2004 Subtext Readings

2004

DECEMBER 1, 2004
Catriona Strang & Nancy Shaw

Catriona STRANG and Nancy SHAW are from Vancouver BC and co-authored Busted (Coach House). They each have books from ECW in Toronto: Low Fancy and Scopocratic, respectively. Strang's collaboration with Francois Houle is available on the CD Clamourous Alphabet.

Shaw is also a visual artist and curator. Busted is a book about governance, and a catalogue of possible relations. It explores a litany of genres concerned with allegiance and refusal, and inhabits the array of ways we do or donít jive with self, group and governing relations. It is a polemic, it is a collage that interrogates how language and linguistic discourses contribute to shaping the relationship between the subject and polity.

NOVEMBER 3, 2004
David ABEL & William FOX

David ABEL is a co-instigator of the Spare Room reading series (www.flim.com/spareroom) in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Recent publications include "A Reading of a Reading of Ashes" (envelope #6) and Threnos (designed and sewn on a thirty-seven-foot ribbon by Katherine Kuehn). "Embargo" is forthcoming in the next issue of Slope (www.slope.org), devoted to responses to the Treasury Department's proposed interdiction on the editing of manuscripts from Iran. Other recent Portland manifestations include the installation/performance "Permanent Red" (with percussionist Tim DuRoche) at the Modern Zoo; a four-hour version of "Chutes and Ladders: A Word Event for mARK oWENs and Jackson Mac Low" at Pacific Switchboard's Fluxus Seminar; and the premiere of Frozen Sea at the Collaborative Poetics Festival.

William L. FOX has published fifteen collections of poetry and six nonfiction books about cognition and landscape. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and most recently the National Endowment for the Humanities. Recent books of poetry include Reading Sand: Selected Desert Poems, 1975-2000 (University of Nevada) and One Wave Standing (La Alameda Press); of nonfiction, Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (University of Nevada) and The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin (University of Utah). He lives in Los Angeles, where he has recently completed books on the Antarctic and Las Vegas, and is working on a book about Mars..

4 PM, SUN OCTOBER 24, 2004 At HENRY ART GALLERY
Marjorie Perloff & Charlie Altieri

CRITICS AS PERFORMERS
Well known critics of contemporaneity / postmodernity take to the stage, exploring what it means to be a critic as performer. Casting off their prepared remarks &/or taking them up anew, these critics enter into the space of their own abandon. No longer avant or apres la lettre, but extemporaneous, expropriating, exfoliating, these critics subsume the excess of their own presence, do just what they want to do, for an evening of wind sheer, free fall, perspicacious pleasures, serious maladies and the like.

Charles Altieri, who spent more than a decade in Seattle at the UW, is currently Professor of English at University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books on critical theory and literary modernism, and a leading authority on expressive theories of art. He has a new book from Cornell University Press titled The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. His books include: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge); Canons and Consequences (Northwestern); Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications; Postmodernism Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts.

Marjorie Perloff is professor emeritus at Stanford and is author of innumerable critical books and essays, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy, and most recently The Vienna Paradox (a memoir from New Directions). See http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/vita.html.

OCTOBER 6, 2004
Margareta WATERMAN & Marion KIMES

Margareta WATERMAN's career in poetry has included most of the stations of the craft: 22 books published; evenings of abstract theatre, mixed-media events and poetry readings; innovative poetry videos, touring the US and Canada; visual poetry mural; collaborative work; festivals; magazines and reviews; workshops. She is publisher of Nine Muses Press. Her work has been featured and praised in magazines and books, on radio and television, in poetry scenes and other literate worlds. Her most recent books are hohokam (a fiction chapbook) and loose ends. She has never left an audience unmoved.


