streets

Expect to hear poetry from
Brent Cunningham
Bill Berkson
Kit Robinson
Alli Warren
Kevin Killian
Ronald Palmer
Leslie Scalapino
Robert Gluck
Solidad Decosta
Justin Chin
Stephen Vincent
Phil Crippen
Cynthia Sailers
Cedar Sigo
Stephanie Young

ARTIFACT: this saturday

artifact otto

Melissa R. BENHAM

Kyle KAUFMAN

Sean MACINNES

saturday, july 16th
7:30pm

2921B folsom street at 25th
(bottom buzzer)

for more info: call 415 647 7689
email: artifact109@yahoo.com

byob darlings

The Drunk Sheep Cabaret : July 17 : 21 Grand

The New Brutalism Presents: the Drunk Sheep Cabaret

Dont miss a night of Sheepish Debauchery!

Sunday, July 17th at 7pm. $4

at 21 Grand
416 25th St. at Broadway
behind Gods Gym

Free spiked punch if you come wearing a sheepsuit.

Hosted by the inimitable Mr. Brent Cunningham

Featuring poetry, dance, music, pastorals and playlets
by

-Dana Teen Lomax & John Mello
Even Toed Ungulata

-Stephanie Young, Rodney Koeneke, Kelly Holt, Cynthia
Sailers, Tanya Brolaski and others in "I Pity the Fool
(Who'd Undertake Such a Project)"

-Honeydew (here known as Honeyed Ewe)

-Eleanor Bayne-Johnson
Lamblet: the Drunken Dane

-Edgar Garcia, the amorous Swain (and his Lady)

-Geoff Dyer and Sweet William


and more

I shall be the one to judge between sheep and sheep.
Ezekiel 34.22

They sacrifice sheep together, while they are
themselves covered with
sheepskins.
Ioannes Lydus, De Mensibus

Volunteers needed!  Please contact
brolaski@berkeley.edu

goodbye to Lorenzo Thomas

goodbye to the darling man that was Lorenzo Thomas. I only met him once, but we talked for a while & for some unknown reason he expressed a real interest in seeing my work. it was this kind of generosity that struck me most.

last night when I heard the news I went to Extraordinary Measures, (which he had signed) & read this "for Melissa, in the hope that our voices can ring as beautifully as the poets of ages past. with all best wishes, Lorenzo Thomas."

ARTIFACT: 7 . 16 . 05 : bios

7 . 16 . 05 : saturday : 7 : 30 pm

melissa r. benham

kyle kaufman

sean macinnes

bios

Kyle Kaufman lives in San Francisco, where he lives in a tiny and hidden apartment, and makes his living as an archivist in a downtown architecture office. He is a founding member of the Rock Paper Scissors Collective [Editor's note: Not to be confused with the illustrious Rock! Paper! Scissors! Collective! in Oakland]. He’s also editor (w/ Sara Larsen) of the poetry zine el pobre Mouse, and publisher (w/ Summer Rodman) of Subday Press. His Steely Dan, Subday’s seventh offering, came out in May. In the same month, he joined the blog world with werdenfield.blogspot.com, an ongoing experiment in articulating a poetics, or something approximating that when seen quickly, in the fog, slightly drunk, at night.

Sean Thomas MacInnes was born in Flint, Michigan and has also lived in Murfreesboro and Memphis, Tennesse; Leeds, England; and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado. His work includes Critical Series and A Room Of Trees from Subday Press, and the novel Albert Valentine, parts of which have appeared in Bombay Gin and The American Drivel Review. His poetry has been published in The Stolen Purse, threethereforetwo, and el pobre mouse. He received a BFA in Theatre from The University of Memphis, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He has also studied the Comedia Del Arte and Lazzie Theatres at Bretton Hall College in Leeds, England. Sean has, in one way or another, been involved with over a hundred theatrical productions in Memphis, Leeds, and Boulder; where he last served as a guest director at Boulder High School’s production of one-act plays The Plays The Thing, directing Samuel Beckett’s An Act Without Words. And even more recently he has joined Free Speech TV where he serves as the production coordinator for the show Sourcecode, a ten-part series which centers on progressive social change by framing local issues through the lens/themes of The American Empire.

