I’m excited that Rae Armantrout is coming to LA on May 12th not only to read and talk to my undergraduate class in “American Poetry Since 1945” but also to give a reading and Q & A to all who are interested just minutes after the class. A real trooper!
If you are interested to coming to this and need help negotiating the wilds of UCLA parking or need information about public transportation and how to get to Humanities 193, please let me know!
No real information on the Poetic Research Bureau website (and I’m too busy to collect it myself) but this looks like a great reading and meeting of the coasts (and countries). These three are all old friends of mine so this will be especially fun, kind of a reunion of “post-Language” poets from the 90s.
Jeff Derksen was early associated with the Kootenay School in Vancouver and is now an achieved scholar of globalization (and poetics) up at Simon Fraser with several great books of poems under his belt. Rachel Levitsky is also very accomplished and the editor of the Belladonna publishing series. And of course David Buuck is just a nut who often attacks podiums when performing – most of you in L.A. who regularly attend poetry readings have probably seen him standing on his head.
I’m being flip, more real information later…
Schindler House
835 N Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
April 9, 2014
6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Artist walkthrough: 6:30 pm
Opening reception: 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Exhibition runs April 10 – June 1, 2014
Andrea Fraser’s work engages the institution of art and art institutions. Vanessa Place’s work interrogates notions of criminality and poetry. Language and sound figure into both of their practices as key investigative tools. Working from the disciplines of art and writing respectively, both employ existing tracts of text and reposition them in the context of art and performance. This exhibition presents new work by each artist in two sound installations in the Schindler House.
For AV, Fraser will attempt to activate some of the structural relations between museums and prisons as the bookend institutions of polarized neoliberal social space. Place debuts her installation, Last Words, about which she writes: “Death is a sentence. Silently handed to each of us, spoken aloud to others.” Both works prompt the viewer—or in this case, the listener—to ask questions about the notions of absence, presence, power, individuality, freedom, and subjectification. Curated by Kimberli Meyer.
Andrea Fraser
Major projects by Andrea Fraser include installations, performances, and surveys for an array of international museums, including the Kunstverein Munich; the Venice Biennale (Austrian Pavilion); the Whitney Biennial; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the Kunsthalle Bern; the Bienal de São Paulo; Tate Modern; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia; the Kunstverein Hamburg; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Her books include Andrea Fraser: Works 1984-2003, Dumont, 2003; Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, MIT Press, 2005; and Texts, Scripts, Transcripts, Museum Ludwig, 2013. Fraser is a professor of New Genres at University of California, Los Angeles.
Vanessa Place
The Boston Review called Vanessa Place “the spokesperson for the new cynical avant-garde,” the Huffington Post characterized her work as “ethically odious,” while philosopher and critic Avital Ronell said she is “a leading voice in contemporary thought.” Vanessa Place was the first poet to perform as part of the Whitney Biennial; a content advisory was posted. Place also works as a critic and criminal defense attorney, and CEO of VanessaPlace Inc, the world’s first poetry corporation.
Photograph by Sandra Peters
Christine Wertheim will perform swOunds, hOwles and other infantile nO|ses from her new book mUtter- bAbel, published by Counterpath Press.
Patrick Ballard will perform Impressions; a rotating cast of pieces for solo performer with a microphone.
$18 General Admission
$15 Members/Students/Seniors
Seating is Limited; Advance Reservations Suggested.
To purchase tickets for the performance, click Here.
Christine Wertheim is author of mutter-bAbel (Countertpath Press) and +|’me’S-pace (Les Figues Press), editor of the anthology Feminaissance, and with Matias Viegener co-editor of Séance and The n/Oulipean Analects. She has performed her work widely, including at La Sorbonne, Birckbeck College London, University of Western Sydney, Machine Project, LA, Echo Park Film Center and the MJT. With her sister Margaret, she co-directs the Institute For Figuring, organizing events at the intersection of science, art and pedagogy. In 2011 the sisters received the Theo Westenberger Grant for Outstanding Female Artists from the Autry National Center. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
Patrick Ballard is a Los Angeles based artist that works through object making, music, performance, writing, various comedic forms, and a motley crew of other assorted media. His performance and sculpture work has been shown at Machine Projects, Grand Central Art Center Santa Ana, and featured as a part of Pacific Standard Time’s Ball of Artists. He will be receiving an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts later this year.
at:
AUTOMATA
504 Chung King Court Los Angeles, CA 90012
automata-la@sbcglobal.net
www.automata-la.org
For Directions to AUTOMATA, click HERE.
Otis Books is pleased to publish a collection of writing that spans the career of the late Italian poet Giovanna Sandri, including verbal and visual texts, poems and poetic essays.
