Stecopoulos &Toscano : 6/1 : New Langton Arts

Eleni Stecopoulos and Rodrigo Toscano
Thursday 01 Jun 2006
8 pm
$8 general, $5 Langton members, students and seniors.

As Rodrigo Toscano’s book Platform questions, it also indicts and it celebrates, and at the end of the day, it offers us poems of striking cultural density and multivalence that reverberate in the skull of the reader long after the last word has been read. –Jules Boykoff, electronic poetry center, SUNY Buffalo

Eleni Stecopoulos works with text, recordings, gestures, and energy, drawing from ‘alternative’ healing methods, to explore how visceral responses to words can form narrative.

Rodrigo Toscano (with other poets) reads several sections from Truax Inimical as well as performs a one-act radio dialogue Eco-Strato-Static. In Truax Inimical Toscano combines the direct expression of a soapbox orator with that of a ghostly chorus as a way of arriving at political and aesthetic contradictions in contemporary culture.

Bios

Eleni Stecopoulos has published poetry and essays in Ecopoetics, Chain, Mirage, Open Letter, the Harvard Review, Kiosk, and other venues. Work is forthcoming in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, the Capilano Review, and MiPOesias Magazine online. Factory School will publish a book on poetics and healing in 2006. Stecopoulos lives and works in San Francisco.

Rodrigo Toscano was a New York Foundation for the Arts 2005 Fellow in Poetry. He is the author of To Leveling Swerve (2004); Platform (2003); The Disparities (2002); and Partisans (1999). Toscano’s work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, 2004; War and Peace,/i> (2004); and In the Criminal's Cabinet: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction. Originally from California, Toscano lives and works in New York City.

New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom Street (between 8th and 9th streets)
San Francisco, CA 94103-3817
415 626 5416

Artifact: 5.27.06 : Benham : Burger : Cole

NORMA COLE
MARY BURGER
MELISSA BENHAM


Saturday, May 27th
7:30pm (reading starts at 8pm!)
$3 donation
byob

2921 Folsom St.
Apt. B
Betw. 25th & 26th Streets

for more info:
artifactsf@gmail.com
415.647.7689

Come one, come all
as we're taking a short summer break!

Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Among her books are Collective Memory, At All, and Spinoza in Her Youth. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert’s Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. Cole has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived since 1977.

Mary Burger is the author of Sonny (Leon Works, 2005) and the co-editor of Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, a collection of critical essays on experimental fiction (Coach House Books, 2004). She edits Second Story Books, featuring works by innovative narrative writers. An Apparent Event: A Second Story Books Anthology has just been published.

Melissa R. Benham is the author of codeswitching (Subday Press, 2003) and is hard at work on a new manuscript, repronounceable. Currently, she curates the Artifact Reading Series and is the publisher/editor for Artifact Press. Her work has appeared in 3rd Bed, el pobre Mouse, How2, Fourteen Hills, Shampoo, Small Town, Watching the Wheels: A Blackbird, and others.

many thanks to Brent Cunningham
for creating this lovely flyer!

Joanne Kyger @ SPT 5.26.06

Small Press Traffic is thrilled to present
JOANNE KYGER,
reading & in celebration of her acceptance of our
Lifetime Achievement Award
plus Book of the Year ceremony
Friday, May 26, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.

Every year the board of directors of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center votes a Lifetime Achievement Award to a living writer of distinction. Past honorees have included Barbara Guest, Jackson Mac Low, and Carl Rakosi. The latest recipient of SPT’s Lifetime Achievement Award is Joanne Kyger.

Joanne Kyger made an auspicious debut as the golden girl of the Spicer-Duncan circle of the late 1950s in San Francisco. Within a month of her arrival everyone wanted a piece of Kyger, and she became associated with many of the fluid, mercurial poetry scenes around the “New American Poetry.” Like her best writing, she was everywhere at once, keep inside the Beat movement, all over Japan and India, up and down the San Francisco Renaissance, steeped in Charles Olson’s polis-based soul curriculum, our ambassador to the New York scenes of Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman, the mainstay of Bolinas, and a seer in the Buddhist poetics of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder. Those are only the locations; deeper underneath, the substance of her many lives created, over forty-five years, a new poetic freedom. Based on frank and sensual observation, an innovating line, a sometimes acerbic wit, and a devotion to the ‘golden root’ of compassion, Kyger’s poetry continues to win her the admiration of numerous generations.

Joining us for Kyger’s reading will be her friend, the poet Michael Rothenberg, who edited As Ever, Kyger’s selected poems, for Penguin Books in 2002. Rothenberg, author of Unhurried Vision, has recently relocated to the Russian River area and will be on hand to introduce her. We will also show Kyger’s 1968 video, “Descartes.”

Additionally, we will have an awards ceremony featuring some remarks from the recipients of our 2005 Book of the Year Awards, including Juliana Spahr and David Larsen in person, Eileen Tabios for John Yau, Rodney Koeneke for Drew Gardner, and Magdalena Zurawski for Aaron Kunin.

& Don’t forget your checkbooks for the New SPT Yearbook for 2005 featuring excerpts from the 2005 readings & the introductions! Hot off the press!!!

Events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to SPT
members, and CCA faculty, staff, and students.
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
(just off the intersection of 16th &Wisconsin)
Map & directions:
http://www.sptraffic.org/html/fac_dir.html

Jenks & Moxley @ SPT Fri. 5/19 7:30PM

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present a reading by
Philip Jenks & Jennifer Moxley
Friday, May 19, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.

