2002 Subtext Readings

2002

December 4, 2002
Peter Culley and Daniel Comiskey

Peter Culley lives in South Wellington, near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. His books of poetry include The Climax Forest (Leech Books, 1995) and Hammertown, which will be published by New Star in 2003. His writings on visual art have been appearing in various venues since 1987.

Daniel Comiskey is co-editor and co-publisher of "Monkey Puzzle," a magazine of innovative and experimental writing. He's also the literary manager for The Poet's Theater, a local company dedicated to producing plays by poets. He writes poetry and works at the Seattle Public Library.

November 6, 2002
Peter Quartermain and Charles Mudede

Peter Quartermain retired in 1999 from UBC, where he taught contemporary poetry and poetics for over thirty years. In addition to writing Disjunctive Poetics: from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (1992), and Basil Bunting: Poet of the North (1990), he edited four volumes on American Poets 1880-1945 for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1986-7), and two anthologies: Other British and Irish Poetry since 1970 with Richard Caddel (Wesleyan UP, 1998) and The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (U of Alabama P, 1999) with Rachel Blau DuPlessis. He has published about seventy articles and essays on poets writing in English. He most recently interrupted the writing of his autobiography Where I Lived and What I Learned For: Part I -- Growing Dumb, with a brief stint conducting a workshop at the Naropa Summer Writing Program in Boulder, Colorado. He is married to the poet Meredith Quartermain. They ran Slug Press (now defunct) and are currently setting up Keefer Street Press, for limited-edition letter-press work.

Charles Tonderai Mudede is a native of Zimbabwe who has lived in Seattle since 1991. He is currently the books editor of The Stranger, where he also writes the "Police Beat" column. He also teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. His work has appeared appeared in the Village Voice, Sydney Morning Daily, Radical Urban Theory, Ars Electronica, Seattle Review, and Nest Magazine, among others. This summer, his screenplay, Superpower, which he co-authored with Robinson Devor, was selected for the Sundance Screenplay Lab. Mudede is a founding member of the Seattle Research Institute and co-author, with Diana George, of "Last Seen," an essay published by the Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver, B.C.

October 2, 2002
Christine Stewart and Bryant Mason

Christine Stewart lives in Vancouver, BC. She studies and teaches and
shelves books at UBC. She has been published in Semiotexte, Raddle Moon, How2, Matrix, The Gig, Alterra and other magazines. Her most recent book, Taxonomy, is forthcoming from West House Press (London).

Bryant Mason is a long time member of the Subtext collective. His work has been variously described as "lightheartedly paranormal" and "born of an almost religious fervor." He promises to leave his Ukulele at home.

September 4, 2002
Jacqueline Turner and Maged Zaher

Jacqueline Turner is a Vancouver poet. Her first book Into the Fold (ECW Press, 2000) examines the poetics of the fold through a series of triptychs that examine the triple pull of the domestic, the erotic, and the geographic. Canadian poet Fred Wah says, "Into the Fold is a narrative and cartography of the erotic that moves quickly and constantly around particles of yearning as pleats of the written body." Her second book, Careful, due out in the fall of 2002, careens around a series of domestic distractions and interruptions where language is compressed and the poetic line rearticulated. Her work has appeared in absinthe, West Coast Line, Rampike, qwerty, Tessera, and Fireweed. In Calgary, she was a founding member of Filling Station magazine.

Maged Zaher was born in Cairo, Egypt and educated in Egypt and the US. His poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, and other magazines. His most recent chapbook, speculations on a second weather, was published in 2001 by So Many Birds Publishing.

August 7, 2002
Aaron Vidaver and Diana George

Aaron Vidaver is an occasional participant in the activities of three Vancouver collectives: Friends of Runcible Mountain, Kootenay School of Writing, and the Pacific Association for Language and Literacy. His poetry appears in Estrus, Judy, Anarcho-Modernism, W, Host and the chapbooks Flukes, Sumac, and Unentitled "wildlife" [repealed, 1994, c.23, s.4]. He recently presented talks on Counter-Interpellation and Sabotage for Artspeak Gallery and the Mayworks Festival in Vancouver.

Diana George studied German and Comparative Literature in Seattle, Buffalo and Berlin. After that, she spent two years working the evening shift in a funeral home. Her essays have appeared in Nest and in Seattle's Arcade. Her fiction has appeared in 3rd Bed, Alt-x.com, and Post Road. She is translating a selection from Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt's Geschichte und Eigensinn.

July 3, 2002
Benefit for BIRD DOG magazine

Writers published in Seattle's newest innovative mag, BIRD DOG, take to the stage on the eve of the nation's birthday to launch this revolutionary zine. Everyone else is invited to deliver their fireworks and smoke bombs at Subtext's first and perhaps only open mike. The group reading starts at 7:30 p.m; the open mike begins after a cake break. Sign ups for the late night reading at the door. All donations for this reading go to the HUGO HOUSE and BIRD DOG.
BIRD DOG'S publisher, Sarah Mangold, will be on hand to answer queries about purchasing and submitting work to this mag. Readers will include John Olson, Roberta Olson, Sarah Mangold, Jeanne Heuving, Robert Mittenthal, Nico Vassilakis, Ezra Mark, and Chad Bennett.