Edited by Otis College Professor Guy Bennett, and introduced by Giulia Niccolai, only fragments found: selected poems, 1969–1998 includes translations by Bennett, Faust Pauluzzi and Giovanna Sandri.
Guy Bennett is the author of several collections of poetry and numerous translations, including most recently Self-Evident Poems and a translation of Mohammed Dib’s Tlemcen or Places of Writing. He is the publisher of Mindmade Books and co-editor of Otis Books/Seismicity Editions.
All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are free of charge, but seating is limited.
Ahmanson Hall Forum, Goldsmith Campus
9045 Lincoln Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. 90045
A group blog created by Janice Lee and Harold Abramowitz, with organizers uploading their own listings, the Los Angeles Literary Calendar is a comprehensive view of the best literary events in LA. Bookmark it now!
Please join us for a reading by poets CAConrad and Laura V. Rivera.
Friday, March 28
Doors open 7pm
Reading at 7:30pm
Poetic Research Bureau @ 951CKR
951 Chung King Rd
Chinatown, Los Angeles
CAConrad writes: “The son of white trash asphyxiation, my childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for my mother and helping her shoplift. I am the author of six books of poetry, and I am a 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, and I conduct workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.” Conrad’s titles include Ecodeviance, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and the Book of Frank.
Laura V. Rivera is a Los Angeles based writer and performer originally from Puerto Rico. She is the founding editor of online poetry journal, Circle. Her works include “You Will Close Your Eyes,” a live group hypnosis, and a chapbook of photographs and poetry documenting a transmigration (City of the Soul). Her new chapbook of poems, Apartment Complex, features work written during periods of experimental hermitism. She is a UCLA Creative Writing alumn and is approaching studies in clinical psychology and traditional psychoanalysis. She is interested in effecting altered states, making bad video, and amateurish brain surgery.
The Poetic Research Bureau presents…
BRIAN BLANCHFIELD & MATIAS VIEGENER
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Doors open 7pm
Reading at 7:30pm
Poetic Research Bureau @ 951CKR
951 Chung King Rd
Chinatown, Los Angeles
Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry–Not Even Then (University of California Press) and, newly, A Several World (Nightboat Books)–as well as a chapbook: The History of Ideas, 1973-2012 (Spork Press). He is at work on a collection of nonfiction, half cultural semiotics half dicey autobiography, forthcoming from Nightboat next year. He lives in Tucson.
Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who lives in LA and teaches at CalArts. His work has been seen at LACMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, ARCO Madrid, the Whitney, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Machine Project, MOCA Los Angeles, and internationally in Mexico, Colombia, Germany, and Austria. He is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit (2004-2013), the author of the new book, 2500 Random Things About Me Too, and the editor of the forthcoming I’m Very Into You, the correspondence of Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. In 2013 he received a Creative Capital award.
Please come to a launch reading for Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone and Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment on March 27th at 7:30 at Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles. Sure to be the L.A. book launch event of the season!
I write a bit about Durbin’s new book in my essay Conceptual Writing: The L.A. Brand.
In Scarecrone, Melissa Broder deepens her self-aware and dark brand of poetry, which The Chicago Tribune says “risks the divine” and Flavorwire calls “unbelievable and overwhelming for its imaginative power alone.” Publishers Weekly says her work is “as funny and hip as it is disturbing.”
The full-length version of Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment sparkles with the static of TV personalities, the privileged dramas of MTV’s The Hills and Bravo’s Real Housewives, the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith. Kate Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic set of Kim Kardashian’s fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in a language of diamond-studded lavishness.
Continue reading Kate Durbin & Melissa Broder | Skylight Books, March 27th
The Los Angeles arts journal East of Borneo published this great article about Bertolt Brecht’s poetry written while he lived in LA during the 40s. Certainly worth a read if you’re interested in the poetic history of the city.
“Los Angeles has long been an urban dialectic par excellence, with its discordant melodies and apparent contradictions; its extreme polarities of nature, of culture, of economics, of politics. The metaphors come easily—the tropical flower abloom in a desert basin, the city of illusions, etc.—and Bertolt Brecht employed them acidly and exactingly in the poems he wrote during his LA exile in the 1940s. Indeed, at no time, perhaps, was the city’s surreal admixture of improbable light and equally improbable darkness (sunshine and noir, in other words) more startling than during that very time, the thirties and forties, when hundreds, perhaps thousands of Weimar-era German-speaking exiles (Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Alfred Döblin, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Salka Viertel, among them) fled the killing fields of World War II Europe and found themselves in a city of angels nestled along the cerulean pool of the Pacific.”