Melissa R. Benham's bio can be seen to your left. thank you. More about her can also be found at www.geocities.com/evilwarlordprincess

ARTIFACT: 7 . 16 . 05 : excerpt : melissa r. benham

excerpt from melissa r. benham's repronounceable

ARTIFACT: 7 . 16 . 05 : excerpt : kyle kaufman

excerpt from kyle kaufman's Steely Dan
in order to view the image, click on it & zoom in.

Poll: intimacy vs. publicity

here is a question I put to all of you:

in light of last night's reading, which was a lovely & joyful event, packing close to 60 people inside 2921B to hear Micah, Patrick, & Cedar read their poems, I'm wondering how you all feel about possibly moving ARTIFACT to a public space, perhaps a gallery setting

there are pros & cons here, of course

the pro being that we would have more space for people, chairs for everyone, & no one would have to stand on the porch stairs, peering in through the window

the cons seems one being we might have to charge a nominal fee
another being that there is the possibility of losing the intimate, informal, party-type atmosphere that seems key to our readings (which is something I'm really not interested in doing)

o how I wish it were possible to have remained at the cypress house, but I hear that the boys have cluttered up the living rooms with musical equipment & boxes for days

so let me know what your thoughts are on this subject

-melissa

note about viewing this page in explorer vs. firefox

firefox good. explorer bad. I use firefox & so microsoft is aethetically punishing me. or maybe it's blogger. who knows. all I know is that when you all are at your office jobs looking at this blog in explorer all the content appears at the bottom of the page. did I mean to do this? no no no. I would not be so silly.

so standby for technical difficulties.

artifact sette

artifact sette

6.18.05 reader excerpts

Micah Ballard

Benediction

They should like
to be quiet, motionless
no more alive than
before. But now the

royal ghosts are calling
the empty theatres
their thieves, harlots their
garlands. Is it the toil

in spirit or sounds
of open tombs that after
time one becomes numb
& so the hour no longer

comes. Last night
her body was carried
to a small wagon
& a death mask–

cask of her face
& hands were made.
Gone are the guests
bones of those who

have not stood alone.
Buried early morning
& involuntary exile
may their remains

cease to be released
& her name left behind
as both signature
& sign.


En Route

for Jeff Butler

Scores of letters, telegrams & poems
Lie unread on the table. Veiled in the folds
Neglected light, there are no more arches
Only wall & shadow. Head of Nero
Bone-pin & scissor, in uniform departure
They pass in procession & do not stand up
To cold or hunger. We keep moving, making
A white cross over both wrist & shoulder.
This does not work well. There are five marks
The first of which enables life after death
So let the first override the third & second
Override the fourth. There are no
Excavations here, only private vaults
Ceremonies left without safe keeping.


Patrick James Dunagan

Acts of Faith

Gazing at the river I understand suicides

in a sky of burnt pink

my eyes turn to blanks

each and every feeling comes along

on a gorgeous afternoon

of course I continue to walk

it wasn't like I'd go for a swim

all the colors of the clouds

piled high and proud

orange purple grey and brown

white mountains I accept

a later day to climb

Randall Jarrell

Natalie Portman is my crutch in this poem

of truths I've nothing to hide.

Every "I've never heard that name" line

like television background noise

another story of full circle success at a young age.

Competing with the movies is difficult

living with a woman in love with herself.

Committed to the words "I love flesh"

into the Real I fold up the screen

following her down the street

as the cars pass and the agony begins.

