Monday, November 30, 2009
MATTHEW HENRIKSEN INTERVIEWS JANE GREGORY
MATTHEW HENRIKSEN: Your poems seem to come from a place inside the brain that speaks; though cerebral, that voice seems more concerned with musicality than explanation. What do you think about when you’re writing?
JANE GREGORY: I’m not sure I will be able to answer this question. While I am sure that I must be thinking while I’m writing, I’m not sure it’s the kind of thinking that takes an object, that there is any thinking about going on. The kind of thinking that happens during writing feels more like trying thinking. Like trying to think in noise, make noise thinkable, or make noise the material thoughts are made of. It probably goes both ways. While I do not actually hear voices, sometimes writing a poem feels like trying to understand voices that are just distant enough to be indiscernible. Sort of the way the neighbors are, even when they are loud. I can hear what the thoughts sound like and then the business of writing the poem becomes a kind of trying to say the thoughts the noise is trying to think in order to impersonate noise’s thoughts. That description sounds either like bullshit or like madness. But we know that poets are very often wrong about their own work, so there is my first wrong answer.
MH: Does the voice in your poems come automatically, or is there some process out of which the voice emerges?
JG: I don’t really know what voice is. I know that some of my poems are more “voicey” than others and those are the ones that I’m most comfortable reading out loud in front of other people. Those poems also often tend to be the ones with regular punctuation, which makes me wonder what the grammar of voice is or if there is one. I hope that voice isn’t exactly personality and that it isn’t exactly style or signature. I think it’s important that poems are transparently trying to communicate to other people and maybe voice is what we call that quality of feeling like we’re being communicated to or spoken to. Maybe voice is always interrogative. Tell me more about what voice is and I can tell you if it’s automatic or if emerges out of a process?
MH: I mean by voice exactly how you define it, the quality of speaking or being spoken to, or at least the quality of some sort of speaking, even if to the self or to a wall. I don’t mean that voice has to imply a personality, but it does imply a person. Sometimes poems are merely made of words and don’t point back to a source. I wonder how the sort of language that adheres itself to a speaker occurs. Can you explain whether that voice is something that naturally comes to you or something you have to discover?
JG: I guess I would like to combine both of the possibilities you’ve offered here. I think that voice comes naturally, but by coming naturally, it necessarily comes through a process— the process of trying to discover what there is to say or trying to discover a way of saying what there is. So, it’s natural but not effortless, and that effort is the adhesive that binds language to a person. Communicating is difficult and I tend to like poetry that manifests that difficulty and the effort it requires. (Poetry that grunts?) I’d like to learn how to write in a voice that points as much to a receiver as to a speaker.
MH: Do you think of the page as a formal constraint? Can you explain how you interact with the page during composition?
JG: Sure, in the way that any formal constraint, if it is working, is a tool. If I’m being honest, I interact with the page in large part through the screen that mediates between the page the poem began on and the one it will end up on. I work from hand written notes and so when I am writing the poem, the vertical page (or whatever the screen is) is a way of organizing the relationships between units in the poem—those units are sometimes single words, lines, stanzas etc. I am terrible at math, but I want to say that if space is used primarily going down the page (between lines or stanzas) it is operating like division, subtraction or addition. Maybe multiplication too but that’s much harder, maybe impossible. If space is being used across the page, (between words or if there are several columns of lines or phrases) it is establishing equations not between the terms but in time. When I use the horizontal space of the page, sometimes it’s to try and play around with simultaneity. Of course it’s impossible, because we read from left to right and from up to down, but it’s fun to try and play with space and see if I can deprioritize things for the reader, so that things are competing for attention and priority. I also think that space on the page is important for when we stop reading. Things we need to pay attention to aren’t always already consolidated for us in the world, we have to cross several types of distances to make sense of things.
MH: What is the relationship of a poem’s sound and its arrangement on the page?