Marion KIMES brought her love of the live reading here in 1981. Over the years a fine pile of small-press books & broadsides has accumulated beside a long list of readings, fests & projects. Her books include CROW'S EYES, of multiplication & light (Nine Muses), Whirled, and NAMORATUNG'A (Woodworks). She has been a driving force in Red Sky Theatre for many years.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2004
Chris MANN & Zhang ER

ZHANG ER was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the United States in 1986. She writes in Chinese, then translates her poems into English with various collaborators. Collections of her work in Chinese include Seen, Unseen, published by QingHai Publishing House of China in 1999, and Water Words, published by New World Poetry Press in 2002. She has published numerous chapbooks in English including: Winter Garden (Goats and Compasses), Verses on Bird (Jensen/Daniels), The Autumn of Gu Yao (Spuyten Duyvil), Cross River, Pick Lotus (Belladonna Books), and Carved Water (Tinfish Press). She teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia.

CHRIS MANN is an Australian composer (currently based in NYC) working in Compositional Linguistics. Or, as he tells it: "Remember that day in second grade when they told you there was a difference between language and music? Well, I was out that day." Mann's work is a dense rush of words - philosophical musings, theoretical babble, Aussie vernacular - delivered at a superhuman velocity that transforms sentences into melodic lines, blurring the distinction between "reading" and "singing." You can't understand a word he says, but it sounds great. Much like opera. Only much, much faster. A founding member of the improvised music/word group Machine for Making Sense, Mann's texts have been deconstructed, interpreted, and set by admiring artists such as Thomas Buckner, John Cage, David Dunn, Gary Hill, Annea Lockwood, Larry Polansky, Robert Rauschenberg, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His recordings have been released by Lovely Music, Frog Peak, Nonsequitur, and others.

THURSDAY AUGUST 12, 2004
RON SILLIMAN

Ron Silliman has written and edited 25 books to date, including the anthology In the American Tree, which the National Poetry Foundation has just republished with a new afterword. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. Volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (r), Toner, What and Xing. Woundwood, his most recent book, is one section of VOG.
His http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com is one of the most widely read blogs on poetics in the English language. Silliman was a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council and received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. An extensive bibliography can be found at: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/pub.html

AUGUST 4, 2004
Nathaniel TARN & Janet RODNEY

Nathaniel Tarn has published some twenty-five of poetry and many volumes of translation, including Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu. His latest books of poems include: _Selected Poems: 1950-2000_ (Wesleyan), _The St Petersburg Poems_ and _The Architextures_ (Chax). He also has an anthology of essays of literary and cultural criticism titled _Views from the Weaving Mountain_. Recipient of numerous awards including the Guinness prize, the Wenner Gren fellowship, a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. A specialist in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions, he currently lives north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Janet Rodney is a digital artist, poet and letterpress printer living in Santa Fe, where she runs Weaselsleeves Press. She is author of four books of poetry, including _Orphydice_, _Atitlan / Alashka_, and the meditative memoir _The Book of Craving_. Raised in Europe, the United States, and Taiwan, she spent fifteen years in Spain as a journalist, editor, translator, and interpreter. Digital images and words are forthcoming in the on-line magazine, Titanic Operas (www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/).

JULY 7, 2004
SUBTEXT POETRY READING - 10th ANNIVERSARY GROUP READING

Readers including: Nico Vassilakis, April Denonno, Maged Zaher, Jeanne Heuving, Doug Nufer, Christine Deavel, John Olson, Joe Keppler, Joe Donahue, Adriana Grant, Mickey O'Connor, Roberta Olson, Lou Rowan, Ezra Mark, Bryant Mason, Kreg Hasegawa, Robert Mittenthal, and maybe more.

JUNE 2, 2004
Lidia YUKNAVITCH & Stacey LEVINE

Lidia Yuknavitch is author of three collections of short stories, _Her Other Mouths_, _Liberty's Excess_, and _Real to Reel_ (FC2), and a critical work, _Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in Late 20th Century Fiction_ (Routledge). Founder of Chiasmus Press, and publisher of Northwest Edge, she lives in Portland, OR.

Stacey Levine lives in Seattle and is the author of the award winning _My Horse and Other Stories_, and _Dra ñ (a novel)_, both from Sun & Moon Press. Her new novel _Frances Johnson_ is forthcoming from Clear Cut Press.

