Thursday, March 2: Arturo Romo & Sesshu Foster @ MOCA storefront

Join us for readings by poet Sesshu Foster and artist Arturo Romo. Winner of two American Book Awards, Foster is the author of Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook. He is currently collaborating on a novel, The East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, a History, with Romo, whose collaborative mixed-media works and drawings explore fluency, agency, and folly. 

These readings are part of a series presented in conjunction with the exhibition storefront: THIS KNOWN WORLD: Spontaneous Particulars of the Poetic Research Bureau.

7pm
March 2, 2017
MOCA Grand Avenue
Sculpture Plaza
FREE

The program is generously supported by William and Ruth True – Gramma Poetry.

http://www.moca.org/program/sesshu-foster-and-arturo-romo

Wednesday, March 1: Citron Kelly, Jeremy Kennedy & Andrew Choate

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

CITRON KELLY
JEREMY KENNEDY
& ANDREW CHOATE

Wednesday, March 1

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Citron Kelly is a poet whose concern with the institutionalization of bodies in healthcare and labor has recently taken the form of slapstick powerpoints and textual talismans. She has presented her fictional health insurance product, the 'Integrated Open Access Context Plan' at Sunview Luncheonette, Berl's, Zinc Bar and Cooper Union. She is the author of Pudding Time (DoubleCross Press) Material Awe (forthcoming), Dopamine Agonist Destiny Forest (forthcoming), and many zines. Other poems can be found in Theme Can, No, Dear, Yew Journal, and Rhizome.org. In collaboration with Spencer Everett, she the founder and editor of Resolving Host, a risograph press.

Since the late 1990’s, Jeremy Kennedy has been building and exhibiting a multi-disciplinary catalog of art and ideas in a wide scope of arrangements across the U.S. Drawing heavily from a conversational core of evolving humor and wordplay, he approaches projects with a “concept over medium” perspective, and maintains a heavy focus on the power of collaboration. All of which inform his outer roles as a general practitioner of improvised music (sound-maker), and co-founder/operator of the art book publisher Rebel Hands Press. Before relocating to Los Angeles in 2009, Kennedy found Bloomington, Indiana as a home base for a decade.

Andrew Choate is the author of Stingray Clapping (Insert Blanc Press) and Too Many Times I See Every Thing Just The Way It Is (The Residual Press/PRB Editions). He programs the Los Angeles-based music series The Unwrinkled Ear.

Saturday, February 25: Ted Dodson & Mathew Timmons

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

TED DODSON
& MATHEW TIMMONS

Saturday, February 25 2017

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Ted Dodson is the author of “At the National Monument / Always Today” (Pioneer Works, 2016). He works for BOMB, is the books editor for Futurepoem, and is a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Mathew Timmons is the author of Terrifying Photo (Wonder 2015), Joyful Noise for three or more voices (Jaded Ibis, 2012), and The New Poetics (Les Figues, 2010). He is also the editor & publisher of Insert Blanc Press in Los Angeles, CA.

His current project, Encouraging Words, looks for spirited language in places near and far, obvious and obscure, and reframes that language to bring it into a performance and poetic context and reveal how even our most saccharine words can be both scary and energizing, or even encouraging.

Two works will be presented this evening: an Untitled Dialogue with Jay Erker and Ben White, and an Untitled Monologue.

Friday, February 24: Nicholas Muellner

Nicholas Muellner will present a scripted slide-lecture in conjunction with the release of his new book from SPBH Editions, In Most Tides an Island.

Seductive, disorienting, informative and allegorical, this work is at once a glimpse of contemporary post-Soviet queer life, a meditation on solitude and desire in the digital age, and an inquiry into the nature of photography and poetry in a world characterized by cruelty, longing, resignation and hope.

As with all of Muellner’s image-text projects, this work initially evolved as a visually choreographed slide lecture, from which the related but distinct book emerged. At the Poetic Research Bureau, he will present the original lecture, integrating over 130 images, many not included in the published book.

In Most Tides an Island grew from two very different impulses: to witness the lives of closeted gay men in provincial Russia, and to compose the gothic tale of a solitary woman on a remote tropical island. Along the way, these disparate pursuits – one predicated on documentation, the other on invention - unexpectedly converged. Shot along Baltic, Caribbean and Black Sea coastlines, distant landscapes met at the rocky point of Alone. From that vista, they ask: what do intimacy and solitude mean in a radically alienated but hyper-connected world?

Nicholas Muellner is a photographer and writer based in West Danby, NY and Los Angeles. His image-text books include The Amnesia Pavilions (2011) and The Photograph Commands Indifference (2009). He is Co-Founder of ITI Press and the Image Text MFA at Ithaca College.

Doors 7:30pm
Lecture 8pm

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA
90012

Sunday 2pm: Book Launch w/ SE Barnet & David Buuck

LA Launch of
Drawing and Other Writing
by SE Barnet and Sally Morfill

including a performance from SE Barnet and David Buuck
and a film by Sally Morfill and Ana Čavić

Through the work of SE Barnet and Sally Morfill, the Everyday Press publication Drawing and Other Writing offers a look at how meaning is formed and interpreted when we make a mark. The practices of these two artists include a range of influences and source material; from the Mass Observation archive to Henri Michaux's alphabet of lines. Additionally, artists Ana Čavić and Louisa Minkin have contributed work to the book.

***

Sunday, February 19 2017
Doors 2pm
Event 2:30pm

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA
90012

AS I STAND LIVING BOOK RELEASE: ZOË RUIZ / BRIAN EVENSON / CHRISTOPHER HIGGS

In his radical memoir, As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs uses the constraint-based techniques William Faulkner employed for the construction of As I Lay Dying to create a deeply personal and philosophical portrait of the year he became a father. Blending elements of fantasy and confession, Higgs confronts parenthood by divulging his most intimate fears, secrets, sorrows, and hopes as a writer, husband, and teacher. A methodically composed and paradoxical blend of inextricably vulnerable emotion and objective fascination, As I Stand Living renders visible the tension between mediation and transparency when attempting to represent, capture, and convey a lived experience on the cusp of its future. (#RECURRENT, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017)

http://copingmechanisms.net/portfolio/as-i-stand-living-by-christopher-higgs/


ZOË RUIZ lives and writes in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The Millions, Marketplace, The Rumpus, Salon, Two Serious Ladies, and the anthologies California Prose Directory (2014), Rooted, and Golden State. She is also the Events Director at The Last Bookstore as well as a freelance book editor and book publicist.

BRIAN EVENSON is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com 2016). He has also recently published Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and Immobility (Tor 2012), both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann's Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek Spanish, Japanese, Persian, and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

CHRISTOPHER HIGGS lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son, where he teaches narrative theory and technique at Cal State Northridge. He wrote The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney: a novel, released by Sator Press, and he assembled the SPD #1 Bestselling novel ONE, in collaboration with Blake Butler and Vanessa Place, released by Roof Books. In addition to publishing two chapbooks, Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius) and Becoming Monster (The Cupboard), he’s written for numerous print and online venues, including: Pleiades, New Theory, Diagram, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Global Queer Cinema, and The Paris Review Daily.

***

 

Doors open 7:30pm

Reading at 8pm 

***

Poetic Research Bureau

951 Chung King Road

Chinatown, Los Angeles