ksp news

March 10, 2010

Feminism/Disability/Embodiment/Poetics. March 20, 2010.

Feminism/Disability/Embodiment/Poetics
a reading/performance/improvisation with
Denise Leto, Amber DiPietra, Eleni Stecopoulos and Petra Kuppers
Berkeley, 2-4pm, Subterranean Arthouse
2179 Bancroft Way
Berkeley CA 94704
(between Shattuck and Fulton)

March 9, 2010

AERODROME/ARMIES/HISTORY Book Release, Readings and Viewing

Artist Amy Trachtenberg joins poets Susan Gevirtz and Eleni Stecopoulos who read from their new volumes of poetry.


Monday, March 29, 7pm
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @ Gough
San Francisco, CA  94102
http://www.thegreenarcade.com/


About Susan Gevirtz’ new book, AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger:
“It’s not possible to be more phenomenologically direct than the poetry on these pages. This is removal of the obstacles of perception, beginning with perception, often by means of the obstacles themselves. This is what the sky is. All other skies in this one. There is a host of impossibilities to be found in AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger.”  – Robert Kocik


About Eleni Stecopoulos’ new book, Armies of Compassion:
”This startling work brings something necessary to American poetry: a visceral poetics that transforms diagnosis into a performative linguistic probe in the service of the disturbed body. The body politic’s symptoms and signs are the foundation for Eleni Stecopoulos’s aversive lyrics, whose beauty lies not in the unbearing of a device but in the bearing of our discomfiture in the world and the potency of our imaginary realignments. Armies of Compassion is a talisman, antidote to what ails, spells woven against an engulfing night.” — Charles Bernstein


Susan Gevirtz lives in San Francisco. Her books include Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger, Kelsey Street, 2010; BROADCAST,  Trafficker, 2009;Thrall, Post Apollo, 2007; Hourglass Transcripts, Burning Deck, 2001. She now teaches at the California College of the Arts, The University of San Francisco, Mills College, San Francisco State University, and has taught at The Hellenic International School of the Arts, Paros, Greece. She received the New Langton Arts “Bay Area Award in Literature” in the spring of 2000.  Gevirtz currently co-organizes the annual translation and conversation meeting of The Paros Symposium with Greek poet Siarita Kouka. See website:  parossymposium.com.


Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York and now lives in Berkeley. Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. She currently curates a series on “The Poetics of Healing” for The Poetry Center at SFSU and is writing a book on the topic. She is at work on a book-length poem, “Earth Also is a Private Language,” which deals with things like rift zones and dream incubation and the history of her grandfather’s hometown on the island of Euboea, renowned since antiquity for curative springs once associated with cults of Apollo and Heracles. She teaches in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College.


Amy Trachtenberg lives and works in San Francisco, exhibiting nationally and internationally. A painter, she began to work with theater companies as a collaborator for new music and dance. Her work in public spaces began in 1999 with the commission for Art in Transit in the Millennium in San Francisco, Bodies Changed: The Natural History of Market Street–now on exhibit at The Green Arcade–a series of 24 posters celebrating the cultural and natural history of the main artery in downtown San Francisco. Currently she is working on integrated artwork in the design for a new BART Station, a 1000-foot long rail station in the Silicon Valley. In 2008, Americans for the Arts granted her Groundwork project the Public Art Network, Year in Review award.

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February 23, 2010

SINA QUEYRAS on Matrix Magazines New Feminism, Les Fugues Feminissance, and Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics.

SINA QUEYRAS on Matrix Magazines New Feminism, Les Fugues Feminissance, and Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics.
This exuberant, detailed post at Harriet begins:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/author/squeyras/
If you found Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine’s American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language exciting you’re going to appreciate Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry, published in 2009 by Coach House Books. Edited superbly by Kate Eichhorn and Heath Milne, the collection includes fifteen of the “most engaging avante garde Canadian women writing poetry today.” Some of these names will be familiar. In particular Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Lisa Robertson, and to the narrative people in particular, Gail Scott. Some of the new names include: Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf and, I must confess, myself.

This exuberant, detailed post at Harriet begins:

If you found Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine’s American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language exciting you’re going to appreciate Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry, published in 2009 by Coach House Books. Edited superbly by Kate Eichhorn and Heath Milne, the collection includes fifteen of the “most engaging avante garde Canadian women writing poetry today.” Some of these names will be familiar. In particular Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Lisa Robertson, and to the narrative people in particular, Gail Scott. Some of the new names include: Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf and, I must confess, myself.

February 22, 2010

D: What does “atmosphere” mean to you, and what is its importance in your life?

