ARTIFACT : 4.4.09 : FISHER : DAVIDSON : OAKES

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

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

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...

hey, Chris Stroffolino wrote us up in The Oakbook!

ARTIFACT : 10.25.08 : FRASER : LEDERER : SKINKER

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

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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

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

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

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

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...

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! :)