The Segue Series

5/30: SZYMASZEK & DURGIN

2009-05-26T19:31:00.002-04:00

The Segue Series Presents
Stacy Szymaszek
& Patrick Durgin
Saturday, May 30, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC
$6 admission
hosted by Kristen Gallagher & Tim Peterson

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Recent chapbooks include Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Chaps, 2008) and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Hyperglossia, the complete poem, is forthcoming from Litmus Press in early 2009.

Patrick Durgin has collaborated with Jen Hofer since 1998 to produce The Route (Atelos, 2008). On his own, Durgin has published Imitation Poems (Atticus/Finch, 2007) and Color Music (Cuneiform Press, 2002).

SEGUE 5/23: BERSSENBRUGGE & SKINNER

2009-05-19T01:08:00.003-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents

MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE & JONATHAN SKINNER
Saturday, May 23, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

Hosted by Kristen Gallagher and Tim Peterson

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and Concordance (Kelsey St. Press, 2006), a collaboration with Kiki Smith.

Jonathan Skinner is a poet, translator and critic, as well as editor of the journal ecopoetics. Skinner completed his Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. In 2005, he published his first full-length poetry collection, Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press).

SEGUE 5/9: KAUFMAN & RETALLACK

2009-05-04T09:55:00.001-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents

ERICA KAUFMAN & JOAN RETALLACK
Saturday, May 9, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

Hosted by Kristen Gallagher and Tim Peterson

erica kaufman is the author of several chapbooks including Civilization Day and several installations of Censory Impulse, her book-length poem, which was published by Factory School/Heretical Texts in January. She co-curates and co-edits Belladonna/Belladonna Books and lives in Brooklyn.

Joan Retallack’s most recent publication is her Gertrude Stein: Selections with an extensive introduction/discussion of Stein’s work, brought out by University of California Press. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Errata 5uite, which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. A collection of Retallack’s procedural poems is forthcoming from Roof Books.

SEGUE 5/2: JULIAN T. BROLASKI & MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI

2009-04-28T22:16:00.001-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

JULIAN T. BROLASKI and MAGDALENA ZURASWSKI

Saturday, May 2, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

Julian T. Brolaski co-curated the the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005 with Cynthia Sailers and the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006. Brolaski is the author of several chapbooks including The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary’s Diary (Cy Press 2005), and Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar 2008).

Magdalena Zurawski was born in 1972 to Polish immigrants in New Jersey. Her first book, The Bruise, won the Ronald Sukenick Prize in2006, and was published by FC2 in 2008.

2009-04-13T01:16:00.002-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

AKILAH OLIVER & CHARLES ALEXANDER
Saturday, April 18, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by Kristen Gallagher & Tim Peterson

Charles Alexander is a Tucson-based poet, publisher, and book artist. He is the director and editor-in-chief of Chax Press. Alexander’s recent books of poetry include Pushing Water: parts one through six (Standing Stones Press, 1998), near or random acts (Singing Horse Press, 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction Press, 2007).

Akilah Oliver is the author of a new book A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2008), and also the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999). She currently makes her home in Brooklyn, NY.

Winter/Spring 2009

2009-01-22T23:59:00.013-05:00

SEGUE READING SERIES
@ BOWERY POETRY CLUB

Saturdays: 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. 308 BOWERY, just north of Houston $6 admission goes to support the readers

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation. For more information, please visit seguefoundation.com, bowerypoetry.com, or call (212) 614-0505.

Curators:
February-March by Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan
April-May by Kristen Gallagher & Tim Peterson.

FEBRUARY 7
KENNETH GOLDSMITH and EDWIN TORRES
Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry and founding editor of UbuWeb (ubu.com). He is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU and teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Edwin Torres is a NYC born lingualisualist currently on hiatus from the apple, living upstate. A NYFA recipient and 2006/7 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence, he’s been widely published and taught his Brainlingo workshop at numerous venues & universities. His books include, The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books), Onomalingua: noise songs and poems (Rattapallax e-book), and Please (Faux Press CD-Rom).

FEBRUARY 14
STEVE BENSON and STEPHANIE YOUNG
Steve Benson, formerly of the San Francisco Bay area, has lived in Downeast Maine since 1996. Transcripts of orally improvised performances appear in Blindspots (Whale Cloth, 1981), Reverse Order (Potes and Poets, 1989), Blue Book (The Figures/Roof, 1998) and Open Clothes (Atelos, 2005), along with written works. With nine other bay area language poets, he is preparing part 8 of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (Mode A, 2006-present). Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland, deepoakland.org. She blogs so rarely at stephanieyoung.org/blog.

FEBRUARY 21
MELANIE NIELSON and SARA WINTZ
Melanie Nielson was born in Humboldt, Tennessee, grew up in Southern California, and lives in New York City. She edited Big Allis magazine for many years with Jessica Grim, and is the author of Civil Noir (Roof Books, 1991). Sara Wintz’s writing has appeared in Ecopoetics, Cricket Online Review, Interrobang?!, and on Ceptuetics. She co-directs, with Cristiana Baik, :the press gang:, publisher of Intricate Systems, by Juliana Spahr and One Might, by Karen Volkman. She lives in Brooklyn and works at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

FEBRUARY 28
JOHN GIORNO and BRIAN KIM STEFANS
John Giorno is the author of many books of poetry, which have been translated into several languages. Subduing Demons in America: The Selected Poems of John Giorno, 1962-2008, a career-spanning survey of his work, will be published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull in 2008. Brian Kim Stefans’ most recent books are What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Kluge: A Mediation, and other works (Roof, 2007) and Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews (Salt, 2006). He just moved to Los Angeles to take a position as professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA.

MARCH 7
JEROME SALA and RACHEL ZOLF
Jerome Sala has been described as an “honorable hysteric” by critic Peter Schjeldahl. His latest book is Look Slimmer Instantly from Soft Skull Press. Other books include cult classics such as Spaz Attack, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent and The Trip. Rachel Zolf’s collections include Human Resources (Coach House, 2007), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Shoot and Weep (Nomados, 2008), and Masque (Mercury, 2004).

MARCH 14
CHARLES BERNSTEIN and ADEENA KARASICK
Charles Bernstein is the CFO of the Center for Avant-Garde Comedy and Stand-Up Poetry. His most recent book is Blind Witness: Three American Operas. Adeena Karasick is the 2008 winner of the MPS mobile award, poet media artist and author of six books of poetry and poetic theory. Forthcoming is Amuse Bouche Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks, 2009). She teaches Film and Literature at CUNY.

MARCH 21
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD and LYTLE SHAW
K. Silem Mohammad is the author Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). Abraham Lincoln, which he edits with Anne Boyer, is the single most significant poetry magazine in North America that always features a large cat and a rainbow on its front cover. Lytle Shaw’s most recent books include The Chadwick Family Papers (a collaboration with Jimbo Blachly, Periscope, 2009) and Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (University Of Iowa Press, 2006).

MARCH 28
JAMES SHERRY and CECILIA VICUÑA
James Sherry is the author of more than 10 books of poetry and prose. His most recent publication, Sorry: Environmental Poetics, is forthcoming from Factory School later this year. He is the editor/publisher of Roof Books and founder of The Segue Foundation. Cecilia Vicuña performs and exhibits her work widely in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. Templo e’Saliva / Spit Temple, a collection of her oral performances, edited by Rosa Alcalá, is forthcoming by Factory School Press.

APRIL 4
RON SILLIMAN and JENNIFER BARTLETT
Ron Silliman has written and edited over 30 books to date. Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons. Jennifer Bartlett is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (New Mexico Press). She was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with the writer Jim Stewart and their son Jeffrey.

APRIL 11
JENA OSMAN and TAN LIN
Jena Osman’s books include An Essay in Asterisks (Roof) and The Character (Beacon). Her book The Network is forthcoming from Essay Press. She co-edits the ChainLinks book series with Juliana Spahr and teaches in the graduate Creative Writing program at Temple University. Tan Lin is a writer, artist, and critic. His most recent book is Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource from Zasterle, and his new work Seven Controlled Vocabularies is forthcoming from Wesleyan
University Press. His visual and video work has been exhibited at the Yale Art Museum (New Haven), the Sophienholm (Copenhagen), and the Marianne Boesky Gallery (NYC).

APRIL 18
CHARLES ALEXANDER and AKILAH OLIVER
Charles Alexander is a Tucson-based poet, publisher, and book artist. He is the director and editor-in-chief of Chax Press. Alexander’s recent books of poetry include Pushing Water: parts one through six (Standing Stones Press, 1998), near or random acts (Singing Horse Press, 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction Press, 2007). Akilah Oliver is the author of a new book A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2008), and also the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999). She currently makes her home in Brooklyn, NY.

APRIL 25
POETRY and ARCHITECTURE EVENT:
featuring VITO ACCONCI, BENJAMIN ARANDA and ROBERT KOCIK
What is the nature of the conversation between poetry and architecture today? In this event for the Segue Reading Series, poets and architects will present works exploring a dialogue between these two disciplines. Vito Acconci will show an image-stream of built & unbuilt spaces & instruments as he reads: 1) about furniture & houses (80's), cities & landscape (90's); 2) from rules for assemblage & incursion (00's); 3) architecture in words only (00's). Benjamin Aranda will present images and talk around the issue of self-assembly, where top-down methods for determining form and making decisions are complicated and sometimes replaced by bottom-up rules of formation. As in natural systems, the architectural structures up for discussion are not carved or composed in a traditional sense; they are grown through simple interactions to produce complex patterns that are both useful and buildable. Robert Kocik will present a plan for the Prosody Building, a note on mercenary poetry (without which business is biocide), Missing Civic Services, and a few architectural plans made entirely of words.

PARTICIPANTS: Vito Acconci's design & architecture comes from another direction, from backgrounds of writing & art. By the late 80's he crossed over & joined with architects to form Acconci Studio. They mix poetry & math, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology as they range from plazas & parks to buildings & interiors to furniture & products to clothing &vehicles. They are currently working on a street through a building in Indianapolis, a building that twists from a courtyard in Milan, a makeover of a former strip-mall in Athens, Georgia. Benjamin Aranda is architect and principal of Aranda\Lasch, New York, NY. Robert Kocik, poet, essayist, artist, design/builder, lives in Brooklyn where he directs the Bureau of Material Behaviors. His architectural works are committed to the realization of 'missing' functions, services, organizations, or agencies. He is currently developing a building based on 'prosody' and poets' imagined importance to our society. With the choreographer Daria Faïn, he has initiated a field of research called The Prosodic Body. His publications include: Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2001), and Rhrurbarb (Field Books, 2007).

MAY 2
JULIAN BROLASKI and MAGDALENA ZURASWSKI
Julian T. Brolaski co-curated the the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005 with Cynthia Sailers and the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006. Brolaski is the author of several chapbooks including The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary’s Diary (Cy Press 2005), and Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar 2008). Magdalena Zurawski was born in 1972 to Polish immigrants in New Jersey. Her first book, The Bruise, won the Ronald Sukenick Prize in2006, and was published by FC2 in 2008.

MAY 9
ERICA KAUFMAN and JOAN RETALLACK
erica kaufman is the author of several chapbooks including Civilization Day and several installations of Censory Impulse, her book-length poem, which was published by Factory School/Heretical Texts in January. She co-curates and co-edits Belladonna/Belladonna Books and lives in Brooklyn. Joan Retallack’s most recent publication is her Gertrude Stein: Selections with an extensive introduction/discussion of Stein’s work, brought out by University of California Press. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Errata 5uite, which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. A collection of Retallack’s procedural poems is forthcoming from Roof Books.

MAY 16
NO READING

MAY 23
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE and JONATHAN SKINNER
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and Concordance (Kelsey St. Press, 2006), a collaboration with Kiki Smith. Jonathan Skinner is a poet, translator and critic, as well as editor of the journal ecopoetics. Skinner completed his Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. In 2005, he published his first full-length poetry collection, Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press).

MAY 30
STACY SZYMASZEK and PATRICK DURGIN
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Recent chapbooks include Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Chaps, 2008) and from Hyperglossia (Hot Whiskey, 2008). Hyperglossia, the complete poem, is forthcoming from Litmus Press in early 2009. Patrick Durgin has collaborated with Jen Hofer since 1998 to produce The Route (Atelos, 2008). On his own, Durgin has published Imitation Poems (Atticus/Finch, 2007) and Color Music (Cuneiform Press, 2002).

THE SEGUE FOUNDATION
300 Bowery
New York, NY 10012

Fall/Winter 2008-2009

2008-09-13T22:18:00.011-04:00

SEGUE READING SERIES
@ BOWERY POETRY CLUB

These events are made possible, in part, with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Saturdays: 4:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.
(readings begin promptly at 4PM)

308 BOWERY, just north of Houston
****$6 admission goes to support the readers****

Fall / Winter 2008–2009

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation. For more information, please visit www.segue.org, bowerypoetry.com, or call (212) 614-0505. Curators: Oct.–Nov., Christina Strong & Alan Davies, Dec.–Jan., Evelyn Reilly & Thom Donovan.

OCTOBER

OCTOBER 4
E. TRACY GRINNELL & HEATHER FULLER
E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Some Clear Souvenir and Music or Forgetting, as well as the limited edition chapbooks Leukadia (forthcoming), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson, Of the Frame, and Harmonics. She lives in Brooklyn where she teaches writing and edits Litmus Press and Aufgabe, an annual journal of poetry and translations. Heather Fuller’s works include perhaps this is a rescue fantasy, Dovecote, and Startle Response. She is one of five poets featured on the narrow house recordings CD Women in the Avant Garde. She lives in Baltimore.

OCTOBER 11
MICHAEL GOTTLIEB & MITCH HIGHFILL
Michael Gottlieb is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently: The Likes Of Us. His essays on Jackson Mac Low and Proust are available at EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts. His long essay, “Jobs Of The Poets,” is available at jacketmagazine.com. Later this year Faux/Other will publish his memoir, excerpts of which are now available at the online magazine mark(s). Mitch Highfill is the author of Moth Light and Rebis. He recently performed parts of Moth Light accompanied by Natalia Paruz, also known as The Saw Lady. Recent work has appeared in OCHO and Critiphoria.

OCTOBER 18
TED PEARSON & DREW GARDNER
Ted Pearson is the author of sixteen books of poetry, including Evidence: 1975–1989, Planetary Gear, Songs Aside: 1992–2002, and Encryptions. He also co-edits markszine.com and is a co-author of The Grand Piano. He lives in Redlands, California. Drew Gardner’s books are Petroleum Hat and Sugar Pill. He lives in Harlem. He does musical collaborations with poets and conducts the Poetics Orchestra.