–interview with Bhanu Kapil on Mars Poeitc blog
D: What does “atmosphere” mean to you, and what is its importance in your life?
B: I read your question and immediately see the balcony of a temple in Mussoorie, in the Himalayas, where I stayed with my uncle for a few days when I was twenty. I was traveling with him from temple to temple, training or witnessing, really, the ancestral practice in my family of “healing with light and color.” My uncle would give a dharma talk, give healings, then the temple would put us up for the night, or as long as we could stay. I remember sitting on the balcony looking down at the mist in the valley below, the sun rising through the clouds, which turned rose and gold in turns — perhaps twenty variations of these colors — wrapped in a quilt, drinking chai from a little glass, and — from this time on, I never lost hope, no matter what happened to me or to others. I was recalibrated by atmosphere to the light in my own body, and lately, as I engage questions of aggression and community, what I do is go to the river near my house in Colorado, with my dog, and sit until the river comes out of itself and into me. It is the same thing. It is SHAKTI, which comes to us through the earth, its ethers and its bodies of water.

–interview with Bhanu Kapil on Mars Poetic blog.

B: I read your question and immediately see the balcony of a temple in Mussoorie, in the Himalayas, where I stayed with my uncle for a few days when I was twenty. I was traveling with him from temple to temple, training or witnessing, really, the ancestral practice in my family of “healing with light and color.” My uncle would give a dharma talk, give healings, then the temple would put us up for the night, or as long as we could stay. I remember sitting on the balcony looking down at the mist in the valley below, the sun rising through the clouds, which turned rose and gold in turns — perhaps twenty variations of these colors — wrapped in a quilt, drinking chai from a little glass, and — from this time on, I never lost hope, no matter what happened to me or to others. I was recalibrated by atmosphere to the light in my own body, and lately, as I engage questions of aggression and community, what I do is go to the river near my house in Colorado, with my dog, and sit until the river comes out of itself and into me. It is the same thing. It is SHAKTI, which comes to us through the earth, its ethers and its bodies of water.

February 19, 2010

Heidegger’s Glasses, by Thaisa Frank

KSP is excited to hear that Thaisa Frank has a new novel out!

9781607477266

Description:

The Third Reich’s obsession with the occult, as well as scrupulous record-keeping has led them to create the Compound of Scribes, concealed in a converted mine shaft complete with rose- colored cobblestone streets and a continuously shifting artificial sky. The Scribes’ sole mission is to answer letters written to the dead—thereby preventing the deceased from pestering psychics for answers and exposing the Final Solution–as well as any questions about unanswered letters after Germany’s ancticipated victory after the war.

As a failing Germany falls apart at its seams, a letter arrives written by eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger to his optometrist and friend, a man now lost in the dying thralls at Auschwitz. How will the Scribes answer this letter?

The presence of Heidegger’s words—one simple letter in a place filled with letters—sparks a series of events that will  ultimately threaten the safety and well-being of the entire Compound.  Part love story and part historical fiction, Heidegger’s Glasses evocatively  constructs the landscape of Nazi Germany from an entirely original and  haunting vantage point.

From the Prologue:
In the ordinary winter of 1920, the philosopher Martin Heidegger saw his glasses and fell out of the familiar world. He was in his study at Freiburg, over one hundred and sixty kilometers south of Berlin, looking out the window at the thick bare branches of an elm tree. His wife was standing next to him, pouring a cup of coffee. Sunlight fell through the voile curtains, throwing stripes on her crown of blond braids, the dark table, and his white cup.  All at once a starling crashed against the window and dropped to the ground.  Heidegger reached for his glasses to look and as he leaned over, the coffee spilled.  His wife cleaned the table with her apron while he cleaned the glasses with his handkerchief.  And all at once, he looked at the thin gold earpieces and two round lenses and didn’t know what they were for. It was as though he’d never seen glasses or knew how they were used. And then the whole world became unfamiliar: The tree was a confusion of shapes, the blood-spattered window a floating oblong. And when another starling flew by, he saw only darkness in motion.

Martin Heidegger didn’t mention this to his wife. Together they cleaned and muttered. She brought more coffee and left the room. Heidegger waited for the world to fall back into place and eventually the ticking belonged to the clock again, the table became a table and the floor became something to walk on.  Then he went to his desk and wrote about this moment to a fellow philosopher named Asher Englehardt. Even though they often met for coffee, they enjoyed writing to each other about tilted moments: The hammer that’s so loose its head flops like a bird. The picture that’s crooked and makes the room seem uncanny.  The apple in the middle of the street that makes you forget what streets are for. The thing made close because it’s seen at a distance.  The sense of not being at home. The world falling out of itself.

