Events

Spring 2008

Unless otherwise noted, events are $5-10 sliding scale
and begin at 7:30 PM in Timken Lecture Hall,
at the California College of the Arts,
1111--8th Street, San Francisco.

This year’s Poets Theater is curated by
David Buuck, Cynthia Sailers, and Stephanie Young.
All seats $10 to benefit Small Press Traffic;
seating is first come, first served.

details >

details >

details >

details >

details >

details >

Friday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.

Bill Luoma & Laura Moriarty

details >

details >

details >

details >

details >

details >

details >

Friday, May 30, 7:30 p.m. &
Saturday, May 31, 10:00 a.m. - 4 p.m.

AGGRESSION: A Conference On Contemporary Poetics and Political Antagonism

details >

top^

Event Details

Unless otherwise noted,
our events are presented in
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco

Poets Theater: An Evening of Short Plays

Friday, January 18, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

“The Obituary Show” by CA Conrad
“Olive Oil from the Notebooks, a radio film” by Arnold J. Kemp
Hannah Weiner’s “RJ (Romeo and Juliet)” from CODE POEMS,
directed by Suzanne Stein
“Up in Arms: an Oratorio at Tense Borders” by Mary Diaz
“a fierce vexation of a dream” by sara m. larsen
“Yoda in His Youth” by Dana Ward
plus a new play by Mairead Byrne and more surprises!

1980s Poets Theater Revivified
Three Plays Reexamined, Reanimated, and Restaged

Friday, January 25, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

“Particle Arms” by Alan Bernheimer (excerpts)
“Third Man” by Carla Harryman (excerpts)
“Creative Floors” by Kit Robinson

Poets Theater Cabaret Extravaganza

At a local venue to be announced

Sunday February 3, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.

SPT’s first Poets Theater Cabaret will feature several acts, ranging from musical and video numbers to speed lectures, performance art, fluxus events, impersonations, puppet theater, acts of mysticism, live psychotherapy, experimental astronomy, food art, avant-gossip, and maybe even some
—gasp! — poetry!

Join us for a night of costumed ribaldry, artistic blasphemy, and cultural craziness, along with drinks, food, bizarre raffle gifts, and a silent auction of not-so-silent wonders! Audience participation welcomed!

See our new weblog (smallpresstraffic.blogspot.com) for updates, directions, auction items, photos,
and more!

Bhanu Kapil & Dodie Bellamy

Friday, February 15, 7:30 p.m.

Bhanu Kapil writes at the intersection of poetry, prose, non-fiction and a kind of irreversible yet mutable “document.” Her works include The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), and Humanimal, a project for future children (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press). Nationally, she has given readings of her work and presented lectures/panel talks on monsters, cyborgs, architecture, and hybridity; most recently as part of a CalArts conference on experimental writing at the LAMoca. She teaches at Naropa University.

Dodie Bellamy’s collection, Academonia, was published by Krupskaya in 2006. Other books include Pink Steam and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. In January, 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker’s clothing

Erica Kaufman & Erin Moure

Friday, February 29, 7:30 p.m.

Erica kaufman is the author of several chapbooks, most recently civilization day (Open24Hours, Winter 2007) and censory impulse (an excerpt of her long poem of the same title — Big Game Books, Fall 2007). kaufman holds a MFA from the New School and was the winner of the 2003 New School University Chapbook Contest. her poems can be found in Puppyflowers, Painted Bride Quarterly, Bombay Gin, The Mississippi Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, the tiny, Turntable + Blue Light, 26, Aufgabe, LIT, among other places. essays and reviews can be found in The Poetry Project Newsletter, CutBank, Rain Taxi, Verse, and elsewhere. kaufman is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and the co-curator/co-editor of Belladonna* and Belladonna Books. She lives
in Brooklyn.

Erín Moure is a Canadian poet who lives in Montreal in French, writes in English, and translates poetry from Galician, Portuguese, French, and Spanish into English. O Cadoiro, her most recent book (Anansi, 2007) plays with notions of lyric, fed by the medieval Galician-Portuguese repertoire of cantigas. Her Little Theatres, a book in English and Galician co-written by Elisa Sampedrín, was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Governor General’s Award, won the AJM Klein Prize, and was on the Globe 100 list for 2005. It appeared in late 2007 in Galician from Editorial Galaxia, as Teatriños. Other recent books: O Cidadán (2002), and Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001), a transelation from the Portuguese of Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa. Moure has also translated numerous other works, is currently translating Chus Pato’s Hordas de Escritura, has just completed a new book of poetry, O Resplandor, with Elisa Sampedrín, and is working on a long collaborativework with Oana Avasilichioaei, one segment of which is at:
http://jacketmagazine.com/32/k-avas-moure.shtml.