JG: When the page helps to establish correspondences and resemblances in sound I think it makes the reader more necessary for the poem’s completion. When we first learn to read we do so by sounding out the phonemes until they make a recognizably meaningful unit, usually a word. Using the page to emphasize that sounding out allows the reader to make meaning accumulate. So if you put the word “intuition” above or beside the phrase “in to it,” intuition defines itself by way of sound. That’s a silly example. In the essays, “Notes on the Structure of Rime” and “The Truth and Life of Myth,” Duncan talks about some of this much better than I can.
MH: You are writing prose poems now. What are the disadvantages of writing in prose?
JG: That sounds like a loaded question. Maybe the first disadvantage is that if you are like me, when you pick up a book of poems you’ve never read and you flip through the pages you might not read the prose poems right away. But I think a good prose poem can have a variety of lengths and paces in it, just like a lineated poem can. It is harder to make a prose poem contain the spaces needed to let lines or sentences “breathe” or be absorbed by the reader. Because I’m writing prose poems right now, I’d rather not think about this question at length. I have a friend named Geoff Hilsabeck who was writing these wonderful prose poems but he insisted on calling them paragraphs instead of prose poems because for him a prose poem had to be lyrical. By lyrical he didn’t just mean musical; he also meant that the prose poem had to engage with the kind of address we think of as the lyric address, either a troubled or untroubled lyric address. As someone who values both the music of a poem and the kind of ‘you’ that the poem tries to make, maybe that is a disadvantage of a prose poems. I can’t imagine Celan (whose you is the best you) writing too many prose poems.
MH: Has theory, or any other recent readings, influenced your writing in unexpected ways?
JG: My first answer is: I hope not in any detrimental ways. I’m in graduate school now, and I hadn’t anticipated how disturbed I am by how often theory effaces or mutilates the object it tries to explain, especially when that object is poetry or any other art form. Being in school has made me really careful about not making my poems do theory. I don’t want my poems to be able to demonstrate any theory, or at least not until I come up with a theory. I do think poetry has a really complex and interesting relationship to philosophy, but I don’t think that good poems can ever really listen to theory, even when it’s theory by a poet, even when it’s poetics. If you try to use A Vision to read Yeats’ poems, you will probably screw up the poems.
MH: You have broad tastes in books, cinema, music, cracks in the sidewalk, hot dogs stands, and so forth. What has gotten the mixer in your brain turning recently?
JG: Right now, I feel really protective of what I’ve been reading so I’m going to be vague. In part, that’s because instead of doing my PhD homework I read other things that are incredibly unfashionable in PhD school. For school I am reading a good deal of critical theory and poetics texts, but I often pretend that I’m a spy. As a spy I read short stories I loved as a teenager, books about death and attitudes, poetry, the dictionary, a variety of mystical texts, all while listening to loud and strange music and eating fake hot dogs because I live in California now.
Matthew Henriksen is the author of Another Word from DoubleCross Editions Single Sheet Series and Is Holy from horse less press. He co-edits Typo, publishes Cannibal Books, and hosts The (now irregular and locationless) Burning Chair Readings.
Jane Gregory's poems have appeared in Absent Magazine, Cannibal, The Hat, Notnostrums, Soft Targets, Typo, and elsewhere. Cannibal Books published a chapbook in 2007. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona and is currently a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
PAUL EBENKAMP INTERVIEWS GRAHAM FOUST
PE: By what process/under what sign do you feel you have moved towards writing longer poems? To what effect are your poems getting, and i mean this appreciatively, more time-consuming?
GF: I think I’ve approached writing in the same way one might approach exercise. Start small, go slowly at first, try to be able to do a little more as time goes on, etc. When I began to write poems, my goal was to pare things down to the fewest possible words, because, well, that's one useful way of thinking about what constitutes a poem. And it happens to be not so easy, I guess, but perhaps *manageable* in some way. Now I'm feeling more like I can get carried away, not in the hallucinatory sense, but like I can go long distances or many rounds with a particular idea or emotion or a particular set of ideas/emotions.
I'm selfish, too--I write poetry because I like writing, and writing little poems just isn’t interesting to me right now, though there are some short-ish poems in the new book. I just finished a 30-page poem, which I'll read at Studio One. Maybe people will stick around to hear the end of my jogging in place.
