Wednesday, August 19, 2009

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...











Amina Cain & Amarnath Ravva

Sunday, August 23 2009 at 4:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 4:00pm
Reading starts at 4:30pm

$5 donation requested

Amina Cain is the author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), a collection of stories that revolve quietly around human relationality, landscape, and emptiness. She is also a curator, most recently for When Does It or You Begin? (Memory as Innovation), a month long festival of writing, performance, and video, and a teacher of writing/literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as 3rd Bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, Dewclaw, The Encyclopedia Project, La Petite Zine, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers, and was recently translated into Polish on MINIMALBOOKS. She lives in Los Angeles.

Amarnath Ravva has performed (as part of the ambient improvisational ensemble Ambient Force 3000) at LACMA, Los Angeles; Machine Project, Los Angeles; and Betalevel, Los Angeles. He has exhibited work at Telic, Los Angeles; Acorn Gallery, Los Angeles; Pond, San Francisco; and Keith & Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona. In addition to presenting his work in numerous readings, he has writing online at PennSound, LA-Lit and Drunken Boat #10, and work forthcoming in Encyclopedia vol. 2, and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. He is on the board of advisors for nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts and is a curator at Betalevel.

Friday, August 14, 2009

The Poetic Research Bureau recommends...

Aimé Césaire: A Voice of History

Mon, Aug 17 9pm @ Downtown Independent Theater

Part of this year's Downtown Film Festival in Los Angeles, this documentary introduces American audiences to the celebrated Martinican author who coined the term negritude and launched the movement called the "Great Black Cry." Euzhan Palcy, the internationally acclaimed director of Sugarcane Alley and A Dry White Season, weaves Césaire's life and poetry into a vast study featuring many of the most important artistic and intellectual figures of the 20th century. André Breton, the high priest of surrealism, described Césaire as “a black man who embodies not simply the black race but all mankind, who will remain for me the prototype of human dignity." Césaire moves to Paris and, with Leopold Senghor, first president of Senegal and the French Guyanese poet Léon Damas, develops the concept of negritude - a worldwide re-vindication of African values. John Henrik Clarke and Howard Dodson of the Schomburg Center discuss the profound impact of black American authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Claude McKay as well as jazz and the Harlem Renaissance on this primarily Francophone movement.