Friday, December 2nd @ 7:30 pm: Robert Andrew Perez, Matthew Siegel and Peter Burghardt, plus art by Peg Videtta

Please join us on Friday, December 2nd @ 7:30 pm 

for a reading featuring Robert Andrew Perez, Matthew Siegel

and Peter Burghardt, plus art by Peg Videtta!

Event is FREE.

Lagunitas beer, wine and snacks will be served.

Studio One Art Center

365 45th Street | Oakland, CA | 94609

here's a map.

+ gratitude & love to our sponsors:

 Oakland Parks and Recreation Foundation

Clorox Company Foundation

Lagunitas Brewing Company

Looking forward to seeing you on Dec. 2nd! 

Robert Andrew Perez lives in Berkeley and is an associate editor & book designer for speCt! in Oakland, where he also curates readings. He is an alum of the Lambda Literary fellowship & a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for poetry. His poetry has appeared in print & online in publications such as DIAGRAM, The Awl, The Laurel Review & The Cortland Review, and has forthcoming work in Vinyl. His first collection, the field, was published with Omnidawn in their pocket book series. He is currently writing a movie about a divorce and wine tasting; it's a comedy. More at robertandrewperez.com.

Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work (University of Wisconsin/CBe) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection. His poems and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches literature and writing at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Peter Burghardt lives in Oakland, California, where he co-publishes speCt! books, and edits OAR, a print journal of poetry and prose. His recent work has appeared in such publications as the Offending Adam, Tammy, The Laurel Review, and White Stag. His chapbook, Cosmic American Music, is forthcoming from Old Gold.

Peg Videtta brings her experience of dance, yoga, and physics into making figurative sculpture. Her work explores the energetic components of the body, especially while in movement.

Friday, October 3 @ 7:30 feat. Cedar Sigo, Lourdes Figueroa, Hugh Behm-Steinberg and Peter Burghardt

Come hear poetry! Join us on Friday, October 3 @ 7:30 pm for a reading featuring Cedar Sigo, Lourdes Figueroa, 

Hugh Behm-Steinberg and Peter Burghardt

Admission is FREE.

Beverages and snacks will be served.

Studio One Arts Center

365 45th Street

Oakland, CA 94609

http://bit.ly/XpvVMB

Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger In Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), and two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005). He lives in San Francisco.

Lourdes Figueroa, was born in Yuba City, California during one of the trips her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil for tomatoes. She grew up in the betweens of everything, not from here and not from over there. She is a native of limbo nation. Lourdes is a proud 2009 and 2011 VONA alum.  Some of her work has been published in Poets 11 (2008 & 2010), an Anthology of poems selected by Jack Hirschman, and also in Generations: a journal of ideas and images. She received her MFA in Poetry at the University of San Francisco. Her first chapbook, yolotl, was published  by Spooky Actions Books, a publisher of quality chapbooks. She currently works as an interpreter, translator, and advocate. Lourdes believes in your lung, your throat, your tongue.

Peter Burghardt lives in Oakland, where he works as a poetry editor and book designer for Omnidawn Publishing, and co-publishes the letterpress chapbook imprint speCt! books. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, and in 2013 founded the Community Poets’ Workshop at University Press Books/Berkeley. He was a 2014 finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and recent work has been published or is forthcoming from such journals as Witness: The Magazine of the Black Mountain Institute, The Laurel Review, Tammy, Issue 4, death hums, and BlazeVox.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press), as well as two Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery and Good Morning! Bird poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such places as Spork, Fence, South Dakota Review, Denver Quarterly and Ping-Pong. With Matt Davignon he performs experimental improvised vocal music as the band Oa. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

Dara Wier Talks to Ben Mirov

Dara Wier: Ben, are you still the recording angel Zachary Schomburg suggests you are?

Ben Mirov: I’m probably more of a recorder than an angel. My personality is kind of flat and suited for observation more than interaction. Sometimes, I feel like a huge eyeball.

I like the idea of being a recorder. I think I’m at my best, poetry-wise, when I’m acting like a recording machine that’s trying to articulate the unfolding of a poem in my brain. If I’m any kind of angel, it’s by accident. Or because I’m terrified of not being liked or breaking the rules or causing trouble.

