ARTIFACT*

ARTIFACT: SATURDAY : 2.27: BENKA : GILES: WOLTAG

2010-02-17T16:10:00.000-08:00

Please join us on SATURDAY, February 27, 2010

for an evening with:

Jen BENKA
Samantha GILES
Laura WOLTAG

*7PM DOORS | 7:30PM READING BEGINS*
[Show up before 7PM & you'll be lugging chairs!]

Address:
3263 Kempton Ave Oakland CA, 94611

$4 donation requested for the readers.

BYOB

Questions? Comments?
Please contact us at artifactsf@gmail.com.

Jen Benka is the author "A Box of Longing With Fifty Drawers," a collection of poems published by Soft Skull Press. She recently relocated to Oakland after close to a decade in New York City where she organized events including a 24-hour marathon reading of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson and a poetry protest during the Republican National Convention, and worked as the managing director of Poets & Writers. Before that, she lived in Milwaukee, her native land, where she worked at several activist organizations, wrote comics and played in a rock band.

Samantha Giles received her MFA from Mills College where she was managing editor of 580 Split. Her work has appeared at/in Deep Oakland, Vert, Work, The Press Gang, Shampoo, and Cricket Online Review. She is the Executive Director of Small Press Traffic.

Laura Woltag grew up in Belfast, NY, home of John L Sullivan and the Bare-Knuckle Boxing Hall of Fame, which is really just seven miles from Angelica, NY, home of the first Republican Party Convention and a landfill that exhibits much of New York City's trash. She works for a non-profit in Berkeley and attends classes at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published by her friends in The Stump.

--
Artifact Reading Series
Artifact Press
Digital Artifact

www.artifactsf.org
www.artifactseries.blogspot.com
www.digitalartifactmagazine.com

Artifact is a Member of the Intersection for the Arts Incubator Program

ARTIFACT : SUNDAY : 11.8 : MUMOLO : WAGNER : WOLFF

2009-11-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

Please join us on SUNDAY, November 8th
for an evening with:

Sara MUMOLO
Catherine WAGNER
Rebecca WOLFF

*7PM DOORS | 7:30PM READING BEGINS*

***Please note different day & earlier time of this reading***

Address:
3263 Kempton Ave Oakland CA, 94611

$4 donation requested for the readers.

BYOB

Questions? Comments?
Please contact us at artifactsf@gmail.com.

Sara Mumolo works at Studio One Arts Center and co-curates the Studio One Reading Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Article Journal, 1913: a journal of forms, Shampoo, Action Yes and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. The Mumolos are from the port-town of Brindisi, Italy where Virgil died and where the fountain of Benito Mussolini habitually conks out.

Catherine Wagner's new book, My New Job, is just out from Fence Books. Her other books are Macular Hole (2004) and Miss America (2001; both Fence). A selection from her new project, an epic romance, appears in the fall issue of Verse; recent chapbooks include Articulate How (Big Game Books/Dusie, 2008), Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha, 2008) and Bornt (Dusie, 2009). She is permanent faculty in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she lives car-free with her six-year-old son Ambrose.

Rebecca Wolff is the author of three books of poems, including The King (W. W. Norton, 2009). Her novel The Beginners is forthcoming in 2011 from Riverhead Books. She is the editor and publisher of Fence and Fence Books, and a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute. She lives in Athens, New York.

We're BACK : 10.23.09 : CROSS : STAITI : YANKELEVICH

2009-10-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

Hey Everybody!

Please join us on FRIDAY, October 23rd
for an evening with:

Erika STAITI
Matvei YANKELEVICH
Michael CROSS

*7:30 DOORS | 8PM READING BEGINS*
[Show up before 7:30 & you'll be lugging chairs & making punch!]

Address & Directions:
3263 Kempton Ave Oakland CA, 94611

$4 donation requested for the readers.

BYOB

Questions? Comments?
Please contact us at artifactsf@gmail.com.

MICHAEL CROSS is the author of In Felt Treeling (Chax Press), and the chapbooks Cede (Vigilance Society) and Throne (Dos Press). He is also the editor of Atticus/Finch chapbooks and co-editor of ON: Contemporary Practice. When he's not trying to finish a dissertation on the writing of Louis Zukofsky, he is working on other projects, such an anthology of the George Oppen Lectures at San Francisco State and a fantasy book project on the writing of Leslie Scalapino. He was born at Kaiser Permanente in Walnut Creek, and continues to call the East Bay his home.

ERIKA STAITI lives in North Oakland where she watches many movies on her 12 inch laptop with crappy speakers.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH is the author of *Boris by the Sea* (Octopus, 2009) and the long poem, *The Present Work* (Palm Press, 2006) and the forthcoming book . His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Damn the Caesars, Fence, Open City, Tantalum, Zen Monster, and many other zines. His translations have appeared in journals including Calque, Circumference, Harpers, New American Writing, and The New Yorker. His translation of *Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms* (Ardis/Overlook, 2009) has received praise from the TLS, The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is a co-translator of *OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism* (Northwestern, 2006), and his translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Cloud in Pants" is included in *Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky* (FSG, 2008). He teaches at Hunter College and Columbia University, and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse. Recently he edited a portfolio of Contemporary Russian Poetry and Poetics for the magazine Aufgabe.

ARTIFACT : 7.11.09 : KENOWER : NEALON : HEJINIAN

2009-06-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Please join us on Saturday, July 11th
for an evening

w/

Lyn HEJINIAN
Andrew KENOWER
Chris NEALON

*7:30 DOORS | 8PM READING BEGINS* [Show up before 7:30 & you'll be lugging chairs & making punch!]

Address & Directions:

3263 Kempton Ave Oakland CA, 94611

*Carpooling from BART can be arranged. *

$3 donation requested for the readers.

BYOB

Questions? Comments?
Please contact us at artifactsf@gmail.com.

See you then!

Melissa Benham

Michael Nicoloff

Brent Cunningham

ARTIFACT : 5.2.09 : BOLDT : CLOVER : FARMER

2009-04-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

ARTIFACT PRESENTS:

Saturday, May 2th at 7PM

Lindsey BOLDT
Joshua CLOVER
Steve FARMER

$3 donation requested for the readers!

BYOB

The address & directions are:
3263 Kempton Ave
Oakland, CA 94611

We will be organizing a few cars to pick up from the Downtown Oakland 19th St. BART at 6:45PM 7:00PM, 7:15PM.

Please email artifactsf@gmail.com if you would like to be picked up or if you’ve got a car & wouldn’t mind picking up some folks.

If you're lost & need help finding your way call:
Melissa at 415-517-5176 (however I'll just be asking someone else)
Brent at 415-314-0649

email us at artifactsf@gmail.com if you have any questions!

We’d like to thank David Buuck, Rob Halpern & Arnold J. Kemp for being so flexible and moving their reading to Sunday, May 3rd. If you would like more information about that reading, please contact David Buuck at dbuuck@mindspring.com. It is sure to be a wonderful evening.

ARTIFACT : 4.4.09 : FISHER : DAVIDSON : OAKES

2009-03-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

ARTIFACT is happy to announce our re-re-invention of itself as a house reading series (again). We started off that way & we're excited to get back to our roots.

Cassandra Smith & her compatriots of The Dollhouse have invited us into their home and for that we are deeply appreciative (& blushing quite a bit)!

We are going to kick it off on:

Saturday, April 4th at 7PM
w/
Kaya OAKES
Dan FISHER
Amanda DAVIDSON
We're going back to our $3 cover-charge (as opposed to $5), as well as our BYOB air!

The address & directions are:
3263 Kempton Ave
Oakland, CA 94611

If you're lost & need help finding your way call:
Melissa at 415-517-5176 (however I'll just be asking someone else)
Brent at 415-314-0649

email us at artifactsf@gmail.com if you have any questions!

BIOS

Amanda Davidson will perform with the assistance of an audio tape, a part of her ongoing homage to lost technologies. With Judith Jordan, she makes a pants-pocket sized zine called Parted in the Middle. She hopes that by the time you are reading this bio, her website partedinthemiddle.com will be loaded up with new and breathtaking film clips, but even if it isn't, she hopes that you will visit the site and enjoy the cartoon. Davidson also co-edits Digital Artifact Magazine, the Web based, narrative little cousin of the Artifact Reading Series. Look online at digitalartifactmagazine.com for submission details on Issue 3: We Made This for You Out of Nothing.

Dan Fisher lives on the island. No one seems to know exactly where the island is. You can get to the island via 4 bridges and a tunnel. His poems have appeared in Bay Poetics, Viz, Lament, Work, Cricket Online Review, among other places. He also makes collages and drawings under the name Fish Fishtofferson. He's really excited about being back in a house.

Kaya Oakes is the author of Slanted and Enchanted: Indie Culture in America (Henry Holt, 2009), and Telegraph (Pavement Saw Press, 2007). Her poems and essays have previously appeared in Kitchen Sink Magazine, Parthenon West Review, Coconut, Volt, and many other publications. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley. Her website is http://www.oakestown.org.

ARTIFACT & ACHIOTE PRESS

2009-01-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

ARTIFACT and ACHIOTE PRESS present...

Scott INGUITO

JTH (Johnny HERNANDEZ)

Margaret RHEE

françois LUONG

Saturday, January 24, 2009
7PM Doors/7:30 Reading

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

Directions here.

$5 suggested donation

About Achiote Press:

Achiote: a shrub or small tree indigenous to Central and South America. Introduced to the Pacific and Asia by the Spanish in the 17th century, Achiote now has firm transnational roots. Achiote produces pink flowers and red spiny seed pods. Peoples have used the seeds as a dye for clothing, arts and crafts, as body paint in times of war and celebration, as spice and coloring for food. Other parts of the Achiote tree have been used to make various medicinal remedies for sunstroke, burns, fever, sore throat, blood disease, eye and ear infections, and hypertension. Achiote has also been used as an aphrodisiac. We named our press after the Achiote tree because we believe poetry has the very same powers to enrich our surroundings, inspire our passions, enhance our senses, and heal our wounds.

To us, Achiote represents the unrepresentable, transnational, migratory, and adaptive. Achiote Press asks what it means to bear witness, to use adaptation as resistance, to cross borders, to map ourselves onto a dislocated world, to speak in exile, and to suffer diasporic hunger.

Achiote Press was founded in 2006. Every season, we publish two chapbooks: a single-author chapbook and a chap-journal featuring poetry, prose, essay, or translation by authors from diverse cultural and aesthetic backgrounds. In addition, we publish special project chapbooks, including chap-anthologies and collaborative work.

BIOS

Scott Inguito lives in San Francisco, teaches writing in San Jose, and paints in his garage. His most recent writing project, PANDAFUCK, is inspired by the pointless, the ill-tuned yet well-intentioned, the black and white of it all. You can find his paintings at scottinguito.com.

Originally from Strasbourg, France, françois luong currently lives in San Francisco. Other work of his has appeared or is forthcoming in Cannibal, Parthenon West Review, New American Writing, and elsewhere. He is also working on a translation into English of chutes, essais, trafics by Rémi Froger and into French wide slumber for lepidopterists by a.rawlings.

JTH (Johnny Hernandez) is a writer who has been born and raised in and around southern California. JTH currently resides in Emeryville and has been the recent recipient of the Academy of American Poets award for 2008. A recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley in English, JTH is pursuing an MFA degree from Mills College. Achiote Press published his first collection entitled U.

Margaret Rhee is an interdisciplinary writer and artist. Currently she is a doctorate student in the program in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She has written academic articles on representation, race, and sexuality for Amerasia Journal; the anthology, Crash Course: Reflections on the Film 'Crash' for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege; and the journal, Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Previously she worked as writer and editor in Los Angeles for YOLK Magazine, Chopblock.com, and Back Stage. She earned her BA in creative writing at the University of Southern California, and her MA in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. She is Kundiman fellow, where in the hot, humid, and gorgeous summers of Virginia, she fell in love with poetry.

ARTIFACT : 11.22.08 : PLACE : PATTERSON : ROBINSON

2008-11-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

ARTIFACT presents...

Elizabeth ROBINSON

Vanessa PLACE

G.E. PATTERSON

Saturday, November 22, 2008
7PM Doors/7:30 Reading

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

Directions here.

$5 suggested donation

Bios

A veteran of the slam-poetry scene, G.E. Patterson was a featured poet-performer in New York’s Panasonic Village Jazz Fest. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Tug (Graywolf Press) and To and From (Ahsahta Press). His writing can be found in several magazines and anthologies, including Blues Poetry, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Poetry 180, Isn’t It Romantic, American Letters and Commentary, nocturnes: (re)view of the arts, Open City, Provincetown Arts, Seneca Review, Swerve, Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s Poets and Poems. After living for several years in the Northeast and on the West Coast, G.E. Patterson now makes his home in Minnesota, where he teaches.

Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2), and, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse (December 2008)). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press in 2010. Place is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and is a co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”

Elizabeth Robinson's most recent books are Inaudible Trumpeters (Harbor Mountain Press) and, if I am lucky, The Orphan & Its Relations, hot off the press from Fence. Robinson has been a recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She has also been a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Fence Modern Poets Prize. Her work is forthcoming in The Best of Fence: the first nine years and American Hybrid, a Norton anthology. Robinson is a co-editor of EtherDome Chapbooks and Instance Press.

Artifact in the news...

2008-10-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

hey, Chris Stroffolino wrote us up in The Oakbook!

ARTIFACT : 10.25.08 : FRASER : LEDERER : SKINKER

2008-09-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

Artifact presents...

Kathleen FRASER
Katy LEDERER
Will SKINKER

Saturday, October 25, 2008
7PM Doors/7:30 Reading*** (note new time!)

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

http://www.oaklandartgallery.org/about_new/?directions

$5 suggested donation

BIOS

Kathleen Fraser has published eighteen books of poems, most recently W I T N E S S (2007, Chax); Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling (2004, Apogee), and the collaged work hi dde violeth i dde violet (2004, Nomados). Her collected essays, Translating the Unspeakable, Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (2000), are part of the Contemporary Poetics Series. U. of Alabama Press. Her il cuore : the heart, Selected Poems, 1970-1995, is available from Wesleyan University Press. Fraser has collaborated on artist books with Sam Francis, Mary Ann Hayden, David Marshall and Nancy Tokar Miller. Twenty wall pieces from ii ss, a collaboration-in-progress with NY painter Hermine Ford, were recently shown at the Pratt Institute of Architecture in Rome and a capsule version of this show will open at Melville House, in the Dumbo gallery area of Brooklyn, on Nov. 6.

In 1973, Fraser founded The American Poetry Archive, during her tenure as Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Between 1983 and 1992, she published and edited HOW(ever), a journal for poets and scholars interested in modernist/ innovative directions in writing by 20th century women—up-dated to the current electronic journal How2 @ www.how2journal.com

Fraser is winner of a Guggenheim and two N.E.A. Fellowships in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Award for innovative achievement. She currently teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts/SF and lives for the spring months of each year in Italy, lecturing widely on American poetry and translating Italian poets.

