Friday, October 4th, featuring Rusty Morrison, Jay Deshpande, and Trisha Peck

Please join us on Friday, October 4th from 7:30-9:30 pm

for a reading featuring Rusty Morrison, Jay Deshpande,

and Trisha Peck!

*****

author bios & photos below.

All of our readings are free & open to the public.

Snacks, wine & Lagunitas beer will be served.

365 45th Street | Oakland | 94609

Here's a map.

+ a huge thank you to our generous sponsors!

Lagunitas Brewing Company

Clorox Company Foundation

Oakland Parks and Recreation Foundation 

*****

Rusty Morrison’s five books include Beyond the Chainlink, the true keeps calm biding its story. Recent poems at Poetry Foundation website & podcast Poetry Now, Fence, Iowa Review. She’s a recipient of Civitella Ranieri fellowship. She’s co-publisher of Omnidawn (www.omnidawn.com). She offers private consultations. For more info, see her website: www.rustymorrison.com

Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger and The Rest of the Body (both from YesYes Books). Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the Scotti Merrill Award, has received fellowships from Kundiman and Civitella Ranieri, and is currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford.

Trisha Peck is a writer and visual artist from a census-designated place just south of the Wisconsin-Illinois border. She studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a late-in-life degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Trisha has exhibited her paintings and drawings in Chicago and Los Angeles, and her poems have appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review and Berkeley Art + Design. She works as a production editor at North Atlantic Books, and is a poetry editor and book designer at Omnidawn.

Friday, September 5: 2014/15 Kick-off Reading! Featuring Rusty Morrison, Maxine Chernoff and Julie Carr, plus art by Patrick Sumner!

Please join us on Friday, September 5 at 7:30 pm 

for our 2014/2015 Kick-off Reading and 

our first-ever temporary art show! 

The evening will feature readings by Rusty Morrison, 

Maxine Chernoff and Julie Carr, with art by Patrick Sumner.

Admission is FREE.

Beverages and snacks will be served. 

365 45th Street

Oakland, CA 94609

Cross is Telegraph or Broadway//BART is MacArthur.

Author & artist bios follow below.

Rusty Morrison's new letterpress, limited edition chapbook from speCt! is Reclamation Project. Her book Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta Press) was published in January 2014. After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, the true keeps calm biding its story won the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the N.CA Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, and the DiCastagnola Award from PSA. Her first book, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poems are anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry, 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, and Beauty is a Verb. She also received the Bogin, Hemley, and Winner Memorial Awards from The Poetry Society of America. She has taught poetry in MFA programs and has been a visiting poet at many universities. In 2001, Morrison and her husband, Ken Keegan, founded Omnidawn Publishing and continue to work as its co-publishers. Besides co-running the press, Morrison gives private writing consultations and teaches poetry workshops through UniversityPress Books in Berkeley, California. Her website: rustymorrison@omnidawn.com.

Maxine Chernoff chairs the Creative Writing Program at SFSU and edits the journal New American Writing. She is the author of six works of fiction and 14 books of poems, most recently Without (Shearsman, 2012), To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn, 2011), and Here (Counterpath, 2014). Winner of a 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and the 2009 PEN Translation Award for The Selected Works of Friedrich Holderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), she was also a visiting International Scholar at Exeter University in England in 2013.

Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2009), Sarah- Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and the forthcoming Think Tank (Solid Objects). She is also the author of Surface Tension-Ruptural Time the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive). Her poems and essays have been anthologized widely, including in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice. Her co-translations of Guillaume Apollinaire and of French poet Leslie Kaplan have been published in Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and a section of Kaplan's Excess-The Factory was published as a chapbook by Commune Editions. Carr teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder and helps to run Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery in Denver.

Patrick Sumner has a BFA in printmaking from Colorado State University, where he also studied metal smithing, painting and design. His work has been shown in the Minot Print Competition, Edinburgh Print Invitational, World Print III, Bridle Gallery in Camden, Maine, and the short-lived Chance Gallery in San Francisco. His design work includes posters, promotional material and C.D. cover-art for various Bay Area performing artists and composers, as well as selected audio artists produced by New American Radio in Brooklyn, New York. He designed and illustrated the graphic story magazine, "One of One", with short fiction by Sheila Davies, published in Oakland, California by Burning Books. In addition, he conceived of, curated and promoted the year-long telephone performance series "Thanks for Calling – Twelve pieces for the telephone". Currently, he is Lead Photographer at Bonham's Auction House in San Francisco and is working on a series of prints which, by association or intention, are related to writing.