June 5, 2002
Chris Stroffolino, Nico Vassilakis and Brett Ralph

Poet, Editor, Rocker, Wild Man Chris Stroffolino, vintage 1963, is a dynamic figure whose recent west coast arrival (Bay Area) has been greeted with much anticipation. He is a new incarnation of the American idiom(t)--set to Spin Cycle 7 (durable fabrics). Author of (among many) Cusps (Aerial Edge) Light as a Fetter (Situations) and co-editor of Cliff Notes Shakespeare's 12th Night. He has also played with some rock bands, including the Silver Jews.

Nico Vassilakis lives in Seattle, drives a car, does stuff, yeah, that's it. He collects shoehorns & enjoys colanders. His most recent book is Orange: A Manual. He is a member of the Subtext Collective. He organized the NORTHWEST CONCRETE AND VISUAL POETRY EXHIBITION, currently showing at the OSEAO Gallery on Capitol Hill.

Brett Eugene Ralph is currently everyone's favorite Associate Professor of English at Hopkinsville Community College in Western Kentucky. His work has appeared in such journals as: Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, Conduit, and The American Poetry Review. His band, Rising Shotgun, can be heard in seedy dives throughout the South. Watch out. Really...

May 1, 2002
Charles Borkhuis and Jeanne Heuving

Charles Borkhuis is author of three collections of poetry, including Proximity (Stolen Arrows), and a book of full-length plays, Mouth of Shadows. He is the recipient of a Dramalogue Award in playwriting and is the former editor of the experimental theater magazine "Theater: Ex." His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in: Avec, Caliban, Central Park, Generator, Hambone, Mudfish, o.blek, Onthebus, St Marks Poetry Project. He is a professor of English at Truro College and lives in New York City.

Jeanne Heuving work has appeared in various journals including Bird Dog, Common Knowledge, Clear-Cut, and Talisman, and in a chapbook, Offering (bcc press). She is on the editorial board of the journal How2, and teaches in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Bothell and in the English Graduate program at the Seattle campus. In addition to her critical book on Marianne Moore, Omissions Are Not Accidents (Wayne St U Press), she has published critical articles on several innovative women poets. She is a member of the Subtext Collective.

April 3, 2002
Geraldine Monk (UK) and Alan Halsey (UK)

Geraldine Monk's latest book Noctivagations collects poems & performance pieces written since the mid-1990s. Her current projects include collaborations with the composer Martin Archer. Their Angel High Wires, a suite of twelve electroacoustic songs, was recently issued on a Voiceprint CD. Interregnum, a sequence of poems on the Pendle Witches, was published in 1994 and a selected poems, The Sway of Precious Demons, appeared in 1992.

Alan Halsey's selected writings, Wittgenstein's Devil, appeared in 2000 and his prose-poem The Text of Shelley's Death was reprinted in 2001. Other recent publications include the text/graphic collaboration with Kelvin Corcoran Your Thinking Tracts or Nations & graphics for Tony Baker's translation of Cendrars' Prose of the Trans-siberian. He is the publisher of West House Books & for many years ran the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye.

March 6, 2002
Ezra Mark and Buck Downs

Ezra Mark is author of Narthex, Tenet, Re(a)d, and untitled. His influences include Wittgenstein, Agnes Martin, and baseball. He is editor of Vortext and a member of the Subtext collective.

Buck Downs lives and works in Washington, DC and he thinks you should, too. He is making a rare Pacific Northwest visit to promote his latest collection Marijuana Softdrink. Publisher's Weekly writes: "In Downs's writing, the humbling effects of the omnipresent everyday, and the moral ambiguities of the brand-name marketplace give his speaker the demeanor of a zealous, defrocked televangelist..." He is editor of Open 24 Hours, and publisher of Buck Downs Books.

February 6, 2002
Susan Landers and Joseph Zitt

Susan Landers lives in Brooklyn, where she co-edits Pom2, a journal that engages and responds to work printed in previous issues. Her work has appeared on-line in theeastvillage.com and readme, as well as in print journals, including Crowd, Lungfull, Washington Review and Ixnay. She is at work on a book length poem, X mgs., panic picnic.

Joseph Zitt's vocal performances combine a background in traditional synagogue and world musics with a mastery of extended vocal techniques. His recordings include All Souls, in collaboration with Thomas Bickley, Comma's (voices), and Gray Code's Live In Philadelphia. Publisher of Metatron Press, he lives in Washington DC. His new book is called Surprise Me With Beauty: the Music of Human Systems. This performance is part of a solo North American tour – including events in 18 cities.