A few days later Asher Englehardt wrote back in his familiar, hurried script, chiding Heidegger for always acting as though the sensation were new. “There is nothing of substance to depend on, Martin,” he wrote. “All these cups and glasses and whatever else people have or do are props that shield us from a world that started long before anyone knew what glasses were for and will go on long after there’s no one left to remember them. It’s a strange world, Martin.  But we can never fall out of it because we live in it all the time.”

Asher believed this resolutely and continued to believe it twenty years later, when he and his son were taken from their home in Freiburg and deported by cattle car to Auschwitz.

Purchase it from Phoenix Books.


February 14, 2010

A few photos from KSP’s 35th Anniversary

From top to bottom: Camille Roy, Elizabeth Robinson, Frances Phillips, Susan Gevirtz, Kathleen Fraser, Dale Going. And, current press members Hazel White, Ramsay Breslin, Tiff Dressen, Val Witte, and Amber DiPietra with co-founders Rena Rosenwasser and Patricia Dienstfrey.

C Roy by Messer 01.28.10
20100128_0068Robinson by Messer 01.28.10aPhillips by Messer 01.28.10Gevirtz by messer 01.28.10Fraser by messer 01.28.10D Going by messer 01.28.10KSP memebrs by Messer 01.28.10

We extend many thanks to all who attended and especially to all the authors and friends who read at the event (for a complete list, see previous post).  We also appreciate David Highsmith for hosting the event at Books and Bookshelves (99 Sanchez, San Francisco) and to Merredyth Messer, the photographer who captured these images.

February 2, 2010

Kon Kon, a film by Cecilia Vicuña. Premieres 2/4/2010

untitled

Recent RAIN TAXI review of  The Oxford Book Of Latin American Poetry, edited by Vicuña.

January 31, 2010

Rohini Kapil. it’s break innit luv.

riffstaposter_web

Multimedia Installation. February 1st — February 6th. 8-10pm. Valencia , CA. 24700 McBean Parkway.

January 24, 2010

Join Us in Celebrating 35 Years of Kelsey Street Press!

KSP is having an anniversary extravaganza—a reading and party on January 28, 2010.

The event will begin at 7:30 at Books and Bookshelves, 99 Sanchez Street in San Francisco.

In addition to snacks and bargain KSP books, the following KSP friends will each read from new or previous works for a few minutes.

Susan Gevirtz

Kathleen Fraser

Frances Phillips

Dale Going

Laura Moriarty

Elizabeth Robinson

Thaisa Frank

Jocelyn Saidenberg

Norma Cole

Camille Roy

Rena Rosenwasser

Hazel White

Pat Dienstfrey

Tiff Dressen

Ramsay Breslin

Amber DiPietra

Val Witte

Michelle Puckett

Lauren Levin

Merredyth Messer will photograph the event.

We look forward to meeting new friends while reconnecting and recollecting!

January 11, 2010

Coordinates are manatees, blind positioning systems, Bhanu.

Flew off to Floridicana for the holidays, was enswamped in black beans and manatee-land; then came back to much catching up at work–dozens of blind people with people to see, places to go, in my cubicle, wanting smart answers about accessible GPS.

So many interesting creatures, all of us–then I remembered this one was blogging for Harriet this month:

Fellow Kitty Cats/those born to it/those not:

Hi. Although I have been taking some considerable pleasure in the space beneath this one, and though I am also in some kind of hollowed out part of the landscape in Vermont, I thought I ought to overcome what was threatening to become, as David Buuck says, [bioperversity]. Have not yet figured out how to ittalicize words on Kitty Cat Blogger.

Well, my massive plan is, having calmed down, which took a paragraph, to present, over a period of three months or so, my research into the field of carnal lithography.   “Architecture, event and geology co-incide in the GIS map to produce indigo nodes.  These nodes burst, spilling into the grid, which is silver, beneath, and map-like.”  Something like that.  Yesterday, I read Mei-mei Bersenbrugge’s essay, “New Form”, in Samosa Man Cafe in Montpelier.  Samosa Man turns out to be from the Congo and I wanted to meet him, but he wasn’t there.  The waitress blasted the music and I sat in a bit of sun at an orange plastic table, where I wrote out Mei-mei’s  sentence* in my notebook: “[The poem] is that particular conjunction of events which includes the history of your body, your experience and your art vertically, and the time and circumstances you are in horizontally…”

That’s Bhanu Kapil blogging for The Poetry Foundatio this January (among other fantastic guest bloggers like Criag Santos Perez, Thom, Donovan, etc etc).

Read the rest of her post here.

Get her newest book from KSP. Humanimal, a Project for Future Children.

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