A conversation with Diane di Prima (San Francisco)

San Francisco Poet Laureate Diane di Prima
In conversation with writer Alan Kaufman
Tuesday April 20, 6:00 pm
Co-sponsored by Poetry Flash

A revolutionary activist of the 1960's and an important writer of the Beat movement, Diane di Prima co-founded the New York Poets Theatre, and edited the literary newsletter, The Floating Bear. She is the author of 43 books of poetry and prose, including Pieces of a Song, TimeBomb, Towers Down, and The Ones I Used to Laugh With. A long-time resident of San Francisco, she teaches private classes and workshops. In 2006 she received the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and community service. In 2009, she was named the Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

Alan Kaufman (Moderator) is author of the books Matches and Jew Boy and editor of several anthologies, including The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. His writing has been anthologized in W.W. Norton's Nothing Makes You Free: Writings From Descendents of Holocaust Survivors.  He has written for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle and Salon.com. He has taught at the Academy of Art University and writing salons in San Francisco. He currently has a blog on the Huffington Post

LOCATION: Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco
TRANSPORTATION: Montgomery BART/MUNI station
Reservations & Information: 415.393.0100
Reservations by email:  rsvp@milibrary.org

Judy Halebsky reads on Friday, April 2

Friday (4/2), 7:30pm: Judy Halebsky will read at The Book Collector, 1008 24th St., Sacramento. Judy trained in Performance Studies at UC Davis and is a member of Sacramento Poetry Center's Tuesday night workshop. Since 2007 she has been in Tokyo studying Japanese literature on a MEXT fellowship. Her book, Sky=Empty, was chosen by Marvin Bell as the winner of the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize.

The New Math of Poetry - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The New Math of Poetry - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
David Alpaugh writes about how the publication of poetry is "likely to double, quadruple, 'ten-tuple' in the decades ahead."

FEB 7 | Walt Whitman reading

Beatitude Magazine | 50th Anniversary

Issue Reading & Party | Tuesday, December 8th, 7pm |  City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco

Poems-For-All | Bone Folders

JUN 01 | Neruda translator interviewed

Monday, June 1st, 2009
Noon
Bibliocracy Radio
KPFK 90.7 FM
access webcast via the bibliocracy blogspot


Andrew Tonkovich of KPFK radio in Los Angeles has prepared a one-hour interview that features World’s End, William O’Daly's final book of translation of Pablo Neruda; a two-part essay O’Daly published in 2006 titled “A Winter’s Sun: Writing Against Torture”; and some of his own poetry.

With World’s End, work written by Pablo Neruda in 1968 and 1969, O’Daly has now published eight translations of the late and posthumous poetry of Neruda, as well as a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry for Still Another Day, the first of his Neruda series. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, with coauthor Han-ping Chin, set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Copper Canyon Press

Big Drink

Big Drink by Crawdad Nelson
2009, 24th street irregular press
5.5" X 8.5", 32 pages.
$5.00

24th street irregular press seems to spend an inordinately large amount of time making miniature books of poetry under its Poems-For-All imprint. But they've been know to put out the occasional larger-sized chapbook now and then.

Big Drink presents an impressive collection of poems by Sacramento poet Crawdad Nelson. "For raw power and freshness of language," writes author Bill Pieper, "nobody outdoes Crawdad Nelson in crafting poems that interweave the natural world with the human psyche and vice-versa. This guy has a gift."

In addition to the title poem, Big Drink, the chap puts together for the first time his popular poems I Get the Impression the World is Made of Roses (previously published in miniatures as part of the Poems-For-All Series) and Bigfoot is Continuous.

Copies are available at The Book Collector in Sacramento, CA or email me here if you're out of the area and would like me to mail you a copy

(Transit)ory Poetry

It's with my great pleasure that Bob Stanley, president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, has lately been presenting me with a lot of creative projects. They've allowed me to put my design skills to good use in support of the literary arts. One project involves putting poetry placards into Sacramento Regional Transit buses.

Poems on Transit isn't a new idea. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for example, calls their project Poetry in Motion. In London, Poems on the Underground has been putting poems on subway trains since 1986. (According to their website, Poems on the Underground has been the inspiration for similar programmes around the world: in Dublin, Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Sydney, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, St. Petersburg and most recently Shanghai.) And it's been done before in Sacramento. Several years ago, the Sacramento Poetry Center initiated a brief project to put poems on buses. Now, Bob Stanley wants to see SPC do it again.

While Bob works on sponsors, funding and RT approval, he's asked me to create a few mock-ups of what the poetry placards might look like. What you see pictured here are preliminary; a starting point towards creating the basic look, with each poem used getting its own unique design while the boilerplate information about the poetry center and sponsors along the bottom stays the same from placard to placard. Bob suggested Ezra Pound's In a Station of The Metro as a "test" poem something to build a first version around. I included a design that features Jack Spicer's First Catch the Rabbit to provide an alternative design. (We presently have permission to use neither in widespread use.)

Anyway, a taste of what I hope becomes a successful Sacramento Poetry Center literary-art-in-public-places project.

Pictured placards are 11" tall and 17" long. (RT permits placards as long as 28".) On the print version, and not clearly depicted here, the placards have a half inch white border. There's a glaring error in Mr. Spicer's poem. "if your going to build..." should, of course, read "if you're..."

APR 15 | poetry | Random Abiladeze

Random Abiladeze
Poetry Night at Bistro 33
Wednesday, April 15

Featuring a rare Open Mic poetic performance by poet Traci Gourdine.

Random Abiladeze (pronounced “Abilities”) is a 24 year-old Hip-Hop Artist and Spoken Word Poet from Sacramento whose work has been honored by the Hip-Hop Congress, a Grassroots International cultural arts organization. His debut CD with fellow artist Prozak Morris – under the name T.O.P. (The Other Poets) – was released in December.

Random won the 2008 Battle of The Bay Poetry Slam at Stanford University and Sacramento State University’s Word of Conscious Action Poetry Slam, was voted Youth Speaks Male Poet of the Month for October 2007, and is a two-time champion of the Got Spit! Poetry Slam, hosted by the Sacramento Chapter of the Hip-Hop Congress. He has also won several rap competitions on such radio stations as 102.5 (KSFM) and 103.5 (KBMB). He has performed at the California State Capitol, the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, Stanford University, the Mondavi Center, and numerous other locations in California.

Poetry Night at Bistro 33, in Davis, hosted by Andy Jones and produced by Brad Henderson, occurs on the first and third Wednesday of every month beginning at 9 P.M. with a 10 P.M. open mic. Please arrive early to ensure seating.