Fanny Howe Events, December 4th and 6th
Thursday DECEMBER 4
FANNY HOWE
4:30 pm @ the Poetry Center
512 Humanities, SFSU, free
Fanny Howe is the prolific author of nearly thirty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her most recent book, The Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2007), follows On the Ground, and the remarkable poetic play ‘Tis of Thee; eight of her novels have been collected in two volumes issued by Nightboat Books; she recently—A Wall of Two—introduced and adapted the poems, written in Polish, of Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel ; her extraordinary, influential essays, many collected in The Wedding Dress, mine the territory of body, spirit, poetics, ethics. Professor Emeritus at UC, San Diego, Fanny Howe lives in New England. Photo: Ben E. Watkins.
. . .
The sky, my loom, is under me.
My foot rests on air.
It’s in my hair
The wind is weaving.
Clack and pedal.
Propeller and reactor.
My garden droops
With bleeding heart.
Thick oily leaves.
Brick and buttresses.
Abstract berries.
Spikes and watching lights.
Down here is the worker zone.
Over there is management.
from “Forty Days,” The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, 2007.
Saturday DECEMBER 6
the George Oppen Memorial Lecture FANNY HOWE
7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $5
Fanny Howe will deliver the 23rd annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, dedicated to the work of the late poet George Oppen, to Oppen’s contemporaries, and his legacy.
A poet and novelist versatile in multiple mediums, Fanny Howe in her essays has met with rare acclaim: “I have never before had such a physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experience while reading one book” (Frances Smith Foster, on The Wedding Dress). Hers is a life-work that takes place very much in a neighboring orbit to that of Oppen: its address and concerns serious, large open questions that keep opening, its embrace of its materials intimate, singular, bold. The Winter Sun, a collection of new essays, is due Spring 2009.
“After all, the point of art—like war—is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.”
Fanny Howe, “Bewilderment,” The Wedding Dress, University of California Press, 2003
November 18, 2008
Robinson, Place and Patterson at Artifact
ARTIFACT presents…
Elizabeth ROBINSON
Vanessa PLACE
G.E. PATTERSON
Saturday, November 22, 2008
7PM Doors/7:30 Reading
@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn’s Alley
Oakland Ca 94612
Directions here.
$5 suggested donation
Bios
A veteran of the slam-poetry scene, G.E. Patterson was a featured poet-performer in New York’s Panasonic Village Jazz Fest. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Tug (Graywolf Press) and To and From (Ahsahta Press). His writing can be found in several magazines and anthologies, including Blues Poetry, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Poetry 180, Isn’t It Romantic, American Letters and Commentary, nocturnes: (re)view of the arts, Open City, Provincetown Arts, Seneca Review, Swerve, Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s Poets and Poems. After living for several years in the Northeast and on the West Coast, G.E. Patterson now makes his home in Minnesota, where he teaches.
Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2), and, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse (December 2008)). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press in 2010. Place is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and is a co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”
Elizabeth Robinson’s most recent books are Inaudible Trumpeters (Harbor Mountain Press) and, if I am lucky, The Orphan & Its Relations, hot off the press from Fence. Robinson has been a recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She has also been a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Fence Modern Poets Prize. Her work is forthcoming in The Best of Fence: the first nine years and American Hybrid, a Norton anthology. Robinson is a co-editor of EtherDome Chapbooks and Instance Press.
November 17, 2008
Beth Murray and Jocelyn Saidenberg at SPT
Friday, November 21, at 7:30
at Small Press Traffic
Timken Lecture Hall,
at the California College of the Arts
1111 8th St
San Francisco
http://sptraffic.org/
Beth Murray practices homeopathy for people and animals. Since she became a homeopath,
she mostly reads materia medica and doesn’t submit her work to magazines. She is in the process
of a adopting a child from the foster system. She lives in Alameda with her dog, Laney. The Island
has everything to do with her experience there.
Jocelyn Saidenberg is the author of Dispossessed (Belladonna, 2007), Negativity (Atelos, 2006), Dusky (Belladonna, 2002), CUSP (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), and Mortal City (Parenthesis Writing Series, 1998). She is an editor and publisher of KRUPSKAYA Books, a small press publishing collective, and also works as a librarian at the San Francisco Public Public Library. Born in New York City, she currently lives in San Francisco.