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