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008) as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003 and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year 2003.

Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Paris Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and Isn't It Romantic? (Verse Press) among other compilations.

Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine. Her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo (2001; 2004; 2005), MacDowell (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005-2006), and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Program.

Will Skinker's work has appeared in Weigh Station, Mirage/Periodical, Shuffle Boil, Ellipsis, word for/word, digital artifact, and The Denver Quarterly; his poems have been in The Night Palace and Morning Train from Auguste Press, which has also recently published his book Mascara.

He grew up in the mountains of Virginia and moved to Oregon, then California in 2000. He lives in San Francisco with his fiancee Yolanda and their two cats, Tootie and Pablo.

a new class for you

2008-09-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

REALISMS OF THE EVERYDAY: A CLASS

Poets Laura Moriarty and Brent Cunningham will be teaching a weekly evening class for writers and poetry readers starting October 7th. Together they taught a popular "Martian Poetics" class in the Spring. The new class, "Realisms of the Everyday," will take place Tuesday evenings at Small Press Distribution in northwest Berkeley. New students especially welcome!

For questions, contact brent@spdbooks.org. Information and sign-up for the class can be found here:

http://www.hookepress.com/everyday/

CLASS DESCRIPTION: A great deal of poetic invention has found its way forward by revaluing or returning to the “real”: the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane, the colloquial, the immediate, the tangible. In this class we will explore the problems and potentials of the real from the perspective of working writers. We will take a look at actuality and everydayness as aesthetic tactics, aesthetic forms, and aesthetic inspirations. We will notice our existence in what we think of as everyday life and note how others have solved the problem of both occupying and representing this “life.” We will focus especially on the difficult problem of defining the “real”: is it what we continuously think, what we immediately perceive, what we actually do, what lasts, what would exist without us, or something else? Is it all of these things? Is it some specific (secret, discoverable?) combination? And, practically speaking, what does it mean to one’s writing to value certain ideas of reality over others? We will often write during class. We will do exercises that use “what is” as their generative engine. In place of in-class workshopping, each student will receive a 30-minute individual consultation with one of the instructors outside of class hours. For interested students there are additional opportunities for one-on-one meetings outside of class at (cheap) hourly rates. There will be opportunities to browse the thousands of small press titles at SPD. And there will be a 30% discount on all SPD books for all students of this class! Throughout, we will attempt to complicate our presumptions about what really is, while also recognizing the undeniable power and vitality of is-ness.

LAURA MORIARTY'S A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 is just out from Omnidawn Publishing. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University among other places & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She received a Poetry Center Book Award in 1984 for Persia. She has also been awarded a Gerbode Foundation grant, a residency at the Foundation Royaumont in France, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature and a grant from the Fund for Poetry.

BRENT CUNNINGHAM is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancee and new daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. After receiving his MA in English from SUNY Buffalo in 1998, he began working for Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley, the nation's only not-for-profit distributor of literary books. He currently holds the position of Operations director. A board member of Small Press Traffic since 2001, he was a founding curator of SPT's "Poets Theater Jamboree," an annual ritual of amateur experimental theater. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. Hooke has published four titles so far, with two more on the way.

ARTIFACT & SPT : 7.26.08 : Nakayasu : Levin : Bernes

2008-07-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Artifact & Small Press Traffic present...

Sawako NAKAYASU
Lauren LEVIN
Jasper BERNES

Saturday, July 26, 2008
6PM Doors/6:30 Reading

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

$5 suggested donation

BIOS

JASPER BERNES is the author of Starsdown (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni). He is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and lives in Albany with Anna Shapiro and their son, Noah.

LAUREN LEVIN grew up in New Orleans and just moved from Grand Lake to Temescal. Her chapbooks are Adventures (Your Beeswax Press) and In Fortune (a collaboration done for the dusie e-chaps project). Lauren edits the magazine Mrs. Maybe with Jared Stanley. There's news, and conversation about skeptical occultism, at the magazine blog.

SAWAKO NAKAYASU is a poet & translator living in the US & Asia. Her most recent book is a translation of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008), and forthcoming books are Hurry Home Honey (from Burning Deck) and Textures Notes (from Letter Machine, a new press.)

links to photos of Artifacts of the past

2008-07-14T11:46:00.001-07:00

more photos from Melissa Benham

more photos from Michael Nicoloff

more photos by Alan Bernheimer

more photos of ye olde artifact by Stephanie Young

more photos from Alli Warren

Artifact: 6.28.08 : Bernheimer : Day : Sailers

2008-06-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

ARTIFACT PRESENTS...

Alan Bernheimer
Jean Day
Cynthia Sailers

Saturday, June 28th
Doors 6PM/Start 6:30PM

@Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

$5 suggested donation

BIOS

CYNTHIA SAILERS is the author of Lake Systems (Tougher Disguises, 2004). She is currently writing a dissertation on perversion and group psychology for the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She is a board member of Small Press Traffic and previously co-curated the New Yipes Reading Series (formerly New Brutalism). Currently she lives in Alameda.

JEAN DAY’s many publications include the recent Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (Adventures in Poetry, 2006) and Daydream (The Eponym) (Belladonna, 2008). New and recent works appears online at mark(s) <http://www.markszine.com/> and in forthcoming issues of The Siennese Shredder, Model Homes, Van Gogh’s Ear, and Sal Mimeo. Her poems have also appeared in a number of anthologies, among them Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology, The Best American Poetry 2004, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, From the Other Side of This Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990, and In the American Tree. She has spent much of the past three decades working for literary publishers in the San Francisco Bay Area, first as wearer-of-all-hats at Small Press Distribution and currently as associate editor of the journal Representations, published by the University of California Press.

Alan Bernheimer was born a New Yorker in 1948. Coastal inclination since. Europe before the age of reason. Graduated from Yale in 1970 and worked with words at various jobs. High-tech marketing for a long spell. A San Francisco Bay Area resident for thirty-some years. His most recent book is Billionesque (The Figures, 1999). Actor, playwright, director with SF Poets Theater in early 1980s and again more recently. Produced poetry radio show on KPFA 1979-80, In the American Tree. Literary nonprofit board member, currently Small Press Distribution. Heaven on earth: Paris.

Artifact & Nonsite Collective present...

2008-05-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 24th

Michael BASINSKI
Jeanne HEUVING
David LARSEN

Please note our new earlier time:
6PM, Reading begins promptly at 6:30PM

$5 suggested donation

Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn’s Alley
Oakland CA 94612

BIOS

Michael Basinski is The Curator of The Poetry Collection State University of New York at Buffalo. He performs his work as a solo poet and in ensemble with BuffFluxus. Among his many books of poetry are Of Venus 93 (Little Scratch Pad); All My Eggs Are Broken (BlazeVox); Heka (Factory School); Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert (Burning Press); The Idyllic Book (Michel Letko, Houston, Texas); Mool, Mool3Ghosts and Shards of Shampoo (Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum); Cnyttan and Heebie-Jeebies (Meow Press); By and The Doors (House Press); Un-Nome, Red Rain Two, Abzu and Flight to the Moon (Run Away Spoon Press): Poemeserss (Structum Press) and many more. See (or hear): RadioRadio on UBUWEB (see Basinski and BuffFluxus). His poems and other works have appeared in Dandelion, BoxKite, Antennae, Unbearables Magazine, Open Letter, Torgue, Leopold Bloom, Wooden Head Review, Basta, Kiosk, Explosive Magazine, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, First Offense, Terrible Work, Juxta, Kenning, Witz, Lungfull, Lvng, Generator, Tinfish, Curicule Patterns, Score, Unarmed, Rampike, First Intensity, House Organ, Ferrum Wheel, End Note, Ur Vox, Damn the Caesars, Pilot, 1913, Filling Station, Public Illumination and in others.

Jeanne Heuving's cross genre Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic, and her book of poems Transducer (Chax Press) is just out. She has published multiple critical pieces on avant garde and innovative writers, including the book Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. She is concluding work on a new critical manuscript, The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry, which focuses on the poetics of Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan as well as several contemporary poets. She is a member of the Subtext Collective, on the editorial advisory board of HOW2, and is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Bothell and in the graduate program in English at UW, Seattle. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, NEH, and UW Simpson Humanities Center. In 2003, she was the H.D. Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

David Larsen has been self-publishing his poetry in the Bay Area for 15 years. From 1999-2002 he co-edited the San Jose Manual of Style, and was a curator of the New Yipes film and poetry series during its 2005-2007 run. A collection of his poetry called The Thorn (Faux) came out in 2005, and his translation of Names of the Lion by Ibn Khalawayh will appear soon from Atticus/Finch. This summer, David leaves San Francisco for the state where he was born in 1970.

also...

Salon with Michael Basinski

Sunday May 25th
7:00-9:00 p.m.

Please email Tanya Hollis for street address at tanya@tanyahollis.com

Come meet Michael Basinksi, visual-performance-fluxus etc. poet and curator, in the wake of the May 24 Artifact reading.

Archival materials will be on display in Tanya's studio for your enjoyment--and you can touch them too! :)

Artifact : 4.26.08 : Armantrout : Giscombe : Warren

2008-04-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

Artifact presents:

Rae ARMANTROUT
C.S. GISCOMBE
Alli WARREN

Saturday, April 26, 2008

***Please note our new earlier time:
6PM, Reading begins promptly at 6:30PM

$5 suggested donation

***New Location:
Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn’s Alley
Oakland CA 94612

Bios

Rae Armantrout’s most recent book of poetry, Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007), was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times. Other recent books include Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in anthologies such as Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007.. In 2007 she received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

C.S Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. Later he attended the State University of New York at Albany and Cornell University. He currently teaches at Berkeley and has
taught previously at Penn State, Illinois State, Cornell, among others. Giscombe also worked as editor of Epoch magazine throughout the 80s. His books are Postcards, Here, Giscome Road, Into and Out of Dislocation (FSG/ North Point) and his newest book, Prairie Style will be out from Dalky Archive in Fall 2008. Giscombe was the recipient of the Carl Sandburg Award for Giscome Road and grants and fellowships from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, the Fund for Poetry, the Council for the International Exchange for Scholars, etc. He is also a long-distance cyclist.

Alli Warren was born a Reagan baby and raised in the smog and wind of the San Fernando Valley. Duration Press recently published NO CAN DO. Other chapbooks include COUSINS (Lame House Press), HOUNDS, Yoke (Faux Press), and Schema (House Press). Alli lives in San Francisco, works at Small Press Distribution, and co-curates The New Reading Series at 21 Grand.

New Yorker: Armantrout

2008-04-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

only Rae Armantrout could get a poem not about sailboats in the New Yorker (April 7, 2008)

Integer

One what?

One grasp?

No hands.

No collection

of stars. Something dark

pervades it.

Metaphor
is ritual sacrifice.

It kills the look-alike.

No,
metaphor is homeopathy.

A healthy cell
exhibits contact inhibition.

These temporary credits
will no longer be reflected
in your next billing period.

“Dark” meaning
not reflecting,

not amenable
to suggestion.

sneak peek for may 24th...

2008-04-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

Repost: Help Tom Clark

2008-04-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'm reposting this from Dale Smith's blog because Tom Clark's in some dire straits after the collapse of New College...

Tom Clark needs your help. He is stranded with no salary and no medical insurance to cover costs due to a recent stroke. He also needs funds for medications to aid in the recovery of his wife, Angelica Clark, from surgery on her hip.

After 25 years on the faculty of the New College of California’s Poetics Program, payment on his salary and his insurance was abruptly stopped when the school came under scrutiny of federal and state auditors last fall.

Tom Clark has been an important voice in postwar American poetry since the 1960s. For a decade he was the poetry editor for The Paris Review. His many books appeared with Black Sparrow for nearly thirty years, and his biographies of Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn have provided essential perspectives on the lives of these New American authors. He is a passionate and devoted teacher who deserves far greater recognition for his services to American poetry communities.

He needs your help now.

There will be a Tom Clark benefit reading in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, April 26, at 7 pm. A painting by Austin painter Philip Trussell will be auctioned, and broadsides and chapbooks by Clark will be available for purchase. Sliding scale donations are required at the door. Beer and wine will be available. All proceeds will be directed to Clark.

I am collecting donations as well from those of you outside of Austin who are willing to contribute. Please send what you can immediately to:

Tom Clark
c/o Dale Smith
2925 Higgins Street
Austin, Texas 78722

*

Background to the Situation

When the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) put the New College of California on probation in July 2007, I wondered what would happen to that 37-year-old institution. By November, the federal Department of Education refused to release $3 million in financial aid. That month, the school stopped paying faculty salaries. Since then, the school has lost its accreditation and it has closed doors indefinitely, stranding many former instructors with no income and a loss of health benefits. A February 28 article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides more details.

With Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman, Leslie Davis, Jeff Conant, Michael Price, and others, I attended the college in the mid 1990s, studying in the Poetics Program with David Meltzer, Lyn Hejinian, Gloria Frym, Adam Cornford, and Tom Clark. It’s a drag to think of that program’s disintegration, particularly since luminaries such as Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, and Diane di Prima had taught there over the years too.

I remember hearing Clark Coolidge, Lorenzo Thomas, Alice Notley, Barbara Guest, and others read there over the years, and I recall the cultural, material, and historic grounding of study in poetics at that time.

The attraction to the program centered on the fact that faculty in the Poetics Program were all poets, and yet instead of teaching in the traditional workshop format, instructors taught courses in poetics and in the material production of poetry.

My first semester included classes in Shelley, Backgrounds to Romantic Culture, and Lyn Hejinian’s class in poetic theory called, “The Language of Paradise.” Other semesters focused on Early Modern, Modernist, and American Renaissance periods, providing students with a thorough grounding in the theoretical, historical, and material backgrounds to the periods studied.

One semester I took Hejinian’s class on Stein, Clark’s on Olson, and Meltzer’s class on backgrounds to modernism, in which we read about John Reed, the IWW, and other revolutionary social movements that joined art and politics to influence change. I also was fortunate enough to study the art of letterpress printing with Jeff Conant.

Students were engaged with the creative possibility provided through poetry, and we worked to discover ways to increase our awareness of the art through study, conversation, and learning the skills necessary to publish magazines and chapbooks on our own. We learned how to extend conversations in poetry to existing audiences. And we learned how to listen to the ongoing dialogues that compose much of the contemporary verse we discovered in California and beyond at that time.

My years at New College grounded me in a serious education from which I could move forward on my own once the formal course work had been completed. I wrote a thesis on Philip Whalen, took my degree, and moved to Austin, where, with Hoa Nguyen, we began to produce magazines, books, essays, poetry, and host readings. New College’s emphasis on the material production of the poem as a social tool of engagement stuck with me. And as testament to the concreteness of this plan of study provided by New College, I was later accepted to a PhD program at the University of Texas based on this prior period of study and the resulting years of production.

By academic standards, the school was funky. But in terms of what was provided intellectually and creatively, it was essential and instructive.