I like being mentioned in the same sentence as Zachary. He is sincere and kind in a preternatural way. Although I may be a little biased towards Zach because Octopus Books, the press he runs with Mathias Svalina and Alisa Heinzman, is publishing my next book. Knowing he has anything to say about me or my writing feels rad.

DW: You do have that great longish poem “Eye, Ghost” in Ghost Machine, so I feel as if I know something about the kind of eyeball you might be.

Someone is going to let me look through her eyeball through its pupil to see inside her brain; she’s studying medicine. Your poems lots of times feel accurately and carefully enunciated, as if what’s in them has to be treated carefully, it’s that fragile out there, how do you do that?

BM: I think the enunciation of “fragility” comes about due to two aspects of the way I write. The first aspect is the content of the poems. I care to write about things that tend towards fragility, like emotions; memory; love; consciousness; relationships; etcetera (The content of my writing is unremarkable. I feel like I write about things people have written about since humans began to write).

The second aspect is the way I revise poems. I revise work over long periods of time. I write a lot, but only foster a small percentage of the poems I write into their mature forms. Once I finish the bulk of a poem, I dwell on it, or file it away and come back to it, sometimes over the period of years. Because I want to enhance the content of what I write, I try to help the form of each poem catalyze its content as I revise. I edit lines down for grammatical simplicity, so that they, hopefully, attain a structural integrity and or lyrical quality that bolsters their “fragile” content. I break lines and or tease out rhymes that enhance the poems object-like qualities. All this is in order to embody the ephemera of the content without undermining it. After a while, if a poem is successful, it takes an advantageous form, one that will hopefully enable it to deliver its messages and survive entropic dissipation.

DW: Wow, I just read your poems “#0.99999” and “#23.33” in the new notnostrums, with atoms and little dots and a very wonderful notice that goes along the lines of “…you only see once / and you don't get to share.” That directly speaks to surving entropic dissipation. Thanks for saying how your work develops, and finally, can you tell me something about the titles I mention. I love 9s for sure, so 3s are great too.

BM: I love nines and threes, too. Those poems in notnostrums are from a collection of poems called the Analects of Confusion, loosely based on the Analects of Confucius, of which I’ve only read a few pages. I thought it would be funny to write a bunch of poems that had a didactic tone, but sort of undermined there moral authority by spiraling into confusion and ambiguity. Using numbers as titles was my idea of cataloging the poems in a completely unorganized manner. Most of the time the number relates to the content of the poem. In the case of the ones in notnostrums, “#0.99999” was intended to have the little line over the last nine [#0.99999], which is a mathematical symbol denoting that the series of nines extends infinitely. Most of the moments in the poem are similar in that they meditate on mysteries that aren’t resolved. The poem moves from paradox to paradox without resolution sort of like the potentially endless string of 9s represented by the title. Also, “0.99999” is on the verge of being the number 1.0, much like the poem, which is on the verge of understanding without ever reaching it. I don’t remember why I went with the title “#23.33,” maybe I thought it was a funny number or it just appealed to me.

Ben Mirov reads this Friday at Studio One with Cassandra Smith, music by Peter Burghardt. Be there!

Friday September 2nd with music from Peter Burghardt. Poems from Cassandra Smith and Ben Mirov.

Check it out:

First Fridays at Studio One

Food Trucks/bites off broadway 5:30-7:30
Readings 7:30-9:30
entry by donation


Cassandra Smith is a visual artist and poet. She makes things and writes things and often these seem like objects more than art. She is a poetry editor and book designer for Omnidawn Publishing. She has degrees. She has fire. She lives in Oakland.







Peter Burghardt and Stuart Pittman have been friends and frequent collaborators for the better part of a decade. Though geographic distance kept them from performing together during the past several years they continued to contribute words, ideas, and encouragement to each others music and art. Reunited again, Peter and Stu look forward to sharing the stage and making sounds wherever folks will have them.




Ben Mirov is the author of Hider Roser (Octopus Books, Summer 2012), Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) and the chapbooks Vortexts (SUPERMACHINE, 2011) I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2010). He is currently working on a trilogy of sci-fi novels about a man named Ben Mirov who is struggling to write his third book of poetry, while suffering from mild burnout and an addiction to the video game Starcraft 2.