2005 Subtext Readings

2005

December 7, 2005
Rebecca BROWN, David McALEAVEY, Charles ALEXANDER

Rebecca Brown’s new book The Last Time I Saw You will be published by City Lights in Jan 2006. She is the author of Woman In Ill Fitting Wig, a collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer, and Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary which was recently published by Granta Books. Other books include The End of Youth, The Gifts of the Body, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, Annie Oakley’s Girl and The Terrible Girls. She has recently written the libretto for The Onion Twins, a dancer opera created in collaboration with Better Biscuit Dance which will have its Seattle premiere in Jan 2006. She teaches at Goddard College and is Creative Director of Literature at Centrum. She lives in Seattle.

Charles Alexander’s books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings, Arc of Light/Dark Matter, Etudes: D & D, Pushing Water 1-6, Pushing Water 7, Four Ninety Eight to Seven, Near or Random Acts, and more. Certain Slants, from Junction Press, is forthcoming. He founded Black Mesa Press in 1981, and founded Chax Press in 1984, where he works as director, editor, publisher, and book artist. Alexander has taught at the University of Arizona, Pima Community College, and Naropa University. In the mid-1990's he was the executive director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he organized the symposium Art & Language: Re-Reading the Boundless Book, and edited the book Talking the Boundless Book.

Poet Robert Creeley has written that Alexander's work "hears a complex literacy of literalizing words. By means of a fencing of statements, sense is found rather than determined. The real is as thought."

Ron Silliman writes of Alexander's Arc of Light/Dark Matter : "What begins in the eye as a paragraph becomes in the ear a line, 53 of them in fact, one line poems rich with news, life, war, sex, parenting, the texts at hand, the spicing of mulled thought, humor, bright southwestern colors, and an ear to die for."

David McAleavey’s fifth book of poems, Huge Haiku was recently published by Chax Press. Earlier volumes are Sterling 403 (1971), The Forty Days (1975), Shrine, Shelter, Cave (1980), and Holding Obsidian (1985), and David McAleavey's Greatest Hits, 1971-2000 (2001). He was editor and publisher of Ithaca House Press in the 1970s, and has been teaching at George Washington University since 1974, where he has been director of creative writing in the English Department since 1998.

November 3, 2005
Dodie Bellamy & Kevin Killian

Dodie Bellamy's latest collection of writings, Academonia, is forthcoming in 2005 from Factory School Press. Pink Steam, her collection of stories, memoirs and memoiresque essays, was published in 2004 by San Francisco's Suspect Thoughts Press. Also in 2004, her infamous epistolary vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker, was reprinted by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her book Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. She is currently working on The Fourth Form, a multi-dimensional sex novel. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Kevin Killian, born 1952, is a US poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written a book of poetry, Argento Series (2001), two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1997), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), and a book of stories, Little Men (1996) that won the PEN Oakland award for fiction. A second collection I Cry Like a Baby was published by Painted Leaf Books in 2001. With Lew Ellingham, Killian has written many essays and articles on the life and work of the American poet Jack Spicer [1925-65] and co-edited Spicer’s posthumous books The Train of Thought and The Tower of Babel (both 1994). Their biography of Spicer, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1998. He and Peter Gizzi are currently (2005) editing Spicer’s complete poems. Killian's work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, Best American Poetry 1988 (ed. John Ashbery), Men on Men (ed. Geo. Stambolian), Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper), Best Gay American Fiction 1996 and 1997 (ed. Brian Bouldrey), and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (ed. Timothy Liu). For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (1996, with Leslie Scalapino) and Often (2001, with Barbara Guest). He is the film columnist for the new online journal Fanzine. His next book—in fact, his next two books—will be all about Kylie Minogue.

October 5, 2005
Stephen Collis & Cathleen Shattuck

Poet and critic Stephen Collis is the author of two books of poetry, Mine (New Star 2001) and Anarchive (New Star 2005), as well as numerous chapbooks, including The Birth of Blue (1997), Anima/lung (1998), Midden (2001) and Blackberries (2005). His essays on contemporary poetry and poetics have appeared in many Canadian and American journals, and he is the author of two forthcoming book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe/George Butterick, a Correspondence (ELS 2006), and has edited Companions & Horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (WCL 2005). A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, he teaches American literature, poetry, and creative writing at Simon Fraser University. He lives with his family in Tsawwassen BC where he indulges his current obsession with Thoreau and berry picking.

Appearing in select living rooms, Cathleen Shattuck sings for the Strawberry Roans and is seven years into her Seattle residence. Her poems have appeared in First Intensity, Five Fingers Review, Oblek, Ashen Meal and Notus and has published two books: The Three Queens and House.

September 7, 2005
Panel Discussion: WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH POETICS

Members of the community and of the Subtext collective, including Ezra Mark, Jeanne Heuving, Bryant Mason, and Robert Mittenthal will address the subject of poetics. An attempt to assess, re-assess the how and why, or the whatever of writing: its process, politics & product.