Cedar Sigo

LIVE at The East

These tears
bury
They have been
left out
in Hades sun

Patterns in
music I once
found difficult
to distinguish

Now repeat
themselves
in fire and
kiss the ring

connecting
passages
to the black
vaults

and crowned heads
of the
coral seas, the edges
of their
collars

had onyx scaled
to amber
The dust
that we wish
to gather against.
That would flash
on me still

The writings
already
a tape already
revolving
so much


with jewelry
cleaners
concentrate
Make light so
pained
No smoke
in the
lungs.



***note: Cedar's poem has lost its line formatting here.

to see this poem in its original state below or click here.

my apologies.

all copyrights are reserved by the authors of these works. no touching.

ah, the readers of june...

6 . 18 . 05 : saturday : 7 : 30 PM

micah ballard

patrick james dunagan

cedar sigo

bios

Micah Ballard is 29 years old & is from Louisiana. Besides having poems appear in a variety of publications, recent books include: Bettina Coffin (Red Ant Press), Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript (Snag Press), In the Kindness of Night (Blue Press), Emblematic (Old Gold), & Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Auguste Press). As of late, he continues to direct the Humanities B.A. Program at New College of California.

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and has published in Blue Book, Chain, Joe Brainard's Magazine, Riprap, Shrimp!, and WeighStation. Chapbooks include: Young American Poets (Showerhead Press, 2000), U.S.A. (surfZombie, 2001), Of Stone (The Snag Press, 2003), Fess Parker (Red Ant Press, 2003) and After the Sinews (forthcoming, Auguste Press 2005.)

Cedar Sigo is 27 years old. He studied Writing and Poetics at The Naropa Institute. The expanded second edition of his SELECTED WRITINGS was just published by Ugly Duckling Presse. A book of collaborations, DEATH RACE V.S.O.P. is forthcoming.

Cedar Sigo's excerpt as it should appear

Cedar Sigo's excerpt as intended...
click on the image & zoom in.

Small Press Distribution needs you terribly

If you are looking for a way to dedicate a few brief hours to small
press literature, consider voluteering at SPD on Sunday, June 26.

Small Press Distribution (SPD) is having our annual inventory that day,
and we need all the help we can get. As many of you know, SPD is the
nation's only distributor dedicated exclusively to independently-published
and small press literature.

The inventory will run from 10am until 7pm, and you can stop by anytime.

Please let Neil Alger neil@spdbooks.org or Brent Cunningham brent@spdbooks.org 
know that you’re coming beforehand.

Staff and volunteers will be counting every book in the warehouse (there
are over 13,000 titles). It’s a great chance to get intimate with a few
rows of SPD’s titles, and to meditate on the many charms of the number
system.

Plus: every single hour you can donate helps SPD continue to provide
access to hard-to-find titles, especially the thousands of poetry titles
that only SPD carries and champions!

Stop by for a quick hour or two of counting, or stay for the whole day.
If you can stay for three or more hours, we’ll happily give you a 40%
one-time discount on your next order from SPD. There will be pizza and
soda available, and of course the camaraderie of fellow poets, writers
and small press readers.

SPD is at 1341 Seventh Street, cross street Gilman, in Berkeley.

Bird & Forest by Brent Cunningham

Bird & Forest
by Brent Cunningham

104 pages, perfect-bound
ISBN: 1-933254-06-8

$10

order from Ugly Duckling Presse

Advance praise for Bird & Forest:

"Bird & Forest is clear, beautiful writing. There is a simple quality of the well-told-tale to these fractured fables. This is a patient, wise and hilarious work whose intimate tone insinuates itself into your psyche only to have its way with you and then suddenly vanish. What more could you want?"

—Laura Moriarty

"With orations, fables, axioms, proofs, journals, and letters, Brent Cunningham offers a riposte to the confounding realities of empire just when we need it most. The repeated "awakenings" of Bird & Forest suggest the wonder of conversion narrative without the ideological baggage. Engaging myriad rhetorical "types," he exhausts their function to disclose the backstory of creation, romantic love, and the curious permanence of warfare while gorgeously demonstrating the resilience of the imagination."

