Friday, October 18 at 8:00pm.
128 W Michigan Ave, apt 5
Performances by TAC & friends. All are welcome! Come out and enjoy what this Ypsi community has to offer.
TAC presents guest reader Cynthia Spencer:
http://
Category Archives: Events
Upcoming: BATHHOUSE EVENTS 11/5 & 11/6
Join us on November 5th and 6th as BathHouse Events and the Creative Writing Department welcomes Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant!
The details…
Readings by Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium
Ypsilanti
And:“Textual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices”
A Discussion with Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Wednesday, Nov. 6th 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium
Ypsilanti
Texual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices
The aesthetic and formal roots of African diasporic cultural production are often determined in relation to oral tradition, from poetic expression and practical education, to transmission of cosmologies and the genealogical storytelling of village griots. Celebrating and analyzing solely the oral can come at the expense of the written word, from signs and pictographs of ancient Egypt or Haiti, to the ‘spirit writing’ of African American mediums and healers. In response to this enduring but insufficient binary thinking, Tisa Bryant and Douglas Kearney devised the concept Textual Orality. Textual Orality is a way of naming this site of generative tension within African diasporic literature. Using this concept as a critical frame, Bryant and Kearney will explore the ways in which both the (il)legible and aural, the stylized mark and the spoken word, experiments in writing and traditions in performance (or vice-versa), are distinct and interdependent features of their individual writing practices and pedagogies.
The aesthetic and formal roots of African diasporic cultural production are often determined in relation to oral tradition, from poetic expression and practical education, to transmission of cosmologies and the genealogical storytelling of village griots. Celebrating and analyzing solely the oral can come at the expense of the written word, from signs and pictographs of ancient Egypt or Haiti, to the ‘spirit writing’ of African American mediums and healers. In response to this enduring but insufficient binary thinking, Tisa Bryant and Douglas Kearney devised the concept Textual Orality. Textual Orality is a way of naming this site of generative tension within African diasporic literature. Using this concept as a critical frame, Bryant and Kearney will explore the ways in which both the (il)legible and aural, the stylized mark and the spoken word, experiments in writing and traditions in performance (or vice-versa), are distinct and interdependent features of their individual writing practices and pedagogies.
Tisa Bryant:
Though she hails from Boston, received an MFA from Brown University, and lives in Los Angeles, Tisa Bryant grew into her writing within San Francisco’s vibrant literary/arts communities, serving in various capacities with ATA, CineLatino, Frameline, New Langton Arts, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Small Press Traffic, and Intersection for the Arts, among others. She is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art; co-editor/founder of the ongoing cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology of black gay men’s desire and survival, nominated for a 2010 LAMBDA Literary Award. Bryant is currently on a reunion tour with the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts exhibition and reading series and she teaches fiction and experimental writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.
Douglas Kearney:
Poet/performer/librettist DouglasKearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry Series. It was also a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in 2010. His newest chapbook, SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps) is available. Red Hen Press will publish Kearney’s third collection, Patter, in 2014. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and fellowships at Idyllwild, Cave Canem, and others. Two of his operas, Sucktionand Crescent City, have received grants from the MAPFund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent Citypremiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty and the Poetry Foundation. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.
Friday, October 4 – Site/Nonsite Detroit: Poetry @ASAP
Site/Nonsite Detroit: Poetry @ASAP
http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/pdfs/ASAP%20reading.pdf
Brian Ang (Oakland, CA; editor of Armed Cell); Sara Larsen; (Oakland, CA; organizer of The Public School); David Lau (Santa Cruz, CA; editor of Lana Turner); Rob Halpern (Ypsilanti, MI; author of Music for Porn); Jonathan Stalling (Norman, OK; author of Yingelishi); UIjana Wolf (Berlin/Brooklyn; author of falsche freunde). Hosted by Tyrone Williams (Xavier University). Organized by Barrett Watten (Wayne State University).
Friday, October 4, 7:30–9:00 PM TheWelcome Center @ Wayne State University Woodward and Warren, Detroit Free and open to the public!