OCTOBER 25
PETER CULLEY & CARLA HARRYMAN
Peter Culley lives in South Wellington, British Columbia. His books include The Climax Forest, Hammertown, and The Age of Briggs & Stratton. Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise will be released from Essay Press this fall. Recent publications include the book length poem Open Box, the novel Gardener of Stars, Baby, and the special edition Toujours l’épine es sous la rose. Harryman is co-editor of Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker and a co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980.

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 1
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE & DARREN WERSHLER
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is sitting next to you right now. Depending. (He’s sitting) upon “how you define ‘next’”. When he does that, he’s doing ‘this’ too. Darren Wershler lives in Toronto and teaches new media and media history at Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent books are The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History Of Typewriting, and Apostrophe (with Bill Kennedy).

NOVEMBER 8
KATHLEEN FRAZER & ALLISON COBB
Kathleen Fraser teaches at CCA/SF and annually migrates to Rome where she and NYC painter Hermine Ford recently showed wall texts from their on-going collaboration ii ss at Pratt Architecture Institute. (Pieces from this show currently up at Melville House, Dumbo/Brooklyn). Recent books: 20th Century, hi dde violeth i dde violet, Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling, and W I T N E S S (artist book with Nancy Tokar Miller.) Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 and is at work on a long piece about the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. She was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and now lives in Brooklyn.

NOVEMBER 15
STEVE MCCAFFREY & KAREN MAC CORMAC
Steve McCaffery is the author of more than 21 volumes of poetry and four books of theory and criticism. His most recent title is Slightly Left of Thinking: Poems, Texts and Postcognitions. He lives in Buffalo where he is the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo. Karen Mac Cormack is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. Her most recent publication *Implexures* (the Complete Edition) was published in 2008 by Chax Press/West House Books.

NOVEMBER 22
KIT ROBINSON & BERNADETTE MAYER
Kit Robinson is a co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–1980. His books include The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems (forthcoming), 9:45, The Crave, and Democracy Boulevard. Kit lives in Berkeley. Bernadette Mayer is the author of Memory, Studying Hunger, A Bernadette Mayer Reader, Midwinter Day, and many other works. Forthcoming in 2008: Poetry State Forest, The Cave with Clark Coolidge, and Ethics Of Sleep.
NOVEMBER 29 NO READINGS—Happy holiday!

DECEMBER

DECEMBER 6
LESLIE SCALAPINO & ARNOLD J. KEMP
Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, inter-genre fiction, and criticism. Among recent works are Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night and It’s go in horizontal/Selected Poems 1974–2006. Arnold J. Kemp is a visual artist and writer. His writing has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Agni Review, Mirage #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, and Art Journal. In 2005 and 2007, Small Press Traffic commissioned two of his plays/performances for the San Francisco Poets Theater.

DECEMBER 13
KIM ROSENFIELD & DAWN LUNDY MARTIN
Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of three books of genre blurring language; Good Morning—Midnight— (Roof Books 2001), which won Small Press Traffic’s Book of the Year award in 2002, Tràma (Krupskaya 2004), and re: evolution (Les Figues Press 2008). She lives in NYC. Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering. She is also the author of The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 for the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship.

DECEMBER 20
LARRY FAGIN & KYLE SCHLESINGER
Larry Fagin’s most recent publication is Dig & Delve, a collaboration with the artist Trevor Winkfield. He is the co-publisher of Adventures in Poetry books and the founder of Danspace, the dance program at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery. Kyle Schlesinger’s books include The Pink, Hello Helicopter and Schablone Berlin with Caroline Koebel. With Thom Donovan and Michael Cross, he edits ON, a poetics journal that focuses on contemporaries.

DECEMBER 27 & JANUARY 3 NO READINGS—Happy holidays!

JANUARY

JANUARY 10
TONY CONRAD & CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN
Tony Conrad was a participant in the founding of minimal music and structural film. Recently his Yellow Movies (1972–73) have been exhibited at the Greene-Naftali and Daniel Buchholz galleries. His installation Beholden to Victory (1980–2007) opened in May at Overduin and Kite in L.A. Carolee Schneemann’s video, film, painting, photography, performance art and installation works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, and Europe. Correspondence Course, edited by Kristine Stiles, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Previous published books include Imaging Her Erotics—Essays, Interviews, Projects and More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Work and Selected Writings.

JANUARY 17
MARCELLA DURAND & ERICA HUNT
Marcella Durand is the author of AREA, Traffic & Weather, The Anatomy of Oil, Western Capital Rhapsodies, City of Ports, and Lapsus Linguae. For the past several years she has been translating Michèle Métail’s book-length work, Les horizons du sol/Earth’s Horizons. Erica Hunt is the author of Local History, Arcade, and Piece Logic. She is the president of the 21st Century Foundation.

JANUARY 24
TINA DARRAGH & STEPHANIE GRAY
Tina Darragh’s essay “Blame Global Warming on Thoreau?” is included in the )((eco)(lang)(uage (reader)), forthcoming from Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs. A section of “Deep eco pre,” her collaboration with Marcella Durand, has been posted on How2. Darragh is happy to confirm the rumors that her opposable dumbs project is being plagiarized. Stephanie Gray’s first poetry collection, Heart Stoner Bingo, was published in 2007. She is also an experimental filmmaker whose super 8 films have screened at Millennium Film Workshop, Ann Arbor, Oberhausen, Viennale, Cinematexas, Antimatter, Chicago Underground and Madcat.

January 31st, 2009 4PM
Cannot Exist #4: a politics of magazine culture
Come join Eileen Myles, Rodrigo Toscano, Christina Strong, Laura Sims, Lawrence Griffin, Rick Burkhardt, Thom Donovan and others for Segue's launch of Cannot Exist #4, a magazine edited by Andy Gricevich of Madison, WI devoted to overlap between politics, philosophy, and poetry. Presentations and readings will be followed by an open conversation about the politics of magazine culture--how the small magazine can affect politics and establish a cultural commons.

Introduction for Simone White (by Erica Kaufman)

2008-06-02T22:27:00.002-04:00

(photo by erica kaufman)

Simone White, a Cave Canem fellow, is the author of a collaborative chapbook in conversation with the paintings of Kim Thomas (from Q Avenue Press). Currently a doctoral student in English at CUNY Graduate Center, she lives in Brooklyn.

“The ardor of the metropolis” permeates Simone White’s poems, full of fierce landscapes, memory-scapes, and body topographies. White writes “Into the street, carrying my own entry” and asks pertinent questions like “what is the paradise?” And, in her imperative inquiries, Simone invites her readers to devote, deliberate, defy, delight, and dissent. And, I can’t help but hear echoes of Milton, his subversive epic musicality, and what White gracefully refers to as “manifesting the primal urge to make oneself over as heroic.” In her landmark book, Milton and his Epic Tradition, Joan Malory Webber writes, “to be heroic in the epic tradition involves knowing and accepting, and at best learning unsteady control over, the sheer animal energy of human nature. It involves accepting life in a world that does not necessarily improve.”

Whether it be under a Bedford Stuyvesant lamppost or “in the middle country,” Simone White’s poetry understands that “perfect desire reveals itself most naturally through song” and also “like suburbs, not independently epic.” As Ralph Ellison writes in his seminal essay, “Living with Music,” “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise and we chose rather desperately to live.”

Please join me in welcoming Simone White.

Segue 5/31: Matthew Rotando and Simone White

2008-05-26T23:35:00.003-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Matthew Rotando and Simone White

Saturday, May 31, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Matthew Rotando’s first book of poems, The Comeback’s Exoskeleton, (with a foreward by Tim Peterson) is available from Upset Press. He is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona. Rotando received his MFA from Brooklyn College and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona.

“Story of Learning”

After I learned the language, I learned it well. Then went down to the lake. I said, “Hey, Pond, you got rabbit-congress, how about witch go seventeen something something?” Pond said, “Man, the language is not like that. You better learn.” So I learned. I learned and learned. Then said to Old Man Killer Whale, “Nice for this mine, your thermos mine, your brown interval mine, your Viggo Mortenson.” Killer Wheel said, “Not far enough yet, son. But if you study, your own reward will be that you studied.” Shivering and shaking, I studied and learned. I learned hand and by hand and hand stealing and victim-focused learning. Then I met Wall Of Dogs. Wall said, “You look like another dog for me.” I said, “Yes, cylinder and me talking—like night fighting—and yes or same project makes blame, the astrolabe, wicca, not chancy chancy, all these marriages end in more desire.” Wall Of Dogs spoke, and said, “Only that last bit showed some learning.” So I made the Walking Wall my right side master, learned something else on my left and in my front I wished for a gymnastics container. I said, “I’ve learned. This old language in mine, and easy now. I have it for naming and knowing and learning.” Then Hey Pond, Old Killer Whale Man, and Dog Wall said, “Ho! Ho! Pond Consonant Boy, look at you, handclapping for bottles and vowels and cans!”

Simone White, a Cave Canem fellow, is the author of a collaborative chapbook in conversation with the paintings of Kim Thomas (forthcoming from Q Avenue Press). Currently a doctoral student in English at CUNY Graduate Center, she lives in Brooklyn.

“Poem That Reminds Me of Barack Obama”

Ice house, not original with me, marooned on an ice plateau,
phantom. Were I captured, rendered elsewhere pictorially,
some other grey flake of building would be like
an erotics of long-headed men,
which are, like suburbs, not independently epic.
Cavalcade of the long-headed man,
turf one so wants to lie down on,
like a basketball star is an aggregate of longings to fly or be multiple, raceless selves,
like angels, like abstraction itself,
nonetheless like the awesome black cock we always imagined and coveted,
like, “The tricks I could do with a new eye pencil!”,
like, “A husband like hers erases neutrality.”
And what about grasses, blades of grass?
Like a fact no one has use for, these have no manner
unlike difficulty, like things I won’t talk about.
Like a scratched off part of my face.

2008-05-18T23:56:00.000-04:00

Jeremy James Thompson reviews the Javier & Delany reading.

Segue 5/17: Samuel R. Delany & Paolo Javier

2008-05-16T15:33:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents:

SAMUEL R. DELANY & PAOLO JAVIER
Saturday, May 17, 4PM-6PM
308 Bowery, just north of Houston

$6 admission goes to support the readers
Hosted by Tim Peterson (curated by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson)

SAMUEL R. DELANY is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a Lifetime's Contribution to Lesian and Gay writing. His novels include Nova, Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton, Hogg, The Mad Man, Phallos, and most recently Dark Reflections. His short fiction has been collected in books such as Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories and Atlantis: Three Tales. His nonfiction has been collected in volumes such as Silent Interviews, Longer Views, Shorter Views, and About Writing, and he is the author of a best-selling study, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

PAOLO JAVIER is a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence. He is the author of LMFAO (OMG! Press, forthcoming), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits the online journal 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, please visit www.seguefoundation.com, bowerypoetry.com/midsection.htm, or call (212) 614-0505.

Segue 5/10: Renee Gladman & Rachel Levitsky

2008-05-10T12:50:00.002-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents

Renee Gladman & Rachel Levitsky
Saturday, May 10, 2008
4PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Renee Gladman is the author of Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice, The Activist, A Picture Feeling, and of a work in-press, Newcomer Can't Swim. Since 2004, she has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a perfect bound series of books for experimental prose. She was previously the editor of the Leroy chapbook series, publishing innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers.

from A Picture-Feeling

pre rust the iron
twists were dull
and new just
about to pull apart
just as I was flooded
with picture-feeling
--attached to ideas—
except this one
which was nameless (V
pinned beneath
unbearable weight)
or was
the moment before
the real thing and
V underneath—
the verb not
the subject

Rachel Levitsky's first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and is currently writing a prose novella. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics.

from The Story of My Accident is Ours

"From Almost Any Angle"

We'd woken to the world like characters you'd see in a science fiction movie, the ones without parents, cloned for the purpose of replacing the organs of the rich, or jailed indefinitely or repeatedly for our child-bearing abilities. We had the appearance of arriving whole, the sets of our features predetermined and complete.

We were defined by limitation. We'd been kept away from history by serial clearances: the slums, the streets, the poor, then the rich, then the home, then the street, then the neighborhood, then the mall, and then the mall. The mall.

We recognized each other by the vacant look in our eyes and the sophistication of our speech, when we had the energy to speak. We were not quite like the creatures in Zombie movies that were popular again in our time, we didn't join in the common cause of destroying another or making them more like us, for we didn't have killer instincts, nor did we think that what we were should necessarily be multiplied, though we were confused about the ways we did have, what they were and how they'd come to be. What we knew better than what we were was what we were strange to. We were strange to the ways of smiles possessed by the ones on television1 and outside in front of the church. Or of the two passing each other while one is on the sidewalk and another is driving to deliver a package from a truck. We did not mean to be unfriendly nor dour though I can now see we most certainly appeared so/were so. We ourselves didn't know how else to be; we were mostly all one way.

SEGUE 5/3: Miles Champion and Ted Greenwald

2008-05-02T21:09:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Miles Champion and Ted Greenwald

Saturday, May 3, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Miles Champion's recent or forthcoming books are Eventually and How to Laugh. His recent collaborations with artists include one on paper with Trevor Winkfield and one in latex with Jane South. He moved to New York—the bulk of the traffic was heading the other way—from London in 2002.

"Wet Flatware"

Two docks, up at the scent door.
Rigid mirrors check my building
tears & service
Eye like a silent film cleaning
out the reference
desk, a focus is expecting dust
the top took to kiss
assume neutral article
it came loose You make
the sounds: ah, ee, oo
No mistake, some view

Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous book of poetry and of a video, "Poker Blues" (made in collaboration with Les Levine), in which he also appears as the sole performer.

from Two Wrongs

Inside person
Speaks to
Outside who
The one with

Alongside
That's the one
Blueprint
New leaf

Introduction for Elizabeth Willis (by erica kaufman)

2008-04-27T21:50:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Willis' most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.

“Fluent in salamander,” Elizabeth Willis’s seemingly organic ekphrasis stuns meteoric after turneresque after abstract. These poems are shapely tornadoes that collide with things past, they take “genre trouble” and out of it create “prose in revolt.” “The world [might] be clanking noun noun noun” (it usually is), but in Willis’s work the poet always has critical control—meaning Willis’s poems radiate the kind of strength that makes one rethink his/her own confidence. (To quote “Errata,” “for the, read her”). Or, as Stefania Heim writes of Meteoric Flowers, “deep fissures between things hold the emotional core, the sharp intelligence, and the relentless energy of the collection at the same time as they remain the sites of what is left unsaid.” To quote Willis, “I do this work to word you.”

In fact, Willis’s newest collection Meteoric Flowers even begins with the Wallace Stevens quote—“A poem is a meteor.” And these poems are indeed meteors—with their atmospheric entry, their impact on the surface (of the page, on the listener’s ear, on Darwin’s own texts), and their finely sculpted shapes. As Willis writes in her “Notes on [Meteoric Flowers] the Text,” “Darwin made poems that perform as well as contain their intellectual discoveries.” Or, as she writes in “All the Paintings of Giorgione,” “this is the moment when painting becomes painting.”

Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Willis.

2008-04-20T22:41:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Thomas Fink and Elizabeth Willis

Saturday, April 26, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, including Clarity and Other Poems. He is the author of two books of criticism, most recently A Different Sense of Power, and he is the co-editor of Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia.

from "Deconstricted Sestina 5"

Dialogue will swerve repeatedly before it survives
patriarchy. Thanks for not smoking inside. I
trust you to profit from any experiment
that respects the survival of those not

yet as fit. Reach into my pocket
and husband what's left. My husband assumes
immortality, but one attentive scribe is becoming
my sole access to recommencing dialogue, into

which labors or equalization should
be poured. My thanks are
colored by suspicion of vested

recollection. Lately, many fund Plato's
experiment; mine could take several

millennia to breed a profit.

Elizabeth Willis' most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.

"Her Mossy Couch"

I stain lengthwise all I touch. The world is so touching, seen this
way, in fleshtones, aggrieved, gleaming as the lights go out, look-
ing into the crease of relativity. We've seen this before, why? Tri-
umph arches over us like bad emotion. We were supposed to feel
more connected to it, we were supposed to feel humanly moved
by imaginary strings. All the words in the world are moving pic-
tures to the dizzy ear, fleas, inadequate deceptions of nocturnal
hair, pushing buttons, pushing papers, pushing pedals up the
long hill. Who could get over the blatant radiance of a name like
Doris Day, throwing your finest features into political relief, a
warehouse in the shadow of apples and streams?

SEGUE 4/19: RUTH LEPSON, WALTER CRUMP, AND DAN MACHLIN

2008-04-16T01:22:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents

Ruth Lepson, Walter Crump, and Dan Machlin
Saturday, April19, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by Tim Peterson

Poet Ruth Lepson and photographer Walter Crump are the authors of the collaborative book Morphology (Blazevox Books). Ruth Lepson is also the editor of Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology and the author of Dreaming in Color. Walter Crump's photography is included in numerous private and public collections including: Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of America Art (Smithsonian), and the National Museum of Fine Art, Hanoi. His website is www.waltercrump.com.

Regarding Morphology, Tina Darragh says:
"'Awake' is now 'Aquake,' and we are more sensible souls for the 'light tablets' this collaboration tones us."

and Charles Alexander says:
"This book is magic. I want to read it a thousand times."

From "Morphology"

*

"Can anyone think of a
Realist writer? I ask. A guy
In the back of the room
Raises his hand. "Simmonds
Hoote," he says.

Robert Creeley's new poems are
black                  and white
maps                  of America
clear                  as New
Mexico.                  The clouds
are verti-                  cal curliques
chalked                  through Nebraska
and Kan-                  sas. The
Midwest                  map
strikes                  me--
its neck,                  the
North-                  east,
has been                  severed.
Later I                  notice the absence
of words,                  the
silence.

Dan Machlin's first full-length collection of poems Dear Body: was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2007. He is also the author of several previous chapbooks: 6x7, This Side Facing You, In Re; and an audio-CD collaboration with Singer/Cellist Serena Jost, Above Islands. He is the founding editor of Futurepoem books.

From "Dear Body"

Meanwhile you were hiding underneath the table. At one time, they too could
assemble you out of grass – an abandoned rug and decaying vegetables.

We prayed to your effigy like to a beautiful library book you wanted to steal –
the perfect never-noticed crime.

Many years later indexing doubts about your presence you uncover lost plans
for some extreme city.

Or you as your own forbidden lover who meets yourself
Late at night in a forgotten deco motel.

A brief conversation about ephemera (each word drenched with sexual potential).

You know, I've never believed in your hope. So somehow the limbs attached to
a trunk of meat and toes a face lips that say a nose balding teeth barely –

O how this house whispers beneath the dinner table!

Introduction for Tonya Foster (by erica Kaufman)

2008-04-13T18:11:00.000-04:00

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance.

In “A Mathematics of Chaos,” Tonya Foster writes, “The act of writing involves a similar process of construction and resistance.” This quote is one of several interstices where a gracefully semi-disjunctive narrative breaks for questioning. Like a moment when the work reflects on its own creation. (aside: I am reminded of something I read describing Cha’s Dictee as “autobiography that transcends the self.”)

Another moment of this sort—“Walking forward while looking back is a natural process through which cities and poems come into being.” Foster is architectural in her ability to construct cities via poetics—whether the place be Harlem, Jersey City, New Orleans, haiku, or a Woman Named Kong. This variant architectonic variance is partially because of Foster’s amazing ear for how words can and should bump up against each other, and partially because of her pioneering recognition of the marginalized (diction, region, politic).

As Foster writes in A Swarm of Bees in High Court “When Moses parted/the Red Sea as if it were/hair, was he tender?” Here I am reminded of Anne Waldman’s “Prelude: My Long and Only Afterlife” (from A Vow to Poetry) in which she writes, “Past is never over, will you learn that now?” then later, “Regarded with a fortress mentality the reclamation of nation, of people.” And so we ask the question, what can poetry do? (active verb)

Quote,
“In memory, the/eye is quicker”

and

“Bullets can/ blot a page, train an eye to/ follow thought and sound”

Please welcome Tonya Foster.

2008-04-10T00:48:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents
Tonya Foster & Anne Tardos

Saturday, April 12, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance.

From "(In)Somniloquy"

History swarms in
the marrow of your thoughts (,/.) as
she lies there (,) sleepless

history swarms in.
To eat or not to? Then what?
She clears her throat.

"You can't be eatin'
from everybody," her aunt warned
after the first loss.

"You can't be eatin'
like you don't mind trading a
baby for red beans."

That yarn's redness bleeds Persephone, Eve, Jemima, Rine. More
squirrels.
That yarn's redness: eating from a strange pot/tree/hand/mind draws
blood or sleep.

Anne Tardos is a poet and visual artist. She has published several books of poetry and the multimedia performance work and radio play Among Men. She is the editor of Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low, from the University of California Press this fall. Her new book I Am You is just out from Salt Publishing.

81

It's time to let go of the narrative section of this poem and let the ride begin

Haa-ooh-aah

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Won't you be my silicone doll
Won't you be my forever stamp
No I will not fix your computer

Music You

Possibly

--from "Letting Go"

Introduction for Wayne Koestenbaum (by erica kaufman)

2008-04-06T13:59:00.000-04:00

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

Part fashion icon, part heroic musicologist, part flaneur, part Lacanian “new species in signification.” Wayne Koestenbaum is Barthes’s dream come true—exactly the kind of agency he calls for in “Musica Practica,” a place where the idea of playing is revivified via concise swerves along the road once thought of as essay. Much like “fashion’s nature is bricolage” (Koestenbaum, “Thrifting”), Koestenbaum breaks genre binaries and instead embraces the influence of one form on another, writing a “diva” I can’t help but indefatigably admire.

Hotel Theory, Koestenbaum’s newest is a masterpiece in mirroring—simultaneously a “dime store novel” and an exploration into a “hotel state of being.” In presenting two seemingly separate prosaic texts side by side, Koestenbaum asks his readers to rethink how we read. The result: a queer poly-narrative that reforms the visibility of a text and the page. To quote from “Hotel Theory,” “We practice a hotel room, just as we practice space: residing and walking are ways of turning space to account, defining and molding it.” To quote from “Hotel Women,” “In Hotel Women, time bent over backwards to make guests happy.”

What does it mean to be happy? Perhaps ultimate “genre autonomy?” Or, an “opalescent red Jung theory of progress.” “in this oops! I call love.”

As Benjamin writes in “Excavation and Memory, “ “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium.” Koestenbaum has found this much talked about medium and cloaked it in sequins, pinstripes, and what The Washington Post refers to as “extravagant gestures and precise observations.” To quote the New Yorker, ‘Koestenbaum breaks the silence,” and it is my great pleasure to be introducing him. Please welcome Wayne Koestenbaum.

2008-03-30T11:34:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents

Wayne Koestenbaum & Marjorie Welish

Saturday, April 5, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by erica kaufman & Tim Peterson

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. He a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

"Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1"

Brahms dreamt
the complacent
girl's allergy to calamine
lotion screwed up her cat's
psyche. Clara's
hubby had a writing
block, which threatened
the Chinese dinner en famille.
Insensate, whorish,
the taxi failed to bring me here.
The hoodlum gang
coalesced. The dime
novel mugged
the Madonna of the Postpartum
Exasperation, a rain of
alphabet-soup letters alighting
on a background landscape's pinched fronds.

***

Recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship, the Howard Foundation Fellowship, twice winner of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and other prestigious awards for poetry, Marjorie Welish is the author of Isle of the Signatories--just out from Coffee House Press, Word Group, and also The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems, which was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist and a Village Voice Best Book of the Year. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press). Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books) compiles papers given at a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to her writing and art. She teaches at Columbia University and at Pratt Institute.

from "Dedicated to"

11.

Translated and with a commentary
Fire, a transient

syllabus, its first word occluded
impending

terrace, identifying the occasion its
element in shadow

being pounded in
signals a scene change

so what
Water, an apparent shroud

pouring
access read at a distance

a proposition from time to time
from the desk of

SEGUE READING SERIES: WINTER/SPRING 2008

2008-02-01T00:45:00.000-05:00

Saturdays: 4PM-6PM
308 Bowery, just north of Houston

$6 admission goes to support the readers

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, please visit www.seguefoundation.com, bowerypoetry.com/midsection.htm, or call (212) 614-0505.

Curators:
February by Alan Davies, March by Charles Borkhuis,
April-May by Erica Kaufman and Tim Peterson.

FEBRUARY 2
GILBERT ADAIR & P.INMAN
Gilbert Adair, who moved to NYC in 1999, founded and curated the “Sub-Voicive” reading series, London’s leading venue for experimental poetry. His pulications include “frog boks,” “keep the curtains the face has ended,” “steakweasel,” and most recently “xiangren,” a collection of short, sometime super-short poems. P. INMAN grew up on Long Island off the coast of “America”; publications include: Ocker; Red shift; criss cross; Vel; at least; amounts to; now/time; employment: retired Fed employee, currently works as a labor rep for AFSCME Council 26, 3 blocks away from the White House.

FEBRUARY 9
MARTHA OATIS & LARRY PRICE
Martha Oatis is the author of from Two Percept (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). As well as text, drawing and sculpture are a part of her work. She is in her first year of acupuncture school and lives in Providence. Larry Price is the sometime publisher of GAZ. In San Francisco until 1988. East coast since. Books include Circadium and the unpublished Comity and aAmerica. He Lives in New Jersey, where he works as the Creative Director of a design studio.

FEBRUARY 16
AUSTIN PUBLICOVER & CHRISTINA STRONG
Austin Publicover is a sound/noise artist whose poetry has appeared in EOAGH and The Moon; his Council of Worms CD features Brenda Iijima’s sound text vs. homemade sonic detritus; forthcoming CDs with Carla Harryman and Sawako Nakayasu; fiercesome solo efforts Stop Me If You’ve Already Heard This One and the double album Sizzle Priory available on repetitive dawn recording. Christina Strong is a poet and designer who lives in Brooklyn. Her books include [Anti-Erato] (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and her e-book Utopian Politics (Faux Press). She is the editor of Openmouth Press and the politics editor of Boog City.

FEBRUARY 23
JOHN GODFREY & MARIANNE SHANEEN
John Godfrey’s most recent books and Push the Mule (The Figures, 2001) and Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry, 2003). Wave Books will publish City of Corners in 2008. Marianne Shaneen is a writer and filmmaker. Her documentary about Humanimals or “furries” is in post production. Recent publications include an essay on Ken Jacobs and the Sublime Horrors of Perception; her chapbook Lucent Amnesis; and an essay on Madeline Gins and Arakawa, “Inhabiting the Impossible.” Excerpts from her long prose work, “The Peekaboo Theory,” have been published in several magazines.

MARCH 1
BRUCE ANDREWS & ABIGAIL CHILD
Bruce Andrews is the author of over 2-dozen books of poetry, performance scores & essays on poetics; most recently, Co (five collaborations); Designated Heartbeat; Swoon Noir. Lately, reading projects on Race & on 1960s Visual art theorizing and collaborating on performances with Sally Silvers. Abigail Child is the author of five books of poetry, among them A Motive for Mayhem and Scatter Matrix as well as a book of critical writing: This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film. She teaches in Boston, and calls NYC her home; her website is www.abigailchild.com.

MARCH 8
MARTINE BELLEN & BRENDA IIJIMA
Martine Bellen is the author of Further Adventures of the Money God, The Vulnerability of Order, Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, and Places People Dare Not Enter. She is presently collaborating with the composer David Rosenboom on an opera very loosely based on The Diamond Sutra. Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press) and Around Sea (O Books). Her manuscript, If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. She runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and design homeopathic gardens.

MARCH 15
DAWN MICHELLE BAUDE & BRENDA COULTAS
Dawn Michelle Baude is the author of The Flying House (Parlor Press, 2008), Egypt (Post-Apollo, 2002) and The Beirut Poems (Skanky Possum, 2001). The winner of a 2006 Senior Fulbright Award in Creative Writing. Baude has lived for the last fifteen years in Europe and the Middle East where she works as a professional writer and teacher. Brenda Coultas is the author of The Marvelous Bones of Time and A Handmade Museum, both published by Coffee House Press. She lives in the East Village.

MARCH 22
NOAH ELI GORDON & DAVID SHAPIRO
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Novel Pictorial Noise, selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and Figures for a Darkroom Voice, in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson. He teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver. David Shapiro has written over 20 volumes of poetry, prose, translations, and art criticism. He wrote the first book on Ashbery, the first book on Johns’s drawings, and the pioneering study of Mondrian’s flowers. He has taught at Columbia, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College, Bard College, Princeton and is tenured as an art historian for the last 25 years at William Paterson University. He was nominated for the National Book Award when he was 24 and edited The Anthology of NY Poets with Ron Padgett in 1970.

MARCH 29
RODRIGO TOSCANO & MARK WALLACE
Rodrigo Toscano’s latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater, which won the National Poetry Series 2007. Toscano is a poet and the artistic director and writer for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His experimental poetics plays, body-movement poems, and polyvocalic pieces have recently been performed in San Francisco, and Alexandria, Virginia. Mark Wallace is the author and editor of a number of books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. A collection of his tales, Walking Dreams was published in 2007 and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion is forthcoming in 2008. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Marcos.

APRIL 5
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM & MARJORIE WELISH
Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft skull Press in 2008. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art. Recipient of the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship, the Howard Foundation Fellowship, and other prestigious awards for poetry. Marjorie Welish is the author of Isle of the Signatories—just out from Coffee House Press, Word Group, and also The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems, which was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist and a Village Voice Best Book of the Year. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press).

