Helen Adam & Kristin Prevallet

Small Press Traffic's Talk Series continues with this special event featuring poet Kristin Prevallet, who will discuss her research on the life and work of Helen Adam, one of the brightest lights of the San Francisco Renaissance. Scottish-born Helen Adam (1909-1992) was a mystic balladeer, who wrote and thought in the language of Dunbar and Ingoldsby while maintaining intimate friendships with Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Madeline Gleason, James Broughton, and countless others in the poetry-mad world of the Bay Area of the 1950s and 60s. A gifted storyteller, collagist and photographer, she is best remembered for her tragicomic operetta San Francisco's Burning!
Kristin Prevallet's Perturbation, My Sister: A study of Max Ernst's Hundred Headless Woman, is forthcoming this spring from First Intensity Press. She is an editor of apex of the M, and is working on a video based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For the past three years she has been cataloguing the archive of Helen Adam at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at SUNY Buffalo.
At this event, Prevallet will give a slide presentation of Adam's life and times, and will introduce the restored version of Daydream of Darkness, the film made by Helen Adam and the painter William McNeill in 1962-3. Daydream of Darkness, a poetic film fantasia, was shown only once, at Robin Blaser's Peacock Gallery on the eve of JFK's assassination, and then abandoned. In the course of her research, Prevallet discovered the film, its celluloid near rotting, and has arranged its restoration for this grand re-premiere!

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