Help those who have seen their livelihood damaged by the mismanagement of New College administration.

Send what you can today.

Please help Tom Clark.

The (New) Reading Series @ 21 Grand: Sunday, 4.20 : Myles & Nicoloff

2008-04-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series @ 21 Grand
Sunday, April 20, 2008
6:30 pm // $3

Eileen Myles & Michael Nicoloff

LIVE @ 21 Grand
416 25th St at Broadway

EILEEN MYLES was born in Cambridge, MA in 1949. In 1974, she moved to New York where she studied poetry with Paul Violi, Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. Her latest book is Sorry, Tree in which she describes "some nature" as well as the transmigration of souls from the east coast to the west. Bust Magazine calls Myles "the rock star of modern poetry" and Holland Cotter in The New York Times describes her as "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde." She has been a professor of writing at UCSD since 2002.

All Things Myles

CA Conrad talks with Eileen Myles

MICHAEL NICOLOFF is the author of the chapbook "'Punks'" which was put out in print form by Taxt Press in 2007 and can now be found on the website Deep Oakland. His poetry and reviews have appeared in such fine publications as The Recluse, Mirage #4/Period(ical), The Orgasm Zine, and Traffic. Born and raised in Olympia, WA, he has hopped between coasts for the last several years. Right now, though, he lives on Alcatraz--the street--in Oakland, CA.

SPD: OPEN HOUSE : 4.12.08

2008-04-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

Small Press Distribution Spring Open House & Book Sale
Saturday, April 12th
12 Noon - 4PM

20-5-% off all books!
Readings at 2PM

Poetry Trading Post
Trade a poem or story for a fee book!

Joanne Kyger, Bay Area master poet, has two recent books. About Now:
Collected Poems and Not Veracruz. She lives in Bolinas.

Marjorie Welish is a poet, painter, teacher and art critic. Her most
recent book Isle of the Signatories is just out from Coffee House.
She lives in New York.

Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern are the co-authors of Snow Sensitive
Skin, from which they'll read together at this event. Brady is an
education activist and the author of several books, most recently
Occupational Treatment. Halpern is a teacher and the author of
Rumored Place. Both are active in the Nonsite Collective and live in
San Francisco.

Free & Open to All!

SPD
1341 7th St. (@ Gilman)
Berkeley, CA
510-524-1668

Pegasus : 4.4.08 : Vitiello & Burger

2008-04-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

READING AT PEGASUS BOOKS

Poets CHRIS VITIELLO & MARY BURGER

Friday, April 4th, 7:30 pm
Free!

Chris is visiting from North Carolina. His 2nd book, Irresponsibility, was recently released from Ahsahta Press.

Mary lives in Oakland and is the author of Sonny (Leon Works) & co-edited Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. She also edits Second Story Books.

Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
(510) 649-1320.

photos from Artifact : 3.22.08 : Buuck : Perez : Scalapino

2008-03-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

Craig Santos Perez reads

David Buuck performs

Leslie Scalapino reads

yay!

2008-03-24T15:42:00.000-07:00

hey all! I just want to say that Saturday's reading was a blast! the gallery is a great space, the directors are amazing, craig perez & leslie scalapino's readings & david buuck's performance were spectacular & everything went swimmingly. there was even a whole slew of cute poet babies!

if you weren't there, too bad for you. definitely come on over for our April 26th reading with RAE ARMANTROUT, CS GISCOMBE, & ALLI WARREN!

hello, with a fantastic line up like that, how could you miss it???

Artifact : 3 . 22. 08 : Buuck : Perez : Scalapino

2008-02-25T13:36:00.000-08:00

Artifact presents

David BUUCK

Craig Santos PEREZ

Leslie SCALAPINO

Saturday, March 22, 2008

PLEASE NOTE OUR EARLIER START TIME:
6PM Doors, 6:30 Readings begin

$5 donation at the door (no one turned away for lack of funds)

ALSO NOTE OUR NEW LOCATION!
Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland, CA 94612

Just steps away from 12th Street BART: Use the Frank H. Ogawa Plaza exit.

Directions may be found here.

Parking is free!!! & available at the following locations:

Dalziel Building (250 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza) Parking Garage (entrance on 16th Street at Clay Street)
Clay Street Garage (entrance on Clay Street between 14th and 15th Streets, behind City Hall)
City Center Garage (entrance on 11th Street between Clay Street and Broadway; also entrance on 14th Street)

BIOS

David Buuck is a Contributing Editor at Artweek, and a founding editor of Tripwire. His ongoing project BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, will be organizing (de)tours this summer as part of the Yerba Buena Center's Bay Area Now exhibition. Recent and forthcoming publications include Ruts, Runts, Between Above & Below, Paranoia Agent, Unmapped Landscapes, and The Suck. He teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute, and lives in Oakland.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam, has lived in California since 1995. He is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks, including constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, 2007), all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007), and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His first book, from unincorporated territory, is forthcoming this year from Tinfish Press. His poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared (or are forthcoming) in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Sentence, and Rain Taxi, among others.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, inter-genre or fictional prose, plays and criticism. Among recent books of poetry is: Day Ocean State of Stars' Night (published by Green Integer in 2007). New from UC Press, Berkeley, is: It's go in horizontal/Selected Poems 1974-2006. She taught for fifteen years in the Bard College summer MFA program, this year is teaching at Mills College, where she's also taught in the past---as well as teaching in the past at the San Francisco Art Institute and Otis Art Institute in L.A.

3/6 : Small Press Month Marathon & New Lit Generation reading

2008-02-25T11:04:00.000-08:00

Small Press Month Marathon & New Lit Generation reading

Thursday, March 6th 2008, 830pm

City Lights Book Store
261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway (North Beach)
San Francisco, Ca 94133

415-362-8193

spdbooks.org
MySpace.com/SPDbooks

Poetry Trading Post Trade a poem or story for a free book!

Manic D Press

Justin Chin, San Francisco, Gutted
Jon Longhi , San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of Third Leg
Alvin Orloff , San Francisco, Gutter Boys
Thea Hillman, San Francisco, forthcoming creative non-fiction collection, Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word
Jennifer Joseph, San Francisco, Editor and Publisher of Manic D Press

Sixteen Rivers Press

Jerry Fleming, Lagunitas, Swimmer Climbing Onto Shore
Margaret Kaufman, Kentfield, Snake At The Wrist
Jackie Kudler, Sausalito, Sacred Precinct
Nina Lindsay, Oakland, Today's Special Dish
Carolyn Miller, San Francisco, After Cocteau

Heyday Books
William E. Justice, Albany, Essential Saroyan
Nesta Rovian, Albany, Tree Barking: A Memoir
Stan Yogi, San Francisco, Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California's Great Valley
Lucille Day, Oakland, Chain Letter, a children's book, illustrated by Doug Dworkin

nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts
Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, San Francisco, Ichi-Ban and Ni-Ban and Manuel is destroying my bathroom
Aja Couchois Duncan, Commingled : Sight, San Francisco
Jacob I. Evans, San Francisco
Douglas "D. Scot" Miller, San Francisco
giovanni singleton, San Francisco, Editor of Publisher / nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts

O Books
Laura Moriarty, Albany, The Case
Bob Grenier, Bolinas, Phantom Anthems
Norman Fischer, Muir Beach, Precisely the Point Being Made
Leslie Scalapino, Oakland, Editor and Publisher of O Books
David Brazil, Oakland, Moe's Books

WritersCorps
Milta Ortiz, Oakland, Scatter My Red Underwear (theater piece)
Myron Michael Hardy, Oakland, www.rondeaurecords.com.
Antoinette Osborne, Notre Dame de Namur University
Robin Black
Annie Yu, City College
Indiana Pehlivanova, School of the Arts

Thanks to the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, The Marin Community Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and the Friends of SPD!

Artifact Reading Series Announces a New Partnership With the Oakland Art Gallery

2008-02-14T12:09:00.000-08:00

Artifact: a reading series of innovative writing, is pleased to announce that it will soon return from its hiatus in a new location at the Oakland Art Gallery. Centrally located in the hustle and bustle of downtown Oakland's Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, the Oakland Art Gallery provides a vital site for national and regional envelope-pushing visual artists to display work ranging from painting and sculpture to video and new media. The writers Artifact has hosted--who range from post-Language writers like Juliana Spahr and Lisa Robertson to New Narrative writers like Robert Gluck and Dodie Bellamy--are certainly no strangers to unknown aesthetic territory, and this shared aesthetic, as well as the beauty of the space itself, makes the Oakland Art Gallery an ideal venue for hosting Artifact's textual experiments. This partnership will have its official kick off on March 22nd, 2008, with a reading by David Buuck, Craig Perez, and Leslie Scalapino.

Artifact began in San Francisco's Mission District on November 20, 2004, in the living room of longtime friends and writers Melissa Benham and Chana Morgenstern. Recognizing a need for a new experimental poetry and prose venue, they began the Artifact Reading Series, which quickly became a vital social and artistic gathering spot for many Bay Area writers. Since then, the reading series has garnered praise in a number of newspaper and magazine articles. Venus Zine called it a "place for renegade literature," and Michelle Tea, writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, wrote that the series hearkens back to the "cozy salons of yore." Artifact maintains a partnership with Hooke Press (www.hookepress.com), which publishes chapbooks of "poetry, criticism, theory, writing, and ephemera" by past Artifact readers and other innovative writers, as well as Digital Artifact (www.digitalartifactmagazine.com), an online journal interrogating narrative in contemporary culture through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, and web-based audio-visual work.

Artifact is a Member of the Intersection Incubator, a program of Intersection for the Arts (www.theintersection.org) providing fiscal sponsorship, incubation and consulting services to artists.

SPD: Live at the AWP

2008-01-28T23:06:00.001-08:00

read what's happening at the AWP bookfair in NYC, as seen by Small Press Distribution's Brent Cunningham & Laura Moriarty as they fight the good fight....

http://awplive.blogspot.com/

Call for Submissions : Digital Artifact Magazine

2008-01-24T20:14:00.001-08:00

DIGITAL ARTIFACT MAGAZINE

ISSUE 2: TRANSNATIONALISM

**Call for submissions**

Deadline: May 15, 2008

Digital Artifact Magazine interrogates narrative in contemporary culture through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, and web-based audio-visual work. We're specifically interested in the impact of digital culture and globalization on contemporary narrative(s). How do these phenomena create new forms of story, text, language, and literature? What kinds of narratives have emerged from specific elements such as web sites, chatrooms, video games, Myspace, internet porn, digital photography, web cams, blogs, internet media and cell phones, as well as broad trends such as the breakdown of national boundaries, the increased speed of communication, and the globalization of culture, capitalism, and war?

The second issue of Digital Artifact will examine the idea of transnationalism. What is the transnational space in literature and art? How do we describe the textual and digital interactions between countries, classes, cultures, languages, and identities? How do we write/track border crossings, migrations, translations, trans-cultural identities and conversations? In particular, we are interested in narratives that cross boundaries between the countries of the so-called first, second, and third worlds, narratives of migration, war, global society, cosmopolitanism and refugee culture. What does nationalism mean in our time? What is your (trans)nationality? We invite creative responses that explore these question through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, or web-based audio-visual work. Our aesthetic tendencies are always on display at digitalartifactmagazine.com.

Submission Guidelines

We accept e-mail submissions only. Send submissions to digitalartifact@gmail.com. In the subject heading, include your last name and the word “submission.” Do not send previously published work, and let us know if the work gets accepted elsewhere. One submission per person, please. Include a brief (50-100 word) bio with your work. We will read and respond to submissions between May 15 and July 15. We regret that we cannot provide payment for accepted content at this time.

**We accept text pieces up to 2,000 words in length. Please paste your work as plain text directly into the e-mail. You may also send a text document as an attachment in addition to pasting the content, if formatting is important to the piece.

**For images, we accept visual files in pdf, jpeg, and gif format. Please send low-res (72 dpi) versions for submission review.

**For sound, send mp3 files, zipped if possible, at a length of 5 minutes or less.

**For video footage, email QuickTime files, compressed for web, again in the vicinity of 5 minutes or less. Links to videos posted online also work. If we have difficulty looking at your video due to compatibility issues, we will email you with information about uploading your submission to the Digital Artifact YouTube account.

digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifactmagazine.blogspot.com
digitalartifact@gmail.com

Digital Artifact Magazine reading at ATA : 2.22.08

2008-01-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

Reading for Digital Artifact Magazine

Friday, February 22, 2008. 8 PM. $6
Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia St., SF
(415) 824-3890, ata@atasite.org
Wheelchair accessible

Digital Artifact Magazine is a new, web-based journal that explores digital and global culture using hybrid aesthetic tactics. Join us for a reading and screening by contributors from Issue 1 (Summer 2007), as we solicit submissions for Issue 2.

Readings by David Christensen, Soledad De Costa, Camille Roy, Will Skinker, Sarah Fran Wisby. Screenings by Faye Driscoll, Kara Hearn, Jessica Lawless, Julianna Mundim, Kirthi Nath, Katina Papson, Sherri Wood.

digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifactmagazine.blogspot.com
digitalartifactmagazine@gmail.com

we're getting the band back together!

2008-01-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

Great news everybody! Artifact will be back in action beginning in March!

Thanks to Kaya Oakes recommendation (yay Kaya), I've just met with the wonderful peeps over at OAKLAND ART GALLERY & they are very excited to have us. It's a great space in downtown Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza (near 12th St. BART & Van Cleef's!). They've currently got a lovely show of painters Mike Henderson & Amy Kaufman. Go see.

We are terribly thrilled to be starting up the series again. It's been lonely without you.

More news to come as it unfolds...

Martian Poetics Class with Laura Moriarty & Brent Cunningham

2008-01-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

MARTIAN POETICS: A CLASS

Led By

Laura Moriarty (Author of Ultravioleta & 13 other books)

Brent Cunningham (Author of Bird & Forest)

TEN (10) CLASSES for $200
Meets Every Wednesday from 6:30pm-9pm
starting March 5th, 2008 ***Note date change***
Class meets at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley
1341 Seventh Street

CLASS DESCRIPTION: It's easy to forget how strange poetry is. Whether it's messages from martians, value for the ecstatic (from greek ekstasis, "to be or stand outside oneself"), or frankensteinian borrowings from areas generally believed to be "other" to poetry (science, philosophy, history, logic), we believe this shifty something else to be at the heart of why poetry interests us in the first place. We will look at some of the ways communities of poets have and might cultivate this something else rather than try to dispel or contain it. We will talk about the ways it shows up in scenes, aesthetic principles, and most often specific poems. We will take dispassionate looks at ekstasis, and ecstatic looks at dispassion. We will often write during class. There will be no workshopping, but for interested students there will be opportunities for one-on-one meetings outside of class at (cheap) hourly rates. There will be opportunities to browse the thousands of small press titles at SPD. And there will be a 30% discount for students! Throughout, we will all try to interrupt our own habits and patterns of thought to invite the different, other, and strange into the room.