Philip Jenks joins us in celebration of his second book, My First Painting Will Be "The Accuser" (Zephyr Press), which has been nominated for an Oregon Book Award. The Chicago Review described his earlier book, On the Cave You Live In (Flood Editions), as: “Inspired speech recording its own fall into dead letter [….] the poems of Philip Jenks are strange, original, terrifying. A stuttered apocalypse, they affirm our fellowship with all matter while suffering divinity’s perpetual departure from our midst.” Jenks grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia and currently teaches at Portland State University in Oregon.

Poet and translator Jennifer Moxley joins us from Maine in celebration of her 2005 book, Often Capital (Flood Editions). Poet Dale Smith writes of Moxley: “ She recharges old forms by dismantling the archaisms and replacing them with her own uses of language. It’s lyric synthesis through a kind of dream narrative, only that dream world brings with it real questions of how to live here and now.” Moxley’s last book, The Sense Record (Edge Books, 2002), received a Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic. Her other works include Imagination Verses and Enlightenment Evidence.

Note: Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to 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)

directions and map: http://www.sptraffic.org/html/fac_dir.html

5/21 Release Party for BAY POETICS at 21 Grand

Small Press Traffic is pleased to be cosponsoring
the release party for the new anthology BAY POETICS.

Sunday, May 21 at 7 PM
**at 21 Grand in Oakland**
FREE 

Release Party for BAY POETICS
Brought to you by SPT (http://www.sptraffic.org/)
New Yipes (http://newyipes.blogspot.com/)
and Faux Press (http://www.fauxpress.com/)

10 contributors read writing from *someone else* in
the anthology. 

Readers will include Micah Ballard, Aja Duncan, Kevin
Killian, Ronald Palmer, Barbara Jane Reyes, Kit
Robinson, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Cynthia Sailers and
others. Whose work they'll read is a mystery!

In 1961 Jack Spicer wrote, "It is not unfair to say
that a city is a collection of humans. Human beings.
In their municipal trust they sit together in cities.
They talk together in cities. They form groups. Even
when they do not form groups they sit alone together
in cities." In 2004 Stephanie Young was given her
assignment: to convene a collection of writing by Bay
Area poets. In 2006 the long-anticipated results are
in, all 496 pages of them. A precedent-breaking
anthology, BAY POETICS goes to the outer limits of
'local' and 'poetry', ranging as it does from Napa
Valley to Santa Cruz and including poems, essays,
lists, short fiction, walking tour reports,
manifestoes and all points in between. An experiment
in 21st century landscape portraiture you won't want
to miss. 

Edited by Stephanie Young
Cover by David Larsen
Faux Press, 496 pp, $29
ISBN 0-9765211-3-X

New Langton Arts: Performance Writing Series May & June Lineups

Performance Writing Series
Thursdays, May 25, June, 5, 8, 15, 22
8 pm
Admission: $8 general, $5 Langton members, students, and seniors

Langton presents literary artists Amanda Davidson, Susan Gevirtz,
Judith Goldman, Robert Glück, Kim Rosenfield, Frances Stark, Eleni
Stecopolous, Brian Kim Stefans, and Rodrigo Toscano, as part of
the award-winning Performance Writing series, curated by Brandon
Brown and Jocelyn Saidenberg.

The Performance Writing series brings multi-disciplinary literary
artists to Langton to present works that explore language in the
context of live performance. The series earned a 2005 “Best of
the Bay” award in the San Francisco Bay Guardian for “Best New
Reading Series to Catapult Language Off the Page.”

Gevirtz and Rosenfield perform Thursday May 25
Stecopoulos and Toscano perform Thursday June 1
Davidson and Glück perform Thursday June 15
Goldman and Stefans perform Thursday June 22

New Langton Arts is located at 1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
For reservations please call (415) 626.5416
For further information please visit newlangtonarts.org

Kyle Kaufman's review of Sara Larsen's Doubly Circulatory on newstands now...

Pick up a copy of the recent edition of the American Book Review

to read Kyle Kaufman's review of Sara M. Larsen's doubly circulatory

Ordering Info:

an edition of 150 on sale now

limited signed, hand-bound edition $8
regular edition $6

For more information:

Email Melissa Benham @ artifactsf@gmail.com

Or call 415.647.7689

Paypal, check, or money order accepted

Paypal payments may be sent through artifactsf@gmail.com

Please make all checks/m.o. out to:

Melissa Benham

2921 Folsom St. Apt. B

San Francisco CA 94110

Please include $2 for shipping & handling

Thank you!

Friday, 5/5 Beth Murray & Kristen Hanlon at Modern Times

Friday, May 5th
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia St (@ 20th)
San Francisco
7 pm

This Friday, join Beth Murray and Kristen Hanlon for a reading and
celebration of their new chapbooks from Noemi Press (Las Cruces, NM).

Kristen Hanlon (Proximity Talks) was born in northern California in 1969.
Her poems have been published in many journals, among them Colorado Review,
Crowd, Interim, and Volt. In 2000 she received the James D. Phelan Literary
Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and since 2002 she has edited
Xantippe, an annual print journal for poetry and reviews of small press and
university press books.

Beth Murray wrote The Night’s Night during 2002-2005. The chapbook by Noemi
press is an excerpt from it. Her other chapbooks include Hope Eternity Seen
on the Hip of a Rabbit, by a+bend, and My Register by Angry Dog Midget
Editions. She currently practices homeopathy for both animals and people in
the East Bay, but she will be moving to Portland in June. She is grateful to
the Bay Area poetry community for many years of support and inspiration.

Friday, May 5 will be Beth's last reading as Bay Area local. Come wave
goodbye and hello at the same time, in celebration of Noemi Press and its
well-loved authors.

http://www.noemipress.org/
http://www.moderntimesbookstore.com/