—Peter Gizzi

creative writing summer class by Ryan Newton at CELLspace

From Ryan Newton:

This Summer I am teaching a six week Creative Writing Course at CELLspace, a non-profit artistic community enabler dedicated to aiding emerging/emergent artists in the bay area and beyond. Class begins July 1st and runs until August 5th each Friday from 7-9pm. It is called The Lyric Voice, and will include examples of verse craft from diverse poets such as: Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Alice Notely, Maria Tsvetaeva, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and many others (subject to change). The best news is the course is quite affordable, only forty dollars for six weeks instruction (I do believe there is a nominal registration fee). For a more thorough course description and other information, I have attached the very lovely CELLspace Summer Course booklet (full of many intriguing classes) as a PDF. My course is listed on page 18. If you cannot download the attachment, check out the CELLspace web site at www.cellspace.org, where links to the course catalog and booklet are on the home page, along with registration information. I hope you will forward this on to those friends of yours who might be looking to get back into writing, or those wishing to continue with current projects. Writers of all levels are encouraged to register. I intend to make it FUN.

For more info email Ryan at neelyfan28@hotmail.com

Xantippe reading, Sunday, June 12th, 3pm

from the editors of XANTIPPE:

Please join us for a reading to celebrate the release of XANTIPPE
No. 3. Reading from their work are Joseph Lease, Sarah Rosenthal,
Michael Sikkema, and Brian Strang.

Where: Canessa Park Gallery
708 Montgomery (at Columbus)
San Francisco

When:  Sunday, June 12, 3 p.m.

Admission is $5 or $10 w/ copy of XANTIPPE

For information about the new issue, or to order a copy, please
visit http://xantippemag.blogspot.com

el pobre mouse : newly released

le nouveau el pobre mouse (numero deux)

edited by kyle kaufman & sara larsen
(see their blogs: werdenfield & oak and mercury)

this issue features individual handmade collage covers.

to order send $5-10 (sliding scale)
checks payable to:
kyle kaufman
1931B mcallister st.
sf ca 94115

for more info: sarahandkyle@earthlink.net

artifact sei 

5:21:05 bios

bios

5:21:05 artifact reading

f i c t i o n

hosted & curated by chana morgenstern

2921b folsom st. sf 94110 (at 25th st.)
7:30 pm

Jess Arndt lives in San Francisco and pours drinks for a living. She was most recently published in Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex, and online at Velvet Mafia: Dangerous Queer Fiction. When not behind the bar, she works on a novel about cross-dressing sailors, buggers, and the Barbary Coast.

David Beavers is the mayor of several small and insignificant cities which are scattered across the deserts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Although he has not been back to any of these since his inauguration(s), he continues to be re-elected with overwhelming support from the populace, which has left him feeling guilty and uncomfortable here in the Bay Area. In this sense David's writing is very autobiographical, and he hopes to have it published before any of the cities catch on about any of the other cities.

Chana Morgenstern was born and raised in Jerusalem and resides in San Francisco. She is the author of Touching New Jersey, a collection of poems. Currently, she is getting her MFA in fiction at Bard College and working on two upcoming novellas. For two years she served as the writer-in-residence at School of the Arts Creative Writing Department. Her plays and monologues have been performed at the New College Theater and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum. She is the recipient of Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship in Fiction and has recently published stories in Red Letters Journal and On our Backs Magazine.

Shoshana von Blanckensee is a native San Francisco girl. She has been published in Suspect Thoughts (the online journal that is), Bottoms Up (the dirty anthology), and On our Backs. She is currently working towards a masters in Creative Writing at SF state, and wrestling with her first novel(la?).

5:21:05 excerpts

Jess Arndt:

Jack followed the kid through the twilight haze. The nape of the kid's neck winked from under his wool collar. Jack was not right, had not been right for so long that he was starting to forget what it felt like. He had found the root, but he could not dig it up, and so it grew longer, more prying as time went on. The two figures moved swiftly. Above them, stars and fog curled together like fingers on a bit of gold.

