Poetic Research Bureau: January 2011

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Belz, Maxwell, Meadows, Schultz: Sun Jan 9

"A Chavez Ravine Reunion Quartet"

If you weren't one of the 200+ who socked into ArtShare last night to try on 70 poets-in-a-can, which was quite delicious, maybe you want to stretch out this afternoon, and listen to four of them read in the cozier compound of the Poetic Research Bureau in Chinatown.

Aaron Belz, Andrew Maxwell, Deborah Meadows, and Susan Schultz are just four baseball enthusiasts who last were all together for a Dodgers game, and suddenly -- all in one place again in an offseason freeze -- decided to do that other thing they do: scribble and mumble in public.

(Baseball poems not necessarily included.)

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Aaron Belz is the author of three books, including Lovely, Raspberry and The Bird Hoverer.

Andrew Maxwell co-directs the PRB, has edited some magazines and hosts several of his chapbooks at peepingmot.com.

Deborah Meadows is the author of many books, including Goodbye Tissues and involutia.

Susan Schultz edits Tinfish magazine and press, and her books include Dementia Blog and Memory Cards & Adoption Papers.

Poetic Research Bureau @ The Public School
951 Chung King Rd, Chinatown, LA, CA

About the Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in Northeast Los Angeles.

Our living room at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown hosts an extended community of autodidacts and guessworkers caught up in language, inquiry and the unguarded arts. Just as it is: a community free school by day, and by night, a non-professional public forum for presentations, readings, screenings and sundry intellectual exchanges.

As an out-of-pocket California milk-crate boosterist enterprise, the PRB also serves as the irregular literary umbrella for projects such as occasional poetry journal The Germ ('97-'05), edited by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card; and art-lit mag Area Sneaks, edited by Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi.

As a research bloc, the Bureau attempts to cultivate composition, publication and distribution strategies that enlarge the public domain. It favors appropriations, impersonations, 'compost' poetries, belated conversations, unprintable jokes and doodles, 'unoriginal' literature, historical thefts and pastiche. The publication emphasis is on ephemeral works, short-run magazines and folios, short-lived reprints and excerpts in print-on-demand formats, and the occasional literary fetish objects of stupidly incomparable price and value.

Several reading series are hosted at 951 CKR, and we welcome writers whose work lacks the 'commercial tendency' while harboring the bright, high-minded intentions that often lead to broad panic, righteous perversions, improbable arguments, and the ill-served cul-de-sacs of genius. The series are coordinated by the aforementioned Messrs Maxwell and Mosconi. If you're sympatico, passing through town, or need a megaphone, 50 seats and a big blank space, give us a write.

contact: directors@poeticresearch.com