PE: Can you talk about collagist/allusive poetic procedures? Your poems contain many quotes and references but in a way that would make an index quite beside the point. I wonder if the many fragments of poems and songs that find their way into your work act as a kind of thickening agent to the nominally solitary lyric voice. Do you snip to thicken?
GF: That seems like a terrific way of describing one of the effects/uses of that technique, though it's not the only one. I’ve always thought that Spicer’s notion that poems can’t live alone any more than we can to be absolutely accurate, so that’s part of it too. I sample to keep my poem company.
PE: Can I ask you a word-association question? In the new book, out of some kind of California, two major themes seem to keep pushing each other around.... So: *grief* and *belief*; what kind of energy (or doubt, or whatever) obtains between these states?
GF: One ends where the other begins. It may be that poetry is rooted in belief-oriented grief. Holding dear a weight? That seems a decent description of a poem.
PE: You've presented half of your books in a specific visual context: the paintings of Brian Calvin. Can you talk about your poetry in the context of the non-auditory arts? Has this become more important to your work over time?
GF: I've been drawn to painting for as long as I've known that I'm incapable of it. Maybe longer. I love Brian's work, and, as it happens, he's been kind enough to let Flood Editions use his images for my books. I don't much like "imagey" covers for books, especially for poetry, but I think his pictures work well with my poems--they set a certain tone, rather than saying "Behold the person these poems are about" or something awful like that. Though it's amazing how many people asked me if the paint on the cover of Necessary Stranger was in the shape of me.
PE: What artists, or artistic trends, in any mode, are currently infuriating you, in good or bad ways?
GF: Bad art is very easy to ignore, as is bad thinking about art (as is bad thinking by artists about subjects other than art)--one need only switch off the computer, leave the gallery, close the book, etc. So I tend to not get infuriated very often. But I get interested in things with some frequency, and lately I've been very interested in Roberto Bolaño, the Brice Marden paintings at SFMOMA, a singer named Eilen Jewell (particularly her album Sea of Tears), and Alice Notley's poem "In the Pines."
But maybe that’s a cop-out answer. Here’s one: “The idea of making things last is something which just has to be conquered.” That’s Spicer, too, and I think a lot of writers seem to be buying it lately (though not necessarily because of him). As much as I like Spicer, I don’t buy it for a second. It’s an idea that the folks who make the plastic gewgaws you buy at Wal-Mart have already conquered. I think we should expect more from poetry.
PE: I read that Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost once had an argument that went respectively something like this: "The trouble with you is you write about things." "The trouble with you is you write about bric-a-brac." Were they having a real argument?
GF: From gewgaws to bric-a-brac . . . We’re on a roll! "Subjects" was what Stevens accused Frost of writing about. In order to have a “real” argument, people have to use a shared set of terms, so I guess I'd have to think about how "subjects" and "bric-a-brac" are related to one another. (And "bric-a-brac" could in fact be a subject, which makes things a little strange.) So, perhaps Stevens is accusing Frost of being grandiose--he's writing about capital-S Subjects--and Frost is accusing Stevens of being chintzy and quotidian. Or maybe Stevens is accusing Frost of knowing what he's going to say before he says it and Frost is accusing Stevens of just fiddling around with language rather than "saying something." These are "live" arguments in the sense that we see these same notions being pitted against each other these days as well, but are they “real”? I feel like poets are always engaged in some combination of all of these things, so I don't see much point in arguing about it. Poetry is what we make out in the distance while other people are quarrelling about it.
Paul Ebenkamp lives and works in Berkeley CA.
Graham Foust is the author of A Mouth in California and three other books of poems. He works at Saint Mary's College of California and lives in Oakland.
GF: I think I’ve approached writing in the same way one might approach exercise. Start small, go slowly at first, try to be able to do a little more as time goes on, etc. When I began to write poems, my goal was to pare things down to the fewest possible words, because, well, that's one useful way of thinking about what constitutes a poem. And it happens to be not so easy, I guess, but perhaps *manageable* in some way. Now I'm feeling more like I can get carried away, not in the hallucinatory sense, but like I can go long distances or many rounds with a particular idea or emotion or a particular set of ideas/emotions.