APRIL 12
TONYA FOSTER & ANNE TARDOS
Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance. Anne Tardos is a poet and visual artist. She has published several books of poetry and the multimedia performance work and radio play Among Men. She is the editor of Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low, from the University of California Press this fall. Her new book Letting Go is also coming out this fall.

APRIL 19
WALTER CRUMP, RUTH LEPSON, & DAN MACHLIN
Poet Ruth Lepson and photographer Walter Crump are the authors of the collaborative book Morphology (Blazevox Books). Ruth Lepson is also the editor of Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology and the author of Dreaming in Color. Walter Crump’s photography is included in numerous private and public collections including: Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of America Art (Smithsonian), and the National Museum of Fine Art, Hanoi. His website is www.waltercrump.com. Dan Machlin’s first full-length collection of poems Dear Body: was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2007. He is also the author of several previous chapbooks: 6x7, This Side Facing You, In Re; and an audio-CD collaboration with Singer/Cellist Serena Jost, Above Islands. He is the founding editor of Futurepoem books.

APRIL 26
THOMAS FINK & ELIZABETH WILLIS
Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, including Clarity and Other Poems. He is the author of two books of criticism, most recently A Different Sense of Power, and he is the co-editor of Burning Interiors: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics. His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia. Elizabeth Willis’ most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.

MAY 3
MILES CHAMPION & TED GREENWALD
Miles Champion’s recent or forthcoming books are Eventually and How to Laugh. His recent collaborations with artists include one on paper with Trevor Winkfield and one in latex with Jane South. He moved to New York—the bulk of the traffic was heading the other way—from London in 2002. Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous book of poetry and of a video, “Poker Blues” (made in collaboration with Les Levine), in which he also appears as the sole performer.

MAY 10
RENEE GLADMAN & RACHEL LEVITSKY
Renee Gladman is the author of Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice The Activist, A Picture Feeling, and of a work in-press, Newcomer Can’t Swim. Since 2004, she has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a perfect bound series of books for experimental prose. She was previously the editor of the Leroy chapbook series, publishing innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers. Rachel Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and is currently writing a prose novella. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics.

MAY 17
SAMUEL R. DELANY & PAOLO JAVIER
Samuel R. Delany is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a winner of four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a Lifetime’s Contribution to Lesian and Gay writing. His novels include Nova, Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton, Hogg, The Mad Man, Phallos, and most recently Dark Reflections. His short fiction has been collected in books such as Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories and Atlantis: Three Tales. His nonfiction has been collected in volumes such as Silent Interviews, Longer Views, Shorter Views, and About Writing, and he is the author of a best-selling study, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Paolo Javier is a 2007/8 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence. He is the author of Goldfish Kisses, 60 lv bo(e)mbs, and the time at the end of this writing, which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year award. He edits 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

MAY 24 (NO READING)

MAY 31
MATTHEW ROTANDO & SIMONE WHITE
Matthew Rotando’s first book of poems, The Comeback’s Exoskeleton (with an introduction by Tim Peterson), is available from Upset Press. He is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona. Rotando received his MFA from Brooklyn College and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona. Simone White, a Cave Canem fellow, is the author of a collaborative chapbook in conversation with the paintings of Kim Thomas (forthcoming from Q Avenue Press). Currently a doctoral student in English at CUNY Graduate Center, she lives in Brooklyn.

Fall/Winter 2007 at Segue

2007-10-13T21:40:00.000-04:00

SEGUE READING SERIES @ BOWERY POETRY CLUB

Saturdays: 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. 308 BOWERY, just north of Houston ****$6 admission goes to support the readers**** Fall / Winter 2007-2008

These events are made possible, in part, with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation.

For more information, please visit www.seguefoundation.com, bowerypoetry.com/midsection.htm, or call (212) 614-0505. Curators: Oct.-Nov. by Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan, Dec.-Jan. by Brenda Iijima & Evelyn Reilly.

OCTOBER

OCTOBER 6 JENNIFER MOXLEY and MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN
Jennifer Moxley is the author of four books of poetry: The Line (Post-Apollo 2007), Often Capital (Flood 2005), The Sense Record (Edge 2002; Salt 2003) and Imagination Verses (Tender Buttons 1996; Salt 2003). Her memoir The Middle Room was published by Subpress in 2007. For links to her work online, reviews, and more biographical information visit: epc.buffalo.edu/authors/moxley/index.html. Maggie O’ Sullivan is a British poet, performer and visual artist. She has been making and performing her work internationally since the late 1970s. Her most recent publication is Body of Work (Reality Street, 2007), which brings together for the first time all of her long out-of-print small-press booklets from the 1980s. Her website is www.maggieosullivan.co.uk.

OCTOBER 13 ANDREW LEVY and BARRETT WATTEN
Andrew Levy is a contributing writer on President of the United States’ The Big Melt (Factory School, 2007), and he is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Ashoka (Zasterle Books), Paper Head Last Lyrics (Roof Books), Curve 2 (Potes & Poets Press), Values Chauffeur You (O Books), and Democracy Assemblages (Innerer Klang). He is editor, with Roberto Harrison, of the poetry journal Crayon. Barrett Watten founded the Grand Piano reading series in 1976 and edited and published This from 1971. His most recent books are Bad History (Atelos, 1998), Progress/Under Erasure (Green Integer, 2004), and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), which won the 2004 René Wellek Prize.

OCTOBER 20 K. LORRAINE GRAHAM and TAO LIN
K. Lorraine Graham is the author of three chapbooks, Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha), See it Everywhere (Big Game Books), and Large Waves to Large Obstacles (forthcoming from Take Home Project), and the recently released chapdisk Moving Walkways (Narrowhouse Recordings). She has just completed the extended manuscript of Terminal Humming. Tao Lin is the author of a novel, EEEEE EEE EEEE (Melville House, 2007), a story-collection, Bed (Melville House, 2007), and two poetry collections, You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am (Action Books, 2006), and the forthcoming Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (Melville House, Spring 2008).

OCTOBER 27 ROB FITTERMAN and MEL NICHOLS
Sandwiched between Shell and Mobil gas stations, Robert Fitterman grew up in a pre-sprawl St. Louis suburb named Creve Coeur (broken heart). He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books) and, most recently, War, the musical (Subpress, 2006) with Dirk Rowntree. Mel Nichols lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at George Mason University. Her chapbooks are Day Poems (Edge Books 2005) and The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6 (Edge 2007), based on the daily blog project at thebeginningofbeauty.blogspot.com.

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 3 CHRIS FUNKHOUSER and MADELINE GINS
Chris Funkhouser was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2006 to lecture and conduct research in Malaysia, where his CD-ROM eBook Selections 2.0 was produced at Multimedia University. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, a history of pre-WWW computerized poetry, has just been published by University of Alabama Press. Madeline Gins: B-b-b-b-b-orn and intends never to die. Three of her eleven books: What the President Will Say and Do!; Helen Keller or Arakawa; Making Dying Illegal (co-author Arakawa). Three of five Arakawa + Gins’ built works: Bioscleave House–East Hampton; Site of Reversible Destiny–Yoro; Reversible Destiny Lofts–Mitaka.

NOVEMBER 10 SEAN COLE and BRANDON DOWNING
Sean Cole is the author of the chapbooks By the Author and Itty City and of a full-length collection of postcard poems called The December Project. He is also a reporter for public radio. In his spare time, he writes bios like this one. Brandon Downing’s books of poetry include LAZIO (Blue Books, 2000), The Shirt Weapon (Germ, 2002), and Dark Brandon (Faux, 2005). A new DVD collection, Dark Brandon // The Filmi, was just released, and he’s currently completing a monograph of his literary collages under the title Lake Antiquity.

NOVEMBER 17 BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER and DANA WARD
Benjamin Friedlander is the author of several books of poetry, most recently The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress, 2007). His edition of Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems 1945-2005 is forthcoming from the University of California Press. He is currently completing a book on Emily Dickinson and the Civil War. Dana Ward is the author of The Wrong Tree (Dusie, 2007), Goodnight Voice (House Press, 2007) and other chapbooks. OMG recently published an edition of For Paris in Prison with images by the artist Matthew Hughes Boyko.

NOVEMBER 24 NO READING–Happy holiday!

DECEMBER

DECEMBER 1 TYRONE WILLIAMS and SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE
Tyrone Williams’s book, c.c., was published by Krupskaya Books in 2002; the chapbooks AAB and Futures, Elections were published in 2004; and the chapbook Musique Noir was published in 2006. A new book, On Spec, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2008. Sueyeun Juliette Lee currently lives in Philadelphia where she edits Corollary Press, a small chapbook series dedicated to new work by writers of color. Her chapbooks include Perfect Villagers (Octopus Books) and Trespass Slightly in (Coconut Poetry). Her first book, That Gorgeous Feeling, is forthcoming from Coconut Books next spring.

DECEMBER 8 JESS MYNES and ANTHONY HAWLEY
Jess Mynes is author of birds for example (CARVE Editions), In(ex)teriors (Anchorite Press) and Full On Jabber (Martian Press), a collaboration with Christopher Rizzo. His If and When (Katalanche Press), Recently Clouds, a collaboration with Aaron Tieger, and Sky Brightly Picked (Skysill Press) are forthcoming this year. Anthony Hawley is the author of The Concerto Form (Shearsman Books, 2006) and four chapbooks of poetry: Vocative (Phylum Press, 2004), Afield (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), Record-breakers (Ori is the New Apple Press, 2007), and Autobiography/Oughtabiography (Counterpath, 2007). His second book of poems, Paradise Gelatin, will be published in 2008.

DECEMBER 15 BARBARA JANE REYES and BHANU KAPIL
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives with her husband Oscar Bermeo in Oakland. Bhanu Kapil teaches writing at Naropa University and Goddard College. She is the author of three full-length collections: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), and Humanimal (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press).

DECEMBER 22 & 29 NO READING–Happy holidays!

JANUARY

JANUARY 5 JENNIFER FIRESTONE and LINDA RUSSO
Jennifer Firestone is the author of Holiday, forthcoming from Shearsman Books. Her chapbooks include Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and from Flashes (Sona Books). She is the co-editor of the anthology Letters To Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics and Community, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books.Linda Russo is the author of MIRTH (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999), among other books. She has published essays on Bernadette Mayer & Hannah Weiner, ecopoetics, and Joanne Kyger, including the preface to Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems.

JANUARY 12 TISA BRYANT and ROBERT KOCIK
Tisa Bryant’s work includes Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), and Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000). She is currently creating [the curator], a meditation on identity, visual culture and the lost films of auteur Justine Cable, and Playing House, an exploration of work, writing and domesticity. Robert Kocik is a poet, essayist, builder, and eleemosynary entrepreneur. His niche, architecturally, is the designing/building of missing civic services. His most recent publications are Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2000) and Rhrurbarb (Field Books, 2007). He is currently researching the Prosodic Body—an exacting aesthetics based on prosody as the bringing forth of everything.

JANUARY 19 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS and ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s two most recent books are Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (University of Alabama Press, 2006). She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University. Anna Moschovakis is the author of a book of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, and two chapbooks. She volunteers as an editor and designer at Ugly Duckling Presse, for which she recently co-edited The Drug of Art, the selected works of Czech poet Ivan Blatny (in English translation).

JANUARY 26 SUSAN HOWE and JAMES THOMAS STEVENS
Susan Howe’s most recent books are The Midnight (New Directions) and Kidnapped (Coracle Books). Two CDs, Thiefth and Souls of the Labadie Tract, in collaboration with the musician/ composer David Grubbs were recently released on the Blue Chopsticks label. A new collection of poems, as well as a re-print of her critical study My Emily Dickinson will be published by New Directions. James Thomas Stevens is the author of seven books of poetry, including A Bridge Dead in the Water, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, and Bulle/Chimere. Stevens is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient and a 2005 National Poetry Series Finalist.

Introduction for Elaine Equi (by erica kaufman)

2007-05-28T21:11:00.001-04:00

Elaine Equi's books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award, The Cloud of Knowable Things, and most recently Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems -- all from Coffee House Press. She teaches in the MFA Programs at The New School and City College of New York, and at New York University. She also edited The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems for All Occasions in Jacket Magazine.

Like Roy Orbison is often referred to as having “defied the rules of musical composition,” Elaine Equi is a poet who time and time again defies how one normally thinks of poetry or poetics. An Elaine Equi poem can easily be seen as a film still, a pop song, a drum solo, a new snazzy striped shirt. In an Equi poem nothing remains stagnant. This is a poetics of transformativity, wit, speculation, and curiosity. As she writes in “Epic Mountain Hoax,” “Whatever I told you yesterday wasn’t me.” Or, to quote from “1+1=3,” “Mirrors/transform us/into ourselves.”

In “The Heroism of Vision,” Susan Sontag refers to photography as “commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things.” Equi employs the same intensity of focus as a photograph might take, only her medium, words, pleasantly seesaws between knowledge and inquiry. As Equi writes in “Surface Tension,” “replace the narrative/with another/form of narrative.” Roland Barthes explains in Camera Lucida, “a photograph can be the object of three practices: to do, to undergo, to look.” As a teacher, Equi taught me how to look-- at my surroundings--unpredictable as exploring the surface of Venus. To quote from “The Pill’s Oval Portrait,” “I have been highly productive/maintaining a certain uncertainty.”

Equi is highly productive, generous, and astute. As she writes in “Brand X,” “I make decisions/or my body/makes them for me/and certain nights/everything is perfect.” Here, the separation between physical self and internal self is not only fantastical, but also acknowledges how much one is capable of without being entirely aware of it. To quote “Second Thoughts,” “Even a landscape can make a gesture towards us.”

The New York Times called Equi’s poems “a bracing, resonant art.” The San Francisco Chronicle says, “Equi writes with a full, post-punk, Dorothy Parkerish kit of weapons: arched-eyebrow barbs, nervy, catchy hooks of pop-conscious metaphor.” SPIN Magazine writes, “Equi’s work does what poetry should do, yet very rarely does—makes you feel the sensations inherent in words and their combinations, while simultaneously throwing down a savvy personal challenge.”

Or, to quote a T. Rex song, “Don’t you know you’re a cool motivator.”

Please welcome Elaine Equi, a terrific poet, mentor, and friend.

2007-05-21T10:21:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents

RAE ARMANTROUT & ELAINE EQUI
Saturday, May 26, 2007
** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books are Next Life (Wesleyan, 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 numerous anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, UP, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, and 2004. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

“The Ether”

The room is ether-bright
rigid,

adrift in words

or I am

an afterthought,
refusing to dissolve.

Nothing

to be taken away;
to be added.

*

What can words say?

Chaplain-service at the checkout;

a desire
to be credible
across the straight.

A man and a woman
finish sentences
and laugh.