LAURA MORIARTY'S A Semblance: Selected & New Poetry 1975-2007 is just out from Omnidawn Publishing. Other recent books are Ultravioleta, a novel, from Atelos and Self-Destruction, a book of poetry, from Post-Apollo Press. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University among other places & is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She received a Poetry Center Book Award in 1984 for Persia. She has also been awarded a Gerbode Foundation grant, a residency at the Foundation Royaumont in France, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature and a grant from the Fund for Poetry.

BRENT CUNNINGHAM is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancee and new daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. After receiving his MA in English from SUNY Buffalo in 1998, he began working for Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley, the nation's only not-for-profit distributor of literary books. He currently holds the position of Operations director. A board member of Small Press Traffic since 2001, he was a founding curator of SPT's "Poets Theater Jamboree," an annual ritual of amateur experimental theater. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. Hooke has published four titles so far, with two more on the way.

Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic

2008-01-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Poets Theater: An Evening of Short Plays

Friday, January 18, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

“The Obituary Show” by CA Conrad
“Olive Oil from the Notebooks, a radio film” by Arnold J. Kemp

Hannah Weiner’s “RJ (Romeo and Juliet)” from CODE POEMS, directed by Suzanne Stein

“Up in Arms: an Oratorio at Tense Borders” by Mary Diaz

“a fierce vexation of a dream” by sara m. larsen

“Yoda in His Youth” by Dana Ward

plus a new play by Mairead Byrne and more surprises!

1980s Poets Theater Revivified
Three Plays Reexamined, Reanimated, and Restaged

Friday, January 25, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

“Particle Arms” by Alan Bernheimer (excerpts)
“Third Man” by Carla Harryman (excerpts)
“Creative Floors” by Kit Robinson

Poets Theater Cabaret Extravaganza

At a local venue to be announced

Sunday February 3, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.

SPT’s first Poets Theater Cabaret will feature several acts, ranging from musical and video numbers to speed lectures, performance art, fluxus events, impersonations, puppet theater, acts of mysticism, live psychotherapy, experimental astronomy, food art, avant-gossip, and maybe even some —gasp! — poetry!

Join us for a night of costumed ribaldry, artistic blasphemy, and cultural craziness, along with drinks, food, bizarre raffle gifts, and a silent auction of not-so-silent wonders! Audience participation welcomed!

See our new weblog (smallpresstraffic.blogspot.com) for updates, directions, auction items, photos, and more!

Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco

New Yipes: Sun. 1/20: Gudath and Harryman with video by Ezawa and Berezin

2008-01-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

7 pm
Sunday Jan 20
at 2 1 G R A N D
416 25th St corner B'way
Oak
$5

Carla Harryman is known for her genre-disrupting prose, poetry, and performance works. Recent publications include Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2006), Toujours l'epine est sous la rose (Ikko, 2006: tr. Martin Richet), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001). A collection of conceptual essays, Adorno's Noise, is forthcoming from Essay Press this spring. Recent performance pieces in Detroit, Montreal, Germany and Austria have featured bilingual choral improvisation and sound manipulation. Her 1994 work, Memory Play, will be staged at the Renaissance Society in Chicago in March 2008. She is also a participant in The Grand Piano collaboration, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers originally identified with Language Poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since her 1995 move out of the Bay Area, she has lived in Detroit.

Lauren Gudath lives in Petaluma, California, where the sky is always sunny and the butter and eggs are always fresh. There she writes sundry items for software companies and poems for a tiny audience that may include you. Lauren's publications include The Television Documentary (Second Story, 1999) and This Kind of Interpretation Brings Luck (Lucinda, 2000). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Kenning, Chain, and Bay Poetics.

Also showing: video by Kota Ezawa and David Berezin

Please help a poet in need

2007-12-03T10:19:00.000-08:00

1 December 2007

“we interact as presence within presence
as spirit twice its equal in spirit
so that a range of beasts burns between us”
--Will Alexander, Exobiology as Goddess

Dear Poetry Community,

Will Alexander, one of our most original and energetic lights, is ill with cancer.

http://www.greeninteger.com/pipbios_detail.cfm?PIPAuthorID=7

The last few months have seen Will in and out of County USC, and otherwise unable to maintain his teaching and reading schedule. Will was freelancing, so his resources to financially cope with this situation are exhausted.

We are collectively asking you to help fund Will's living expenses while he is in treatment and working on recovery. Sheila Scott-Wilkinson, Will's long-term partner, is acting as Will’s primary caregiver and financial manager. She and Will have opened a special joint checking account to receive these monies. Checks can be addressed to 'Sheila Scott-Wilkinson', and mailed to the following address:

Sheila Scott-Wilkinson
400 South Lafayette Park Place, #307
Los Angeles, CA 90057

Love and Peace,

Thérèse Bachand
Jen Hofer
Andrew Joron
Harryette Mullen
Diane Ward

SPD's Holiday Open House! Books! Readings! Food!

2007-11-26T11:18:00.000-08:00

Small Press Distribution's

Holiday Open House & Book Sale

1341 7TH St at Gilman in Berkeley

Saturday, December 1, 2007, 12-4PM

(Readings at 2PM)

13,000 titles, 20-50% off

Featuring free snacks, free readings and selected free books (in
trade for your own poetry)!!!

C. S. Giscombe just began teaching at UC Berkeley this fall. He is
the author of several books of poetry and a memoir Into and Out of
Dislocation. He received a prestigious Walt Whitman Award for his
first book Giscombe Road.

Susan Gevirtz's book Thrall is just out from Post-Apollo Press. She
teaches in the Visual Criticism Program at California School of the
Arts.

Brian Awehali is an award-winning journalist and author of Tipping
the

Sacred Cow: The Best of LiP: Informal Revolt, 1996-2007.

Catherine Meng's poems have appeared in Fence, Crowd, Fulcrum and The
Boston Review. Her first book Tonight s the Night is just out from
Apostrophe Press.

PLUS: TURN YOUR POETRY INTO FREE BOOKS

at the Poetry Trading Post

Small Press Distribution connects readers with writers by providing
access to independently published literature. SPD allows essential
but underrepresented literary communities to participate fully in the
marketplace and in the culture at large through book distribution,
information services, and public advocacy programs. SPD nurtures an
environment in which the literary arts are valued and sustained.

Artifact notes...

2007-09-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

hello all,

Writing here from the midst of hiatus to "update" the blogosphere on what's up with Artifact.

So what is up with Artifact? Well, the reading series is on hiatus for a few more months and hopefully will be making a comeback in the winter of 2008. As most of you know, I had baby Mina Natalia Benham-Cunningham in May & so have been slightly pre-occupied with that undertaking. But there have been other changes as well. Chana Morgenstern, who co-founded Artifact with me & has continued to host Artifact in her apartment after I moved to Oakland last fall, and has moved to Providence, RI to begin her Ph.D at Brown. Renee Evans, who has been such an incredible asset to Artifact, has also moved there, so we have lost 2 major players over here and miss them both dearly. Chana had been working as our fund-raising director and spearheading our public writing projects arm of Artifact. Now that she is leaving, I believe it's best to dismantle this part of Artifact. In the meantime, I will be accepting any help offered in the way of fund-raising, mainly in grant-writing.

Chana & Renee's departure means a new space for Artifact, and likely that space will be public. I'm currently on the lookout for a suitable spot, so if anyone has any suggestions or connections, please contact me at artifactsf at gmail dot com. I am looking for a space in SF, close to transport, that will house 50+, and will allow booze & won't make demands on our programming. A tall order, but I'm keeping my fingers x-ed. If nothing in SF turns up, I may move it over here to the East Bay...so we'll just have to see.

In publishing news, Digital Artifact, led by Amanda Davidson, has made it online debut & looking towards a second issue. Their site looks amazing, thanks to the artwork of Renee Evans and the web developing of Jay Thomas. In print, I am working with Brent Cunningham and Neil Alger to bring Artifact Press and Hooke Press together which has been something we've been talking about for a long time.

So that's the news. Be well & I hope to see you all at an Artifact reading soon(ish).

xoxo,
Melissa Benham

New Yipes: 9/16 : Meng : Berrigan : Goodman

2007-09-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

7 pm
Sunday
Sept. 16
at 21 GRAND
416 Twenty-Fifth Street
Oakland, California
5 dollars

CATHERINE MENG was born in New Jersey & raised in Massachusetts.
She spent time in New Mexico, Montana, and cooking school before moving
to the Bay Area in 2000. She lives in a shack and works at a restaurant.
Her first collection of poems, Tonight's the Night, was published in
March 2007 by Apostrophe Books.

ANSELM BERRIGAN's books of poems include Some Notes on My
Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Integrity & Dramatic Life, all published by
Edge Books. From 2003 to 2007 he was the Artistic Director of the Poetry
Project at St. Mark's Church-in -the-Bowery. He's working on writing a
couple hundred poems all called "Have A Good One," and is a little
more than halfway there.

CRAIG GOODMAN lives in San Francisco, where he has made videos
based on popular genres such as commercials, music videos, and
made-for-TV movies. He was also a member of the sit-down keyboard
ensemble "The Helen Lundy Trio," with Karla Milosevich and Kota Ezawa.
Craig has also been fortunate to enjoy the work of others by acting as
curator for numerous video screenings, including "Visual Urban Legends,"
"The There There," and "Alone," at New Langton Arts in San Francisco.

* * * *
Oct. 21: Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Dolores Dorantes and video by Katie Edmonds

http://newyipes.blogspot.com

Sailers, Cunningham, & Luoma at Moe's, Monday 9/10

2007-09-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

MONDAYS AT MOE’S
September 10th, 2007, 7:30pm

Cynthia Sailers, Brent Cunningham & Bill Luoma

CYNTHIA SAILERS is the author of Lake Systems (Tougher Disguises, 2004). She is currently writing a dissertation on narcissism and perversion in pathological group organization for the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She is a board member of Small Press Traffic and previously co-curated the New Yipes Reading Series (formerly New Brutalism). Currently she lives in Alameda.

BRENT CUNNINGHAM is the author of Bird & Forest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005). He lives in Oakland, works for Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley and serves on the board of Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. He and Neil Alger also run Hooke Press (hookepress.com), a local chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. They've published four titles so far, with two more on the way.

BILL LUOMA is the author of Dear Dad (Tinfish, 2004), Works & Days (Hard Press, 1998), Swoon Rocket (Figures, 1996), and other works. He lives in Berkeley. He did not write or approve this biographical note, but he is a terrific writer.

Naropaens Unite!

2007-08-27T04:57:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest missive from my Naropa alum, Jim Goar, who publishes Catfish Press. He has published 2 books by other Naropa alums, Richard Froude and Matthew Langley, both very talented writers.

Buy their books! Now! Thank you!

Dear Friends,

Know you have been waiting and waiting. Well, the
waiting is over. Catfish Press has made two books, The
Margaret Thatcher Trilogy by Richard Froude & Letters
Toward Jim by Matthew Langley. Stacy Dacheux & Allan
McLeod provided the lovely art for the books. Both
books can be purchased from the Catfish Press website
(http://www.pastsimple.org/catfishfront.html) with
PayPal. Both books are better than a cold Budweiser…
even better than drinking a cold Bud while floating in
a lake in one of those floaty chairs. Trust me. Also
on the site is our new Catfish jingle. It was written
by Pirooz Kalayeh and Jim Goar and performed by Pirooz
Kalayeh and The Slipshod Swingers. All in all, just
dig.

SUNDAY | Stephen Beachy | Lara Durback | Martha XIV | 8/26

2007-08-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

This Sunday August 26
at 21 GRAND
416 25th Street
Oakland, California
6 blocks from the 19th St BART station
7 pm | $5 or fewer

STEPHEN BEACHY is the author of the novels The Whistling Song and Distortion.
His latest book consists of two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat,
just out from Suspect Thoughts. He is currently finishing up a book
of essays entitled Dreams of Terror and Abuse and working on another
novel, Now That I'm Dead by Kathy Acker, among various other ephemeral
projects.

LARA DURBACK is an artist/poet working with text, letterpress printing, sound
(analog synthesizers and field recording), as well as the book form
and any other medium that can be combined and smashed together.
Currently contemplating humans awash in electromagnetic fields: both
those from the earth and those emitted by powerlines and electronic
devices, and how difficult it is to match a field to a source. Vectors
and concentric circles constantly going in and out...

MARTHAXIV grew out of mud and creeks and still feels very tied to them
despite her current urban existance. at present she is working on the
video and sound for a puppet show she is developing in collaboration with
her brother and a friend entitled, "between dog and wolf." marthaxiv
hopes to adopt a dog/wolf of her own in the near future.

* * * *

Sept. 16: Anselm Berrigan & Catherine Meng, w/ video by Craig Goodman

Oct. 21: Dolores Dorantes & Demosthenes Agrafiotis, w/ video by Katie Edmonds

As foretold at http://newyipes.blogspot.com

"The Persians" in Presidio--LOCATION CHANGE

2007-08-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

from the nonsite collectives website:

Ah, the fate of guerrilla theater!

Since we initially scouted the site, construction has begun at the Presidio bunkers, making them unreachable to the public!!!

However, there is a more easily accessible public space at the Army Education Center across the way that should also make for good
theater.

Directions are the same: The easiest parking is in the huge unpaved lot just before Fort Winston Scott. The lot is on your right hand side, about 1/3 mile after you turn right off of Kobbe onto Lincoln Blvd.

Then, rather than going west towards the Coastal Trail, head east across the giant army quad at Ralston Ave.

There will be signs (and ushers) directing you, so you won’t miss it. Watch for the first sign just after the turn at Kobbe.

It is possible to get a glimpse of the bunkers from the Coastal Trail detour. We will try to get some information about their fate to share with you at the performance.

"The Persians"--Performance event in the Presidio, Aug. 26th

2007-08-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

*****PERFORMANCE EVENT ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 26*****

*****RIDES AVAILABLE TO THIS EVENT*****

*****BE AWARE, THIS EVENT IS NOT WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE (OR NOT WITHOUT
REAL DIFFICULTY)*****

Dear Friends,

Come see military civilizations collide!, in a special production of

Brandon Brown's "The Persians by Aeschylus"

Brandon's text is a literal translation of "The Persians" by
Aeschylus, which has been adapted for a site-specific performance in
San Francisco's Presidio, at the bunkers near the Golden Gate Bridge.


-----
CURRICULUM SOURCES RELATED TO THE PERFORMANCE


For an artist statement by Brandon Brown on his translation, please
see the PAGES section of the Nonsite Collective website (click on
"Curriculum Resources") at: www.nonsitecollective.org.