I'm selfish, too--I write poetry because I like writing, and writing little poems just isn’t interesting to me right now, though there are some short-ish poems in the new book. I just finished a 30-page poem, which I'll read at Studio One. Maybe people will stick around to hear the end of my jogging in place.
PE: Can you talk about collagist/allusive poetic procedures? Your poems contain many quotes and references but in a way that would make an index quite beside the point. I wonder if the many fragments of poems and songs that find their way into your work act as a kind of thickening agent to the nominally solitary lyric voice. Do you snip to thicken?
GF: That seems like a terrific way of describing one of the effects/uses of that technique, though it's not the only one. I’ve always thought that Spicer’s notion that poems can’t live alone any more than we can to be absolutely accurate, so that’s part of it too. I sample to keep my poem company.
PE: Can I ask you a word-association question? In the new book, out of some kind of California, two major themes seem to keep pushing each other around.... So: *grief* and *belief*; what kind of energy (or doubt, or whatever) obtains between these states?
GF: One ends where the other begins. It may be that poetry is rooted in belief-oriented grief. Holding dear a weight? That seems a decent description of a poem.
PE: You've presented half of your books in a specific visual context: the paintings of Brian Calvin. Can you talk about your poetry in the context of the non-auditory arts? Has this become more important to your work over time?
GF: I've been drawn to painting for as long as I've known that I'm incapable of it. Maybe longer. I love Brian's work, and, as it happens, he's been kind enough to let Flood Editions use his images for my books. I don't much like "imagey" covers for books, especially for poetry, but I think his pictures work well with my poems--they set a certain tone, rather than saying "Behold the person these poems are about" or something awful like that. Though it's amazing how many people asked me if the paint on the cover of Necessary Stranger was in the shape of me.
PE: What artists, or artistic trends, in any mode, are currently infuriating you, in good or bad ways?
GF: Bad art is very easy to ignore, as is bad thinking about art (as is bad thinking by artists about subjects other than art)--one need only switch off the computer, leave the gallery, close the book, etc. So I tend to not get infuriated very often. But I get interested in things with some frequency, and lately I've been very interested in Roberto Bolaño, the Brice Marden paintings at SFMOMA, a singer named Eilen Jewell (particularly her album Sea of Tears), and Alice Notley's poem "In the Pines."
But maybe that’s a cop-out answer. Here’s one: “The idea of making things last is something which just has to be conquered.” That’s Spicer, too, and I think a lot of writers seem to be buying it lately (though not necessarily because of him). As much as I like Spicer, I don’t buy it for a second. It’s an idea that the folks who make the plastic gewgaws you buy at Wal-Mart have already conquered. I think we should expect more from poetry.
PE: I read that Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost once had an argument that went respectively something like this: "The trouble with you is you write about things." "The trouble with you is you write about bric-a-brac." Were they having a real argument?
GF: From gewgaws to bric-a-brac . . . We’re on a roll! "Subjects" was what Stevens accused Frost of writing about. In order to have a “real” argument, people have to use a shared set of terms, so I guess I'd have to think about how "subjects" and "bric-a-brac" are related to one another. (And "bric-a-brac" could in fact be a subject, which makes things a little strange.) So, perhaps Stevens is accusing Frost of being grandiose--he's writing about capital-S Subjects--and Frost is accusing Stevens of being chintzy and quotidian. Or maybe Stevens is accusing Frost of knowing what he's going to say before he says it and Frost is accusing Stevens of just fiddling around with language rather than "saying something." These are "live" arguments in the sense that we see these same notions being pitted against each other these days as well, but are they “real”? I feel like poets are always engaged in some combination of all of these things, so I don't see much point in arguing about it. Poetry is what we make out in the distance while other people are quarrelling about it.
Paul Ebenkamp lives and works in Berkeley CA.
