a good read

Chris Stroffolino has put up an insightful article on the relationship btwn poetry/lit & the weeklies (East Bay Express, SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, etc.) over the years. In it also discussing Michelle Tea's article last week on Artifact in the SFBG. A good beginning for conversation here.

His blog is here.

in the news again...

Hats off to Michelle Tea!

Her lovely article, The Salon, on the Artifact Reading Series & Press has just appeared in this past week's Lit Section of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her ongoing House Hunter column, searches out Bay Area small presses & does a pretty little dance about them. They are always a great read. In this article Michelle does a splendid job of talking up Sara Larsen's doubly circulatory (which is on sale for a mere $6!--just email us at artifactsf@gmail.com for ordering info).

Click here to read the article.

Many thanks to you Michelle!

say, can you spare a space?

dearest darling artifactees,

we've discussed this in the past, taken polls, etc. & have heard a resounding ambivalence towards even the suggestion of moving the artifact reading series to a larger, public venue, however, with all this delightful publicity we're nearly too big for our britches & getting bigger every second. rather than resorting to the grapefruit diet, I'm thinking, branch OUT.

if you have in your possession or are connected with a larger space (one that may house 45-80 people reasonably & legally) in san francisco & might like to lend us a mere 3-4 hours one saturday a month, then we would like to hear from you. we're thinking, gallery, artspace, etc. a space that may continue in the vein of intimacy that our living room has held, welcoming experimental writing & its community into its fold.

(we also enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach, fine wine & dining).

sound lovely to your ears? please contact me @ artifactsf@gmail.com.

yrs,
melissa benham

hooke press hits the interweb

it's happened & it's beautiful...

for Norma Cole's At All (Tom Raworth & His Collages)
& soon to arrive books by Lauren Shufran & Kevin Killian
check out the beautiful & the delicious at www.hookepress.com

ABOUT HOOKE PRESS
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 (but which do not necessarily share his famously sullen temperament). It is our conviction that “poetry” has gradually become less a genre than a locale. Under its banner, a wide array of thought, writing and activity now takes place which can find no other home in an increasingly restricted publishing and political environment.Our initial chapbook series includes books by Norma Cole, Kevin Killian and Lauren Shufran.

Hooke Press wishes to thank the Holocene Research Society (HRS) for its past support. The HRS is a “shell society” for the Research Foundation of the Holocene (RFH), which we also wish to thank for fronting the HRS. In addition we wish to thank the Society for Research into Holocene Culture (SRHC) which currently acts as the European parent company for the RFH.

More directly, Hooke Press is affiliated with the Artifact Reading Series and Press in San Francisco.

(Quoted from their site)

Venus: Summer 2006: Assembly + Craft = Artifact

ASSEMBLY + CRAFT = ARTIFACT

an article by STACY ELAINE DACHEUX

" Two San Francisco women are keeping the DIY literary spirit alive with their monthly reading series and publishing project."

Issue #28 Summer 2006
106 pgs $4.50
on newstands or order online at: http://www.lastgasp.com/d/28812/

Also in this issue:
Amy Sedaris, Sonic Youth, Joan Jett, The Fiery Furnaces, Pretty Girls Make Graves
& a million other things you want to read about.

Innumerable thanks to:
Stacy Elaine Dacheux for writing this article, Jessamyn Harris for taking the photos, & the ladies at Venus for allowing us to live, if only for a moment, in the same breath as some of the raddest people on earth.

Check out their sites:
www.stacyelaine.com
www.jessamynharris.com
www.venuszine.com (under construction)

6/18 : Brolaski & Brown : New Yipes

Sunday, June 18
at 21 Grand
416 Twenty-fifth St
(@ Broadway)
Oakland, California
7-9 pm $4

Singing and speaking with strings and without and letting the world know about it:

Tanya Brolaski is a love poet, and she dedicates all her verses to Love.
She is the author of Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003),
The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary’s Diary
(Cy Press 2005) and the blog Swimming for Dummies
(http://tanyabrolaski.blogspot.com).

Brandon Brown is the author of the unpublished books "The Persians By
Aeschylus,""Kidnapped," "Kidnapped," "E Podes & Odes," "Pool" and
many others. He is also the author of "My Life As A Lover" (Detumescence
2005) and the forthcoming "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (Cy Press 2006).
He is a relief pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, and he dedicates all his
verses to the San Francisco Giants.

Stecopoulos &Toscano : 6/1 : New Langton Arts

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

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

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

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

Bios

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

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

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

Artifact: 5.27.06 : Benham : Burger : Cole

NORMA COLE
MARY BURGER
MELISSA BENHAM


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

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

for more info:
artifactsf@gmail.com
415.647.7689

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

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

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

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

many thanks to Brent Cunningham
for creating this lovely flyer!

Joanne Kyger @ SPT 5.26.06

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10, sliding scale, free to SPT members, and CCA faculty, staff, and students.

Unless otherwise noted, our events are presented in
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th &
Wisconsin)

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