For info on Aeschylus' play, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persians

For info on a "literal translation," please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation

For a (standard) translation by Robert Potter of Aeschylus' "The
Persians," please see:
http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/persians.html

For info on the Presidio and its history, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidio_of_San_Francisco
www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/san-francisco-presidio.htm

For info on Executive Order 9066 (authorizing the internment of
Japanese Americans in concentration camps, signed at the Presidio):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066

If you would like to share information you have found about the
Presidio's past/present/future, or to share any other potential
resources related to this performance, please send a link or document
to:
presidiodocs@nonsitecollective.org

-----

The cast for this special performance will include: John Sakkis,
Cynthia Sailers, Suzanne Stein, Dan Fisher, Taylor Brady, Tanya
Hollis, Lauren Shufran, and Brent Cunningham.

We suggest you bring along a blanket and a cold beer for a hopefully
not-so-cold afternoon.

The performance will begin at 2pm.  Rides to BART will be available
afterwards, so that we all can catch the New Yipes event at 21 Grand
in Oakland at 7pm, featuring novelist Steven Beachy and poet Lara
Durback, with films by Martha XIV.

For more info, please see:
http://newyipes.blogspot.com/

-----
PRESIDIO MAP

For a map of the Presidio, please go to:
http://www.nps.gov/prsf/planyourvisit/maps.htm

There is a "Printable Park Map" pdf there; when printing, choose
"crop" in order to get a larger image of the northwest corner of the
map.  This will give you an image that encompasses the Arguello St.
entrance as well.

The bunker, called "Battery Marcus Miller," is located at the very
northwest (top left) corner of the map, about an inch below the Golden
Gate Bridge.  It should be easy to find on the map-image because it
has a very distinct shape: it has two small semi-circles bulging out
at the left (towards the west).

The bunker is also located right on the Coastal Trail, about .1 miles
from the Golden Gate Bridge.  There are spectacular views of the
bridge here—almost like optical illusions.

For a re-scanned map of the Presidio with the bunker circled, please
see the PAGES section of the Nonsite Collective Website (click on
"Curriculum Resources") at: www.nonsitecollective.org.

-----

We hope to see you all there!!

All best to you,

Brandon Brown, and the Nonsite Collective

RIDESHARES AVAILABLE TO THIS SPECIAL EVENT!!!!!
PLEASE SEE THE DIRECTIONS BELOW FOR ARRANGING FOR RIDES AND OFFERING
RIDES TO THIS NON-STANDARD LOCATION.

Getting and Offering Rides

To get a ride to the Presidio site or to offer a seat in your vehicle
to someone seeking a ride, please send an email to:
carpool@nonsitecollective.org

Please specify whether you want to pick up/be picked up at the
MacArthur BART station or at the Civic Center BART station.
Ride-givers: Please give details about the look of your vehicle so
that ride-seekers matched with you can find you.

Rideshares for the east bay will be coordinated by David Brazil; he
will contact you by Saturday, Aug. 25th.

Rides from the east bay will meet at 1pm sharp!

Rideshares for SF will be coordinated by Taylor Brady; he will contact
you by Saturday, Aug. 25th.

Rides from SF will meet at 1:30pm sharp!

Driving Directions for Rideshares

From the Civic Center BART station

The Civic Center BART is located at about Hyde St./bet. 7th and 8th
streets on Market St. in SF.

Rides and riders can meet up at the following parking lot:

(Exit BART through the Hyde St. exit, walk up Hyde Street.)  One block
up from Market, you'll see the parking lot to your left.  The parking
lot is in between Hyde (east) and Larkin Streets (west), and bounded
by Fulton to the South and McAllister to the North.  There is a statue
glorifying the Spanish conquistadors in the middle of it.

From the parking lot to the Presidio site:
[PRINTING OUT THE PARK MAP IS STRONGLY SUGGESTED]
Take McAllister to Franklin, turn Left.
Take Franklin to California, turn Left.
Take California to Arguello, turn Right.
Take Arguello to the Arguello entrance of the Presidio.
Enter the Presidio, drive about 1/3 mile to Washington Blvd. and veer
Left onto Washington.
Take Washington about 2 miles to Lincoln Blvd.  (There is a small
interface with Kobbe Ave to get onto Lincoln, which is to your Left;
follow the signs to Lincoln Blvd.)
Take Lincoln about 1/3 mile until you are parallel with Ralston Ave.
There are various parking lots here marked with signs and all are less
than ¼ mile to the Battery Marcus Miller.

From the MacArthur BART station:
Take Telegraph to Grand, turn Right.
Take Grand to 880/80 towards the Bay Bridge.
Exit 80 at the Civic Center exit, veering Right, but getting ready to
make a soft Left onto Harrison, for about ½ block.
Get into Righthand lanes to turn R on 9th St.
On 9th St., get into Lefthand lane.
Cross Mission, then Market.  As you cross Market, you'll be making a
soft Left onto Hayes.
Take Hayes to Franklin, turn Right.
Follow directions above from Franklin.

Aug 5: Sarah Rosenthal and Sara Larsen at Overland Books

2007-07-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

The Great Overland Book Company Presents

a poetry reading with

Sarah Rosenthal
Sara Larsen

Sunday, August 5, 7:30 pm

The Great Overland Book Company
345 Judah St.

Sarah Rosenthal's cross-genre book Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming) was shortlisted for the Starcherone Fiction Prize. Her chapbooks include How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000), and not-chicago (Melodeon, 1998). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals such as Xcp (Cross-Cultural Poetics), 26, Bird Dog, Aufgabe, and Boston Review, and have been anthologized in Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2005) and hinge: A BOAS Anthology (Crack Press, 2002). She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and Santa Clara University as well as privately. She is editing a collection of interviews with Bay Area avant-garde writers. She is a recipient of the Leo Litwak Award for Fiction.

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

Announcing the launch of Digital Artifact's online magazine

2007-06-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Digital Artifact is a new online magazine launched and sponsored by Artifact and edited and designed by a collective of writers and visual artists. Our first issue investigates the ways in which the internet transforms narrative and language.

Check it out at:
http://www.digitalartifactmagazine.com/issue1

Digital Artifact Online Magazine

Digital Artifact Magazine interrogates narrative in contemporary culture
through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, or web-based audio-visual
work. We're specifically interested in how the internet, digital culture,
global and non-Western literature, pop culture, eroticism, documentary,
philosophy, politics and war are creating hybrid texts and new forms of
narrative and literature.

For more info about Artifact and Digital Artifact please visit:

http://www.digitalartifactmagazine.com
http://www.artifactsf.org

Artifact : 6.09 : Beavers : Evans : Jordan : Tremblay-McGaw

2007-05-29T15:45:00.001-07:00

Artifact presents . . .

A LAUNCH PARTY FOR DIGITAL ARTIFACT MAGAZINE!

David BEAVERS
Renee EVANS
Judith JORDAN
Robin TREMBLAY-MC GAW

Saturday, June 9th, 2007
7:30PM, reading begins at 8PM

2921B Folsom St. @25th St. SF 94110
$5 donation goes to Digital Artifact Magazine

www.artifactsf.org
digitalartifactmagazine.com
digitalartifact@gmail.com

BIOS

David Beavers was born in Santa Rosa, and lives and works in San Francisco. He never considered himself a "city person" until he moved there, and has developed a growing obsession to write about sprawling, mythical cities and the bored, lonely, or interesting people who inhabit them. He lives in the Sunset District, which is a much more fascinating place than you might think it is.

Renee Evans was born and raised in Southern Virginia and currently resides in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in fiction from Bard College in 2006 and is the author of the prose chapbook, How it Burned, and the comic book series The Secret Life. Renee spends her spare time making books, checking the mail, cutting up instructional manuals and medical textbooks, and her indentured time as a line cook in San Francisco.

Judith Jordan can be reached at velcro.buttons@gmail.com. Pocket Myths published her short story "Skylla" in their Odyssey anthology last year; snippets of her poetry are up at the Lodestar Quarterly and SomArts Review; a critical essay appeared in The Abolitionist; she was a resident artist at the Jon Sims Center for Performing Arts (2005); and Prestel is planning to publish one of her interviews in the Learning to Love You More collection this fall.

Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s work has appeared in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, HOW2, marks, Poetry Flash, Five Fingers Review, Mirage, and elsewhere. Currently she is at work on her dissertation which examines Bay Area Oppositional Writing. With Kathy Lou Schultz and Jim Brashear she edits Lipstick Eleven.

New Yipes : 5.27 : Sailers : Clark : Alvarez

2007-05-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

7 pm Sunday May 27
at 21 GRAND
416 25th St
@ B'way
Oakland
Calif
$4

CYNTHIA SAILERS is the author of Rose Lungs (atticus/finch 2003) and
Lake Systems (Tougher Disguises, 2004). Recent poetry has appeared in

Bay Poetics, Vanitas, Small Town and The Recluse. She co-curated the New

Brutalism Reading series and New Yipes from 2004-2006. She is currently working

on a doctorate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and beginning a dissertation on

narcissism and perversion in pathological groups.

JEFF CLARK was born in southern California in 1971. He attended UC Davis
for football, immediately quit, played baseball for a few months, and not long
after became involved in writing and the Davis music community. He was one
half of Buick (www.quemadura.net/p71alt.html ) and also drummed on Slowest Eye,
the last studio album of the Popealopes. Went to Iowa for poetry, then moved to
San Francisco, where he lived from 1995 to 2000. From 2000 to early 2004 he lived
in Oakland, and now lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his partner, the poet Christine
Hume, and their daughter, Juna Hume Clark. After eleven years with Oakland design

studio Wilsted & Taylor, Clark does book design as Quemadura (www.quemadura.net).

His own books are The Little Door Slides Back (Sun and Moon, 1997; reprint FSG, 2004),

Music and Suicide (FSG, 2004), and 2A (Quemadura, 2006), a book written in

collaboration with Geoffrey G. O'Brien.

ALFONSO ALVAREZ has collaborated with a number of musicians and filmmakers
to create multi-projector shows with live musical accompaniment. His films have
screened in many high-end warehouses, bars, galleries and film festivals locally
and around the world. He recently co-produced a 6 projector, live music show for
the Illuminated Corridor show on the Great Wall of Oakland at West Grand and
Broadway.

Artifact : 5.12 : Banerjee : Kaipa : Wilson

2007-05-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Artifact : 5.12 : Banerjee : Kaipa : Wilson

2007-05-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

Artifact presents . . .

Neelanjana BANERJEE
Summi KAIPA
Emily WILSON

Saturday, May 12, 2007
7:30PM, reading begins at 8PM

2921B Folsom St. @25th St. SF 94110

$5 donation goes to Digital Artifact online magazine - coming in June!

www.artifactsf.org
artifactsf@gmail.com

BIOS

Neelanjana Banerjee's writing has been published in the Asian Pacific American Writers' Journal, Kitchen Sink, Nimrod, Ellipsis, Suspect Thoughts and others. She is putting the finishing touches on her MFA thesis for San Francisco State University, a collection of short fiction entitled "Misbehaving." She also works as an editor and journalist for non-profit media organization New America Media and Hyphen magazine.

Summi Kaipa has authored several chapbooks, including "The Epics" (Leroy Press), "One: I Beg You Be Still" (Belladonna), and most recently "The Language Parable" (Corollary Press). For eight years, she was the editor of Interlope, a magazine publishing innovative writing by Asian Americans, and in 2002, she received a Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize to write and produce her first play. Once a resident of SF's bustling Mission District, Kaipa now resides in a quiet neighborhood in North Berkeley, where she studies for a doctorate in psychology, cooks delicious meals, and makes slow progress on her first full-length manuscript. Occasionally, she emerges from her shell to charm friends and admirers with a benshi or a reading.

Born in NYC and educated at UCBerkeley, Emily Wilson is a visual artist and writer. Chlorine, a photographic/prose collaboration with Amanda Davidson, may be found online at marjoriewoodgallery.com. Emily has shown her paintings at Southern Exposure and The Lab, as well as Portland's Pulliam-Deffenbaugh Gallery; the Mark Wolfe Gallery in San Francisco has scheduled a show of her work in October. Emily is currently working on Failure: A Novel.

SPD's Bee-In! May 14th

2007-05-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

Join us for a celebrity spelling bee to support SPD!

Tickets are selling out fast! Don't miss your chance to attend this exciting event with even more spellers added to the roster!

THE BEE-IN, A Spelling Bee to Benefit Small Press Distribution will be an old fashioned spelling bee but with alcohol and more fun! The proceeds will help support the work of SPD, the nation's only remaining non-profit distributor of literary small press books.

Drinks, Nibbles & Spelling!

Monday, May 14th - Crown Point Gallery, 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco

Doors Open @ 6:30 (Bee starts at 7:30 and lasts for about an hour)

Cocktails courtesy of Craft Distillers, pouring Hangar One Vodka

MC: NPR commentator Laura Sydell (All Things Considered)

Judge: San Francisco Chronicle Book Editor Oscar Villalon

Spellers (With More to Come!):

Cookbook guru Mollie Katzen (The Enchanted Broccoli Forest )
"Sexpert" Susie Bright (Best American Erotica )
Author and Stanford professor Tobias Wolff (Old School )
Ex-stripper Stephen Elliott (Happy Baby )
Jack Spicer biographer and former New York state Spelling Bee champion Kevin Killian (Little Men )
Political commentator George Lakoff (Don't Think of an Elephant! )
Former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez
Writers with Drinks diva Charlie Anders (Choir Boy )
Author and teacher Melanie Abrams (Playing forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic)
New York Times bestselling novelist Beth Lisick (Everybody Into the Pool )
"Riot grrrl" Michelle Tea (Rose of No Man's Land ).
Best-selling fiction writer Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner )
Award-winning author Nona Caspers (Heavier than Air )
Novelist Marc Lecard (Vinnie's Head )
Novelist, poet, teacher and literary magazine editor Maxine Chernoff (Among the Names )
Poet and former SPD Board Member Forest Hamer (Rift )
Cultural leader Penny Cooper
(NEW!!) Journalist, subculture skipper, and novelist Kemble Scott (SoMa)

General Admission Tickets: $50

Patron Tickets: $250

www.spdbooks.org/bee/

For Directions to Crown Point Gallery, please click here.

Parking: at 5th & Mission garage or at lot on 3rd between Howard & Folsom

10 Brecht Poems as Plays

2007-04-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Here's something you don't see all the time: Brecht's poetry performed dramatically:

April 26-28, 2007
At FURY factory Festival - San Francisco 7 PM

Travelling Jewish Theatre 470 Florida Street, San Francisco, CA
415-626-0453 ext. 108
www.foolsfury.org
$15 General Admission / $12 Student, Senior

10 Brecht Poems will be presented as part of a special NET (Network of Ensemble Theatres) weekend. This festival within a festival will feature performances, workshops and panels focused on the growing cultural movement of ensemble theatre in America. A full NET weekend pass is available.