Graham Foust is the author of A Mouth in California and three other books of poems. He works at Saint Mary's College of California and lives in Oakland.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Thursday December 3rd
Readings are Thursdays for December and January. Then we will return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Check it out:
Jane Gregory's poems have appeared in Absent Magazine, Cannibal, The Hat, Notnostrums, Soft Targets, Typo, and elsewhere. Cannibal Books published a chapbook in 2007. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona and is currently a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley.
Music from Mouse Heaven http://www.myspace.com/apacheria
Mouse Heaven is a mix of Goth Country Cocaine Blues. It was formed in Oakland in early 2009 by Samuel Stein (Lead Guitar + Vocals) and Alena Johson (Vocals). Thomas Denesha (Guitar + Banjo) joined in the summer of 2009.
Graham Foust is the author of A Mouth in California and three other books of poems. He works at Saint Mary's College of California and lives in Oakland.
donation for entry
7:30 to 9:30
Doors at 7
Readings start at 7:30
Bart is MacArthur
Cross is Broadway
Parking in Street or in back of Studio
Check it out:
Jane Gregory's poems have appeared in Absent Magazine, Cannibal, The Hat, Notnostrums, Soft Targets, Typo, and elsewhere. Cannibal Books published a chapbook in 2007. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona and is currently a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley.
Music from Mouse Heaven http://www.myspace.com/apacheria
Mouse Heaven is a mix of Goth Country Cocaine Blues. It was formed in Oakland in early 2009 by Samuel Stein (Lead Guitar + Vocals) and Alena Johson (Vocals). Thomas Denesha (Guitar + Banjo) joined in the summer of 2009. 
Graham Foust is the author of A Mouth in California and three other books of poems. He works at Saint Mary's College of California and lives in Oakland.donation for entry
7:30 to 9:30
Doors at 7
Readings start at 7:30
Bart is MacArthur
Cross is Broadway
Parking in Street or in back of Studio
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Neat Art Show on Friday
My friend Jake Gillespie, who has shown films at Studio One, is having an art show on Friday. If you are in the Oakland area, stop over at Rooz by the lake.
Show of drawings+videos by Jake Gillespie as well as live music from Joseph Bryce and RACCCCNS.
Jake Gillespie = jakegillespie.com
Joseph Bryce/ClovisHeald = josephbryce.blogspot.com
RACCCCNS = RACCOONS.TUMBLR.COM
Art show starts at 7pm (FREE)
Rock&Roll show starts at 8pm ($5)
Show of drawings+videos by Jake Gillespie as well as live music from Joseph Bryce and RACCCCNS.
Jake Gillespie = jakegillespie.com
Joseph Bryce/ClovisHeald = josephbryce.blogspot.com
RACCCCNS = RACCOONS.TUMBLR.COM
Art show starts at 7pm (FREE)
Rock&Roll show starts at 8pm ($5)
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Angela Hume interviews Shannon Tharp
Angela Hume: Why so few words here? What’s the value of (this breed of) asceticism for you, in your time and place? Is this asceticism? If not, what is it?
Shannon Tharp: So few words might have to do with my cutting away at phrases and notes; they might have to do with being quiet; they might have to do with waiting. What I know: the poems’ figurations lend themselves to asceticism, but the poems’ guts do not. What’s to be said is said as plainly as it needs to be said, nothing more. Omission’s at work. And we all know that omissions are not accidents…
AH: Talk about Objectivist poetics (upon reading your poems, I’m thinking, of course, of Niedecker). What can it teach us in the 21st century?
ST: Louis Zukofsky said the poet’s purpose is “to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day.” Objectivist poetics can teach us to look at and listen to words and the world (for a really long time if need be). I don’t know that the concentration required for said looking and listening is any different from the concentration required for many other activities. I’m thinking here of learning how to play an instrument, drive a car, walk. All kinds of things.
Anyway, would Objectivist poetics have us strive for perfectly wrought poems? No. But it would have us pay attention to how we respond to the world, and what we put into the world. You mentioned Niedecker: her “depth of emotion condensed” is something to strive for.
