Thursday, December 24, 2009

Saturday, November 7, 2009

November 21/David Buuck/Kevin Killian/Dana Teen Lomax

WHAT:
If you’re going abroad I can’t help you. If you’re crossing the street I might be there. David Buuck, Kevin Killian, and Dana Teen Lomax take on “autobiography” in this 16th installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

David Buuck is the author of *The Shunt* (Palm Press), and several multi-genre booklets. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He lives in Oakland, where he is a teacher and freelance editor.

Kevin Killian, US poet, novelist, critic and playwright, 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 in 2001. With Lew Ellingham, Killian has written often on the life and work of the American poet Jack Spicer, and co-edited Spicer’s posthumous books The Train of Thought and The Tower of Babel; Killian and Peter Gizzi just released a new edition of Spicer’s collected poetry for Wesleyan University Press. Killian's work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, Best American Poetry 1988 (ed. John Ashbery), and Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper).
His newest books are a book of selected Amazon reviews, Action Kylie, and Impossible Princess (City Lights Books).

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Disclosure (Dusie, 2009), Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006), Room (a+bend press, 1999), and the co-editor of Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). She is currently editing Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children and teaching at San Francisco State University and Marin Juvenile Hall.


WHEN:
Saturday, November 21, 8pm sharp

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.


Coming up next: January 16, 8pm – Cassandra Smith/Noah Eli Gordon/Eric Baus on "storytelling"…

Sunday, October 4, 2009

October 17/Stephanie Young/Dana Ward/Alli Warren

WHAT:
Never fall in love with the potential/It’s never the utopia it pretends to be. Stephanie Young, Dana Ward and Alli Warren take on “location/exchange” in this 15th installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Stephanie Young
lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland (www.deepoakland.org)


Dana Ward
is the author of Goodnight Voice (House Press), Roseland (Editions Louis Wain), the Drought (Open 24hrs), among others. A collaborative book with the artist Paul Coors entitled I Want This Forever is being published this fall. With Corina Copp he recently wrote and directed the play "Hot Tub" as part of BoogFest 2009. Recent writing appears in Try!, With + Stand, Shampoo, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and Boog City. He lives in Cincinnati, edits Cy Press, and works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over-the-Rhine Learning Center.


Alli Warren
was born before the turn of the century and remains extant. She is the author of the chapbooks Schema, Yoke, Hounds, Cousins, No Can Do, and with Michael Nicoloff, Bruised Dick. Mitzvah Chaps will soon publish Well Meaning White Girl. She works in Berkeley, lives in Oakland, and co-curates The New Reading Series at 21 Grand.


WHEN:
Saturday, October 17, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.

Coming up next: November 21, 8pm – David Buuck, Dana Teen Lomax, Kevin Killian on "autobiography"...

Friday, September 4, 2009

September 19/Julien Poirier/Cynthia Sailers/Jacqueline Waters

WHAT:
I am here I am in the middle I have this question. Was that a possibility? The kind of confidence of knowing exactly where you belong. Julien Poirier, Cynthia Sailers, and Jacqueline Waters take on “the un/familiar” in this 14th installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Julien Poirier
started in San Francisco in 1970, grew a few inches in Berkeley (he lives there now) and then moved to New York City, where he went to school, taught poetry and other things to public school kids in the 5 boroughs, helped start Ugly Duckling Presse, and edited New York Nights newspaper to make endless war stink worse. His books include Absurd Good News (Insert Press), Zoco Harpo (Gneiss Press) and the newspaper novella Living! Go and Dream (UDP).

Cynthia Sailers is writing a dissertation on perversion and group psychology. She is currently in private practice as a therapist in San Francisco as well as working at a publicly funded clinic at the Mission. She serves on the board for Small Press Traffic. And is expecting a second book out soon from CyPress.

Jacqueline Waters is the author of a book, A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry), and a chapbook, The Garden of Eden a College (A Rest Press). Recent work has appeared in No: A Journal of the Arts and Zoland Poetry. She is an editor of The Physiocrats, a new pamphlet press: ThePhysiocrats.com.

WHEN:
Saturday, September 19, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:

Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.

Coming up next: October, 17 8pm –Stephanie Young, Dana Ward and Alli Warren on "location/exchange"...