Each sentence is both
an acquiescence
and a dismissal.

***

Elaine Equi's books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award, The Cloud of Knowable Things, and most recently Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems -- all from Coffee House Press. She teaches in the MFA Programs at The New School and City College of New York, and at New York University. She also edited The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems for All Occasions in Jacket Magazine.

“Epic Mountain Hoax”

Always a question of scale
fanning the flames of music.

Temple of crumbs.
Stalwart microcosms.

Swerps of brazen heroes
coup de grease.

Singularly panoptic delirium.

Tales of the mogul
lost in space.

What are you not doing down there—
the sky seems to say.

I am climbing
a flat surface (hence the difficulty)

with a sack of juicy fears—
I mean pears!

Whatever I told you yesterday wasn’t me.
I was mixed up.

Today I can separate,
subtract myself better from the landscape.

Introduction for Eileen Myles (by erica kaufman)

2007-05-20T19:20:00.001-04:00

Eileen Myles is like the Flash of the poetry world—able to move, think, and react at superhuman speeds. Bust magazine calls her “the rock star of modern poetry.” Publishers Weekly declares she's "the native informant of living life punkily on the streets," but also "having the best of both worlds, as working-class Bostonian and New York aesthete." Myles leaves no territory untouched—she’s written thousands of poems, published numerous books of poetry, a novel (Cool for You), short stories, and as an editor she brought the seminal anthology The New Fuck You/Adventures in Lesbian Reading to life. Myles was also the Artistic Director of The Poetry Project, toured with Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road Show, and in 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States (I wish she would run again!). Myles lives in New York and Southern California and teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Eileen Myles's newest book of poems Sorry, Tree was recently published by Wave Books. It explores themes of nature, translocation, politics, love and corporate squalor. Myles takes her signature short line to new heights in these bi-coastal lyrics. (To quote from “Home,” “I thought if/I inventoried home it would be broad.”) Here landscape changes and how one identifies a geographic residence. Similar to the lightening bolt that gives Flash his superhuman speed, Myles’s short lines and the ground they cover revolutionize what can be accomplished in a single poem. (Quote, “No Rewriting,” “which pants am I in/do I remember them?”) Again, like Flash, Myles uses her super powers to fight evil—but in this case evil translates to mean political disaster, capitalism, sexism, homophobia, and many many more “isms” and injustices that plague our society. To quote from “To Hell,” “The city is emptying. The elephants have been planning their party for years.”

In this same poem Myles writes, ‘I want to show you complicated dyke love, construct a poem about women and men.” The shift from Republican invasion to dyke pride is remarkable, vivid, and affective. Myles’s voice is like Flash’s, as in when she speaks or writes her voice is a sonic boom. To quote from “The Lesbian Poet” (a piece from School of Fish), “I think we all write our poems with our metabolism, our sexuality, for me a poem has always been an imagined body of a sort.” These poems are bodybuilders, in perfect shape, about to win the Olympics.

In an essay about “Postmodernism” Kathy Acker writes, “Language always occurs in the present because it makes the present, because it’s active.” In “Tulip,” (a poem from on my way), Myles writes, “The incandescence/of poetry/is a result/of the/moment of /being alive.” Myles’s work is more than alive, it is vital, animated, thought-provoking, genius. Quote, “The woman turning, that’s the revolution. The room is gigantic, the woman is here.”

Please join me in welcoming Eileen Myles.

2007-05-14T21:52:00.001-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents

Jack Kimball & Eileen Myles

Saturday, May 19, 2007
** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Jack Kimball's 350-page Post~Twyla collects imploded haiku, essay fragments, and made-up journal entries. Co-editor of "Queering Language" for the online zine EOAGH, he blogs at pantaloons.blogspot.com and publishes Faux Press.

from Post-Twyla

Momentum.
Does the hair actually grow? Off shore
The sound of it forces us to make a
water landing.

(Lap-dogging, I wish I were a poet.)

Eileen Myles's newest book of poems Sorry, Tree was published by Wave Books in April. It explores themes of nature, translocation, politics, love and corporate squalor. She lives in Southern CA & New York and teaches at UCSD.

"Jacaranda"

What's
the feminine
of feet
I didn't
know I
could
have
a lavender
tree

Language Poetry & The Body: A Panel

2007-05-14T21:47:00.000-04:00

panelists: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Leslie Scalapino, Maria Damon

Introduction to Language Poetry and the Body: A Panel (by erica kaufman and Tim Peterson)

2007-05-13T11:12:00.000-04:00

Introduction to Language Poetry and the Body: A Panel

Language poetry and poetics are known for their critique of commodified concepts such as "the self," "experience," and "identity," replacing these concepts with an emphasis on language as material. Language viewed in this way brings to the foreground meaning as a social construct while simultaneously advocating a more democratized notion of reader participation. In the words of Bruce Andrews, "The writing helps stage, rather than conceal, the particulars of its format. It helps the text foreground its "social" constructedness, as a body of social sense, not just leaving us stuck with a fetishizing of artistic "process" or the preenings ofauthor control."

This panel will address the precise nature of this materiality in language. Can words be said to have a physical body or a sonic body? How does this concept relate to the phenomenological, the physical, or other concepts that are outside of the text, such as the body of the reader? In the words of Lyn Hejinian, "A person alone, or in groups of persons, has accompanied art throughout its history; it is assumed that a work of art is, at the very least, a manifestation of his or her presence. But whose?"

What is the role of the body, both the social body and the body of the individual, in Language and Post-Language poetics? What does language want?

2007-05-08T14:53:00.002-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents

LANGUAGE POETRY & THE BODY: A PANEL
Panelists include: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Maria Damon, and Leslie Scalapino
Moderated by:Tim Peterson and erica kaufman

Saturday, May 12, 2007
3:45PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Bruce Andrews is the author of such now classic texts of the American avant-garde as GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE and I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER, SO SHUT UP (OR, SOCIAL ROMANTICISM) . Along with Charles Bernstein, Andrews edited the crucial poetry magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He teaches political science at Fordham University.

Steve Benson has often incorporated oral and physical improvisation, as well as presentational and instrumental uses of projections, audiotape, and printed texts, into works presented as poetry readings. This is his first New York appearance since March 2005.

Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry , and co-author (with mIEKAL aND) of Literature Nation, pleasureTEXTpossession, and Eros/ion.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, inter-genre fiction-poetry-criticism and plays, including recently Zither & Autobiography, The Tango, Orchid Jetsam , and Dahlia's Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction. Scalapino's Selected Poems, 1974-2006/It's go in horizontal is forthcoming from University of California Press.

Susan Bee & Johanna Drucker

2007-05-08T14:53:00.001-04:00

2007-05-02T22:54:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents


Susan Bee & Johanna Drucker
will give a multimedia presentation and talk about collaboration


Saturday, May 5, 2007
**3:45PM**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson


Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in NYC. Bee has had
four solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC.  Granary Books has published six
of her artist's books, including A Girl's Life with Johanna Drucker. She has
collaborated with Charles Bernstein on five books. Her website is:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee. For more information on Susan Bee,
please also visit:

M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/

A Girl's Life
http://www.granarybooks.com/books/a_girls_life/a_girls_life1.html
http://www.analogous.net/beedruckercollab.html

Johanna Drucker is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the
University of Virginia  and Professor in the Department of English.  Her
most recent  critical work is Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art  and 
Complicity. Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and
experimental, visual poet whose work has been exhibited and collected in
special collections in libraries and museums nationwide. For more
information on Johanna Drucker, please visit:

Johanna Drucker's EPC page:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/drucker/

Drucker's page at the Media Studies Program at UVA:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jrd8e/

Essay on Susan Bee and Miriam Laufer:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/Laufer/drucker.html

Tongues: A Parent Language (from EOAGH #2)
http://chax.org/eoagh/issuetwo/drucker.htm


*  *  *
For the entire Spring 2007 Segue Reading Series, visit
http://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm

Introduction for Charles Bernstein (by erica kaufman)

2007-04-29T12:31:00.000-04:00

Charles Bernstein's most recent books are Girly Man and With Strings (University of Chicago Press), Shadowtime (Green Integer), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon). Author page at http://epc.buffalo.edu. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

When I first read Charles Bernstein’s work I remember thinking to myself, “wow, this changes everything.” The book I’d read was Islets/Irritations—a volume full of fluctuations visually, formally, and in its vocabulary. (To quote from the “Klupzy Girl,” “his parables are not singular”).

Bernstein’s prose redefined how I think about essays (to quote from “Revenge of the Poet-Critic,” “a modular essay form that allows for big jumps from paragraph to paragraph and section to section. it becomes possible to recombine the paragraphs to get another version of the essy”). His poems redefined how I think about poetry (to quote from “State of the Art,” poetry tosses up into an imaginary air like to many swans flying out of a magician’s depthless black hat so that suddenly like when the sky all at once turns white or purple or day-glo blue, we breathe more deeply.” or from “A Particular Thing,” “I want in my writing a texture of wordness opaque and alone”).

Bernstein’s newest gem, Girly Man, is a book that proves that “there are no thoughts except through language” (to quote his seminal essay, “Stray Straws and Straw Men”). These poems range from blues to ballad to litany to lament to irony to hilarity to likeness—what a range! To quote “Sign Under Test,” “everything in the world exists in order to end up as an opera.”

Please welcome Charles Bernstein.

2007-04-22T23:36:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series presents

Charles Bernstein and Tenney Nathanson
28 April 2007, 4 PM
Bowery Poetry Club,
308 Bowery at Bleecker, NYC
$6 at the door

Hosted by Tim Peterson and Erica Kaufman.

Charles Bernstein's most recent books are Girly Man and With Strings (University of Chicago Press), Shadowtime (Green Integer), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon). Author page at http://epc.buffalo.edu. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

from "Self-Help"

Lake Tang Woo Chin Chicken with Lobster and Sweet Clam Sauce still not served and everyone else got their orders twenty minutes back.—Savor the water, feast on the company.

Subway floods and late for audition.—Start being the author of your own performance. Take a walk.

Slip on ice, break arm.—In moments like this, the preciousness of life reveals itself.

Wages down in non-union shop.—You're a sales associate, not a worker; so proud to be part of the company.

Miss the train?--Great chance to explore the station!

Suicide bombers wreck neighborhood—Time to pitch in!

Nothing doing.—Take a break!

Partner in life finds another partner.—Now you can begin the journey of life anew.

Bald?--Finally, you can touch the sky with the top of your head.

Short-term recall shot.—Old memories are sweetest

Hard drive crashes and novel not backed up.—Nothing like a fresh start.

Severe stomach cramps all morning.—Boy are these back issues of Field and Stream engrossing.

Hurricane crushes house.—You never seemed so resilient.

Tenney Nathanson is the author of the book-length poem Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) (O Books, 2005) and the collection Erased Art (Chax Press, 2005). Recent work appears in issue 3 of EOAGH. He is the author of the critical study Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass (NYU Press). A native New Yorker, he has lived since 1985 in Tucson, where he teaches American poetry and, from time to time, creative writing in the English Department at the University of Arizona.

Recent work at http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/nathanson.html

from "One Block Over"

What the eyes sees;
Four bottles full of capsules
huge vistas under the hippie's outstretched arm
Utah signed Laszlo Kovacs my name is Emerson what am I
salt crystals splintered ice mounting in the precious miniature the contact lens

it does my laundry. Which is family values:
see, the scones. My terrier
crosses the gingko-lined street
with your biscuit, says Wittgenstein
so I am dead: in private language
weep for the investigations trails jam
I'm sorry that's impossible
Bruckner singing under the larches in the Botanical Gardens
Is an instance of this and I am your bus
if it please your lordship
by the lower instenstine.
Sternum
and plectrum
it's in Brooklyn. The poodle just sat there and wept
it's an Arp retrospective
I'm no cockney

But we are your bodies.

* * *

For the rest of the Winter/Spring Segue Reading Series,
please visit http://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm

2007-04-18T10:48:00.000-04:00

(photo by Aya Karpinska)

The Segue Reading Series presents
E-Poetry 2007 NYC Performances
And A Symposium for the LEA New Media Poetry Special Issue
Event Guest-Curated by Loss Pequeño Glazier.
Featuring Aya Karpinska, Elizabeth Knipe, and Jim Rosenberg. Shawn Rider,Respondent.
21 April 2007, 4 PM
at the Bowery Poetry Club,308 Bowery at Bleecker, New York City
Hosted by Tim Peterson and Erica Kaufman.

Live performances, talks, and discussion about New Media art forms, issues, and poetics in a cordial setting. Poetry is on the move ... catch a glimpse of present poetic forms in action! This event seeks to further conversation about poetics through its sampling in digital forms. Join us for an historic presentation of digital poetics featuring an engaging mix of foundational and emerging digital poets!

About the participants
Aya Karpinska (http://technekai.com) is a digital media artist and interaction designer. She is the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Brown University Fellowship in Electronic Writing.

Elizabeth Knipe ( www.dreamdilation.com) is an engaging interdisciplinary artist. She is digital poet and experimental video artist who entertains an interest in physical electronic installations.

Jim Rosenberg (http://www.well.com/user/jer) has been working in non-linear poetic forms in one medium or another since 1966 and is one of the foundational figures in digital poetry. His best-known work is Intergrams.

Shawn Rider (http://www.shawnrider.com) is a writer, artist, teacher and programmer, currently working as a Web Technologist for PBS TeacherLine. He is also the owner and Editor in Chief of GamesFirst.com, a long-running independent videogame review website.

Loss Pequeño Glazier ( http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier ) is a digital poet, professor of Media Study, and Founder and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center. He is the author of the digitally-informed poetry collection Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt Press) and the digital theory treatise Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Alabama UP).

Tim Peterson (http://mappemunde.typepad.com/) is the author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press). He edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and currently curates part of the Segue Reading Series in New York.

About the LEA New Media Poetry and Poetics issue
Guest edited by Tim Peterson, the issue features Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg and Matthias Hillner. Don't forget to scurry over to the equally exciting gallery, exhibiting works by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska, Daniel Canazon Howe, mIEKAL aND, CamillE BacoS, Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. Click here to access the LEA New Media Poetics Special (LEA Vol 14 No 5 - 6). URL: http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/index.asp

Join us on April 21st for this celebration of LEA, the poetics of the present, and the diversity of digital forms!

* * *
For the rest of the Winter/Spring Segue Reading Series, please visit http://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm

2007-04-15T16:50:00.001-04:00

2007-04-15T16:48:00.000-04:00

Introduction for Craig Watson by erica kaufman

Craig Watson is the author of Secret Histories (Burning Deck, 2007), True News (Instance Press, 2002) and Free Will (ROOF Books, 2000). He works as a producer and dramaturge at Trinity Repertory Company, a professional theater in Rhode Island.