AH: In your poem “The whole scene comes before us,” you write, “there is // responsibility / in vision.” For you, what is this “responsibility”? As a poet who *sees*, what is your re-visionary work?
ST: The responsibility I’m getting at is fidelity to the real. I can only present what’s in front of me—what I think I do or don’t know—as best I can at any given moment. It’s difficult. What Gertrude Stein said in “Composition as Explanation” might help: “Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted…”
AH: Here, in your chapbook Determined by Aperture, are gorgeously and painfully distilled seeing and hearings of “nature.” What kind of “nature” is this? What does distilled seeing and hearing do for the “natural” world these days?
ST: The nature you’re asking about, as I’ve felt it, is a combination of a) the nature some take for granted and/or assume—the tree, rock, water ilk, and b) the internal—what one sees, hears, feels, thinks, etc.
For me, there’s a lot of anxiety, dis-ease, and restlessness involved in nature. I’ve noticed that when obligations encroach, I read and write poems. It’s my way of closing out whatever’s closing in on me. Location’s a large part of nature, too. I feel at home in Seattle much differently than I feel at home in Gillette, Wyoming. And a city can be disheartening in a much different way than a small town can be disheartening. There’s a tension between urban and rural landscapes that likely affects what I write.
AH: When you’re “closing out whatever's closing in,” what are you doing to the “out,” i.e., to what’s outside? How do you read your own “closing”? Is it actually a “closing”?
ST: I’m ignoring day-to-day activities that take up a lot of my time—planning lessons, reading case studies, responding to e-mails, etc. I'm backing away from clutter. That said, I don’t ignore what’s outside of me. I’d really like to know what’s outside, what it is. Writing allows me to address that uncertainty and respond to it. My closing can’t be a closing if I ask (and want) the outside to come in.
AH: What is your project now? How do your poems look, sound, and feel different from the poems you published as Determined by Aperture? Where is your work going?
ST: I’m in school for library science, and there’s a lot of discussion about what, exactly, functions as information. (There are many answers.) That’s right up my cognitive alley, and not unlike reading a William Bronk poem. All this talk of making sense of things has lent itself nicely to writing as of late. There are longer poems, poems that’ve broken away from the good ol’ left margin, and prose poems at work right now. And I’ve been revising a book of poems, The Cost of Walking, for several years. Where the work is going is hard to say.
Shannon Tharp is the author of Each Real Bird (The Elliott Press, 2006) and Determined by Aperture (Fewer & Further Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Cultural Society, Effing Magazine, The New Ohio Review, and The New Yinzer, among others. She is from Wyoming and lives in Seattle, where she is a teacher and librarian.
Angela Hume lives in Oakland. She holds an MFA in poetry from St. Mary’s College of CA and is working on a PhD in English at UC Davis. Her poems have appeared in cold-drill, The Portland Review, Flyway Literary Journal, and others.
Shannon Tharp: So few words might have to do with my cutting away at phrases and notes; they might have to do with being quiet; they might have to do with waiting. What I know: the poems’ figurations lend themselves to asceticism, but the poems’ guts do not. What’s to be said is said as plainly as it needs to be said, nothing more. Omission’s at work. And we all know that omissions are not accidents…
AH: Talk about Objectivist poetics (upon reading your poems, I’m thinking, of course, of Niedecker). What can it teach us in the 21st century?
ST: Louis Zukofsky said the poet’s purpose is “to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day.” Objectivist poetics can teach us to look at and listen to words and the world (for a really long time if need be). I don’t know that the concentration required for said looking and listening is any different from the concentration required for many other activities. I’m thinking here of learning how to play an instrument, drive a car, walk. All kinds of things.
Anyway, would Objectivist poetics have us strive for perfectly wrought poems? No. But it would have us pay attention to how we respond to the world, and what we put into the world. You mentioned Niedecker: her “depth of emotion condensed” is something to strive for.
AH: In your poem “The whole scene comes before us,” you write, “there is // responsibility / in vision.” For you, what is this “responsibility”? As a poet who *sees*, what is your re-visionary work?
