2007 Subtext at Hugo House thru May

May 2, 2007
Charles Alexander and Mike Katell & Ensemble
with music of Tim Risher

Charles Alexander reads his poetry in advance of the musical performance of "Aviary Corridor," a contemporary piece of music written by Tim Risher in response to Alexander's poem of this name. Mike Katell directs the ensemble of soprano, flute, string quartet, and piano.

Charles Alexander’s books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press, Tucson, 1990), arc of light / dark matter (Segue Books, New York, 1992), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse Press, San Diego, 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction Press, 2006). He lives in Tucson Arizona, where he directs Chax Press, publisher of letter press and trade editions of poetry. A former director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, he has taught at Naropa University, the University of Arizona, and Pima Community College. He has published multiple essays on poetry and poetics, and on book arts. He is the current recipient of the Arizona Arts Award, the largest award given to an artist in the state.

Tim Risher received his BA in Music at the University of Central Florida and his MM in Music Composition from the Florida State University in Tallahassee. At Florida State, he organised their first permanent new music ensemble, the Tallahassee Camerata. He also founded Paragaté, composing for these groups, Songs for the Virgin Mary and Concerto for Wind Ensemble, among other works. He worked as a producer at National Public Radio for six years, producing FSU faculty and student concerts and Radio Diffusions, a showcase of new music. For more information, see: http://www.timrisher.de/index2.htm

Mike Katell received his B.A.from Bard and is a music composer and director of collaborative performances, including most recently the dance opera The Onion Twins in Seattle. He teaches media studies at Bellevue Community College.

April 4, 2007
Curtis Bonney & Jocelyn Saidenberg

Jocelyn Saidenberg is the author of Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series), CUSP (Kelsey St. Press), winner of the Frances Jaffer Book Award, and Negativity (Atelos). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Capilano Review, Mirage#4/Period(ical), Raddle Moon, Bay Poetics, and Tripwire. She has been a creative writing teacher in the California prison system and a curator for New Langton Arts. She is also the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in San Francisco where she is active in the queer arts communities and works as a reference librarian for the public library.

Curtis Bonney’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New American Writing, Bird Dog, The New Review of Literature, The Boston Review (with an intro by Maxine Chernoff), 6500, Key Satch(el), Fourteen Hills, and 21 Stars, among others. He’s recently finished One Day Your Family Will Love Being Yours, a collection that doubles as a remarkably lucid overview of the various psychoanalytic theories of early childhood development. He teaches at and coordinates the English language program for immigrants and refugees at North Seattle Community College.

March 7, 2007
Rob Fitterman & Bryant Mason

Robert Fitterman is the author of nine books of poetry including: Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books), winner of the Small Press Traffic “Book of the Year Award” in 2003, and Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press), which received the Sun & Moon “New American Poetry Award” in 2000. With novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he co-authored the film What Sebastian Dreamt, a selection of the Sundance Film Festival (2004) and the Lincoln Center Latin Beat Festival (2004). A full-time faculty member in NYU’s General Studies Program since 1993, he has also taught at Bard College, Bennington College, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Bryant Mason writes code and lives in Seattle. He is a founding member of the Subtext Collective. In 2003, members of the collective performed his multi-voice collage of the work of Louis Zukofsky at the Beyond Text Festival in Los Angeles. Texts under his name have appeared in certain finer publications such as Talisman, Score, and Birddog.

February 7, 2007
Lindsay Hill & Chris Putnam

Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco in 1952. Graduate of Bard College. Began writing under influence of Robert Duncan, Tarn, Rexroth and Rilke. First book Avelaval (Oyez, Berkeley 1974). Work has appeared in numerous journals including Sulfur, Caliban and New American Writing. Four other books including most recent Contango (Singing Horse). Past co-editor of poetry/poetics journal Facture. Current focus on sentence-based collage writing. Living in Portland, OR with wife, Nita and children Ian and Helena. Member of the Spare Room poetry collective.

C.E. Putnam maintains P.I.S.O.R. (The Putnam Institute for Space Opera Research). Some of his chapbooks include Manic Box (2001), Did you ever hear of a thing like that? (2001), Things Keep Happening (2003), and Crawlspace, a forthcoming collaboration with Daniel Comiskey. For this February reading, C.E. Putnam will read cosmic-sex/earthly-love poems. See http://www.pisor-industries.org

January 3, 2007
Paul Hoover & Maxine Chernoff

Paul Hoover has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006) and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award in poetry. He is editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, of the literary magazine New American Writing. His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. With Nguyen Do, he has translated an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese poetry, and the selected poems of the great ancient poet Nguyen Trai. With Maxine Chernoff, he has translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Holderlin, which will appear from Omnidawn in 2008. He is Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing. She is the author of six books of fiction and eight books of poetry, most recently Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005), of which Cole Swenson said, “Among the Names [creates] a vast and layered network, in short, an economy. Exploring complexities of “the gift,” Chernoff’s is an economy of the uncanny—each exchange is strikingly new.”

Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a NYT Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year, were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her novel A Boy in Winter is currently in production in Canada by an independent film company. With Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which will be published by Omnidawn Press in 2007.