What’s happened, what’s happening? Where are “we” going; what are people thinking / doing?

Texts as openings for discussion from are available at http://subtext-poetics.blogspot.com/ Or contact miss_bosanquet@yahoo.com for more information. Your participation is encouraged and necessary.

August 3, 2005
Rusty MORRISON and Christine DEAVEL

Rusty Morrison’s Whethering won the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Forrest Gander. Her poems &/or essays have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, New American Writing, Rain Taxi, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She is the co-winner of the 2003 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize. Co-editor and co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing, and co-edits the poetry journal 26, which is affiliated with the Saint Mary's MFA program. She is also a contributing editor for Poetry Flash.

Christine Deavel's work has appeared in Fence, Ploughshares, Talisman, American Poetry Review, and other magazines. She is co-owner of Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of two poetry-only bookstores in the country.

July 6, 2005
Christian BÖK and Nico VASSILAKIS

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (2002). Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), his first book of poetry, has also earned a nomination for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry. His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s Cubes and Lego Bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

http://www.chbooks.com/online/eunoia/index.html
http://www.chbooks.com/online/eunoia/new_ennui.html
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bok
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bok.html

Nico Vassilakis lives in Seattle. Recent writing can be found in Bird Dog, Traverse, 3rd Bed, 5 trope. Nico has a DVD recently available titled Concrete: Movies. He is also working on a play about Morton Feldman. With compass and pencil he is drafting his way through dread.

Ron Silliman writes: Nico Vassilakis writes a very clean line… There are, of course, as many reasons to not want a clean line as there might be to desire one. Like rhyme or the tub-thumping metrics of iambic pentameter, the form insinuates a vision of unmediated & harmonious existence that is patently a lie. Vassilakis does a superb job in … of using just such possibilities against themselves. Sort of an anti-Moxley, Vassilakis’s irony meter has arrived at a throbbing red maximum. “Meanness is allowed to fester / And it will ruin the spine” is an absolutely fabulous moment in this regard. It is difficult to imagine how an individual could ever hope to write much better than that.

June 1, 2005
Ezra MARK & Susan CLARK

Susan CLARK is the author of as lit x: the syntax of adoration (Runcible Mountain). Editor of the reknown journal Raddle Moon, she currently lives in Victoria BC. Other books include Bad Infinity, Believing in the World, & Suck Glow.

Ezra MARK is a signifying practice, as specific yet as general as the words "alone" and "bread." He is the author of Intention, Narthex, and Two. His influences include Wittgenstein, Agnes Martin & baseball.

May 4, 2005
Eric BAUS & Joseph BRADSHAW

Eric Baus' book, The To Sound , was selected by Forrest Gander for the 2002 Verse Press Prize and was awarded a grant from the Greenwall Fund of the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of three chapbooks: The Space Between Magnets , A Swarm In The Aperture , and Something Else The Music Was . His poems have appeared in Verse, Colorado Review, Hambone, Web Conjunctions, and other journals. He currently lives in western Massachusetts.

Peter Gizzi writes: Eric Baus has channeled the consciousness of migratory animals, of a collective self, of others, of objects. He has written an open letter from a marvelous land just beside this one, a place of interior wonder and intimate noise. It’s The To Sound of course: bent, exuberant notes that will wake you up wherever you are.

Joseph Bradshaw cofounded and helps FO A RM Magazine, and is a member of the Spare Room poetry collective in Portland. Recent work has appeared at flim.com, in many mailboxes, and is forthcoming in more mailboxes and in the form of a chapbook, Wolf Assay.

April 6, 2005
Lance Olsen & Andi Olsen & Vanessa DeWolf

Lance Olsen is author of fifteen books of and about innovative fiction, including his new novel 10:01 about the Mall of America, which exists in complementary print and hypermedia versions. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two, one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. His website is http://www.cafezeitgeist.com/.

Andi Olsen is a collagist, assemblage artist, and short-film maker who explores the notion of monstrosity in her ongoing installation Hideous Beauties: A Freak Show. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and published around the country and abroad. Her website is www.cafezeitgeist.com/andi.html.

Vanessa DeWolf creates image-based performances and artworks using: found text, objects, improvisation, writing processes and collage-forms. In 2002 she investigated the inner life of a 1950's housewife through her appliances in "Her Home Magic Set". In 2001 Vanessa received an Artist Trust GAP grant to complete "Citrus Effect", an obsessive collection of orange, lime and lemon objects that resulted in a series of site-specific performances. She is eclectically trained as a figure skater, visual artist, and performer and in 1992 received an M.A. in Playwriting at Boston University under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. Last year "Even Here", an installation-performance, was selected for On The Boards 2004 Northwest New Works. In 2004 Vanessa, also had "Narrative Object #5: A Woman's Hairpiece", selected for the Tacoma Art Museum's Northwest Biennial. She is currently the director of The Field-Seattle, an artist-run organization that holds regular peer-review feedback sessions for writers and performers. In addition to being the director, she has been the editor and publisher of "FLOW", an annual Field-Seattle chapbook. She is the proud partner of STUDIO-CURRENT, a new multi-arts studio in the heart of Capitol Hill and home to Tuesday Surrealists.