ST: The responsibility I’m getting at is fidelity to the real. I can only present what’s in front of me—what I think I do or don’t know—as best I can at any given moment. It’s difficult. What Gertrude Stein said in “Composition as Explanation” might help: “Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted…”
AH: Here, in your chapbook Determined by Aperture, are gorgeously and painfully distilled seeing and hearings of “nature.” What kind of “nature” is this? What does distilled seeing and hearing do for the “natural” world these days?
ST: The nature you’re asking about, as I’ve felt it, is a combination of a) the nature some take for granted and/or assume—the tree, rock, water ilk, and b) the internal—what one sees, hears, feels, thinks, etc.
For me, there’s a lot of anxiety, dis-ease, and restlessness involved in nature. I’ve noticed that when obligations encroach, I read and write poems. It’s my way of closing out whatever’s closing in on me. Location’s a large part of nature, too. I feel at home in Seattle much differently than I feel at home in Gillette, Wyoming. And a city can be disheartening in a much different way than a small town can be disheartening. There’s a tension between urban and rural landscapes that likely affects what I write.
AH: When you’re “closing out whatever's closing in,” what are you doing to the “out,” i.e., to what’s outside? How do you read your own “closing”? Is it actually a “closing”?
ST: I’m ignoring day-to-day activities that take up a lot of my time—planning lessons, reading case studies, responding to e-mails, etc. I'm backing away from clutter. That said, I don’t ignore what’s outside of me. I’d really like to know what’s outside, what it is. Writing allows me to address that uncertainty and respond to it. My closing can’t be a closing if I ask (and want) the outside to come in.
AH: What is your project now? How do your poems look, sound, and feel different from the poems you published as Determined by Aperture? Where is your work going?
ST: I’m in school for library science, and there’s a lot of discussion about what, exactly, functions as information. (There are many answers.) That’s right up my cognitive alley, and not unlike reading a William Bronk poem. All this talk of making sense of things has lent itself nicely to writing as of late. There are longer poems, poems that’ve broken away from the good ol’ left margin, and prose poems at work right now. And I’ve been revising a book of poems, The Cost of Walking, for several years. Where the work is going is hard to say.
Shannon Tharp is the author of Each Real Bird (The Elliott Press, 2006) and Determined by Aperture (Fewer & Further Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Cultural Society, Effing Magazine, The New Ohio Review, and The New Yinzer, among others. She is from Wyoming and lives in Seattle, where she is a teacher and librarian.
Angela Hume lives in Oakland. She holds an MFA in poetry from St. Mary’s College of CA and is working on a PhD in English at UC Davis. Her poems have appeared in cold-drill, The Portland Review, Flyway Literary Journal, and others.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
November 6th!
Check it out--
Shannon Tharp is the author of Each Real Bird (The Elliott Press, 2006) and Determined by Aperture (Fewer & Further Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Cultural Society, Effing Magazine, The New Ohio Review, and The New Yinzer, among others. She is from Wyoming and lives in Seattle, where she is a teacher and librarian.
Widely known as the ‘drummer dude’ in Comets on Fire, Utrillo Kushner’s musical talents range far beyond the drunken-master-style wailing he unleashes on any given night with the Comets. Having tickled the ivories for close to a decade, Kushner assumes command of the keys in Colossal Yes and steps it up as a full-fledged piano man. Two elements that should damn Colossal Yes to lite-rock purgatory - unabashed sincerity and piano-playing - miraculously works to the band's advantage. Somehow, when untainted musicianship meets earnest presentation something happens, and the results are damn good. Maybe it’s just the joy of creation. The true essence of rock, stripped to its essentials by virtue of its vainglorious indulgences, existing forever as the absolute articulation of the form. Think simple melodies and basic structures with lyrical territories such as expired youth, grand betrayals, overdrawn faculties, and dissolving empires. In this regard, Kushner pays respect to songwriters like Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Bejar of Destroyer, and Alex Chilton while also incorporating the honesty of Graham Nash's Songs for Beginners, the romanticism of Nikki Sudden's Waiting on Egypt, and the sonic merriment of Thunderclap Newman's Hollywood Dream. Colossal Yes is the greatest affirmation of them all, bigger than big, and there’s no joke behind the smiling.