Craig Watson's newest collection of poetry, Secret Histories, begins with a quote from the great Bob Dylan song, "Visions of Johanna"—"this must be what salvation feels after a while" ( Blonde on Blonde, 1966). This song is one of many examples of Dylan's mastery of both rapid fire long image songs, as well as stories of the current political climate (in this case "Visions of Gehenna" or hell). Watson accomplishes these things and more in his work—a lyric "documentarian" of "political unrest" or a mapper of images via cyclical phrasing so tight not a word escapes the eye or ear.

In Secret Histories, Watson presents us with several serial poems, each written in a visual structure that mirrors the social climate he explicates. To quote from "Steppe Work--#7), "to be human [the lying animal]/ to believe a soul [made of mud]/ to whisper ["I belong to no-body"]" The call and response format of these box-like numbered left justified poems is one that lends itself to being heard as an argument, while also echoing bleak musings often found in blues songs or folk music. In the poem, "Pre-Science," a roman numeraled sequence that appears as triads of steps, Watson writes, "there's no limit to limits," and this is indeed proven true as he continues to bring to the ear and the page that "Language is a process, as well as a product of those very processes of social and economic change" (The Radical Syntactical Forms of Language Poetry by Susan Brill). Watson writes in "Last Man Standing—December," "OK fiction/ this is what happens/ what if one knew/ the outcome/ of every event/ in advance."

Watson's Free Will also begins with a Dylan quote, "here's your throat back thanks for the loan" (from the song "Battle of a Thin Man")—again appropriate in how it mirrors what Steve Evans refers to as Watson's "uncowered ability to face and state truths we'd prefer to avoid." Or, to quote from "persuasion & judgement," "this is what we want/ what we paid for/ a world of property alternating with entertainment/ a statuatory cradle simplified for users/ one culture: inductive and pure."

It is my great honor to introduce to you, Craig Watson.

2007-04-15T16:47:00.000-04:00

A RARE NEW YORK APPEARANCE

2007-04-13T10:28:00.000-04:00

The Segue Reading Series Presents

BEVERLY DAHLEN AND CRAIG WATSON

Saturday, April 14, 2007
4PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just North of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by Erica Kaufman and Tim Peterson

Ron Silliman writes, "Beverly Dahlen is the most enigmatic American poet since Laura (Riding) Jackson. Not that Dahlen is unnecessarily difficult or obtuse, but that – like Riding – she writes brilliantly, but has also proven exceptionally reluctant to letting her work into print...Dahlen had helped to co-found HOW(ever) (now How2) and was already well into writing A Reading, an "endless" – the term she has used more than once – poem that is, to my mind, one of the masterworks of the 20th century."

Robert Duncan said of Dahlen, "The psychic life she draws in writing may be drawn from her own psychic life, but here its body is the text and it speaks to the psyche of the reader as a reader." Dahlen is the author of The Egyptian Poems, Out of the Third and 4 volumes of A Reading. A native of Oregon, she has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years.

from A Reading 18

"therefore I'd be a shadow freed of former hands and execute this mission of destruction on past lives.
there is nothing that can be safely brought in to the arena. the body question. the Frankfurt school in
a loose coalition with strippers and wombats. he raised the antenna and the picture cleared. wherever
two or three are gathered together in my name the project prospers. ego is now supposed to have
given way to mercy and light. cracks through which you could drive a needle

whatever was the point of organizing the world in this way: the helpless baby. further evidence: my
father thought me up fully armed. no consolation there. where does she arise from the sea or in the
mountains beyond reason."

**
Craig Watson is the author of Secret Histories, True News , and Free Will. He works as a producer and dramaturg at Trinity Repertory Company, a professional theater in Rhode Island.

Andrew Joron writes, "Craig Watson's engaged lyric continues to discover "more songs in the gaps" of the system; as he traces the antinomies, his long poems build toward an almost orchestral scale and ordonnance. Fiercely and deliberately, Watson redesigns the echoes inside such hollow abstractions as Reason and Free Will, and so allows us to hear, even with "ears knotted into the wall," the real music of thought."

from "Last Man Standing"

--January

hello mutant
welcome back
horses are falling
birds freeze under the bed

god told the first lie
ends-over-means

excess is not a weakness

*

the distance between
seeing and thinking
is everything else

what we hated
was expression

Myung Mi Kim & Judith Goldman at Segue, BPC Sat Jan 27

2007-01-25T09:14:00.000-05:00

Myung Mi Kim & Judith Goldman
Saturday, January 27th, 2007
4-6 pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
as part of the Segue Reading Series
308 Bowery, just north of Houston
www.segue.org

Myung Mi Kim is the author of Commons, Dura, The Bounty and Under Flag.
Anthology appearances include Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative
Writing by Women, Premonitions: Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American
Poetry, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women and other
collections.

Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder, which won a Small Press Traffic
Book of the Year award in 2002, and DeathStar/rico-chet. She also recently
co-curated, with Leslie Scalapino, War and Peace 2.

Bully Pulpit

2007-01-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/impact.html

I mean, this is pretty fucked up.

Frank Sherlock & Mark Lamoureux @ BPC this Saturday--4PM

2007-01-11T11:24:00.000-05:00

Frank Sherlock is the author of Spring Diet of Flowers at Night, ISO, and 13, and has engaged in collaborative projects with CAConrad, Jennifer Coleman, Brett Evans and sound artist/DJ Alex Welsh. He is a contributing editor for XConnect: Writers for the Information Age.

Mark Lamoureux’s first full-length book of poems, Astrometry Organon, is due out from Spuyten Duyvil/Meeting Eyes Bindery in late 2006. He is the editor of Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry, and teaches English at Kingsborough Community College.

Frank read at the New Orleans Benifit this summer and lit the place up.
I beat Mark at Poetry trivia once.
Go see them.

Winter/Spring at Segue.

2007-01-05T16:12:00.000-05:00

yummy.

Saturdays: 4 PM – 6 PM
308 Bowery, just north of Houston
****$6 admission goes to support the readers****
Curators:
Feb-March by Tonya Foster & Erica Hunt
April-May by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson.

February 3 BARBARA HENNING and CHRISTOPHER STACKHOUSE Barbara Henning is the
author of two novels, six books of poetry and a series of photo-poem pamphlets.
Her most recent book is a novel, You, Me and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil,
2005). My Autobiography is forthcoming from United Artists Books, and Thirty
Miles to Rosebud is forthcoming from Spuytin Duyvil. Christopher Stackhouse's
writing has appeared in the journals Aufgabe, Bridge, Hambone, and NYArts,
among others. Seismosis, a book featuring his line drawing with text by writer
John Keene, was published as a letterpress limited-edition book by The Center
for Book Arts in NYC in November 2003. He is a poetry editor for FENCE and a
Cave Canem Writers Fellow.

February 10 SERENA JOST & DAN MACHLIN and JEREMY SIGLER Serena Jost is a singer-
songwriter and cellist. Her new full-length CD produced by Brad Albetta at
MonkeyBoy Studios will be released in Winter 2007. Check out her music at:
www.myspace.com/serenajost. Dan Machlin's first full-length book of poems is
forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2007. He is the author of several
previous chapbooks: 6x7, This Side Facing You, and In Rem. He is the founding
editor of Futurepoem books. Jeremy Sigler's Crackpot Poet is forthcoming from
Black Square Editions/Brooklyn Rail. He is also working on a limited edition
letterpress book with drawings by Jessica Stockholder called Led Almost By My
Tie.

February 17 JULIE PATTON and MARLENE NOURBESE PHILIP Julie Patton is a
performance artist and writer. She is busy working on various community
development/greenspace/sustainability projects under the rubric of Think Green!
Her new chapbook Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake is forthcoming. Julie often
takes to the road for various collaborative projects with Uri Caine, and is a
fellow at Bates College's Common Grounds Project in Maine, where she
collaborates with Jonathan Skinner. Marlene Nourbese Philip is a poet,
essayist, writer and lawyer who lives in Toronto. A recipient of a Guggenheim
Fellowship in poetry, the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for She Tries
Her Tongue, Nourbese Philip is also the 1988 first prize winner of the
Tradewinds Collective Prize (Trinidad & Tobago) in both the poetry and the
short story categories.

February 24 MONICA DE LA TORRE and PATRICIA SPEARS JONES Mónica de la Torre is
the author of the poetry books Acúfenos and Talk Shows. She is co-editor of the
anthology Reversible Monuments: Mexican Contemporary Poetry with Michael
Wiegers, translator and editor of Poems by Gerardo Deniz, and is the poetry
editor of The Brooklyn Rail. African American poet and arts writer Patricia
Spears Jones is author of two poetry collections, The Weather That Kills and
Femme du Monde, and the play 'Mother' commissioned and produced by Mabou
Minesand a new commission Song for New York: What Women Do When Men are
Knitting, which Mabou will premiere in 2007.

March 3 BETSY ANDREWS and ROBERT HALPERN Betsy Andrews' book New Jersey was
selected for the 2007 Brittingham Prize in poetry. She is the author of She-
Devil and In Trouble. Her poems, essays, and review have appeared widely in
publications ranging from PRACTICE to the Yemeni newspaper Culture. Robert
Halpern is the author of Rumored Place. Currently, he's at work co-editing the
poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, writing a
collaborative poem with Taylor Brady, and translating the early essays of
Georges Perec, the first of which is forthcoming in Chicago Review. His
chapbook Disaster Suite just recently appeared.

March 10 R. ERICA DOYLE and FRANCES RICHARD R. Erica Doyle is a writer of
Trinidadian descent who lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Bum Rush the
Page, and Ms. Magazine. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the
Hurston/Wright and Astraea Foundations and the New York Foundation for the
Arts. She is a fellow of Cave Canem, a workshop and retreat for African
American poets. Frances Richard is a poet, critic, and educator. The author of
See Through, she was awarded the 1999 Marlboro Review Prize, chosen by Brenda
Hillman. She is the recipient of a grant from the Barbara Beming/Money for
Women Fund.

March 17 WILL ALEXANDER and ANTHONY JOSEPH Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist
Will Alexander's most recently published work is Sunrise and Armageddon.
Forthcoming is Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat, a book of essays from Factory
School, and several poetry collections. Will has been teaching in the Graduate
Program at Mills College. One of the UK's most exciting and innovative new
voices, poet, musician, and novelist Anthony Joseph was born in Trinidad and
has lived in the UK since 1989. He is the author of two poetry collections,
Desafinado, 1994 and Teragaton, 1997 and a spoken word CD "Liquid Textology:
REadings from the African Origins of UFOs." In September 2004, he was selected
by the Arts Council of England as one of fifty writers for the historic photo
"A Great Day."

March 24 GREG PARDLO and BOB PERELMAN & FRANCIE SHAW Gergory Pardlo is a 2005
NYFA Fellow in poetry and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in translation
from the NEA. His manuscript, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the
2007 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and will be published in September. Bob
Perelman and Francie Shaw lived in the Bay Area from 1976 to 1990. There, Shaw
had a one-woman installation show at 80 Langton Street and collaborated
extensively with poets. She has also shown her work in Philadelphia and New
York (A.I.R. Gallery). Perelman now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including If Life, Ten to One, and The
Future of Memory; and 2 critical books, The Trouble With Genius and The
Marginalization of Poetry.

March 31 JAM ON THE COMMONS: Poets, writers, musicians, and artists on “the
commons” (spaces outside the stress of market forces).

April 7 CA CONRAD and KENWARD ELMSLIE CAConrad's childhood included selling cut
flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped
to Philadelphia the first chance he got, where he lives and writes today with
the PhillySound poet (www.phillysound.blogspot.com). His book Deviant
Propulsions was published in 2006 by Soft Skull Press. Kenward Elmslie's recent
publications include Agenda Melt, Snippets, Cyberspace, all with visuals by
Trevor Winkfield, and Routine Disruptions, selected poems.

April 14 BEVERLY DAHLEN and CRAIG WATSON Robert Duncan said of Beverly Dahlen,
"The psychic life she draws in writing may be drawn from her own psychic life,
but its body is the text and it speaks to the psyche of the reader as a
reader." Dahlen is the author of The Egyptian Poems, Out of the Third, and 4
volumes of A Reading. A native of Oregon, she has lived and worked in San
Francisco for many years. Craig Watson is the auhtor of Secret Histories, True
News, and Free Will. He works as a producer and dramaturg at Trinity Repertory
Company, a professional theater in Rhode Island.

April 21 E-POETRY 2007 NYC: PERFORMANCES AND A SYMPOSIUM FOR THE LEA NEW MEDIA
POETRY ISSUE. Event guest-curated by Loss Pequeño Glazier; featuring Aya
Karpinska, Elizabeth Knipe, and Jim Rosenberg. Loss Pequeño Glazier is a poet,
professor of Media Study, and Founder and Director of the Electronic Poetry
Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu). He is the author of the digitally-informed
poetry collection Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm, several other books of
poetry, and the award-winning Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Aya
Karpinska is a digital media artist and interaction designer. Aya is the 2006
recipient of the Brown University Fellowship in Electronic Writing. Her website
is located at http://technekai.com. Elizabeth Knipe is a digital poet and
experimental video artist who entertains an interest in physical electronic
installations. See her work online at www.dreamdilation.com. Jim Rosenberg has
been working in non-linear poetic forms in one medium or another since 1966.
His best-known work is Intergrams and his website is located at
http://www.well.com/user/jer/.

April 21 CHARLES BERNSTEIN and TENNEY NATHANSON Charles Bernstein's most recent
books are Girly Man, With Strings, Shadowtime, and Republics of Reality: 1975-
1995. Author page at epc.buffalo.edu. He teaches at the University of
Pennsylvania. Tenney Nathanson is the author of the book-length poem Home on
the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) and the collection Erased Art.
A native New Yorker, he has lived since 1985 in Tucson, where he teaches
American poetry and, from time to time, creative writing in the English
Department at the University of Arizona.

May 5 SUSAN BEE and JOHANNA DRUCKER will present a multimedia talk on
collaboration Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in NYC.
Bee has had four solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC. Granary Books has
published six of her artist's books, including A Girl's Life with Johanna
Drucker. She has collaborated with Charles Bernstein on five books. Her website
is http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee. Johanna Drucker is currently the
Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and
Professor in the Department of English. Her most recent critical work is Sweet
Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity. Drucker is internationally known as a
book artist and experimental, visual poet whose work has been exhibited and
collected in special collections in libraries and museums nationwide.