Friday, 4.27 : kari edwards memorial

2007-04-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

Frances Blau, Marcus Civin, Rob Halpern, Joseph Lease, Kevin Killian, Roxi Hamilton and Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson would like to invite you to:

a memorial celebration
of the life and work of
kari edwards (1954-2006)

Friday, April 27, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Co-Sponsored by Small Press Traffic and the CCA MFA Writing Program

Presenters will include:
Charlie Anders, Frances Blau, Taylor Brady, Marcus Civin, Amanda
Davidson, Donna de la Perriere, Rob Halpern, Roxi Hamilton, Brenda
Iijima, Kevin Killian, Joseph Lease, Wendy Loomis, Akilah Oliver,
Leila Rauf, Ellen Redbird, Leslie Scalapino, Sherman Souther, Eleni
Stecopoulos, Eileen Tabios, Justin Veach, Maggie Zurawski

The memorial will also feature video of kari edwards

ALL ARE WELCOME

California College of the Arts, San Francisco Campus
1111 Eighth Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

The memorial will celebrate kari edwards' indomitable spirit and
compassionate revelation of body and language. Focusing on kari's
considerable legacy, the memorial will include poetry, performance and
visual art. Despite our deep sadness for kari's untimely passing,
kari's commitment to justice in general and transgender issues
specifically and hir ingenuity as an artist inspire all of us.

Contact
Small Press Traffic: 415-551-9278 www.sptraffic.org
or Marcus Civin: Marcus_Civin@hotmail.com
for more information about kari, please visit the blog: transdada3.blogspot.com

did I not say
despite the body
there is a universe
despite the universe
born waves of existence
did I not say
saying I must go
did I not say
death does not annihilate
it only breaks up conjunctions

kari edwards, did I not say, www.listenlight.net
from the unpublished manuscript Bharat Jiva

Digital Artifact : Call for Submissions : April 30th

2007-04-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

DIGITAL ARTIFACT
Call for Submissions
**Deadline April 30th**

Digital Artifact, a new, online journal created in conjunction with the Artifact Reading Series and Press, seeks work that interrogates the role of narrative in contemporary culture. We're specifically interested in how the internet, digital culture, global and non-Western literature, pop culture, eroticism, documentary, philosophy, politics and war are creating hybrid texts and new forms of narrative and literature.

The first issue of the journal will be dedicated to examining Narrative and Global Digital Culture. What is the impact of the internet and global culture on language and conceptions of narrative? We invite creative responses that explore this question, whether through fiction, criticism, experimental prose, or web-based audio-visual work.

A series of salons focusing on related topics will be held in conjunction with production of the web journal. To find out more about participating in the salons, email digitalartifact@gmail.com . Find out more about Artifact online at artifactsf.org.

We look forward to reading your work!
Chana Morgenstern, Amanda Davidson and the Editorial Team

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We accept e-mail submissions only. Send submissions to digitalartifact@gmail.com by April 30th. In the subject heading, include your last name and the word "submission." Do not send previously published work, and let us know immediately if the work has been accepted elsewhere. One submission per person, please. Include a brief (50-100 word) bio with your work. We will get back to you within three months.

**We accept text pieces up to 2,000 words in length. Please paste your work as plain text directly into the e-mail. You may also send a text document as an attachment in addition to pasting the content, if formatting is important to the piece.

**For images, we accept visual files in pdf, jpeg, and gif format. Please send a low-res (72 dpi) version for submission review.

**For sound, send mp3 files, zipped if possible, at a length of 5 minutes or less.

**For video footage, email QuickTime files, compressed for web, again in the vicinity of 5 minutes or less. If we have difficulty looking at your video due to compatibility issues, we will email you with information about uploading your submission to the Digital Artifact YouTube account.

Artifact : 4.21 : Cunningham : Ratcliffe : Saidenberg

2007-04-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

Artifact presents...

Brent CUNNINGHAM
Stephen RATCLIFFE
Jocelyn SAIDENBERG

Saturday, April 21, 2007
7:30PM, reading begins at 8PM

2921B Folsom St. @25th St. SF 94110

$5 donation goes to readers & drinks!

www.artifactsf.org
artifactsf@gmail.com

BIOS

Brent Cunningham's first book, Bird & Forest, was published in 2005 by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn. Since 1999 he has worked for Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Recent writing and visual art can be found in Vanitas, Encyclopedia, Bay Poetics, and on his blog at www.brentcunningham.blogspot.com. As the co-founder of Hooke Press (www.hookepress.com), he and Neil Alger have published delightful chapbooks by Norma Cole, Kevin Killian and Lauren Shufran.

Stephen Ratcliffe's most recent book is REAL (Avenue B, 2007). Previous books include Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and SOUND/(system) (Green Integer, 2002). Listening to Reading, a collection of essays on contemporary experimental poetry, was published by SUNY Press in 2000. He lives in Bolinas, California and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

Jocelyn Saidenberg is the author of Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series), CUSP (Kelsey St. Press), winner of the Frances Jaffer Book Award, and Negativity (Atelos). She is the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in San Francisco and works as a reference librarian for the public library.

*Just a note:

This will not be the last reading of the season!

Amanda Davidson will be curating readings for May & June!

Yay for Amanda!

Sunday, 4.22 : New Yipes w/SPT: Boyer & Moor with video by McGuire

2007-04-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

New Yipes & SPT present

Seven pm Sunday

April Twenty-Second

at 21 GRAND

416 Twenty-Fifth Street

Oakland, California

$4 would be great

ANNE BOYER is a poet, painter, fashion model, neurophysician, elevator repairwoman, ghostbuster, and empress operating out of various enclaves, conclaves, and clavier warehousesin the midwest. Her chapbook Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse was published by Effing Press in 2006, and her book The Romance of Happy Workers is forthcoming from Coffee House Pressin 2008. She is also the creator of the art project Odalisqued (http://odalisqued.blogspot.com/) where the remains of her visual/textual collage work as well as assorted dream visions and geopolitical prophecies can be found.

"WILLIAM MOOR is the true and undeniable author of many another man's authorships. Usingmodern technology devices such as email, WILLIAM MOOR assumes an identity, the grotesquefictionality of which is only equivocated by his real appearance. To see him in person is to seehis mediocre stunt double, for in fact I, Stan Apps, am the real WILLIAM MOOR and author of all his poems. Only his numerous plagiarisms continue to inspire doubt: surely Stan Apps is notthe elected representative of the people of Arizona? All that and more: WILLIAM MORE! I thank him for participating in this great façade and self-promotional scheme." --Stan Apps

ANNE McGUIRE's feature-length films include "Strain Andromeda, The" (1993) and "Adventure Poseidon, The" (2006), which played last month at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. Her non-kinetic visual work is on view in the show "To Here Knows When" at Soap Gallery (1142 Howard between 7th & 8th Streets, San Francisco) through May 12.

http://newyipes.blogspot.com/

Thurs, 4.19: Unitarian Center : Larsen & Harrison

2007-04-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

Roberto Harrison and David Larsen
Thursday April 19, 2007
7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center
1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5

Roberto Harrison edits Crayon with Andrew Levy, and the Bronze Skull chapbook series. Two full- length collections appeared in 2006, Os (subpress) and Counter Daemons (Litmus). “This gorgeous, riveting, improvisational epic shatters the singular viewpoint with burgeoning polyrhythms...brilliant and beautiful in its modulations of flux and open collectivity.” (Brenda Iijima on Counter Daemons). Harrison works as a Systems Librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin and lives in Milwaukee.

David Larsen’s long record of self-publishing was broken in 2005 with the appearance of The Thorn from Faux Press (Cambridge, MA). That same year, a downtown Oakland reading series fastened itself to him and called itself New Yipes.

At his first reading for the Poetry Center Larsen’s poetry takes a back seat, that he may present his translation of a stirring treatise by the philologist Ibn Khalawayh (d. 371 AH/980 AD). David Larsen lives in San Francisco.

Reading @ New College : 4.20

2007-04-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

A Poetry Reading at New College
Friday, April 20th 7pm

You're invited to kick up your heels with:

Brian Teare
Jane Mead
Catherine Meng
Nicole Collen
Susan Maxwell

New College Theater, 777 Valencia St., S.F.
The Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry from Autumn House Press

Small Press Distribution OPEN HOUSE : 4.14

2007-04-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

SPD's Spring Open House

Saturday, April 14th, 2007
12 Noon - 4 PM
20%-50% off all books!
Readings at 2 PM

Poetry Trading Post!
Trade in a poem or story for a Free Book!

Juliana Spahr teaches at Mills College. Her most recent book is This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. The Transformation is forthcoming from Atelos Press

Will Alexander is a visiting writer at Mills College and is the author of many books of poetry, including the recent Exobiology as Goddess. He has also written numerous plays and essays.

Dodie Bellamy's Academonia is just out. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Poetry. She is a novelist, essayist, journalist and teacher.

Albert Flynn DeSilver is the author of Letters to Early Street and Walking Tooth & Cloud and is the publisher of The Owl Press. He teaches in San Francisco and Marin.

The Open House also offers open-stack browsing on our 13,000+ titles, a 20-50% discount on all books (including 20% off the Plants and Landscapes book), and ample free food and drink.

Founded in 1969, SPD now distributes more than 500 small presses to libraries, bookstores, colleges, online stores, other distributors, and individuals.

For more information, call SPD (510 524-1668 x 300) or email Alli Warren at alli@spdbooks.org.

Sunday, Mar 25: Overland Books Reading Series

2007-03-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

The Great Overland Hong Kong Tea Literary Society Reading Series presents:

An evening of poetry

Yvonne Cannon
Sharon Pretti
Cathryn Shea

Sunday, March 25
7:15-9:00

Great Overland Book Co.
345 Judah, San Francisco

ARTIFACT : 3.17.07 : Gluck : Robertson

2007-03-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

ARTIFACT presents...

Bob Glück
Lisa Robertson

March 17, 2007
7:30PM
Reading begins at 8PM

$5 donation goes to readers & drinks!
(no one is turned away for lack of funds)

2921B Folsom St. @ 25th St. SF 94110
www.artifactsf.org

contact us @ artifactsf@gmail.com

Bios

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist. His new book of stories, Denny Smith, appeared in 2004. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic, director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. Glück’s poetry and fiction has been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction 1988 and 1996, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in Artforum International, Poetics Journal, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, and he prefaced, Between Life and Death, a book of paintings by Frank Moore. Last year he received the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. With Dean Smith, Glück has made a film, Aliengnosis. He teaches at San Francisco State and he is an editor of Narrativity, a web journal. In 2005, Coach House Press published Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative, an anthology edited by Glück, Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott.

Lisa Robertson just learned that she will be visiting artist at California College of the Arts in 2007-08. Her most recent publications are The Men (Bookthug, Toronto) and Rousseau's Boat (Nomados, Vancouver). Just now, she is writing an essay on Piranesi, Sir John Soane, and the architecture of the book, for a colloquium in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

SPT : 3.16 : Degentesh & Gardner

2007-03-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

Friday, March 16, 2007 at 7:30 p.m.
Katie Degentesh & Drew Gardner

Katie Degentesh joins us in celebration of her first book, The Anger
Scale (Combo Books, 2006), of which Anselm Berrigan says ""Don't be
fooled by the bawdy surfaces... [these] joyous, meta-ballistic poems
will guide any reader daring enough to read them in a realm where
everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it
would. You will be shamed by your elders and peers for not possessing
this book." Degentesh has an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis, and
now lives in New York.

Drew Gardner is the author of Sugar Pill (Krupskaya, 2002) and
Petroleum Hat (Roof, 2005), which received a Small Press Traffic Book
of the Year Award and of which Publishers Weekly says "Gardner
conjures the kind of complicated, childish political ignorance and
faulty, malevolent citizenship that George Carlin can only joke
about." Gardner joins us from NYC, where he edits Snare magazine and
teaches workshops at St. Mark's Poetry Project. He conducts the
Poetics Orchestra, an ensemble featuring poetry and structured
improvisation.


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 at Timken Lecture
Hall, California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street, San
Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin)
http://www.sptraffic.org

New Yipes : 3.18 : Bellamy : Campanna : films by Lockhart

2007-03-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday, March 18

at 21 GRAND

416 25th St

at the corner of

Oakland's Broadway Auto Row

7 pm | $4

"ARMAND F. 'THE DEVIL' CAPANNA II RHSP CHICAGO W 16, L 10, K 150, BB 56, .327 ERA, 1.20 WHIP, CG 5, SO 2, HB 32, WP 4, BAA .217 (.250 R, .178 L), HR 15 BATTING H 15, .112 BA, 1 SB, 2 3B SCOUTS NOTES Excellent Staff Ace...Fireballer who gives batters 'the creepies'...biggest break on a back door curve I have seen a RHP have...student of the game, quiet, thoughtful, will teach young rookies...like having another coach...not a misprint hit 32 batters last year...will not be f&cked with...Ejected 5 times last year...Umpires tires later found slashed...clubhouse behavior is mixed, some like him, others hate him...stole Sammy Sosa's Barbie collection last year and strung the heads around his locker...When confronted Capanna told Sosa '[The Bodies] are in the ivy, where your children will be if you ever talk to me again you f&cking prick.' ...ruins lives...is responsible for Rick Ankiel's breakdown, Capanna was a September call up for the Cardinals that year and was upset that Ankiel got a spot on the postseason roster and not him, Ankiel will only acknowledge that 'He [Capanna] did things to my head, he got in my dreams. I can't get him out of my dreams. You devil I give in I will never pitch again!'...Methadone addiction, though has never done heroin...Gang affiliations...strange sexual proclivities...Will only wear 'throwback uniforms'...the devil...he's in my head...I can't get rid of him..."-Parker Zane Allen

Dodie Bellamy's essays and reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, Out/Look and The San Diego Reader as well as numerous literary journals and web sites.In January, 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker's clothing for White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art space. With Kevin Killian, she has edited over 100 issuesof the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period(ical). Her novel The Letters of Mina Harker (reprinted 2004 by University of Wisconsin Press, with an introduction by Dennis Cooper) is a Gothic thriller updated for the 21st century; Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2001), a radical feminist revision of the "cut-up" pioneered by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Poetry. Come join us in celebration of Dodie's latest, a cross-genre collection of pedagogical essays and fictions entitled ACADEMONIA (Krupskaya, 2006).

Sarah Lockhart screens Suburban Guerrillas, a work of cultural misanthropology that posits the inhabitants of America's cul-de-sacs as an exotic warrior tribe and depicts their rituals, environment and battles through cut-up Super-8 home movies with obligatory subtitles. Lockhart also premieres America's Favorite Movie-The Trailer, inspired by the conceptual work of Komar and Malamid, deconstruction directed by statistics.

Woolf at the Berkeley Rep: 02-23 thru 02-27

2007-02-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

Apologies to ye Artifacters that this isn't exactly poetry, but it is the almost-poetry of Ms. Woolf, as performed by the Berkeley Repertory Theater.

The Berkeley Rep is kindly extending a special 20% discount to see their world premier adaptation of Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE this weekend. The offer was originally for Small Press Distribution supporters, but they encouraged SPD to pass it along.