David Beavers:

Associative pathways form in the brain in their own improbably dense labyrinths, and while the organization of the sub-sub stacks of the library seems fairly schizotypal, so is Edvard's brain, at times, he feels, and so one or the other of the two—his brains or the shelves, if in fact they are moving—are growing to meet the other. Moving through the corridors on instinct, even or especially in the dark, gentle overhead fans working to suck the air clean of dust but space between the shelves still thick with molted thickness; so a series of turns and passageways clicks in Edvard's brain, a physical sensation that guides him from wherever he is loading books onto his little cart, through the never-quite-the-same paths of the labyrinth to one of the exits through the underground service conduit, narrow and requiring Edvard to hunch, under the street up the freight elevator into the warehouse to the machine, which scans the books—the machine, some insanely expensive looking array of mechanical eye-stalks that scans with mild bursts of radiation and infra-red, reading decayed or decaying texts through dense layers of papyrus. Turning this into text.

Chana Morgenstern:

Loose, gangled, pimply and violent, almost a curse of a person, Ori watched Godard films with her in the middle of the night, when she couldn't pain-sleep and he snuck back in through the window. They sat together on the couch, and she could not have named all the thoughts between them. She thought he might be gay, because in the year that he had bestialized, growing all his body parts strange and large enough to awe himself, and fled from the house to sleep in Jerusalem park, Mom reported that he was almost kidnapped by a gang of homos who would have made him a sex-slave in some sordid apartment on the Israel coast, near Netanyah, near Be'er sheva, somewhere to be fucked and hole-pummeled and forgotten and misshapen into a new human. But instead they caught him, locked him in rehab for a year. He talked on and on over the film, saying how they taught him to think about the steps of each thought before he made the decision and his head seemed large to her, as if the speed of this thought-catalogue was only catapulting him forward. But maybe it wasn't the rehab or him being in the closet. He reeked of weed and his eyes could have been gouged out. It seemed the next logical step. Ori reminded her of her full brother, the one her parents fucked and loved for, and she had as hers till he left when she was seventeen. Something about the way he hung, his bones unaligned, draped on furniture and against the walls. Or how his red rim eyes and searching pupil, and his retreat, hands shoved in the pockets and caving the chest, made her think there were two of him in the room.

Shoshana von Blankensee:

Back in Long Beach when I am four I fall off my board while I'm surfing on the rocking chair. I tumble in the waves so my heart crackles and I try to find up, but instead I smash my head open on the stone fireplace. My sweatpants are green; I sit up and watch a little spill of blood dribble onto them, blue spots, blue blops. A noise comes out of my mouth but I don't make it. My dad runs in and lifts me by my arms, so my head swings back. My eyes find the ceiling and our shadow, cast across it by the lamp on the end table. My fingers are splayed, long and extending across to the far wall. "Get the truck!" he hollers to my mom and somewhere there is the sound of keys.

My eight-year-old sister leans in the doorway wearing one of my dad's T-shirts, the armpits stained yellow. She's holding a hard boiled egg, in the other hand a pile of shells, her hair tousled and her toenails painted red. Our eyes press right into each other, like a walkie-talkie made from string and tin cans.

Talking to my head wound instead of me, my father leans in and yells "Goddamn it" at it a couple of times. My cat Nilla, watches from the window, as I'm carried out to the driveway.

In the truck we sit on a shower curtain because the roof leaked in winter and the seats rotted out, old broccoli in a plastic bag, grosser then gross. My father takes off his shirt and wraps it around my head so tight it pulls my eyes off to one side. His chest covered in brown hair, he smells like Irish Spring and I'm resting against him. I can see out the top of the windshield, the telephone wires dipping and swinging back up into blue, occasionally a bird nicks the line, but I go crazy right around this part. The memory of that drive to the hospital suddenly explodes, scattering in all directions. The sounds of his mouth following behind every opening.