May 12 LANGUAGE POETRY & THE BODY: A PANEL. Panelists include Bruce Andrews,
Steve Benson, Maria Damon, and Leslie Scalapino. Moderated by Tim Peterson and
Erica Kaufman. Bruce Andrews is the author of such now classic texts of the
American avant garde as GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE and I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT
UP (OR, SOCIAL ROMANTICISM). Along with Charles Bernstein, Andrews edited the
crucial poetry magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He teaches political science at
Fordham University. Steve Benson has often incorporated oral and physical
improvisation, as well as presentational and instrumental uses of projections,
audiotape, and printed texts, into works presented as poetry readings. This is
his first New York appearance since March 2005. Maria Damon teaches poetry and
poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of
the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and co-author (with mIEKAL aND)
of Literature Nation, pleasureTEXTpossession, and Eros/ion. Leslie Scalapino is
the author of thirty books of poetry, inter-genre fiction-poetry-criticism and
plays, including recently Zither and Autobiography, The Tango, Orchid Jetsam,
and Dahlia's Iris: Secret Authobiography and Fiction. Scalapino's Selected
Poems, 1974-2006/It's go in horizontal is forthcoming from University of
California Press.

May 19 JACK KIMBALL and EILEEN MYLES Jack Kimball's 350-page Post-Twyla
collects imploded haiku, essay fragments, and made-up journal entries. Co-
editor of "Queering Language" for the online zine EOAGH, he blogs at
pantaloons.blogspot.com and publishes Faux Press. Eileen Myles's new book of
poems Sorry, Tree will be out in April. It explores themes of nature,
translocation, politics, love, and corporate squalor. She lives in Southern CA
& New York and teaches at UCSD.

May 26 RAE ARMANTROUT and ELAINE EQUI Rae Armantrout's most recent books are Up
To Speed, The Pretext, and Veil: New and Selected Poems. A new book, Next Life,
is forthcoming from Wesleyan in 2007. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and
Poetics at the Unviersity of California, San Diego. Elaine Equi's books include
Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award, The Cloud of
Knowable Things, and most recently Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems. She
teaches in the MFA Programs at The New School and City College of New York, and
at New York
University.

Alex has moved to Tangiers

2007-01-05T16:06:00.000-05:00

It's sinister. I'll try to keep this thingy going though i've got to say i don't quite see the appeal. Beyond the informative. So, information here. most likely in a timely fashion. No promises.

nb

UB Poetics List hits new highpoint

2006-12-01T15:02:00.000-05:00

Alan Sondheim hide details 1:39 pm (1 hour ago)
reply-to UB Poetics discussion group
to POETICS@listserv.buffalo.edu
date Dec 1, 2006 1:39 PM
subject speed.
mailed-by listserv.buffalo.edu
speed.

i can't slow up. death is an hysteria. i don't care about your gender. i
send out work as soon as it's done. i make work as soon as i think of it.
i read as fast as i can. i watch news and practice music while i read. i
know if i slow up i'll die. i know there will be a missive or missile here
in this space that will not be sent. i know the missive will be the tag or
curlicue. i know it will be the conjunction of my death. i read the con-
junction as not both life and death. i read the conjunction as neither
life nor death. i eat fast. i never sleep properly. i dream theory and
practice. i hunt on the internet. i shape ride on the internet. i speak [..you get the point]

from Tom W. Lewis
2:02 pm (58 minutes ago)
reply-to UB Poetics discussion group
to POETICS@listserv.buffalo.edu
date Dec 1, 2006 2:02 PM
subject Re: speed.
mailed-by listserv.buffalo.edu
meth brings out
the egomaniac
in us all, Alan

meth me in St. Mayhem, Sondheim,

tl

Phil Primeau hide details 2:35 pm (26 minutes ago)
reply-to UB Poetics discussion group
to POETICS@listserv.buffalo.edu
date Dec 1, 2006 2:35 PM
subject Re: speed.
mailed-by listserv.buffalo.edu

Do cocaine, you pauper.

PP

Selfish Promotion

2006-11-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

marjorie WELISH / jessica GREENBAUM / tim GRIFFIN / rika LESSER / nick BREDIE / steven henry MADOFF
Bowery Poetry Club
6:00 PM - 7:30 [right after Segueway]

This is apparently the first of a series featuring writers who did time at the alma mater on the hudson. yes, we are taking over. yes, we will eat your brains.

Columbia Voices
The first in a series celebrating the range of great writing coming out of Columbia through the decades, the readers on November 18 include poet, painter, and critic Marjorie Welish, whose recent books include Word Group, The Annotated Here and Selected Poems (an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize finalist), and Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960; Jessica Greenbaum, whose Inventing Difficulty was the winner of the Nation's Discovery Prize, PEN's Emerging Writer Award, and the Gerald Cable Prize for a first book; Tim Griffin, poet, critic, and Editor-in-Chief of Artforum magazine; Nick Bredie, who [is way out-gunned]; Rika Lesser, distinguished poet and translator, author of the books Etruscan Things, All We Need of Hell, and Growing Back, among her many publications; and Steven Henry Madoff, the curator of this series, author of While We're Here, Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity, and many other books and publications.

Unselfish Promotion

2006-11-14T15:53:00.000-05:00

Unselfish Promotion:

Charles Borkhuis and Leonard Schwartz
Saturday, November 18, 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Please come on time!!!
Segue Reading Series @ Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, just north of Houston, NYC
$6 admission goes to support the readers

Charles Borkhuis' seven books of poems include: Afterimage, Savoir-fear,
Alpha Ruins, and Proximity (Stolen Arrows). He was a finalist for the W.C.
Williams Poetry Award and is a recipient of a Drama-Logue Award. Two of his
radio plays were produced over NPR and his play Barely There was seen at the
Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 2006.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The
Tower Of Diverse Shores and Ear and Ethos, both from Talisman House. He
hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, available on the web at
Pennsound.

N=E=W=S=F=L=A=S=H

2006-11-03T14:39:00.000-05:00

This is the best thing that's ever happened to this blog. http://www.foxnews.com/oreilly/index.html (go down to the videos segment at the bottom and look for the familiar face).

UPDATE: It's now tagged as O'Reilly's "Outrage of The Week."

November 4th: Michael Gottlieb and Rod Smith

2006-11-02T00:33:00.000-05:00

Michael Gottlieb’s most recent books include Lost and Found, Gorgeous Plunge, and The River Road. In the late 70s and early 80s he helped edit one of Language Poetry’s seminal periodicals, Roof Magazine.

Rod Smith is the author of Music or Honesty, The Good House, Poèmes de l'araignée, In Memory of My Theories, The Boy Poems, Protective Immediacy, and New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma. A CD, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005.He edits Aerial magazine and publishes Edge Books. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley for the University of California Press.

News every Seguegian should hear

2006-11-01T22:41:00.000-05:00

*Chefs Dig War (Scroll down to "Human Interactions")

*Big trouble in the Deep South: Feminism. Narrative. New Sincerity. Nuevo-Confessionalism.

Poetry Fight.

www.looktouch.blogspot.com and/or www.rustbucklenews.blogspot.com

UPDATE: Best comment so far:
"You don't know what you're missing.

Okay, I have to read Marx now.

See you later---

xo
S"

*Joe Massey teaches us all how to write a blog post.

*Alice Notley reads Friday at 6:30

Alice Notley @ Cue Art Foundation
Introduction by Bill Corbett
511 W 25th Street, b/t 10th & 11th Ave, Ground Floor
6:30 - 8:00 pm, Free
http://www.cueartfoundation.org/highres.html

*Your humble blog masters will be reading uptown at the old West End Friday at 8. Recognize.

(image via beatmuseum.org)

Howl
November 3, 8-10pm
West End II: Havana Nights [no, really]
2909 Broadway @ 114th st. [1 to 116th]
New York, NY
$, rsvp

(I've been told when you RSVP for this event at Columbia you get the following message:

"Thank You.
Please print this page as a record of your transaction.
Thank you for participating in the Howl."

You stay cool Columbia!!!

P=H=O=T=O=S

2006-11-01T22:29:00.000-05:00

Nada/Yoko does photography:

[Eileen Myles?] James Sherry and Juliana Spahr at the BPC

Bill Luoma and Anselm Berrigan--the lives of the party

Poets of the Future

2006-10-28T19:22:00.000-04:00

TRACK CHANGES! How will future poetry consumers understand the personal suffering you experienced over putting in that personal pronoun if all they have are your slick, finished word documents. But the fine folk at Microsoft have your back. Just hit cntl+shift+e for 'e'mmortality.

I thought they were fighting in the captain's tower

2006-10-28T19:03:00.000-04:00

And this makes Bruce Andrews what? a neutron bomb? [via Jordan Davis]

Reading Report on Meredith and Peter Quartermain by Henry Gould

2006-10-25T09:55:00.000-04:00

Attended Meredith & Peter Quartermain reading on Saturday at Bowery Poetry Club (yes, friends, occasionally I do leave the library. It's about an 8-yr cycle). Glad I went. Well-organized, sparsely attended. Charles Bernstein was there, along with Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan, the emcees. Some NYU students.

M. Q. read from Vancouver Walking, a book she said was influenced by Pound's Cantos historical grab-bag, which she was reading at the time. Also Charles Olson's passion for local news, & Zukofsky-Niedecker word precision. (She is a very good reader. Every word spoken clearly & distinctly, yet without a lot of mannerism. Perfectly matching her style.) Now I'd like to read this book, though the poems were almost too dry and world-ironic for my taste. A long satire on the subliminal influence of Queen Elizabeth II on Canadian culture - seemed a subject not worth attacking, exactly. But that's just me. Overall it was fascinating to hear someone contemporary carrying on a certain vein of 20th-century poetry in an honest, authentic way. (Plus I was in Vancouver once. Can't think of a better city for walking.)

P.Q. read a chapter from work-in-progress, a memoir. An early passage, relating adventures as the youngest boy (age 7) in parochial British boarding school. Very charming, entertaining. I spoke with him briefly after - asked whether he simply had good recall for those days, or whether it came back to him during the writing. He said the project started when he & a friend decided, as a joke, to write some of each others' autobiography (sounds like a Brit schoolboy thing, to me). Soon after, he was flooded with childhood memories, & started writing it in earnest.

He told me he set some firm rules of style beforehand (in order to avoid memoir-boredom) : ie., no subordinate clauses. I said "the Hemingway approach?" He said he hated Hemingway, but, yes. It worked – became fast-moving, a "page-turner", in his words.

October 28: Bill Luoma and Juliana Spahr

2006-10-24T23:49:00.000-04:00

Nada's introduction to

Bill Luoma

Bill Luoma is the author of Works & Days, Dear Dad, Western Love, and the unpublished sound sequence Some Math. He lives and works in the bay area.

Over ten years ago, when I lived in Japan, I sent an email to Bill asking him “what’s inspiring you these days?” He responded that he was fascinated by, of all things, the Weather Channel. And this is what I love about him: how his fascinations illuminate subjects others might find quotidian or inaccessible, and how he transmutes these subjects into writing.

Indeed, like Goethe, Athanasius Kircher, Leibniz, Pan Chao, Leonardo da Vinci, Coleridge, Ben Franklin, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Jose Rizal, Queen Elizabeth I, and H.G. Wells, Bill Luoma is truly a polymath.

According to Martin Frost, a renaissance man (which is, of course, a sexist word for polymath!) should:

• Be able to defend himself with a variety of weapons, especially the sword.

• Be able to play several musical instruments.

• Be able to paint and output other works of art.

• Be forever interested in advancing knowledge and science.

• Be able to engage in debates regarding issues such as philosophy and ethics.

• Be a skilled author and poet.

I’m not sure about the first two criteria, but I am certain that Bill meets the other four. His capabilities are capacious: he makes collages and visual detournements, lettrist vispo and digital artwork; he built a random media generator; he thinks and writes about mathematics, gender, baseball, and life among poets; he translates from Greek; he writes site-specific poems, western poems, poems about his dad, poems about lovers, poems about (and, I’m guessing with) math, and poems of amazing concatenations of words so plastique you can almost feel them knocking about in your head.
__________________________
Juliana Spahr’s books include This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, and Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You. Her next book, The Transformation, is forthcoming from Atelos Press. She co-edits the journal Chain with Jena Osman.

Poetry news every Seguegian should hear

2006-10-24T23:18:00.000-04:00

*Bernadette Mayer et. al. are reading from 0-9 at the Poetry Project Wednesday 10.25 @ 8.

* Nathaniel Mackey is reading at the poetry project this Friday at seven. This is not going to be one to miss. Also here's to Splay Anthem winning the National Book Award on November 15th.

*Corrine Fitzpatrick and C.A. Conrad are reading at Zinc this Sunday.

*Chris Westcott has created an NYC poetry calendar (focusing on new/innovative/experimental/post/avant writing) that is the most useful addition to the world of digital poetry dreck in quite some time. Check it out.

* Earlier this month Brian Kim Stefans launched a new flarf blog that will "examine how this new phenomenon just could not have happened prior to the internet." I happen to have it on record from David Shapiro that he invented Flarf in 1968, but nevermind. Discuss amongst yourselves.

P=H=O=T=O=S 10/21/06

2006-10-24T22:54:00.000-04:00

More great photos from the inimitable Nada Gordon along with penetrating commentary from the ____ Alex Young.

Meredith Quartermain reads poems about walking in Canada and riding a train in California.

Peter Quartermain gives us the skinny on life, language, and warm-smelling nurses in English public school.

The Segue blog presents: MEGABEAK. Actually Jordan Davis presented them early this month.

Our esteemed host Bob Holman, also appearing on the Million Poems Show.

MEREDITH & PETER QUARTERMAIN

2006-10-18T09:40:00.000-04:00

Nada Gordon's Intro to Meredith Quartermain

Meredith Quartermain has published and read her work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain. Her most recent book is Vancouver Walking (NeWest 2005). Chapbooks include Terms of Sale (Meow 1996), Abstract Relations (Keefer Street 1998), Veers (Backwoods Broadsides 1998), Spatial Relations (Diaeresis 2001), Inland Passage (housepress 2001), The Eye-Shift of Surface (Greenboathouse 2003), and [with Robin Blaser] Wanders (Nomados 2002). Her book of prose poems, A Thousand Mornings (Nomados 2002), is about Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood, the dockside area of Strathcona.

Metaphors that posit the poem as terrain, map, space, or landscape and the writer or reader as traveler, flaneur, surveyor, or adventurer abound. And in Canada, which is all about sheer land, more than one writer has literalized the metaphor by writing works that trace and traverse terrain in verse: I think here of Lisa Robertson’s Soft Architecture: A Manifesto and Gail Scott’s Paris.

I also think of Bruce Chatwin’s book, The Songlines, in which he explores the Australian aboriginal custom of singing the world out of dreamtime. He recounts the aboriginal creation myth thusly:

The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed; wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music.

Meredith writes: Geography means writing the earth, or you might say writing the world. It  seems to me that the act of writing the world is the act of creating it. As such I  would hope that this writing keeps rewriting itself, or that writers, as geographers  keep rewriting the world-space, and keep approaching it as an act which must  unfold in the presence of a plurality of such actors (geographers), so that there is  no definitive world or definitive geography, but rather an ongoing discussion or  network of stories.

