Digital Artifact Magazine reading at ATA : 2.22.08

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!

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

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

SIGN UP NOW (Pay Pal & most credit cards accepted):

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

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

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

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!

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...

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

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

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.