Friday, February 1st, featuring Sara Mumolo and giovanni singleton for our 10-year anniversary reading!

Please join us on Friday, February 1st from 7:30-9:30 pm

for our 10-year anniversary reading, featuring

Sara Mumolo and giovanni singleton,

plus art by tomye neal-madison!

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Support the Studio One 10-year anniversary chapbook, published by speCt! books!

Contribute $20 + and receive a copy of the book ~

You can also purchase advanced copies at the event!

author & artist 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

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Sara Mumolo is the author of Day Counter (Omnidawn, 2018) and Mortar (Omnidawn, 2013). Sara serves as the Associate Director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA. Poems have appeared in 1913: a journal of forms, Action Yes, Lana Turner, The Offending Adam, PEN Poetry Series, Volta, and Volt, among others. She has received residencies to Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Center for the Arts, and has served as a curatorial resident at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, CA.

Photo Credit: Amarnath Ravva

giovanni singleton is the author of Ascension and the poetry/art collection AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper. She has received the California Book Award Gold Medal, the African American Literature and Culture Society’s Stephen E. Henderson Award for literary achievement, and fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, Napa Valley Writers Conference, and Cave Canem. Her work has appeared in many journals and publications, and has also been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, Oakland's Digital Literature Garden, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. She served as the 2017-18 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California-Berkeley and has held visiting professorships in creative writing at Sonoma State University, New Mexico State University, and CalArts. Additionally, she has taught poetry at the de Young Museum, California College of the Arts, and Naropa University. She collects bookmarks and enjoys figs and greek style yogurt.

tomyé neal-madison has shown a passion for Drawing & Painting of various subjects since a child of elementary school age. By the time she relocated from the East Coast to the West, her abilities included, Graphic Design, Illustration, and Calligraphy. In the S.F. Bay Area, she learned how to frame Artworks, woodworking, being a guest Art Teacher, curating exhibits, fabricating with glass and using all these skills as a Visual Arts Specialist employed by the City of Oakland’s Parks and Recreation Department for 18 years. Currently, tomyé’s Artworks are small scale as well as larger for Public Art sites. She mostly enjoys depicting portraits and figurative Artworks. Due to the shift in humanity, tomyé often depicts more serious content that addresses disparities and inequitable politics, knowing there are others who relate to her images and need reaffirmation.

Fugitive Slave Act / Belonging   (Gouache Painting), by tomyé neal madison

Bind Up The Broken Hearted (Fused Slumped Glass atop Text), by tomyé neal madison
 

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?  

D. Scott Miller interviews giovanni singleton

giovanni singleton and Brenda Hillman are reading tonight at Studio One Arts Center 7:30pm

D. Scott Miller: In what ways does truth - however you define it - enter into your work?

giovanni singleton: Not sure if truth of my own making/definition enters into my work. Such has proven to be a rather nasty stumbling block in previous writing endeavors. The work, I feel, brings a certain truth along with it. And it isn't always pleasant, reasonable, recognizable, or even coherent to me. Honesty and trust are perhaps more my domain.

DSM:Reading your work, particularly ascension, I'm struck by the dream-like nature of your imagery. How do dreams play within your work? How do you capture the ethereal quality of a dream or translate it into something accessible to the reader?

gs: Those are good questions. Tough. I often find playing in the back of my mind the lyrics of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, the last line of which is "Life is but a dream." What I am interested in are ways in which it might be possible to give "dream" and "reality" equal weight and measure. Neither is elevated above the other. I'd like to see/think of them as being both plausible and implausible. I am reminded of the Lankavatara Sutra's words "Things are not as they seem nor or they otherwise." This then dismantles the dualistic relationship between dream and reality. I like that open field. Dreams can be useful when not appended to Hope and Fear which again makes for a field that's open. I think an ethereal quality is somewhat necessary in order to deal with struggle and with its cessation. Impermanence as well as a connection/recognition of something greater than the "I" is also in the language of dream or the ethereal. No real in unreal. No real in real either.

DSM: Boundaries (between artist and subject, reader and writer, subject and object, object and other) sometimes seem to disappear in your larger pieces. Is this intentional or just a by-product of your process?

gs: In most instances in a life, good boundaries are important. Mind the fence. However, it is a big relief when the veil drops away and reveals the interconnectedness that holds the universe together. I wasn't aware that working on larger/longer pieces allowed for this to happen but I suppose it does. It's the removal of excess. Spaciousness is amazing canvas, I think. Erasable too.



D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist , teacher, curator. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes (re)view, and is a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Popmatters, and Mosaic Magazine. He is completing a book of poems, his Afro-surreal novel, Knot Frum Hear, and has recently published his old fashioned manifesto simply titled: AfroSurreal.

giovanni singleton, a native of Richmond, VA and former debutant, is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view, a journal dedicated to innovative and experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Aufgabe, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, Alehouse, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poets for the Millennium, the Best of Fence: An Anthology, and is forthcoming in What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America and Writing Self and Community: African American Poetry After the Civil Rights Movement. Work from her AMERICAN LETTERS series was selected for San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry & Performance Festival. Her recently completed manuscript ascension is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane. She collects bookmarks and enjoys figs and greek style yogurt.

Friday October 2nd

Check out readings and music from--

giovanni singleton, a native of Richmond, VA and former debutant, is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view, a journal dedicated to innovative and experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Aufgabe, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, Alehouse, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poets for the Millennium, the Best of Fence: An Anthology, and is forthcoming in What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America and Writing Self and Community: African American Poetry After the Civil Rights Movement. Work from her AMERICAN LETTERS series was selected for San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry & Performance Festival. Her recently completed manuscript ascension is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane. She collects bookmarks and enjoys figs and greek style yogurt.

ali lanzetta is a linguistic, musical and visual artist who is enamored with the giraffe. ali is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at SF State, and is currently uncomfortable with genre distinctions, but might get back to you on that later. ali was born and raised in a forest in New Hampshire, whose state motto is "Live Free or Die." hardwired into her system is a resulting affinity for maple syrup, porcupines, thunderstorms, old things and autumn. ali writes all of her own music, and plays it almost exclusively in her bedroom, to a one-dog-audience named Olive. The heart of a giraffe is over two feet long.


Brenda Hillman is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Cascadia (2001) and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), which received the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, and Practical Water (2009). She has also published three chapbooks. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College where she is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry and works with CodePink, a social justice group against war.


doors 7
readings 730, sharp
donation for entry

365 45th st
Oakland
Bart is MacArthur