Kenny Goldsmith & Andrew Choate

Friday, March 7, 7:30 p.m.

Andrew Choate was born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina and educated at Northwestern University and CalArts. His latest book, Langquage Makes Plastic of the Body, was published by Palm Press in 2006. It includes a CD of his singing and reading. Pigs in Blankets, a radio play from 2004, and Spir-ahchoo!-ality, a sneeze-based recording from 2005, have been audially exhibited in London, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Rome and Yerevan. His writings on music and art have been published in d’Art International, Coda, Facsimile Magazine, Signal to Noise, Urb and the Wire since 1998. As “The Unwrinkled Ear,” he has hosted a weekly radio show since 1994; the current incarnation can be heard on www.killradio.org from 21:00-22:30 PST, Thursdays. He is a member of The Little Fakers, an urban marionette collective.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most “exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (http://ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, a online poetry archive. More about Goldsmith can be found on his author’s page at the University of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith.

Bill Luoma & Laura Moriarty

Friday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.

Bill Luoma is author of Works and Days, and the chapbooks Dear Dad, Swoonrocket, and Western Love. Recently work has appeared in Abraham Lincoln. He is a member of subpress, which gave him the opportunity to publish Jennifer Moxley’s autobiography, The Middle Room. He lives in Berkeley with Charles, Juliana, and Sasha Berkman Tupac Spahr.

Join us in celebrating Laura Moriarty’s A Semblance, Selected and New Poems 1975-2007 just out from Omnidawn. She has published eleven books of poetry, a short novel, Cunning (Sputyen Duyvil 2000), and a novel of science fiction, Ultravioleta (Atelos 2006). Moriarty has been a very active member of the Bay Area community for 25 years, has traveled extensively to do readings and workshops, has had her work translated into half a dozen languages, has taught at Mills College, Naropa University and Otis Art Institute, and has been a nonprofit literary organization director for 20 of those years. Moriarty currently works as Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

Kristin Palm & Juliana Spahr

Saturday, April 5, 7:30 p.m.

Featuring an after-reading interview by David Buuck

Kristin Palm joins us in celebration of her first book, The Straits (Palm Press, 2007). Her writing has appeared in LVNG, Bird Dog, Boog City, Chain, There, Dusie and the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), as well as numerous magazines and newspapers, including Metropolis, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and the Detroit Metro Times. She has taught poetry to high school students in Detroit and is currently a writer-in-residence at John Muir Middle School in San Leandro, CA.

Current east bay resident Juliana Spahr has lived in many other places, including Chillicothe, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Honolulu, Hawai‘i; and Brooklyn, New York. She has absorbed, participated in, and been transformed by the politics and ecologies of each. Her most recent book, The Transformation (Atelos, 2007) is about that process. Among her previous works are This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (U of California, 2005), a collection of poems that she wrote from November 30, 2002 to March 30, 2003 that chronicled the buildup to the latest US invasion of Iraq. She has edited the journal Chain with Jena Osman for the last twelve years and with nineteen other poets she has been an editor of the collectively run and collectively funded Subpress.
SPT Board President, David Buuck will lead an on-stage interview with Kristin & Juliana after
their reading.

Please note special day for above event!

Zoe Whittall & Eileen Myles

Saturday, April 19, 7:30 p.m.

Zoe Whittall is the author of the novel Bottle Rocket Hearts (Cormorant, 2007) and two volumes of poetry, including the recent Emily Valentine Poems (Snare, 2006) and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan, 01). The Globe and Mail recently called her, “the cockiest, brashest, funniest, toughest, most life-affirming, elegant, scruffy, no-holds-barred writer to emerge from Montreal since Mordecai Richler.” Her stories and poetry have been anthologized widely in books like Baby Remember My Name edited by Michelle Tea, Red Light: Superheroes, Saints & Sluts edited by Anna Camilleri, Brazen Femme edited by Anna Camilleri and Chloe Brushwood-Rose, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn edited by Amber Dawn and Trish Kelly, and Breathing Fire Two: Canada’s New Poets edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane. She was born on a sheep farm in rural Quebec and has lived in Toronto since 1997.

Over the last three decades Eileen Myles has written, produced, and performed a multitude of poems, plays, articles, libretti. In 1992, she conducted an openly female “write in campaign” for President of the United States. She has toured internationally with Sister Spit’s Rambling Road Show and is considered “America’s best known unofficial poet.” In Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007), Myles describes “some nature” as well as the transmigration of souls from the east coast to the west. She’s a “rock star of modern poetry” according to Bust magazine and we’re glad to have here back at SPT.

Please note special day for above event!

