Friday, September 6th @ 7:30pm featuring Joseph Lease, Emily Carr, and Evan Karp

Join us for a reading with Joseph Lease, Emily Carr & 

Evan Karp, + a performance of "After Frost"

This event will begin promptly at 7:30pm; please arrive on time.

Beverages and snacks will be served.

+ Come early for Bites Off Broadway: amazing food outside on the Studio One Lawn, 5:30-8:30pm 

 Joseph Lease, photo by Laird Hunt

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011) and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007).   Lease’s poems  "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American  Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition). "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.  The Academy of American Poets anthologized Lease’s poem “True Faith” on poets.org, and emailed the poem to 70,000 subscribers.  Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World  are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained.  Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my /  Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials.  His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority:  Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is.  An exquisite collection!”

Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.” Of Testify, Sheila Murphy wrote: “Lease is the master of tenderness, crafting a deeply felt synthesis that is as potent in its specificity as it is accurate in its intuitive musicality.  . . Lease’s singular use of anaphora, the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase for a specific effect, achieves perfection as it sings or cries its musical reality in repeated chant-like fragments that become in their aggregate more whole than any more traditional construction would allow . . .”

Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

 

Emily Carr

Emily Carr directs the Low-Residency MFA at OSU-Cascades. She is passionate about the rediscovery of Mississippi poet besmilr brigham, the sexual politics of meat, the limits of Achilles’ honesty and the problem of Chaucer’s spring, unposted love letters, cannibal chickens and a ship too late to save the drowning witch. Emily has been a finalist in seven national poetry competitions, most recently the National Poetry Series. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, directions for flying (Furniture Press 2010) and 13 Ways of Happily: Books 1 & 2 (Parlor Press 2011) and some lovely chapbooks from horseless press, Little Red Leaves Textile Series, and dancing girl press. Her third full-length poetry collection, Up The Shinbone Superlatives, is forthcoming from horseless press in 2014.

Evan Karp

 

Evan Karp puts words on paper in a way that feels good to him. He does not care about poetry as such, nor about fiction, and believes all overtly political art is a contradiction. He also feels if something is not important enough for you to learn by heart you shouldn't publish it. New and improved, Evan's lived in the Bay Area for four years without a job, writing regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, KQED, and SF Arts, as well as contributing articles to the Guardian UK, BOMBlog, The Rumpus, The Bay Citizen, and elsewhere. He's the founder and Executive Director of Quiet Lightning and the founding editor of Litseen.com, and his ideas and feelings may be found in Eleven Eleven, Vertebrae, OmniVerse, and Dusie (some of which he does not have memorized).

 Tobey Kaplan

"After Frost", a mixed-media performance with text by poet Tobey Kaplan and choreography by choreographer/dancer Nan Busse, + music by Julianne Moscovitz & others:

Tobey Kaplan, a poet originally from New York City, with degrees from Syracuse and San Francisco State Universities, has been teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area for over thirty years.  Her honors include: Dorland Mountain Colony Fellow, and Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, as well the recipient of a Bay Area Award (New Langton Arts, 1996). A full-length volume appeared Across the Great Divide (Androgyne, 1995), and her poems are contained in numerous publications, most recently East Bay Monthly  April 2012, Omnidawn Feature February 2010, Turning A Thought Upside Down (Scarlet Tanager 2012)and  The Berkeley Poets Cooperative: A History of the Times (Hip Pocket Press, 2013). She also has a position at a Native American social service agency encouraging those she works with to write, tell stories and continue with some kind of formal education.

Coming quite late to dance following 20 or so years as a visual artist, Nan Busse has danced for many years primarily with local choreographer, Danny Nguyen.  Having also performed with Christine Germaine & Dancers, Vangie King, Amy Lewis, Axis Dance Co. and participated in Deborah Hay's "Solo Performance Commission Project", her focus has turned increasingly over the past couple of years to creating her own work solo and with the likes of the fine performers with whom she’ll be performing at Studio One, and whose efforts are inestimable.

Classically trained musician, Julianne Moscovitz, has performed alternative music for decades and accompanied various traditional and non-traditional art presentations and performances.  Julianne currently serves as Director of Performing Arts and Music at Castlemont High School in Oakland.    

Other "After Frost" performers include:

Dan Bruno-waltz
Cynthia Berrol-performer

Gustav Davila-performer

Leslie Egashira -performer

Cathy Broder-waltz

Paul Lynch- musician

Peggy DeCoursey-performer