Today, we are fortunate to join Meredith on her peregrinations. Please welcome…
_______________________________

Gary's intro to Peter Quartermain

Peter Quartermain has authored and edited many scholarly books, essays, and books of poetry over the years, including, Getting Here; Basil Bunting: Poet of the North; Disjunctive Poetics; The Objectivist Nexus (edited with Rachel Blau DuPlessis); and, with Richard Cadell, the groundbreaking anthology Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, which miraculously collects together the likes of Maggie O’Sullivan and the late Bob Cobbing, and yet was not photocopied and hand-stapled, but somehow published by Wesleyan University Press.

The male half of the Quartermain powerhouse has written essays on many of your favorite poets, including Lorine Niedecker, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Mina Loy, and Louis Zukofsky (if you haven’t yet, check out his completely engaged and engaging “Thinking with the Poem” in Jacket magazine’s recent feature on Zukofsky).

Like Zukofsky, Quartermain brings an open ear to bear on what he sees and seizes, with an eye towards what he hears or feels he hears in here [points to head] as well as out there:

Sun blurs my lash catches
cold fire the heat of my hand
like love goes through the plashy fen
vole's questing feathered feet
to type what right
here I can never see
but feel

Please help me welcome Peter Quartermain to the stage.

Nada's photos

2006-10-14T13:37:00.000-04:00

Nada Gordon took some great pictures of Stan and Kim's reading--that's Stan with the marascino cherries in his eyes. Enjoy.

Bruce Andrews and the Martini Rodeo

Stan Apps brings the Flarf

Katie Degentesh, who was on her way to band practice. No really.

Gary Introduces Kim

Kim Rosenfield

Lucca & Lytle Shaw

No Comment

GOOD AFTERNOON EVERYTHING: Dirk Rowntree reports on Stan Apps and Kim Rosenfield

2006-10-14T13:10:00.000-04:00

It was a gorgeous, if not a little too warm, October 7th, 2006. The Bowery's upper reaches were bathed in Indian summer gold with shards of reflected sun streaking from the windows of new condos across the shady boulevard. Inside Bob Holman's Bowery Poetry Club glowing and refracted light continued. On this particular Saturday the Segue on-the-Bowery experimental reading series featured Kim Rosenfield and Stan Apps. This section of the series is curated by Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon and shrewd curatorial acumen was displayed by the pairing of these two writers.

Each poet read for the customarily amorphous block of time except for Ms. Rosenfield, who had to almost battle with an intrusive and insistent stage manager for her last few minutes of showtime. The poet, not surprisingly, remained focused and composed and finished a colorful and multi-textured bolt of a reading that, at times, had young, already jaded, big city children singing out loud and much older former teenagers wrenching their eyes in disbelief.

Ms. Rosenfield is the author of a number of volumes of poetry including Good Morning Midnight and Trama. She maintains a bustling psychotherapy practice in Soho and can smell an underpriced second-hand Mark Jacobs bag on the other side of town. "I think I'm just naturally making my writing more performative as I go," she once confessed.

Holding forth last Saturday Ms. Rosenfield embodied her typical combination of humility, championship style, and grace and as she led us through territory that felt familiar, but somehow disrupted. Growing up in the spidery edges of Los Angeles might have something to do with fomenting a sensibility that wires together advanced physics and lipstick etiquette, dank juvenile folklore and blank-faced medical procedure.

Grandmother Rose was briefly channeled when Ms. Rosefield credited the departed seamstress with the design and production of the stunning black sweater the poet choose for her reading. Densely encrusted with countless sequins, it dazzled under Bob Holman's stage lights sending off a faithful metaphor for and premonition of the theatrics to come. "I'm acutely aware of how the language of beauty and perfection under the guise of guidance marks and reformulates culture. Beware of anyone offering solutions is really what I mean. Science can work in much the same way. Both genders are affected by fashion although women are more targeted and men are more part of the fallout."

At this reading, everyone was part of the fallout.

Stan Apps, who's favorite American poem is "I've Been Working on the Railroad," lived in Waco, Texas, for several years before taking up residence in Los Angeles, where he now maintains a college teaching position and keeps up an active life in the local new writing scene. Among his recent publications is a small chapbook, the title of which commands us to "enjoy your everything." Other pieces include "soft hands" and the upcoming "Info Ration."

Mr. Apps, when encouraged by Nada Gordon, made this poignant observation about feminism. "feminism made my wife a worthy companion and adversary, a person who has flowered into a genius of free-will and intellectual curiosity (so I can imitate what she says and sound smarter)."

It was his reading that kicked things off on this sunny Saturday. On the black stage, Mr. Apps displayed an easy congeniality and the calm exuberance of a slightly demented Jimmy Stewart. Associated at times with the "cult" of Flarf, the poet delivered a notable lesson to this observer. It's clear now that a charismatic reader with an audience in his\ hand can take the "arf" out of Flarf. For instance, the poem "I (heart) Melinda Gates" as presented that afternoon, on reflection seems openly narrative with smooth rides across bumpy emotional and representational terrain. The poem sounds almost placid, with heartfelt giddiness and spite rolled together with generous elocution and humble body language. Its performance was a hit drawing audibles from all ages. On the other foot, reading the poem in the slim printed volume entitled "enjoy your everything," produces a different array of tones. The dirty bleeding toes of the Flarfian are far more evident in the cracked contextual windshields and spilt milk of the printed poem. The printed subject, gone now and then, is dispersed into a post punk architecture of glare and redirection while grazing and scraping everything. On-rushing corners of reference are suddenly invisible, replaced by blinding free falls and hilarious blankness.

Mr. Apps has made this observation about advanced poetry of the last 5 years. "Poets study the work of pornographers, economists, and real-estate developers. They know a poem must satisfy the needs of a consumer, and that the needs of a consumer must be defined in an abstract and generalized manner, without too much reference to specific persons, in order to facilitate the production cycle. Every poem is a new tax-free anal McMansion for that reason."

All the workers on the railroad had their consumer needs satisfied this black Saturday on the Bowery.

SHANNA COMPTON and MICHAEL MAGEE

2006-10-12T11:35:00.000-04:00

Gary Sullivan's introduction to Shanna Compton

Your mother put a
fan in the oven,
he said, to cool
it down. That’s right
the door is open
and on it sits
a little fan, blowing.
I am a little
fan, she says, an
ardent fan, a big
fan of yours. Whew.

That poem, Shanna Compton’s “Post-Texas Expressive Heat,” is quickly becoming one of the most often-quoted poems of her generation. It’s short, it’s funny, and like William Carlos Williams’ plum-eating confession it’s memorable. It’s also a great example of how a poem can keep resonating in myriad ways, up to and including a meta-reading of it that focuses on how the poem, as though it were the blades in a fan, turns right in the middle to upend or 180 our expectations & get our thoughts spinning. Whew.

The poem, the playful messing with expectations, is par for Shanna’s course. But to the extent that poetry is golfing: An exceedingly dull competitive sport wherein the world’s blandest, fashion conscious-less human beings follow each for endless hours over astonishingly unremarkable landscape trying to “score less” than each other, Shanna Compton is mini golf all the way, and “Post-Texas Expressive Heat” is the windmill on the 7th hole. Like a mini golf course she is various, ironic, surprising, colorful, and deceptively simple.

Her new series, “For Girls,” poetic responses to 19th and early 20th century women’s physiology and etiquette books, is delightful, and as I believe she’s going to treat us to some of those poems this afternoon, I’ll say no more about them.

I do want to say, before I bring her up, that I just finished Gamers, the Soft Skull Press book she edited wherein poets and musicians and other artsy types write personal, theoretical, and historical accounts of everything from Space Invaders to the Sims, and I have to say, it’s one of the best-edited projects I’ve read in a long time--I read it straight through, completely riveted, despite having (a) no time and (b) no interest whatsoever in gaming or gaming culture.

This is the part in the intro where I should link up the playful mini-golf aspects of her poetry to some larger, more grandiose idea of “Gaming”—“for life is but a game,” etc., etc.—but that would be obvious, predictable, and Shanna Compton is anything but. Please help me welcome her to the stage.

Nada Gordon's Intro to Michael Magee
Michael Magee is a senior lecturer in English at Rhode Island School of Design and director of its new Institute for Poetic Arts and Critical Theory. He is the editor of Combo Magazine, publisher of Combo Books, and the author of Mainstream, MS, Morning Constitutional, and Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing.

Michael Magee’s writing is sardonic, well-informed, whack, capacious, soulful, cheeky, hilarious, and transgressive. His poems are cultish artifacts of a world off its rocker, and as such, sometimes get inside people’s bonnets and buzz around, making trouble. His classic anthem MAINSTREAM POETRY, in its splendid quasi-evangelical vigor, functions as a kind of theatricalized flesh-eating bacteria, showily devouring its subject as we watch in stunned glee.

As do all of the poets in the Flarf Collective (of which Michael is a key member), Michael takes much of his language from online sources. This re-purposing of language has taken on the loaded term, “appropriation,” – the ethics of which continues to be hotly debated as one of the central cultural controversies of our time – and about which I have composed this little tune:

Two hot twins of Peshawar are drinkin’ brilliantine
In the blazin’ sun of Providence, RI
And My Angie Dickinson, with glittering gray eyes
is pissin’ dead popes out of her urethra

Mike pulls out his laptop and starts googling squid
and soon dick cheney’s rendered in marzipan
and SADAM HUSSEIN IN CHOCOLATE as AN OLD YANKEE BARN
That Mike Magee is messin with my head

Appropriation’s just another word for a lotta words to use
And poetry ain’t worth nothing if it ain’t free
And if taking words is easy, well now, how can we refuse,
Cuz stealin words is good enough for me
Good enough for me and Michael Magee

Saturday, October 7th: Stan Apps and Kim Rosenfield

2006-10-07T13:25:00.000-04:00

Nada Gordon's Introduction for Stan Apps:

Some people have been asking me, “Who’s Stan Apps?”

We know the bio-data: He is a poet from Los Angeles, author of a chapbook of poetry, soft hands, from Ugly Duckling Presse, and of an upcoming full-length collection, Info Ration from Make Now Press. Stan co-curates the Last Sunday of the Month reading series at the smell in L.A. He is also co-editing a new chapbook press called Insert Press. His blog, refried oracle phone (which can be found at oracularvaginatakesherplace.blogspot.com) is one of my very favorites.

But who is he… really? And how good is he?

I don't want to sound too flowery, but he's so good that it makes me want to work harder to make him proud of me. His writing is so uncommonly lucid and weird and funny that each piece is like a bright piñata releasing little treats of insight, and we’re the eager kiddies clambering underneath to grab them up.

He’s so good that the whole world wants to wrap him up in a big huggy bundle.

You will understand this shortly.

He's so good that I just put him in front of the tv and he behaves himself. Sometimes, I turn off the tv and have him play with his toys. He has truly mastered the art of playing. In one of the mind-blowing essays that appear frequently on his blog, he writes,:

Inspiration is when you suddenly think of a beginning… .The beginning comes when something that was not fun becomes fun, or when fun energy suddenly comes over you while you’re doing something else. Good writing is fun because the writer was having fun.

I have to admit that my writing is fun and rarely work, because I usually find that I can be having fun (inspired) from the moment I sit down at my writing desk. Now that I’ve admitted this, I can’t expect to be financially rewarded for my writing, because since it is fun it’s obviously part of my leisure time, so I will have to always work at a real job. This real job will provide me with edifying interludes of not-fun, so I can experience reality and I won’t get out of touch, living the life of imagination’s hummingbird.

We today are privileged to bear witness to the frantic beating of those wings. Please welcome…

___________________________________________

Gary Sullivan’s introduction for Kim Rosenfield:

“Our childhood is a blackmailer, it makes us pay over and over again.”

—Kim Rosenfield, the last line from her manuscript, re: evolution.

Not since Don Marquis has a poet fully appreciated the appeal and the power of what, for want of a better word, I’ll call infantilization. That word may dredge up images of adult men and women wearing diapers, and although that’s related, as is baby talk between consenting adults, Kim’s sights are trained generally on the power (and terror) of regression, flights from responsibility into fantasy, passivity and awe, and cue-taking from those who “know better”:

“Say ‘ouch’ ‘help’ and ‘fire’ many times. Pretend being donkeys and repeat ‘Heehaw.’”

The surface of Kim’s writing tends to be both playful and complex, often drawing from several genres at once. Here’s “Value for the Volume of the Ocean,” from re: evolution:

Molocules they undergo many collisions

and their direction of motion

alters everything

Their movement is sometimes called the drunkard’s walk

and there’s value for the volume of the ocean

Ring of solid/ carries no charge

ring of solid/ it carries no charge

a gas

a glow in the dark

The extent to which she’s playing here, the extent to which this is actually quite beautiful and lyrical, suggests more than mere critique of infantilization or regression—it’s really an exploration, by someone—and Kim is of course a psychotherapist—who has done a lot of thinking about childhood and how childhood continues to echo into adulthood. And, because it does echo, how others can manipulate it. We probably would all agree that much of what has been perpetrated post-9/11 in and by the U.S. elsewhere has been allowed to happen in part because we allow ourselves to be infantilized. What Kim looks at and explores in her writing is our deeper “contract with childhood,” which is not in and of itself a bad thing, although big bad people may use it against us, including some of the big bad people inside us.

2006-2007 Master Schedule

2006-09-18T22:43:00.001-04:00

Welcome to the Segue Series Blog! All readings are held at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery between Bleecker and Houston--across from CBGB) at 4 pm.

OCTOBER 7: STAN APPS and KIM ROSENFIELD

OCTOBER 14: SHANNA COMPTON and MICHAEL MAGEE

OCTOBER 21: MEREDITH QUARTERMAIN and PETER QUARTERMAIN

OCTOBER 28: BILL LUOMA and JULIANA SPAHR

NOVEMBER 4: MICHAEL GOTTLIEB and ROD SMITH

NOVEMBER 11: KIMBERLY LYONS and NICK PIOMBINO

NOVEMBER 18: CHARLES BORKHUIS and LEONARD SCHWARTZ

NOVEMBER 25: NO READING–Happy holiday!

DECEMBER 2: KRISTIN PREVALLET and TAYLOR BRADY

DECEMBER 9: CATHY PARK HONG and JOAN RETALLACK

DECEMBER 16: FIONA TEMPLETON and ROSMARIE WALDROP

JANUARY 20: TINA DARRAGH and ROBERTO HARRISON

DECEMBER 23 & 30: NO READING–Happy holidays!

JANUARY 6: AKILAH OLIVER and JILL MAGI

JANUARY 13: FRANK SHERLOCK and MARK LAMOUREUX

JANUARY 20: TINA DARRAGH and ROBERTO HARRISON

JANUARY 27: MYUNG MI KIM and JUDITH GOLDMAN