Tuesday, September 28, 2004

what i'm doing with my milliseconds of free time this week.

on wednesday...
free ride to reading after workshop if anyone wants one from me.

from Stephanie Young:
I hope you'll be able to come out this Wednesday night, September 29, for food and drinks and to hear Aaron Kiely & Suzanne Stein read. Plus, we can celebrate fall. I'm planning to make a tomato tart and everything.

The details:
7:00 Potluck
8:00 Readings
@ Stephanie Young's house
434 36th Street
Oakland, 94609

FROM 580 EAST:
Take the Broadway/Webster exit and stay in the right lane towards Webster. As you loop off the exit, go right at the stop sign, under the underpass. 36th is your first left. My house is approx. 5 houses down on your right. (see house description)

DRIVING IN THE EAST BAY:
36th runs parallel to MacArthur. Cross-streets are Telegraph and Webster. It's behind Mosswood park - email me if you need more specific directions.

WALKING FROM BART:
I'm within walking distance of MacArthur BART. Go out the back of the parking lot and take a right onto Telegraph. At the light (MacArthur) cross to the other side of the street. Continue down Telegraph. 36th is the second left. Walk up the street, my house is near the top on your left side.

HOUSE DESCRIPTION FOR EVERYONE:
It's a white/cream colored house. We are in the lower flat, so *do not go to the front door of the house*. Instead, walk up the driveway to the right of the house, our door is to your right, up a few grey cement steps behind a red piece of wood. You'll see a shed at the end of the driveway which is how you'll know you're in the right place. I'll put up some signs, too.

ABOUT THE POETS
(Apologies to the Aaron b.c. I wrote the following, and he shouldn't be held accountable for that, right?)
AARON SEVEN KIELY lives in Manhattan. He lived in Boston for a long time before that, and was an originator of what's come to be the Boston Poetry Marathon. He was listening to Journey and Morrissey a little while ago but I'm not sure what he's listening to now. David Hess said about a reading by Kiely this summer: "Aaron Kiely probably read the tenderest poem or poems of them all..." I'd like to say more but I'm still discovering Aaron, who is well-loved on the East Coast as he will be here soon. Please extend your arms, bay area, please open them to Aaron.
Mr. Kiely's poems can be found here:
http://www.canwehaveourballback.com/kiely.htm
http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooNine/kiely.html
And David Kirschenbaum reviews Aaron's chapbook MONEY here:
http://home.jps.net/~nada/kiely.htm

SUZANNE STEIN lives in San Francisco. Her works have appeared in Mirage #4/Period[ical], Fourteen Hills, Commonweal(s), Zeal series, the Poetry Center, Precious?, fourwalls, Refusalon Gallery, the San Francisco Exploratorium, the Berkeley Art Center, Outpost for Art, the Yucca Valley Inn, the Desert Star, Mission Street, Miami Beach, Brandon Brown, kathryn l. pringle, the Bureau of Material Behaviors, and elsewhere. She is the former codirector and film curator of four walls gallery, San Francisco. In Brandon Brown's 4th issue of Commonweal he asked a number of Bay Area poets to answer the following questions: "How has / does living in the Bay Area impress or influence your work?" and "Do you see your work as related to historical or current moments in Bay Area poetics?" Here's an excerpt from Suzanne's answer: "How I understand the fact of, California, coarse segment of land in abutment to the ocean; binary coast whose edge marks out at the cliffline every kind of mirror or transversal, as the line marks the fold between double entry, that which equates everything to zero in order to calculate what can't be calculated, in this way I understand the true being of the West and California, usually faulted."

and an excerpt from her poem Shack, which I'm grateful she let me quote from:
Shoulder to shoulder,
breathing into the shack,
weathering the shack,
breathing temperature in to articulable breathing,
finding skin a penetrable course,
revisioning the outer membranes,
discovering the inner,
sliding along a path less worn for all its uses,
breaking the source,
opening the measure,
sluice drawn forward out of lack, or out of emptied behaviors that leave
soul and the forced door of weather.


also, on thursday...

Peter Gizzi Discussing Jack Spicer. 3:30 p.m. The Poetry Center, Humanities Bldg. 512, San Francisco State University. (415) 338-2227. (this one i can't make)

but i'm going to this one:
Poetry Reading with Peter Gizzi and Beverly Dahlen. 7:30 p.m. $5. First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin St., S.F. (415) 776-4580.