March 2, 2005
Kerri Sonnenberg & Drew Kunz

KERRI SONNENBERG lives in Chicago where she edits the journal Conundrum and co-directs the Discrete Reading Series. Her first book, _The Mudra_, was published by Litmus Press in 2004, and the chapbook _Practical Art Criticism_ is forthcoming from Bronze Skull Press. Work has appeared in the journals 26, Bird Dog, antennae, Crayon, Factorial, Moria and elsewhere.
Photographer, artist, & writer

DREW KUNZ is co-editor of the poetry journal traverse as well as editor of g o n g chapbooks. He has published numerous pieces in antennae, Aufgabe, Bird Dog, Conundrum, & the Cultural Society on-line. He has work forthcoming in Pom2 and has provided monotypes for Stacy Szymaszekís book _Emptied of All Ships_ (Litmus Press, 2005). He currently lives on Bainbridge Island with his wife and their cat.

February 2, 2005
Alicia Cohen and Seattle School

Alicia Cohen lives in Portland, Oregon, where, in 2000, she helped establish the art space collective Pacific Switchboard. She has published a book of poems, _bEAR_, with Handwritten Press and last year wrote, directed, and produced a multimedia opera and gallery installation titled "Northwest Inhabitation Log." Her work has recently appeared in Ecopoetics, How2, Bird Dog, and Traverse. She earned her doctorate at SUNY Buffalo, writing a dissertation about vision and epistemology in the work of Jack Spicer, Emily Dickinson, Leslie Scalapino, and Robert Duncan. She is the poetry editor for the Organ review of Arts.

Seattle School was established in 2002 as a performance group interested in exploring sound and music, primarily in terms of spatial relations, memory, deep-time/wide-incidence, calculus, communication/notation, failure, physicality, and inquiries into the definitions of tone, language, and audience. Influences include the Futurists, Dada, Earle Brown, Fluxus, Aktionists, Yoko Ono, Irritart, John Cage, Abbie Hoffman, Buster Keaton, Harry Partch, Alvin Lucier, Andy Kaufman, video game audio implementation, and No Wave.

Mike Min was honorably discharged from the US Army. Between 1998 and 2000, he released three independent CD's: Popollution, At Chateau Dunbar, and The Aberdeen Transplant (2000). He has scored for the films True and Black Sheep of Chinatown, and, for a brief period until its demise, IgooTV employed Min as its resident composer. He is a member of the Seattle Composers Alliance and serves as the Vice President of Sound Currents.

Korby Sears attended the University of North Texas as a composition major, with an instrumental concentration in organ performance. He has contributed music and sound design to projects in diverse media, including a number of films and video games. As a performer, Korby has been principal contrabassist for the Sammamish Symphony, a pit orchestra member of the Peccadillo Players, and a freelance jazz pianist, accordionist, and contrabassist with various jazz ensembles. He has written for The Stranger, Seattle Weekly and P-Form Magazine. He curates the Seattle Composers Alliance Score Salon series, a monthly orchestral score study group.

January 5, 2005
David Matlin & Lou Rowan

DAVID MATLIN is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include the books _China Beach_, _Dressed In Protective Fashion_, and _Fontana's Mirror_. His first novel _How the Night is Divided_ (McPherson & Company, 1993) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. †Excerpts from his new novel entitled _A HalfMan Dreaming_ have been published in the Notre Dame Review, Apex of the M, Golden Handcuffs Review, Fiction International, Poetry New York, and FLASHPOINT.
His book length essay _Vernooykill Creek: The Crisis of Prisons in America_ (San Diego State Univ Press, 1997) is based on ten years of teaching in one of the oldest Prison Education Programs in the nation in New York State. This essay discusses the crisis of prisons, the invention of surplus populations, and how America has been mining its own civil disintegrations for at least two decades. The book was widely reviewed and continues to receive strong critical acclaim. A new publication of the book with a more extensive introduction is forthcoming from North Atlantic Books. From 1986 through 1989, Matlin was the Curator of Poetry and Literature at P.S.1 and the Clocktower in New York City. He is a widely published reviewer and an essayist on art, literature, and culture. He lives in San Diego where he teaches in both the Literature and MFA Creative Writing Programs at SDSU.

LOU ROWAN currently writes fiction and essays. He's at work on a novel about the losing of the American West, and he has completed a book of short stories, _Except My Life_, a satirical novel narrated by a superhero, and a collection of poems. His fiction currently appears in Prague Literary Review, and his stories, essays and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of journals. He began writing in New York City, and participated in many of the literary experiments around St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He has earned his living as a businessman and as an educator, and now edits Golden Handcuffs Review and works in residential real estate in Seattle.