Upcoming: Carla Harryman M–/W– launch (9/28)
Carla Harryman and George Tysh kick off the evidence series in Ferndale on September 28.
evidence:
new writing in the metro
Saturday, September 28, 8 pm
Carla Harryman: M–/W– launch
George Tysh
407 West Marshall, Ferndale 48220
*For info on Carla Harryman’s M–/W– visit http://splitleveltexts.com/texts/w-m
Upcoming: An Evening of Poetry and Conversation (9/27)
Please join us for an evening of poetry and conversation with:
CATHERINE WAGNER, KAPLAN HARRIS,
BRENNA YORK, & MATVEI YANKELEVICH
Friday September 27
@ Rob Halpern and Lee Azus’s home:
319 Garland Street in Ypislanti
Gathering begins 7:00. Readings begin at 7:30.
Beer & Wine & Partners, all welcome!
Bios and Links:
Catherine Wagner’s collections of poems include Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012) and three previous books from Fence. Her work appears in the recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and other anthologies. She teaches in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her son.
Recent work by Catherine can be found here:
http://theclaudiusapp.com/2-wagner.html
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Wagner.php
Brenna York resides within the Peabody Manor in Oxford, Ohio. She released Mr. Ivy, a chapbook with Plumberries Press, this past June at the Midwest Press Festival in Milwaukee. Brenna is a graduate of EMU’s Creative Writing Program.
A performance of “Twat-lite”, a collaboration between Brenna York and Elizabeth Mikesch, can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/user14622738
Matvei Yankelevich is the author of the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), and the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis). He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series. He is a member of the Writing Faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College; in Fall 2013 he is Visiting Writer at Long Island University’s MFA in Creative Writing.
Recent work by Matvei can be found here: http://bombsite.com/issues/119/articles/6447
[excerpts from the long poem "Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt" and a film based on the same poem made in collaboration with Jeanne Liotta]
Kaplan Harris is an editor & scholar. He has forthcoming essays in the Cambridge Companion to American Modernist Poetry & an exhibition catalog on the clairvoyant conceptualist Hannah Weiner. He lives with his daughter in Buffalo, NY.
Recent work by Kaplan can be found at:.
“The 2013 Buffalo Small Press Fair,” Harriet Open Door Series (May 2013).
“Avant-Garde Interrupted: A New Narrative after AIDS.” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (winter 2011).
“A Zine Ecology of Charles Bernstein’s Selected Poems,” Postmodern Culture 20.3 (May 2010).
Interview for “Into the Field #5” (podcast series), hosted by Steve McLaughlin, Jacket2 (June 2011)
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley. Edited by Kaplan Harris, Rod Smith and Peter Baker. University of California Press.
CRTW Graduate Showcase
It excites the Creative Writing blog to announce the Creative Writing Graduate Showcase on Thursday, April 18th from six until eight in the evening. This blessed event will be hosted in the Carillon Room in the Halle Library on EMU‘s campus. The graduate performances promise to “blow down doors and hurl windows from the highest of towers.” Those performing include Nicholas “Mr. Electric Ocean” Mourning, Arthur “Ace” Challenger Oemke, and the articulated semtex-man Gerard Breitenbeck. Each will be performing an aspect of their Creative Masters Thesis projects. Mourning’s work is a an ethnographic mapping that bisects poetics and the electric self. Oemke’s can best be referred to as debauched fiction that attempts to undermine the authority of the sensorium. Capping the event, Breitenbeck will showcase new forms which break stale narrative sculptures and blast through our rectangular age with a re-percussive return to the early eighties.
EMU’s CW students’ public collaboration makes national news
Hats off to undergrads Sam Schimmel, Eric Corliss, Karen Thompson, Taylor Cyr, and Garret Stralnic from Christine Hume’s “Collaboration and Community Projects” and Linette Lao’s “Mixed Media” classes! Their work has received national attention in the New York Daily News. The members were from the collaborative group known as Operation Mongoose 2012 whose public work urges a remembrance of books and bookstores as a declining animal in our increasingly virtual world of books.
Bathhouse and more
This week is jam packed with creative writing. Bathhouse reading series presents two performers. November 28th will be a reading featuring Dimitri Anatasopoulo, Camille Roy, and Rachel Levitsky.