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

August 15/Linda Norton/Cedar Sigo/giovanni singleton‏

WHAT:

I mean there’s the thing and then what the thing really means. Don’t let what the thing means scare you away from the thing, okay? Linda Norton, Cedar Sigo, and giovanni singleton take on “resistance” in this 13th installment, and the second season opener, of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Linda Norton is the author of the chapbook Hesitation Kit (Etherdome, 2007) and the essay The Great Depression and Me (Counterpath Press online, 2007). Her collages illustrate both these works, and appear on the covers of other books and magazines as well. Her poem Landscaping for Privacy was set to music by New York composer Eve Beglarian, and is available on the cd Tell the Birds and on iTunes. She is senior editor at the oral history office in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and was for many years the New York publicist and an acquisitions editor at the University of California Press, where she started the New California Poetry series with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, and Calvin Bedient. She is currently in search of a publisher for her recently-completed manuscript, The Public Gardens: Poem and History, and is back at work on her memoir and meditation, My Little Brown Book.

Cedar Sigo is 31 years old and moved to San Francisco in 1999. His books include two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse) and most recently Expensive Magic (House Press). He has given readings at The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, The Bowery Poetry Club, Beyond Baroque, The San Francisco Poetry Center, Small Press Traffic, and The San Francisco Art Institute, among others.

giovanni singleton, a native of Richmond, VA and former debutant, founded nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal committed to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Writers Workshop, and Cave Canem. Over the past 15 years, she has taught poetry at Saint Mary’s College and at museums and schools throughout the Bay Area. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Five Fingers Review, Aufgabe, Proliferation, Chain, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, Alehouse, Beyond the Frontier: African America Poets for the Millennium, the Best of Fence: An Anthology, and What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America (forthcoming).

WHEN:
Saturday, August 15, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.


Coming up next: September 19, 8pm – Julien Poirier, Cynthia Sailers, and Jacqueline Waters on “the un/familiar” . . .

Monday, June 8, 2009

June 20/Melissa Eleftherion/Norma Cole/ Jocelyn Saidenberg

WHAT:
But then you just have to take a deep breath and be like it’s ok. Melissa Eleftherion, Norma Cole, and Jocelyn Saidenberg take on “the incommensurate” in this twelfth installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Melissa Eleftherion grew up in Brooklyn. Her poetry has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Big Scream, Defenestration, Inch, TRY, and Ur Vox, as well as online in Womb and the press gang. Forthcoming work includes a long piece from Letterbox Magazine. She received her MFA from Mills College and lives in Oakland with a gorilla and a phoenix.

Norma Cole’s new work just out: Natural Light from Libellum Press, If I’m Asleep from Mermaid Tenement Press, and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 from City Lights. Forthcoming is 14,000 Things from a-bend press. Among her books are Collective Memory, Do the Monkey, and Spinoza in Her Youth. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert’s Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. Cole has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Jocelyn Saidenberg’s books are: Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series), CUSP (Kelsey St. Press), Negativity (Atelos), and Dispossessed (Belladonna). She is the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books.

WHEN:
Saturday, June 20, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.


Coming up next: August 15, 8pm – Filip Marinovich, Cedar Sigo, and giovanni singleton on “resistance” . . .

Saturday, May 2, 2009

May 16/Laurel DeCou/Stan Apps/Bill Luoma


WHAT:
17908eihe oo_*@^Dh;Y**(!@^@*(^#)087j. Laurel DeCou, Stan Apps, and Bill Luoma answer all the “inarticulate” what what what and why why why in this eleventh installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Laurel DeCou thinks Oakland’s tight which is why she lives there. Her poetry has been published in the online journals (thus saving lots of paper) Coconut, There, and Cricket Online Review. Her work is forthcoming in Tea Party magazine as well. The time she spent working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center taught her just what it means to be physically inarticulate or speechless.

Stan Apps is reasonably good at writing poems, essays and emails, and dabbles in genres like plays and memoir. He lives in Los Angeles or Tampa. Books include: God's Livestock Policy (Les Figues, 2008), Handbook of Poetic Language (eohippus labs, 2008), Grover Fuel (Scantily Clad e-book, 2009) and Info Ration (Make Now, 2007). Stan thinks San Francisco is nice, mostly because of the people. He often posts reviews, drafts of essays and loose thoughts on his blog at nonprovocativeurl.blogspot.com.

Bill Luoma is the author of My Trip to New York City and Western Love. He is a member of the subpress collective.

WHEN:
Saturday, May 16, 8pm


WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.



Coming up next: June 20, 8pm – Melissa Eleftherion, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Norma Cole on “the incommensurate”. . .