An Evening of Innovative Fiction
featuring Amanda Davidson, Yuri Herrera, Summi Kaipa & Chris Nagler

at the CCA Oakland Campus, Nahl Hall
5212 Broadway in Oakland

Saturday, April 26, 7:30 p.m.

Join us at CCA’s Oakland Campus for a memorable evening of Bay Area experimental fiction. You’ll be glad you did!

Amanda Davidson is a San Francisco-based writer and multi-media artist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Famous magazine, Viz. Inter-Arts, Encyclopedia Volume F-K, and elsewhere. She co-edits Digital Artifact Magazine and maintains several alter-egos online at partedinthemiddle.com.

Born in Actopan, México in 1970, Yuri Herrera is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Hispanic Language and Linguistics. He received a M.F.A from University of Texas in El Paso and his B.A. from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Political Science. Herrera edits the literary journal El perro and is the author of Trabajos del reino (a novel), Este es mi nahual! (a short story for children), and has contributed to several anthologies of short stories in Spanish.

Summi Kaipa has authored several chapbooks, including The Epics (Leroy Press), One: I Beg You Be Still (Belladonna), and most recently The Language Parable (Corollary Press). For eight years, she was the editor of Interlope, a magazine publishing innovative writing by Asian Americans, and in 2002, she received a Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize to write and produce her first play. Kaipa is currently completing a doctorate in clinical psychology and is slowly writing her first full-length manuscript.

Christian Nagler is a fiction writer, translator, and performer. In 2005 he received his M.F.A. from Brown University. His work has appeared most often in the form of handmade artist’s books. Recently, he has been performing with Anna Halprin’s Sea Ranch Collective, and with Severine La Pan Vaux’s Dance company in France, and translating the works of the Salvadoran philosopher and economist Alberto Masferrer. He teaches community art at San Francisco State and is working on a novel.

Please note special day for above event!

Miranda Mellis & Dawn Lundy Martin

Friday, May 9, 7:30 p.m.

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press) and a founding editor at The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Post Road, Fence, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction and an NEH grant. In her former life as an aerialist in the tiniest circus in the world, she toured with Sister Spit in 1998. She teaches at the California College of the Arts.

A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, Dawn Lundy Martin’s new poetry collection, published by the University of Georgia Press, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2006. Ms. Martin is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is an assistant professor in the English Department, University of Pittsburgh. She is the cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation, a national organization for young feminists.

SPT Presents: Student Writers from throughout the Bay Area

Friday, May 16, 7:30 p.m.

Featuring Emergent Writers from the Bay Area’s diverse community of writing programs including Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Mills, New College, San Francisco State University, St. Mary’s, University of San Francisco, and non-academic writing workshops.

Stay tuned to our website (www.sptraffic.org) for more information!

Jennifer Firestone & Matthew Shenoda

Friday, May 23, 7:30 p.m.

Jennifer Firestone, a SF poet currently living in Brooklyn, is the author of the book Holiday (Shearsman Books, 2008), and the chapbooks Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), from Flashes (Sona Books, 2006), and snapshot (Sona Books, 2004). Jennifer’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including How2, 14 Hills, 580 Split, Boog City, MIPOesias, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Dusie and Moria. She is the co-editor of the anthology Letters To Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics and Community, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books, and she is Poet in Residence at Eugene Lang College at the New School University.

Matthew Shenoda is a faculty member in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Author of Somewhere Else, winner of the 2007 Hala Maksoud Award for Emerging Voice, and a 2006 American Book Award, his latest collection, Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, will be published in 2009 from BOA Editions.

AGGRESSION: A Conference On Contemporary Poetics and Political Antagonism

An SPT Conference organized by Chris Chen,
Cynthia Sailers, & Stephanie Young

Friday, May 30, 7:30 p.m. &
Saturday, May 31, 10:00 A.M. – 4 p.m.

While a triumphalist rhetoric of community and collective subjects has frequently accompanied the construction of oppositional poetic communities, the purpose of this conference is to instead explore the myriad ways in which consensus can fail and to produce fresh opportunities for rethinking poetic theory and practice.

The first panel will address the perils and possibilities of technologically mediated public spaces, specifically focusing on how new technologies may mystify, reproduce, or intensify existing racial, gender, and class divisions. The second panel will investigate the fault lines within and among Bay Area experimental poetry communities during the 70s and 80s, and how this history of contestation informs current conversation, participation and social space. Finally, the third panel will investigate the volatile relationship between race and the idea of an avant-garde. Please check our website (www.sptraffic.org) for more information!

top^

Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at CCA 1111 -- 8th Street San Francisco, California 94107 smallpresstraffic at gmail 415-551-9278