Gillian Conoley’s most recent collection is THE PLOT GENIE with Omnidawn Publishing (fall 2009). The author of six collections of poetry, her work has appeared in over 20 national and international anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Nuova Poesia Americana, and Best American Poetry. She has received the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, several Pushcart Prizes, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she teaches in the Program for Writers and Poets at Sonoma State University.
doors at 7
readings at 730, sharps
365 45th st
oakland
donation for entry & beverage
Shannon Tharp is the author of Each Real Bird (The Elliott Press, 2006) and Determined by Aperture (Fewer & Further Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Cultural Society, Effing Magazine, The New Ohio Review, and The New Yinzer, among others. She is from Wyoming and lives in Seattle, where she is a teacher and librarian.
Widely known as the ‘drummer dude’ in Comets on Fire, Utrillo Kushner’s musical talents range far beyond the drunken-master-style wailing he unleashes on any given night with the Comets. Having tickled the ivories for close to a decade, Kushner assumes command of the keys in Colossal Yes and steps it up as a full-fledged piano man. Two elements that should damn Colossal Yes to lite-rock purgatory - unabashed sincerity and piano-playing - miraculously works to the band's advantage. Somehow, when untainted musicianship meets earnest presentation something happens, and the results are damn good. Maybe it’s just the joy of creation. The true essence of rock, stripped to its essentials by virtue of its vainglorious indulgences, existing forever as the absolute articulation of the form. Think simple melodies and basic structures with lyrical territories such as expired youth, grand betrayals, overdrawn faculties, and dissolving empires. In this regard, Kushner pays respect to songwriters like Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Bejar of Destroyer, and Alex Chilton while also incorporating the honesty of Graham Nash's Songs for Beginners, the romanticism of Nikki Sudden's Waiting on Egypt, and the sonic merriment of Thunderclap Newman's Hollywood Dream. Colossal Yes is the greatest affirmation of them all, bigger than big, and there’s no joke behind the smiling.Gillian Conoley’s most recent collection is THE PLOT GENIE with Omnidawn Publishing (fall 2009). The author of six collections of poetry, her work has appeared in over 20 national and international anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Nuova Poesia Americana, and Best American Poetry. She has received the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, several Pushcart Prizes, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she teaches in the Program for Writers and Poets at Sonoma State University.
doors at 7
readings at 730, sharps
365 45th st
oakland
donation for entry & beverage
Monday, October 19, 2009
Also at the Studio on Nov. 6th
Studio One • Presentation on the History of Temescal • November 6, 2009
In celebration of Studio One’s 60th anniversary, community artist and neighborhood historian, Jeff Norman, will present a talk and slide show on the history of Studio One as part of the art center’s First Friday event on November 6, 2009. Jeff’s presentation will cover the history of the 115-year-old building that Studio One occupies, as well as the philosophy, vision, and leadership that established the city-run program in North Oakland. Jeff's recent book, Temescal Legacies, includes a chapter on Studio's One's unique history. Jeff will be available to sign copies of his book following the program.
For thirty years, artist Jeff Norman has been using images and text to address how we experience our everyday environments. Since 1996, his community art projects specifically have explored a wide range of physical and social changes that have occurred in the Temescal district and surrounding neighborhoods of North Oakland.
His projects include: Beyond the Pussycat: Nine Lives of a Neighborhood Landmark, installed in 2000 on the former theater site at Telegraph and 51st St.; and History Walk, a tile photo/text walkway commissioned by the City of Oakland for the Station 8 firehouse on 51st St.
Through Shared Ground, an organization he founded in 1998, Jeff also has produced in collaboration with others the local history book, Temescal Album; the video, Where We Live: Stories from Temescal; and PostMark Temescal, a community interpretive site on Shattuck Ave. outside the North Oakland Post Office. For more information on these and others of Jeff’s projects, visit www.SharedGround.org
Starts at 7:00 pm in the theatre room
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