Then, join us on the 29th for a panel discussion with our presenters moderated by our own Carla Harryman entitled: Intersections: Community, Politics and Art.
The event takes place at Roosevelt Hall from 4-6pm both days, so if you cannot make one there is another. For more information be sure to check out the reading series page.
But wait, there’s more! After the Bathhouse reading EMU’s Nicholas Mourning will be performing at Wednesday Night Sessions at the Mentobe Cafe in Farmington. This is the final reading of the year so be sure to catch it if you can. Other “fantastic” authors include Steve Gillis, Mary Minock, and Horam Kim. The event beings at 7pm and should run about one hour.
In other news Dr. Rob Halpern has recently been awarded the Sexiest Poem Award! Congrats to Rob, one of the Creative Writing faculty here at EMU.
Upcoming Temporal Arts Collective Event
![[ a n o c t a v e ]](http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8058/8184016639_50099771e9.jpg)
Great news! Upcoming performances by the Temporal Arts Collective. The event, [ a n o c t a v e ], will be taking place Saturday November 17th at 9:00pm 106. N. Adams Apt. 2 in Ypsilanti. The event promises to be “an evening of contemporary poetry.” A mix of performers, alums, current undergrads, graduate students and innumerable others will be there. Those reading include, but are not limited to:
- Kellie Nadler
- David Boeving
- G. Matthew Mapes
- Jonah Mixon-Webster
- John Farmer
- Nick Compton
- Miranda Metelski
- and Kristen Gines
For more information about the Temporal Arts Collective check out their Facebook page.
If you cannot make it, fear not, the blog will send one of its staff writers to the event.
CW Faculty and Student Performances
This past week was a big one for both students and faculty. Performers from each echelon exhibited work in the Detroit Metro Area. Both Dr. Christine Hume and CW Grad Student Danielle Etienne were among the artists performing.
On Thursday November 8th at 7:00pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), the blog bore witness to both a Reading & Performance of Catherine Wagner & Christine Hume. Christine Hume started the night with a solemn incantation in a piece titled “Speech Talks Back,” afterwards Catherine Wagner performed poems from her new book, Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012).
During Dr. Hume’s piece, the gallery space was plunged into near dark, a single light illuminating the reading space. The audience sat hushed, and distracted. Dr. Hume read as simultaneous audio boomed from several speakers. At times ears were overwhelmed with the recording and at other times one could feel the reading more palpably. The effect was incongruous with the play between the two channels of narration creating a third space where the piece took form. The performance caught the audience in this third space, between the poles of navigation, the reading and the recording.
When Dr. Wagner took the stage, the lights came up and all was visible. She calmed herself using a variety of medieval songs rendered live before the audience. She stood before the audience eschewing the podium for a more intimate relation with the attending crowd. Her poems created laughs, frowns and other expressions as diverse as the material she read. Occasionally a poem would also include sung lyrics. This was not a professional musical performance, but an interaction between an untrained singing voice and a honed reading. Indeed, “the poems of Nervous Device express a self-conscious scepticism about the potential for human connection even as they maintain[ed] an optimistically charged eroticism.”
On Saturday November 10th at 8:00pm, Creative Writing Graduate Student Danielle Etienne read three short fiction pieces at Flip Salon in Ferndale. The exhibition/performance, titled Little Cloud Rising/STRAIGHT TO HELL, also featured artwork from artist Jacqueline Woodrich and live musical accompaniment. The space itself, Flip Salon, is indeed a hair salon. Artwork lined the walls and Ms Etienne read in the “waiting room” while the audience crowded around and watched from a variety of perches. As Ms Etienne read a banjo played on, the aura of white trash hillbilly that Ms Etienne articulates in her piece was brought twanging into the salon space. The audience hooted and hollered throughout the performance as Ms Etienne’s evocative descriptions filled them with laughter or caused them to cringe inwardly.
Each of the events was a remarkable demonstration of the breadth of diversity that is present in the EMU Creative Writing Program and the blog looks forward to more performances of both students and faculty.