For details, go to http://www.berkeleyrep.org/smallpress

Dates are Friday Feb 23rd, Sat Feb 24, Sun Feb 25, and Tuesday Feb 27th.

About the show:
For the past two years, Obie Award-winning director Les Waters has shown Bay Area audiences the best and worst of family dynamics in the luminous Eurydice, dark and disturbing Finn in the Underworld; breathtaking The Glass Menagerie; and edgy, enthralling The Pillowman. Now he reflects on yet another family with To the Lighthouse, a bold world-premiere adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel. Just as Virginia Woolf’s innovative style exploded the boundaries of prose, this production explores and explodes the boundaries of theatre -- with brilliant new music by composer Paul Dresher (whose venues include the Carnegie Hall, San Francisco Symphony and Project Artaud) to further illuminate the lives of the Ramsay house and its inhabitants.

ARTIFACT: 2:17:07: Scalapino: Morgenstern: Roy

2007-02-06T14:43:00.000-08:00

ARTIFACT presents...

A launch party for TANTALUM: a magazine that redefines the fictive

Leslie Scalapino
Chana Morgenstern
Camille Roy

Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007
7:30PM, reading begins promptly at 8PM
$3 donation goes to the readers & drinks!
2921B Folsom St. @ 25th St. SF 94110
www.artifactsf.org

BIOS:

Camille Roy is a writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. She edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative with Mary Burger, Robert Gluck, and Gail Scott (CoachHouse 2005). Earlier books include CHEAP SPEECH, a play, from Leroy, and CRAQUER, a fictional autobiography from 2^nd Story Books , as well as SWARM (two novellas, Black Star Series), among others. In 1998 she was the recipient of a Lannan Writers At Work Residency at Just Buffalo Literary Center. She is a founding editor of the online journal Narrativity (http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity). She teaches fiction at San Francisco State University.

Leslie Scalapino’s new book of poetry, Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night, is a collection of the last eight years. She is the author of thirty books of poetry, inter-genre fiction-poetry-criticism and plays, including recently Zither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press), The Tango (Granary Press), Orchid Jetsam (Tuumba), Dahlia’s Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2 Publishers), and a reprint of Defoe by Green Integer. Scalapino’s Selected Poems, 1974-2006/It’s go in horizontal is forthcoming from University of California Press at Berkeley in spring 2008. Her CDs include ‘Can’t’ is ‘Night’ and Other Poems and way.

Chana Morgenstern was born and raised in Jerusalem and now resides in San Francisco . She is currently at work on Home, a multimedia interview project she conducted with Israelis and Palestinians. For two years she served as resident writer and teacher of San Francisco School of the Arts Creative Writing Department. She has her MFA in fiction from Bard College and is working on an upcoming novel. Her plays and monologues have been performed at the New College Theater and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum. She is the author of the chapbook Touching New Jersey (Little Red Press) and the recipient of Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship in Fiction. Recent works of hers can be read in Red Letters Journal, On our Backs Magazine,
El Pobre Mouse, Shifter Magazine, Marjorie Wood Gallery and Tantalum.

New Yipes : 2.18 Vanitas #2 Reading

2007-02-04T14:08:00.000-08:00

Sunday, Feb 18

at 21 GRAND
416 25th St, corner B'way
6 blocks north of 19th St BART
in Oakland

7 pm

A FREE EVENT in celebration of VANITAS magazine (ed. Vincent Katz)

Featuring 3 films by RUDY BURCKHARDT in Glorious Sixteen Millimeter

And readings by

Bill Berkson
Mary Burger
Kate Colby
Norma Cole
Del Ray Cross
Brent Cunningham
Susan Gevirtz
Robert Glück

Duncan McNaughton
Laura Moriarty
Kit Robinson
Stephanie Young

as they leap from the pages of http://www.vanitasmagazine.com/

and into the annals of http://newyipes.blogspot.com

Clayton Eshleman reads at Mills 2/15 @ 5:30PM

2007-02-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

Mills College
Contemporary Writers Series:
Clayton Eshleman

The Chana Bloch Reading of Writers in Translation presents Clayton Eshleman
reading from his translation of Cesar Vallejo.

Date: February 15, 2007
Time: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Free to all

Location: Mills Hall Living Room

5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland CA 94613

2.2.07 : SPT : Last Night of Poets Theater!

2007-01-29T11:36:00.000-08:00

Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic
Friday, FEBRUARY 2, 2007 at 7:30 P.M.

all seats $10--this is a fundraiser for SPT
arrive promptly (or early as these events have been selling out!)

“Hooligan’s Island,” / Written & Directed by Scott MacLeod

“Self/Cell” / Text by Olivia E. Sears / Images by Aline Mare / Music by Craig Bicknell

“The Deathperts” / Written & Directed by Chana Morgenstern

Selections from “James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet” (1982)
Written by John Cage / Directed by Marie Carbone / With Gillian Conoley,
Patricia Dienstfrey, Dale Going, Brenda Hillman, Denise Liddell Lawson, Denise
Newman, giovanni singleton and Carol Snow

“The Gunfight” / Written & Directed by Brent Cunningham

"FEED" / Written & directed by Juliana Spahr


Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center at CCA
1111 -- 8th Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
415.551.9278
http://www.sptraffic.org

links! they are down!

2007-01-22T17:37:00.000-08:00

as most of you know, blogger has been a mess since switching over to their new non-beta world. & I inadvertantly screwed up this blog by reinstalling our template. thankfully I kept a list of most of our links but need some time to get them up.

arghhhhh....

robots are no longer my friends.

1/24 : SPD New Lit Generation Reading & Party--City Lights

2007-01-22T16:18:00.000-08:00

Small Press Distribution & City Lights Bookstore present...

NEW LIT GENERATION READING & PARTY
This Wednesday January 24, 2006 -- 7:30 PM

with readings by Ben Lerner, Dana Teen Lomax, Aimee Suzara, Jay Thomas, Eric Foster and Indiana Pehlivanova

City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway (North Beach)
San Francisco, California 94133
Tel + 415.362.8193

POETRY TRADING POST Trade a poem or story for a free book!

See more info at http://www.spdbooks.org/GENnewlitevents.asp

or MySpace.com/SPDbooks

1. 25 : Saidenberg & Moriarty @ Modern Times

2007-01-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

Reading: Thursday, 1/25, at 7:30
Jocelyn Saidenberg and Laura Moriarty
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia Street at 20th Street
415-282-9246
http://www.mtbs.com/

Books will be available at the reading and can be ordered from Small
Press Distribution:

Negativity:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=1891190253

Ultravioleta
http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=189119024

1.19 : Poets Theater Jamboree @ SPT

2007-01-19T14:15:00.000-08:00

FRIDAY, JANUARY 19, 2007 at 7:30 P.M.
“Tarantula” / Written & Directed by Marc Arthur.

“Orgasm” / Written by Dodie Bellamy / Directed by Margaret Tedesco

“Bowl, Cat and Broomstick” (1917) / Written by Wallace Stevens / Directed
by
Dana Teen Lomax & Danna Lomax

“The Haunted House” / Written & Directed by Brandon Downing

“Pig Angels of the Americlypse” & “Spine” Written by Rodrigo Toscano /
Directed by Stephanie Young

“The Party” / Written by Lisa Jarnot / Directed by Kevin Killian

All tickets are $10. This is a fundraiser to benefit Small Press Traffic

Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center at CCA
1111 -- 8th Street San Francisco, CA 94107
415.551.9278
http://www.sptraffic.org

New Yipes: 1/21: Melissa Benham | Sean Labrador | films by Glenn Wait

2007-01-19T13:10:00.000-08:00

Sunday, January 21 at
21 GRAND | 416 25th St
corner B'way | Oakland
6 blocks north of 19th St BART
7 pm | $4 | or whatever

Melissa Benham, a native Jersey girl, now happily resides near Children's Fairyland with her giant panda, Brent Cunningham. She is the author of codeswitching (Subday Press), and the chapbooks repronounceable and surrealistic object vs. narrated dream. For the last two years, she's been the curator & host of the Artifact Reading Series in SF with Chana Morgenstern. Currently, Melissa is single-handedly building a small human mechanism who hopefully will share her passion for unicorns and scratch 'n' sniff stickers.

The poet formerly known as Sean Manzano Labrador--a week after graduating from Mills he will be marrying the lovely Jennifer Dearinger, and both will share the last name Manzano--is a journeyman Bay Area student/poet doing time at UCB, UCSC, SFSU, and Mills. He wants to add other institutions to his nomadism. He believes in localizing his terminologies and defining his geographies within this narrow corridor. Lately he teaches the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Ghazzal, as well as Queer, Feminist, and Postcolonial theory and Critical Pedagogy in UC Berkeley's Upward Bound High School outreach Program. The last two collaborative sestinas included one twinning Donna Haraway ("A Cyborg Manifesto") and Huey Newton (founder of the Black Panther Party), and the other sestina married Horatio Alger and Tupac.

1.14 : Sandy Florian & Arielle Greenberg @ Pegasus Books

2007-01-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

Sandy Florian & Arielle Greenberg

Sunday, Jan. 14 @ 7:30PM

Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704

Sandy Florian earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Brown University.
She is currently a doctoral candidate in English and Creative Writing
at the University of Denver.   Her first book, _Telescope_ is
published by Action Books, and her first chapbook, an excerpt of a
book-length manuscript called _32 Pedals and 47 Stops_, is forthcoming
with Tarpaulin Sky Press.  Her poetry and prose appears in over 35
national and international journals including Diagram, Gargoyle, Bird
Dog, and Parthenon West Review.

Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books,
2005) and Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs
from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003).  She is also the editor
of a new composition reader, Youth Subcultures: Exploring Underground
America (Longman, 2006), and the co-editor, with Rachel Zucker, of the
forthcoming anthology Efforts & Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship
(U of Iowa, 2008). Her poems have been included the 2004 and 2005
editions of Best American Poetry and a number of other anthologies,
including Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande, 2006).  She is the poetry
editor for the journal Black Clock and a founder and co-editor of the
journal Court Green.  She is an Assistant Professor in the poetry
program at Columbia College Chicago and lives in Evanston, IL with her
family.

--
EYEBALL HATRED
http://claytonbanes.blogspot.com/

1: 16 : Dodie Bellamy & Roberto Tejada @ City Lights

2007-01-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

KRUPSKAYA Books is pleased to announce the publication of two new
AMAZING books, Dodie Bellamy's Academonia and Roberto Tejada's Mirrors 
for Gold. Please come to City Lights Books in San Francisco to help
celebrate! Details below.

READING : TUESDAY, January 16, at 7:00 pm
Dodie Bellamy and Roberto Tejada
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway
San Francisco, California
Tel + 415.362.8193
http://www.citylights.com/index.html

Books will be available at the reading and can be ordered through Small
Press Distribution.
More information is posted here:

ACADEMONIA:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=1928650252

MIRRORS for GOLD:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=1928650260

Artifact : 1 : 13 : 07 : Browne : Jaffe : Mellis

2007-01-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

ARTIFACT presents...

Laynie Browne
Sara Jaffe
Miranda Mellis

Saturday, Jan. 13, 2007
7:30PM, reading begins at 8PM

$5 donation goes to the readers & drinks!

2921B Folsom St. @ 25th St. SF 94110
www.artifactsf.org

BIOS

Laynie Browne has two books forthcoming in 2007, Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Press) and The Scented Fox, which was a National Poetry Series selection chosen by Alice Notley (Wave Books). She is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently Drawing of a Swan Before Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2005), and also a novel, Acts of Levitation (Spuytenduyvil, 2002). She has curated reading series and taught poetry-in-the-schools and Creative Writing in NYC, Seattle and Oakland. She is currently guest editing "Mem," a journal of poetry by women mothering young children.

Sara Jaffe is a writer and musician currently living in Western Massachusetts, though San Francisco is still lodged deep in her head and heart. She is former guitarist for dance-damaged band Erase Errata and proprietor of Inconvenient Press and Recordings, a DIY purveyor of printed and musical matter. Her writing has appeared in Encyclopedia, Tantalum, Instant City, and Fort Necessity.

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007) and Restless (BeeHive, temporalimage.com, 2003). Recent stories and reviews can be found in Post Road, Denver Quarterly, Fence, American Book Review and The Believer. She is a founding editor at The Encyclopedia Project and teaches writing at California College of Arts. Once an aerialist in the tiniest circus in the world, The Turnbuckles, she toured with Sister Spit in 1998.

12/17 Hooke Press reading @ New Yipes: Killian & Shufran w/films by Smith

2006-12-11T00:18:00.000-08:00

Sunday 12/17
at 21 GRAND
416 25th St @ B'way
Oakland, CA
6 blocks north of 19th St BART
7 pm | For lack of $4
none need miss out
on readings by
*
KEVIN KILLIAN
*
LAUREN SHUFRAN
*
with a set by AERO-MIC'D
*
and films by WAYNE SMITH
*
brought to you by HOOKE PRESS

Kevin Killian is the author of ARCTIC SUMMER, ARGENTO SERIES, LITTLE
MEN, BEDROOMS HAVE WINDOWS, I CRY LIKE A BABY, SHY and other
works of poetry and prose. 35 of his plays have been presented by San Francisco's
Poets Theater over the past twenty years. With Dodie Bellamy he has edited
130+ issues of MIRAGE #4/PERIOD(ical), and for many years he worked behind
the scenes at Small Press Traffic, the San Francisco literary arts center.
His latest book (from Hooke Press) is SELECTED AMAZON REVIEWS, edited by

Brent Cunningham. In the future: a new book of poetry called ACTION KYLIE and an

edition, with Peter Gizzi, of Jack Spicer's COLLECTED POEMS.

Lauren Shufran lives near here. She is currently working on her MA and MFA at

San Francisco State, and celebrating the release of her book BURROW from

Oakland's Hooke Press. From 2001 to 2003 she collected tolls on the Peace Bridge

between bomb threats. Now she farms chiefly for pleasure rather than income.

HOOKE PRESS was founded in late 2005 by Neil Alger and Brent Cunningham.
It was named for Robert Hooke, a 17th century British scientist and the first Curator
of Experiments at the Royal Society. Inspired by Hooke's experiments and
observations across an astonishing number of disciplines, Hooke Press seeks to
publish small-run books of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera that share
his ecumenical spirit, though not necessarily his famously sullen temperament.

* * * * * *
What. http://newyipes.blogspot.com

Pelton & Roy @ SPT 12/1

2006-12-03T18:07:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present a reading by

Ted Pelton & Camille Roy

Friday, December 8, 2006 at 7:30 PM

Ted Pelton is the author of three books, most recently the novel Malcolm and Jack (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006), which Cris Mazza says “reminds us of the quagmire that is history. Fact and fiction can't be easily boxed; everything is true even as everything isn't. Don't even bother trying to pinch yourself every so often while reading to see if it’s ‘real.’ Pelton’s book does the pinching for you.” Pelton is the publisher of Starcherone Books and teaches at Medaille College of Buffalo.