Sunday, January 26: The Lana Turner Glamour Reading (#Six release)

Come celebrate the release of Lana Turner #Six on 

Sunday, January 26 from 7-10 p.m. 

Hosted by the journal's co-editors: 

David Lau & Calvin Bedient

Admission is free.

Beverages & snacks will be served.

Featuring:

Brian Ang's current poetic project is The Totality Cantos, for Atelos. He edits ARMED CELL in Oakland.

Rusty Morrison's Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta) is just published (January 2014). After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, the true keeps calm biding its story won the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the N. CA Book Award, the DiCastagnola Award from PSA. Her first book, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poems are anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, Beauty is a Verb, and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn.

Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights Books, 2011).

Juliana Spahr:  In addition to Commune Editions, Juliana Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers; she has done other recent collaborative work with Stephanie Young, Joan Retallack, Claudia Rankine, Joshua Clover, and Chris Chen.

Brenda Hillman teaches at Saint Mary's College where she is Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; her most recent collection is Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of 4 books of poetry, most recently People on Sunday.

Alli Warren's first book is Here Come the Warm Jets (City Lights, 2013). New work can be found in The Emerald Tablet, Elderly, and Compost. 

Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. His most recent collections are Active Boundaries (Selected Essays and Talks) (New Directions, 2008), Madman With Broom (selected poems, with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Thread (New Directions 2011). A new collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Times Bones, will have its San Francisco premiere in April 2014. He has taught at various universities in the United States, Europe and Asia and published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.

Lauren Levin is from New Orleans and lives in Oakland. She wrote Working (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), Song (The Physiocrats), Keenan (Lame House Press) and Not Time (Boxwood Editions). She co-edits the Poetic Labor Project and Mrs. Maybe.

Joshua Clover has appeared in every issue of Lana Turner. He has collaborated on poetry, critical writing, and conferences with Chris Nealon, Chris Chen, Aaron Benanav, Annie McClanahan, Louis Schwartz, Jasper Bernes, and Juliana Spahr; with the lattermost two, he edits Commune Editions. 

& the editors:

David Lau is co-editor of Lana Turner. He is the author of a recent chapbook, Bad Opposites (speCt! Books), and a collection of poems, Virgil and the Mountain Cat (UC Press, 2009). He teaches writing at Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz.

Calvin Bedient is the author of four books of poems, the most recent being The Multiple (Omnidawn Publishing) and Days of Unwilling (Saturnalia Books).  He is co-editor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.

Memory as Motion: A Reflection by RJ Ingram

Memory as Motion: A reflection on Rusty Morrison’s After Urgency (Tupelo Press, 2012) and giovanni singleton’s Ascension (Counterpath Press, 2011)

by RJ Ingram

The best word I’ve found to articulate the conversation between giovanni singleton and Rusty Morrison’s poetry is devotional. As both poets spend an entire book meditating and ruminating on personal topics, interesting and inviting connections draw themselves between the ways singleton and Morrison use poetry as a daily practice. 

Ascension, singleton’s first book is built around a daybook “Ear of the Behearer,” written immediately after the death of musician and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane. This particular sequence, with much variation in form, never seems to scatter too far from the meditation singleton is having. The fourth poem/day ends with “one part winter. one part parting. // leaves far from gathered.” While contemplative in tone, this passage evokes the complicated desire to piece reason into death, an instinct that singleton seems to be trying to eschew later in the sequence when she says “let me tell you / where i’ve been // before the / tide turns.” (poem/day 13). Here singleton has assumed more of a passive role in the meditation process, letting events happen and recede without distress or a refrained desire to undo, while still retaining the poet’s desire to record and replay.

As Coltrane’s transition through the bardo (states between death and rebirth) nears end (or beginning?) the shapes of singleton’s poems continue to restructure their possibilities and constraints. When challenged to write daily, the poet either finds solace in repetition or inventing new ways to see, speak. Short lyrical columns grow into steadier squarer stanzas— aphorisms, prose, and concrete poetry are all present—and as “Ear of The Beahearer” comes to a close, the I Ching instructs singleton to “write what you know.” But singleton is writing what she knows: absence, memory, and identity.

singleton’s devotion leaves her to record the arcs between the stages of Coltrane’s journey. As a daily practice, poetry can inhabit a an awareness of multiple times in a single space, as well as challenge multiple spaces throughout a single lapse of time. Here, a daily poet’s notebook records the journey of both the poet and the world. singleton’s “Ear of The Behearer” not only records her journey with Coltrane, but record’s the devotional poet’s journey into the inner realm of craft and connection with the Other. As the devotional poet travels further inward, memory and identity become the modes most accessible. 

