Friday, October 26: David Abel & Mark Wallace

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

DAVID ABEL
& MARK WALLACE

Friday, October 27 2017

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

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David Abel is a poet, editor, and educator, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop & Gallery in Portland, Oregon. He is currently touring with two new books: Selected Durations, a limited-edition, letterpress artist’s book published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno, and XIV Eclipses, a book of poems from Couch Press in Portland. With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series, and since moving to Portland at the end of the last millenium he has published twenty-five issues of the free poetry & art broadside series Envelope.

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a novel, Crab, and book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy. Selections of his multi-part long poem The End of America, which he has been writing since 2005, have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in San Diego, California.

Saturday, October 21: Louise Mathias, Elena Karina Byrne & Steffi Drewes

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

LOUISE MATHIAS
ELENA KARINA BYRNE
& STEFFI DREWES

Saturday, October 21 2017

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

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Louise Mathias is the author of two books of poems, Lark Apprentice, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize, and The Traps (Four Way Books), as well as a chapbook Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest, chosen by Martha Ronk for the Burnside Review Chapbook competition. Raised in England and Los Angeles, for the last eight years she has lived in Joshua Tree where she drives around the Mojave taking photos and writing poems about wildflowers, desolation, sex and trash.

Multi-media artist, editor, Poetry Consultant / Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Elena Karina Byrne is the author of Squander (Omnidawn 2016), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press 2002). She just completed a collection of essays entitled, Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art & Desire. Her book reviews and poetry publications include the Pushcart Prize XXXIII, Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, APR, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Slate, Volt, Diode, OmniVerse, Verse, and BOMB.

Steffi Drewes is the author of Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press, 2016) and the chapbooks Magnetic Forest, Cartography Askew, History of Drawing Circles, and New Animal (forthcoming 2017, Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as 6x6, Eleven Eleven, Laurel Review, MAKE Literary Magazine, and in the anthology It’s Night in San Francisco But It’s Sunny in Oakland (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014). This spring she also debuted a custom set of photo-based tarot cards in performance at The Wassaic Project Summer Exhibit: Vagabond Time Killers in New York. She works as a freelance writer and editor in the Bay Area.

Sunday afternoon, Oct 15th: @SEA #16 "The/oral"

The Poetic Research Bureau's Sunday live magazine returns, with hauntings from Vienna, New Mexico, Buenos Aires and beyond. The sixteenth episode is focus on the theme of "the/oral" – voice, oral history, the guttural, the sung.

Featuring:

Philipp Schmickl (Vienna) – talk
Chelsea Rector (Los Angeles) – folk-song & active listening
Jon Davis (New Mexico) – translation & poetry
Nelson Carlo De Los Santos – film excerpt
Andrew Choate & Jeremy Kennedy – voice & falsely ethereal music

Doors 1pm
Event 1:30pm-3:30pm

* * *

Philipp Schmickl is the editor of "THEORAL – oral music histories and interesting interviews", a rhizomatiqc and continuously growing web of stories and thoughts in- and outside of the experimental music scene. In his talk "On being a medium" he will try to point out the guiding principles of his work.

Chelsea Rector performs Young Tambling: "I will listen, unaccompanied. She will sing, unaccompanied. "Young Tambling" is a folk-tale with a woman at the center of the narrative. She is mortal and is as impregnable as she is fallible. Saving the life of her beloved, in an enchanted forest, Chelsea Rector's adapted folk-song subtly resets the primary-text. As "Young Tambling" is performed, as it is sung, the terminology shifts from magical to relatable."

Jon Davis reads from recent work and translations of Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan. Jon is the author of six chapbooks and four books of poetry, including Preliminary Report (Copper Canyon, 2010) and Scrimmage of Appetite (University of Akron, 1995). He also co-translated Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2015) from the Arabic with author Naseer Hassan. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a Lannan Literary Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is Director of the Low Residency MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He occasionally performs as the peripatetic poet Chuck Calabreze.

We will screen an excerpt of Canciones De Cunas by Nelson Carlo De Los Santos. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias is a director and writer, originally from the Dominican Republic, and is known for Cocote (2017), Lullabies (2014) and Le Dernier des Bonbons (2011).

Andrew Choate & Jeremy Kennedy haint Los Angeles. They will perform "Philosophy Coaching," This performance uses the relationship between coaching and action to coax out an experience of musical activity as relatable, manipulable and un/imaginable. Advice translated live. Music falsely ethereal.

Postponed: Gillian Conoley & Martha Ronk

Due to the tragic fires in Northern California, which have impacted the friends and families of both Gillian Conoley and PRB programmers, we are postponing Saturday night's reading until later this fall. We wish our fellow Californians strength and resolve during a difficult time, and look forward to Gillian and Martha joining us soon. Let the water come.

October 7: Will Alexander & Aldon Lynn Nielsen

This Saturday night, Will Alexander reads at the Poetic Research Bureau with Aldon Lynn Nielsen, who will be launching his new book from Make Now Press, TRAY.

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

TRAY by A.L. Nielsen

With Tray Aldon Nielsen establishes himself as a formidable voice among American poets. And voice, his forte and bete noire, articulates social criticism as aesthetic form. The incantations of religious and secular crusades are rendered in the eponymous opening poem as live scratching by a deejay (call him History, or God): Gangster Zimmerman as another wanna-be gangsta. And in the poems that constitute “Escamotage,” the second half of the book, Nielsen’s penchant for puns, jokes and blues whimsy are offset by a deft lyricism that is, by turns, poignant (“Interval” is a touching homage to Lucille Clifton’s “The Lost Baby Poem”), humorous (“Clarence Farmer’s Complaint”) and celebratory (“Experimental Hope”). The common senses and uncommon sense delineated as Tray will be balm for our new dark age.
–Tyrone Williams

These days we’re trying to save us. These are some good poems about that.
–Rod Smith

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Will Alexander—poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, aphorist,visual artist, and pianist. He is author of over thirty books in the above mentioned genres. His latest book is one of aphorisms entitled Across The Vapour Gulf.

A.L. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry, and has appeared in both Best American Poetry (selected by John Ashbery) and Best American Experimental Writing (selected by Tracie Morris and Charles Bernstein). His previous books of poetry include Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, VEXT, Mixage, Mantic Semantic and A Brand New Beggar. He currently serves as the Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University, and previously taught at Howard University, San Jose State, UCLA, Central China Normal University and Loyola Marymount. His books of criticism include Reading Race, Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant and Integral Music. With Lauri Ramey he has edited two anthologies of innovative writings by African American poets. Other awards include The SAMLA Studies Prize, the Kayden Prize, the Darwin Turner Award, an American Book Award and the Josephine Miles Award. When not teaching at Penn State, he lives in Santa Barbara.