Camille Roy is a writer and performer of plays, poetry, and fiction. Her two most recent books are Cheap Speech, a play, from Leroy, and Craquer, from 2nd Story Books (both 2002). Her book Swarm (two novellas) was published by San Francisco's Black Star Series with funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is a founding editor of the online journal Narrativity. Girlfriends magazine says “Camille Roy is as brilliant and horny as William S. Burroughs with his consciousness way raised” and Robert Gluck calls hers “gorgeously perverse…starstruck langugage.”

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)

Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center at CCA
1111 -- 8th Street San Francisco, CA 94107
415.551.9278

http://www.sptraffic.org

Nagami & Warren @ SPT 12/1

2006-11-27T14:37:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present a reading by
Heather Nagami & Alli Warren
Friday, December 1, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.

Heather Nagami joins us from North Carolina in celebration of her first book, 
Hostile (Chax Press). Ron Silliman describes her writing as having “a goofball
elegance that has much to do with the New York School’s commitment to wit.”
Nagami’s poems have appeared in Antennae, Rattle, and Xcp (Cross-Cultural
Poetics). She is codirector of overhere Press, a small press that publishes
hand-bound chapbooks with an emphasis on poets of color and other
underrepresented peoples.

Alli Warren grew up in the San Fernando Valley. She is the author of the
chapbooks Schema, Yoke, Hounds, and most recently Cousins (Lame House Press).
On reading four lines from Hounds, Jack Kimball writes, "A narrow, stodgy and
often ostentatiously learned, pedestrian, callow youth with an unpromising
future, not a voracious reader of fine literature, a painter without pictures,
a radical without followers, a bloviater on par with the windiest, incapable
of getting to the point, one who's cacography was really a mess" She has
performed work recently at the Artifact and New Yipes reading series, and
every weekday at 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)


Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center at CCA
1111 -- 8th Street San Francisco, CA 94107
415.551.9278
http://www.sptraffic.org

12/1 The Encyclopedia Project Launch @ Modern Times

2006-11-27T14:33:00.000-08:00

THIS FRIDAY THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT PRESENTS:

X – R E F E R E N C E

A pre-holiday book launch extravaganza for Encyclopedia Volume 1 A-E
(everyone's favorite new pink and turquoise encyclopedia of fiction, prose and
art!)

FRIDAY DECEMBER 1, 7:30PM
@
MODERN TIMES BOOKSTORE (888 VALENCIA STREET)

Readings, Screenings, and Live Cross-Referencing Action!

Hosted by Miranda Mellis & Kate Schatz.

FEATURING VOL. 1 CONTRIBUTORS:

Jaime Cortez (see: dahlia)
Jacob Eichert (see: Exene)
Bob Glück & Jocelyn Saidenberg (see: babble)
Minal Hajratwala (see: America; Gloria Anzaldúa; autobiography)
Jeff Johnson (see: audience; book; destroy)
Chris Nagler (see: astrology)
Kirthi Nath (see: epigram)
Micah Perks (see: ending)
Praba Pilar (see: anxiety)
Sara Seinberg (see: ephemera)
Chuleenan Svetvilas (see: documentary)

WITH ART BY:

Corinna Press
&
Miriam Klein-Stahl

Special holiday prices on book!
Mind-blowing raffle! Door prizes!

The Encyclopedia Project will be collecting books for the Prisoner's Literature
Project, so if you can please bring books to donate.

For more info contact miranda@encyclopediaproject.org or
kate@encyclopediaproject.org

www.encyclopediaproject.org
www.mtbs.com

12/2 SPD Holiday Open House: Readings & Book Sale!

2006-11-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

Small Press Distribution invites to our
Holiday Open House and Book Sale.

Saturday, December 2, 2006, 12 noon-4pm
20-50% OFF ALL BOOKS!

Readings at 2pm + Music by David Buuck at 12:30 and 3pm

Featured Readers: Lisa Robertson, Stephen Ratcliffe, Marvin K. White, and Barbara Jane Reyes.

Free and Open to All!

SPD is located at 1341 Seventh Street, a half a block from Gilman in North Berkeley, between San Pablo blvd. & the 80 freeway.

1341 7th St
Berkeley, CA 94710-1409

Thanks to our generous supporters: Ashkenaz, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Cheeseboard, East Bay Express, Festoon Saloon, Jeff Maser, Jimmy Bean's, Lalime's, Landmark Theaters, Parkway Speakeasy, Peet's Coffee, San Francisco Performances, Vino!

ARTIFACT: 11.18.06 : Davidson : Koeneke : Vincent

2006-11-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

ARTIFACT presents...

Amanda Davidson
Rodney Koeneke
Stephen Vincent

Saturday, Nov. 18, 2006
7:30PM, reading begins at 8PM

$5 donation will benefit the Artifact Reading Series, Press, & Public Writing Projects

byob kids!

2921B Folsom St. @ 25th St. SF 94110
www.artifactsf.org

BIOS

Amanda Davidson is a San Francisco writer and image-maker. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Baby, Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing, Other Magazine and online at the Marjorie Wood Gallery. Come On, Big Empty, a film collaboration with Kirthi Nath, played recently at the APAture and 3rd i festivals. Davidson is currently working on a multimedia poem called Goodbye, Meat Pants: Imaginary Postcards from a Real War.

Rodney Koeneke is the author of Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX Books, 2006) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China (Stanford University Press, 2004) is a souvenir from his history days that's unlikely to have much bearing on this reading. His work has been read or performed at Small Press Traffic's Poets Theater, the Poetry Center at SFSU, the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and the 2006 Flarf Festival in New York. He's recently left San Francisco for Portland, OR for dark economic reasons.

Most recently, Stephen Vincent is the author of Walking (from Junction Press), Triggers (a Shearsman ebook) and Sleeping With Sappho (a faux ebook.) In the spring, Junction Press will publish Walking Theory, his collected poems from “the feet up.” This evening he will read work from his most recent ‘transversion’ projects, including Tenderly (improvisations on Stein’s Tender Buttons and Jack Spicer in Glasgow ( improvisation on Spicer’s Language, including some letters to Jack). Vincent’s blog (http://stephenvincent.net/blog/) includes various excerpts from these works.

Sam D'Allesandro Tribute @ USF : Wed 11/15 : 7:30PM

2006-11-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

From Kevin Killian:

If you're going to be in the Bay Area on Wednesday, November 15, I hope
you can come to a reading at USF (University of San Francisco) at 7:30
p.m.

We're going to be reading from the stories of Sam D'Allesandro, the San
Francisco-based "New Narrative" writer who died, aged 31, of AIDS in 1988.

Last year Suspect Thoughts Press put out a new edition of D'Allesandro's
stories, called THE WILD CREATURES, and it has been a big success so far,
winning the Stonewall Award from the American Library Association.

USF is commemorating 25 years of "artistic struggle against AIDS" by a
yearlong program of readings, plays, exhibitions, lectures and panels, and
this is part of that. I will be there, and also reading from
D'Allesandro's work will be the poets Bill Luoma and Suzanne Stein, and
the artist Colter Jacobsen. This event is sponsored by the MFA in Writing
Program, and by the Department of Performing Arts. And it's free to the
public (I always wonder what that expression means, and if there's some
other group, not the public, that has to shell out the entrance fee. The
sponsors I guess).

Anyhow you may be thinking, didn't we act up, fight back, fight AIDS years
ago, and that this reading should be solemn and sad, I don't think so! I
expect it will be the reading of the year, so don't miss it.

USF, Lone Mountain Campus (2800 Turk Street), Room 100.

Thanks, hope to see you on the 15th.

Kevin Killian

SPT: Arnold on Loy, Niedecker, & Oppen 11/10

2006-11-06T12:11:00.000-08:00

Small Press Traffic is pleased to present the 2nd of our Predecessors Talks:
Elizabeth Arnold on Rhyme & Politics in Oppen, Niedecker, & Loy
Friday, November 10, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.

Elizabeth Arnold writes: “In a talk I gave on rhyme in free verse, the focus
was, naturally, on the music of the language, the lyricism of the poems I
chose. And yet, several people in the audience were surprised to find that, in
addition to being compelling aurally, so many of the poems were political.
Included among them were some poems by George Oppen. Oppen’s adherence in
particular to what Wallace Stevens of all people insists upon: the necessary
interaction of reality and imagination. Social realism did not allow for the
unanticipatable emergence of ideas and feelings in a poem; as a committed
Marxist, Oppen chose not to write for twenty-five years rather than compromise
his art. Lyric power was crucial to him, the ear being necessary to the
success of poems carrying, out of the deepest recesses of a man who lived what
he believed, lyric poems with political subject matter. I may also look at
poems by Lorine Niedecker and Mina Loy in this light.”

Elizabeth Arnold is the author of two books of poems, Civilization (Flood
Editions, 2006) and The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The
recipient of a Bunting fellowship and a Whiting award, she edited Mina Loy’s
Insel for Black Sparrow Press and teaches in the MFA programs at the
University of Maryland and Warren Wilson College. She lives outside
Washington, D.C.


SPT's Predecessors Talks series exists to map and illuminate continuities of
influence and impetus among writers of a range of eras and milieux.


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)

The Los Angeles Project

2006-11-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a letter I received in the mail from Ms. Dacheux herself. Please see http://www.thelosangelesproject.blogspot.com/ for more information...

October 3. 2006

Dear Friends,

I am being held hostage by a progressive underground coalition called “The Imaginative Action Regime.”

I have no concept of where I am anymore. But don’t worry, I have not been harmed. My captors treat me well and feed me popsicles. They do not ask for my body. I have tried many times to spread my legs freely, but they have refused. This is my plight, as they are very attractive.

They want something else, which is why I am writing you. They want you to know about The LOS ANGELES PROJECT, a reaction to The Manhattan Project.

Manhattan. Los Angeles. Manhattan. Los Angeles. East Coast. West Coast. Fuck it.

I responded with a charismatic joke about Tupac and Biggie. I told them that if I were ever in a war, it would be a rap one, and I would be a super small fiery bundle of rhymes that jumps out into the spotlight to save everyone from gunfire.

Yes, they agreed. I am a maniac. I know nothing of war, let alone rap, or even hula hooping. Yet, they liked my joke, mostly because of my enthusiasm and tone. I felt promoted. And, in my playfulness, became one of them.

They told me to forget about coasts, forget about this and that, and to think only in concepts. They suggested that I think about The Manhattan Project minus Manhattan in a non-linear manner. They told me that The LOS ANGELES PROJECT should be thought of in a similar way but with different effects.

We have had many arguments over this.

I said that I could only think about things that are real.

This is how I get through the day, by putting one foot in front of the other, by zipping things up, by opening the door. I told them that ever since my dad died, I have been overly concerned with concrete things, because when I think too long about unreal things, I start to float in space.

“There’s nothing wrong with space,” they said.

I explained that if I sit still long enough, my body becomes magnetic, like water, pulling apart at the seams.

They nodded their heads and then tickled me. It was very sexy, and I grew distracted . . .

They are laughing over my shoulder right now . . . they are throwing me winks.

Where was I? Oh, that’s right. The Manhattan Project.

“Can you invent something that was unimaginable until now?” they asked.
“I’m not strong in physics.” I said.
“You don’t need to know how things work. This is not about knowing.” they explained.

They pushed piles of paper under my nose and forced me to write the word “coast” over and over again, for hours upon hours, until I saw only inane squiggles and curling pencil marks.

“What is that?” my captors demanded.

My hand ached, my eyes crossed. “It’s just pencil.”

“But, what does it mean?”

“It means pencil. It means we talk without talking through this scribble. I understand and you understand”

"No," they said, “we don’t understand.” They pointed to my scribblings.

“Nothing real means anything solid.” They do several little dances to spite my exhaustion. A lovely twirl for hours, a choreographed dance to Pat Benatar, and then I get crazy. They never tire.

On the next day, they told me to draw the first dead person I had ever seen.

On the next day, they told me to draw the second dead person I had ever seen.

On the next day, they told me to draw these two dead people as though they had forgotten about peanut butter.

It was difficult-- drawing the nose has always been challenging for me. At first, I drew carefully, and then carelessly as they watched, until eventually I grew distracted-- uncertain of my squiggles . . . this was a good sign.

On the next day, they asked me to illuminate myself like a fish gasping for air.

“Do you remember the Manhattan Project?” they asked me again.
“What are you, a nihilist?” I threw down my pencil.
“Would a nihilist have a suntan?” they laughed.

It was true, they had great suntans.

They urged me to continue. They described these times as apocalyptic and they told me what was at stake. They elaborated on some funny stories about performance pieces where performers protest performers to performers as though to suggest that wars are solved in art galleries.

They warned me about self-indulgent ego blasting, that some artists would not find it interesting, that some creative types only glory for other established creative types . . . this is not what The LOS ANGELES PROJECT means.

If their demands are not met, I will be held captive for a long long long fucking long ass time.

They said some artists would critique this, eat too much cheese and drink too much wine, throw up on themselves, demand this letter be more serious, especially when talking about war times and death. They might suggest my writing flat, that in three years it might mature, but in three years it might be too late.

I told them about you. How you are different.

I said that you believe in possibility, that chance is what you bring into the world and what you are capable of creatively evoking.

This is why they demanded I write you. For whatever reason, they believe in me, and in this sense, they believe in you.

“There is nothing wrong with funny childlike art,” My captors told me. “In fact,” they added, “only funny art will save the situation at hand.”

This is The LOS ANGELES PROJECT-- an extreme progressive need for imaginative action during these war times.

They are serious about being silly and their demands are as follows . . . pay attention, this is the important part--

1. Look out of a piece of paper and pretend window.
2. Write down something childlike or embarrassing—otherwise known as something
that could change the world. Do not talk about serious existing politics. As we all know, that route will not change the world, let alone save it.
3. Draw what you wrote down, especially if you are shy about drawing.
4. Make sure your something was fantastical and incomprehensible until now.
5. Place the pretend window in an envelope, and mail to our portal:

The LOS ANGELES PROJECT
c/o ms. dacheux
1803 Gramercy Place #12
Los Angeles, CA 90028

or place the pretend window in a scanner & jpg us at thelosangelesproject at yahoo dot com .

6. Now, think of a friend who was imaginary when you were a kid and is now very real.
7. Send them this document, paste the url, etc. get the word out, and tell them to repeat these actions.

My captors are building something quite spectacular here. They promise explosive results. Their brains are on fire. We are all doodling noses and feet for fish. Do not worry, I am safe, I am enjoying my stay. But, I miss you all. I miss you all so terribly. They will not release me until their demands are met. So, please act fast.

I don't know all the details. Every day is new. But, they have assured me of this--

Collectively, if geniuses were able to build something destructively unimaginable out of science, surely we can build something constructively unimaginable out of art. This is the beginning. This is where you and I hold hands & walk into the project.

Sincerely Your Friend & Future Collaborator,

Stacy Elaine Dacheux