Rusty Morrison also wrote from these modes of mourning in her book After Urgency (winner of Tupelo Press’ Dorset Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield). Like singleton, Morrison’s devotional practice led her to explore absence. The entire book occupies the spaces left after the deaths of Morrison’s parents. While singleton’s meditation process led her to craft a daybook, the forms recycled in Morrison’s After Urgency resemble more of a series of ruminations. After Urgency is a tapestry spun from five occasionally similar serial poems that can be read either individually or at the same time, as the book suggests. Just as Morrison is left wandering between the particulars of her daily life, her poems wander around spaces unwilling to let memories pass.

Examples of Morrison’s recursive desire to revisit and remain revisited by space can become haunting; moreover as the sections layer onto themselves like days just after the loss of loved ones, the poems double back, slowly becoming seemingly ‘the same.’ In the re-occurring poem “Aftermath,” for instance, readers are brought to not only the right margin, but to the bottom of the page as these frequent single line stanzas weave through major sections of the book. Here, Morrison reminds us that breaking also leads to growth, to splinters that spread the self. Take the poem “Multiplication,” for example, in which Morrison is reminded of her mother in the space between self and her mother’s scarf:

A fabric shot through with veins.

As black lint curls, embryonic,

from the black knit scarf on my mother’s shelf.

As the scarf becomes a friction that hurts my eyes.

As the past’s frequency and the future’s finality—the always

and the never again of my mother wearing her scarf—coexist here.

Not a hiddenness. Not a warning, like “touch” or “don’t.”

But a taunt, from the purity of isolation,”

The friction of the scarf’s stitches inhibits the image (or lack of image) of the speaker’s mother wearing her scarf just as the stitches of “Aftermath” bring the reader in and out of Morrison’s self in absence. Wreckage is a word to use to describe the scarf here, but it isn’t the correct word. Morrison isn’t wrecked in her absence, she is simply surviving, and survival for the devotional poet coexists with creation.

The title of another of After Urgency’s cycles invokes singleton’s desire to record her own journey with Coltrane’s. “An intersection of leaves not likeness” seems to summarize what both poets return to poem after poem: the desire to record in that space just after.

Friday, December 7th featuring poetry by Rusty Morrison, giovanni singleton, and Sarah Valentine plus music by Alberto Madueño

Come join us on Friday, December 7th at 7:30 PM 
for a night of poetry and music with poets Rusty Morrison, giovanni singleton, and Sarah Valentine, plus music by singer/songwriter Alberto Madueño!

Snacks and beverages will also be served at the event. 

Thanks for reading and we hope to see you there!

 Photo by William Bagnell

Rusty Morrison's -After Urgency- won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, -Book of the Given– is available from Noemi Press, -the true keeps calm biding its story- won the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. –Whethering- won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from The Poetry Society of America. Her poems and/or essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from A Pubic Space, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pleiades, VOLT. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing (www.omnidawn.com).

  Photo by Sarah Collins

giovanni singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a critically acclaimed journal dedicated to experimental work by artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Ascension (Counterpath Press), her debut collection, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal for poetry. She has been selected for inclusion in the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Poets series. Her work was featured in San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Writing for Children, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She has taught poetry at the de Young Museum, Saint Mary's College, and Naropa University.

Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, Into the Snow: Poems by Gennady Aygi, is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006).  Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics.  Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University.  She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA.  Sarah lives and Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.  

 

Photo by Vicente Peñuela

Alberto Madueño has been playing and recording music for over a decade. Not concerned with advertising or satisfying any genre, his methods, instruments and techniques remain in a state of constant motion and redirection. Most recently, he has been active as a sound scrapper and creative adviser for the El Gato Film Collective, a teleological experiment group focused on blurring painting past what is still. He wants to be better than he is, always, he says. And that, the only way to do that is to keep working, long beyond the point of reason or explicit intent. He is affected by light. He wants more, and he often still wonders. Is there life on mars?