May 5, 2004
CRITICS AS PERFORMERS featuring:
Charles ALTIERI and Steven SHAVIRO

CRITICS AS PERFORMERS -- A SUBTEXT SPECIAL EVENT
Well known critics of contemporaneity / postmodernity take to the stage, exploring what it means to be a critic as performer. Casting off their prepared remarks &/or taking them up anew, these critics enter into the space of their own abandon. No longer avant or apres la lettre, but extemporaneous, expropriating, exfoliating, these critics subsume the excess of their own presence, do just what they want to do, for an evening of wind sheer, free fall, perspicacious pleasures, serious maladies and the like.

Charles Altieri, who spent more than a decade in Seattle at the UW, is currently Professor of English at University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books on critical theory and literary modernism, and a leading authority on expressive theories of art. He has a new book from Cornell University Press titled The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. His books include: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge); Canons and Consequences (Northwestern); Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications; Postmodernism Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts.

Steve Shaviro is author of Connected, or what it means to live in the network society (University of Minnesota, 2003), Doom Patrols (Serpents Tail), The Cinematic Body, and Passion and Excess. He is currently teaching his last term at the UW before moving to Detroit to teach at Wayne State University.

APRIL 7, 2004
Anselm BERRIGAN & Karen WEISER

Anselm Berrigan is the author of Zero Star Hotel and Integrity & Dramatic Life (both from Edge Books). He is also the author of a few chapbooks, including Strangers in the Nest (Dolphin), They Beat Me Over the Head With a Sack (Edge), and On the Premises (GAS). A cd of poetry (no music) was recently released by Narrow House Records. He lives in New York City, and is the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

Karen Weiser lives in New York City where she is developing a long-term love for Milton. Her chapbook, published by Pressed Wafer (2002), is entitled Eight Positive Trees and she co-authored the chapbook Underneath the Bright Discus (1998) published by Potes and Poets Press. Poems will be appearing this winter and spring in upcoming issues of Van Gogh's Ear, 6x6, and Lungfull! Magazine.

MARCH 3, 2004
Juliana SPAHR & Bill LUOMA

Juliana Spahr won the National Poetry Series for her first book, _Response_ (Sun & Moon). She is author of _Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You_ (Wesleyan), and a critical study, _Everybodyís Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity_ (U Alabama). She teaches at University of Hawaiíi and at Mills College. She is an editor of Chain magazine & of the anthology _American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language_ (New England).

Bill Luoma is the author of Works & Days, Swoon Rocket (The Figures), Western Love (Situations), My Trip to New York City, and Dead Dad. He currently lives in Oakland, CA. He is a member of the subpress collective.

FEBRUARY 4, 2004
Jeff DERKSEN & Kreg HASEGAWA

Jeff Derksen is author of three books of poetry: Down Time, Dwell and Transnational Muscle Cars. His writing on art, urbanism, and imperialism has appeared in magazines in North America & Europe. He lives in Vancouver, B.C. where he works at Simon Fraser University. He is a member of the transnational poetry collective, The Social Mark.

Kreg Hasegawa lives in Seattle. He is coeditor of Monkey Puzzle, a stapled, 8 1/2 by 11 inch magazine of poetry and prose. His essays have appeared in The Stranger, Tablet, Copper Press, and The American Book Review. His work is due to appear in The News and The Ensign.

JANUARY 7, 2004
Maryrose LARKIN & Roberta OLSON

Maryrose Larkin lives in Portland, where she works as a freelance researcher. Her work can be found in F O A R M, Insurance, Bird Dog, Columbia Poetry Review, & Washington Review. She is co-editor, with Cynthia Kimball, of FLASH+CARD Press, and is a member of the Spare Room Poetry Collective.

Roberta Olson's work has most recently appeared in the Seattle journals Bird Dog, and Monkey Puzzle. Her chapbook All These Fair and Flagrant Things was published in 2001 by Etherdome (Oakland). She continuously lives in Seattle with her husband John Olson and their cat Toby. Her future is ungraspable.