3.3.06 : Mary Burger : on Telling Time : SPT

Friday, March 3, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.
New Experiments: Mary Burger on Telling Time

Burger writes: “Narrative exists in the tension between disbelief and its suspension. The seduction of narrative is that it creates an experience of events in time, but that we are aware, in the midst of this experience, that what we are experiencing is a representation. Narrative is not a window onto the world, a transcription of an interior monologue, or a faithful account of things as they happened, though it may assume any of these guises or others. As participants in narrative, we have the power and the pleasure of being in more than one place at one time—or, of being at more than one time in one place…. Is narrative an engagement with events, or an enactment of events? Is our understanding of time, of events taking place in time, separable from our use of narrative to represent events in time? Or, are all of our understandings of time ultimately instances of narrative?”

Mary Burger is the author of Sonny (Leon Works) and a co-editor of Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books). She edits Second Story Books, featuring works of experimental narrative. An Apparent Event, an anthology of Second Story chapbooks, will be published in 2006.

for directions & a map please see their website
http://www.sptraffic.org

Timken Lecture Hall, CCA SF campus
1111 8th Street, San Francisco
just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin

Steven Taylor at the Poetry Center, 2/16

Steven Taylor, solo performance

Thursday February 16
4:30 pm @ The Poetry Center
HUM 512, SFSU, free

Steven Taylor --poet, songwriter, musician, ethnomusicologist-- traveled the world accompanying Allen Ginsberg (his choral arrangement for "Footnote to Howl" just premiered in New York City), lent his fluid musical acumen as driving wheel to legendary Lower East Side singing bard band The Fugs over two recent decades, chronicled anarchist punkers False Prophet (Wesleyan University Press), and directs and teaches in the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder.

Join us for a solo performance of poetry, song & maybe some après la guerre punk history. Maybe even a preview reading of Travels with My Aunt (on the road with Allen Ginsberg).

2/18 Kenward Elmslie with Steven Taylor

Kenward Elmslie with Steven Taylor, music

Saturday February 18th

7:30 pm @ Knuth Hall
Creative Arts Building, SFSU, $10 ($5 students)

Kenward Elmslie appears in live performance in the sumptuous Knuth Hall music-theater at San Francisco State U., presenting a Retrospective Evening of Original Poetry and Song, accompanied by non pareil musical maestro Steven Taylor.

For four decades, Mr. Elmslie and his body of works (as librettist for Truman Capote's The Grass Harp, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Chekhov's The Seagull, et al., to poetry & song revues Postcards on Parade, 26 Bars, Lingoland) have graced stages Broadway to Bouwerie and Way Beyond. Elmslie's an adept at thrilling discerning audiences with his extraordinarily sui generis mixmaster wit, ultra-camp/vamp presence, and cryptic dark-flecked joys, bending all poetic means to previously unwitnessable music-theatrical heights. Do not miss this exciting evening! And pleeease, why not treat yourself with a visit (in advance of Big Night Out) to kenwardelmslie.com?

February's ARTIFACT reading 2.11.06

a r t i f a c t :
a series of innovative writing

saturday . february 11th . 7:30pm
reading to start promptly at 8pm

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

BYOB & donations happily accepted.

readings by:

Elise FICARRA
Susan GEVIRTZ
Scott INGUITO


BIOS

Elise Ficarra lives and works in San Francisco. Her first book,
Swelter, (just out from 14 Hills Press) won the Michael Rubin Award in
Poetry for 2005. Her work has appeared in Bird Dog, Commonweal, 14 Hills,
Small Town and Hinge, a BOAS anthology of eight Bay Area experimental
women writers (Crack Press, 2002.) For her day job, she manages the
Poetry Center at SFSU and does freelance grant writing.


Susan Gevirtz's most recent books are Black Box Cutaway from Kelsey
Street, Hourglass Transcripts from Burning Deck and Thrall, forthcoming
from Post Apollo. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Scott Inguito’s poems have appeared in Fence, Aufgabe, 1913: a journal of forms, DANTA, and Parlour Games. New poems will appear in an Anthology of Latino Poets from University of Arizona Press, and Bay Poetics from Faux Press. His chapbook, lection, is out from Subday Press. Scott lives in San Francisco."


for more info:
artifactsf@gmail.com
415.647.7689

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present a reading by

Gloria Frym & Bernadette Mayer 

Friday, February 10, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.
Co-sponsored by the CCA MFA Program in Writing

Gloria Frym's most recent collection of poems, Homeless at Home, won an
American Book Award in 2002.  A new collection, Solution Simulacra, is
forthcoming from United Artists Books in 2006. Frym's other books include the
story collections Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned 
(Coffee House Press); a number of other poetry collections; and a book of
interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists  (Chronicle
Books). The Austin Chronicle says "Gloria Frym's Distance No Object is
possibly ahead of its time while masquerading as an elegy for an end to an
era."


Generous, prolific, and beloved, Bernadette Mayer is one of the major figures
of her generation of experimental poets. The San Francisco Chronicle calls her
"One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of late-20th century
experimental poets." Mayer joins us from New York in celebration of her new
book, Scarlet Tanager, out last year from New Directions. Her other books
include Proper Name and Other Stories (1996), The Desires of Mothers to Please 
Others in Letters (1994), The Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), Sonnets (1989),
Midwinter Day (1982), The Golden Book of Words (1978), and Ceremony Latin 
(1964).

for directions & a map please see our website
http://www.sptraffic.org

Timken Lecture Hall, CCA SF campus
1111 8th Street, San Francisco
just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin

Logan Ryan Smith & Brandon Brown read Thursday 2/9

readings on the danube
(curated by Larry Kearney)

Logan Ryan Smith
Brandon Brown

thursday, february 9, 8pm

@ the blue danube cafe, 4th & clement

FREE

Tonight: Mary Burger and Ron Halpern at Moe's

From the better-last-minute-notice-than-not-at-all file . . .


Mary Burger and Rob Halpern

Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704

February, 06 2006, 7:30 pm


Mary Burger is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her books include Sonny (Leon Works, 2005), The Boy Who Could Fly (Second Story Books, 2002), Thin Straw That I Suck Life Through (Melodeon, 2000), Eating Belief (pamphlet, Belladonna Books, 2000), Nature's Maw Gives and Gives (Duration Press, 1999), and Bleeding Optimist (Xurban, 1995). Her work is included in An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman, 1998) and Technolgies of Measure: A Celebration of Bay Area Women Writers (Small Press Traffic/Yerba Buena Center, 2002), and numerous small-press publications, including Aufgabe, Bombay Gin, Chain, Explosive, Five Fingers Review, Kenning, nocturnes, Shark, syllogism, Tinfish, Van Gogh's Ear, and others.

Rumored Place (Krupskaya, 2004), Rob Halpern’s first book, combines a near confessional narrative of physical passion with the documentation of “social fact.” It inscribes a subjunctive locale situated in an impossible nowhere space and time. “The book,” he states, “is situated between subjective desire and objective need.” “I’ve tried to activate the untimely tension between a present in which it is impossible to live humanly, and a collective future that exceeds our ability to grasp.” The writing takes aim at an unrepresentable moment from whose standpoint alternate histories will have emerged-and life will be other than we can imagine it now.