Support the Poetic Research Bureau

Dear friends, poets, and friends of poets:

It’s been awhile since we’ve reached out like this! While we’ve been opening up our humble living room to all comers since 2010, and hosting events across LA for many years prior, October marked only our second full year as an independent nonprofit and “literary service in the public domain.”

We’d love your help to keep the momentum going. As always, we aspire to keep our calendar full, and it’s our intention to do so as long as the doors to 951 Chung King Road remain open. We hope that you will support the PRB by making a year-end tax-deductible donation.

In 2017 the Poetic Research Bureau held nearly 60 readings and performances from its storefront in Chinatown in Los Angeles. And we’ve endeavored to expand our programming over the past year with new series, hosts and offsite events, including:

• THIS KNOWN WORLD: Spontaneous Particulars of the Poetic Research Bureau, an exhibition and reading series that took place at MOCA Storefront from January 16 to June 28, 2017 
• Desert Poetry, a three day poetry festival that included workshops, talks, screenings and readings that took place in Joshua Tree over a windy weekend in April ((and organized in collaboration with some of our favorite writers)
• @SEA, our ongoing Sunday afternoon “live magazine” of film, music, performance and talks 
• The Mingus School, Harmony Holiday’s sound and word workshop of radical poetics, deep listening and archival research 

In addition, we’ve brought on new curators to keep our programming fresh and informally ranging, and we’ve initiated new collaborations with existing organizations such as ALOUD at the Central Library and the Villa Aurora artist residency. We also provide a working space for other artist and activist run projects like the Reader’s Chorus and The Public School.

We have several exciting things planned for 2018, including our ongoing busy schedule at Chung King Road, and an expansion and formalization of our extensive chapbook and magazine archive. Your contribution gives us the opportunity to continue to provide a space for free and open readings and performances, new publications, and support for traveling writers. Any size contribution is welcome.

Holiday hugs,

Joseph & Andrew
Poetic Research Bureau

Saturday, December 16: Man's Wars & Wickedness

Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz invite you to join us for a launch/reading in honor of their new collaborative book –

Mans Wars and Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies and Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, and Ill-will

Saturday Night
December 16th

Doors 7:30pm
Event 8:00 pm

~

The book is based on the idea of words being medicine - taking us into spaces of dissolution and re-emergence. Amanda and Harold have had an ongoing collaboration also thinking about how we literally ingest/digest language to create unexpected personal transformations, spark our intuitive genius, and embody surprising antidotes to tyranny.

Launching the book with us will be:

The Nine Herbs Charm Collective (Saewon Oh, Eric Kim Hannah Mjolsnes) – conducting a plant ceremony for an herbal antidote. Nine Herbs Charm consists of Hannah Mjølsnes, Eric Kim, Saewon Oh and the nine plants described in an Old English poem first recorded in the 11th century. They perform ceremonies and create environments for encounters with these plants, whose history is closely interconnected with our own.

Eric Heep leading The Reader's Chorus – performing a newly written score based on text from the book! The Reader’s Chorus is made up of LA composers, musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and poets. Inspired by the possibilities of a group of speaking voices we write for, experiment with, and perform the sound of reading.

+ readings by

Joseph Mosconi

Joseph Mosconi is a writer and taxonomist based in Los Angeles. He co-directs the Poetic Research Bureau and co-edits the art & lit mag Area Sneaks. He is the author of Fright Catalog, Demon Miso/Fashion In Child, and other books. Writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The Third Rail, Fillip, Material Press, Best Experimental American Writing and other journals.

Sam Cohen

Sam Cohen's fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Fence, Gulf Coast, Black Clock, Two Serious Ladies, Pank, and other journals, and as a chapbook on Birds of Lace. She is working on a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California and is the founder of the online journal Yes Femmes.

Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz

Amanda Ackerman’s publications include the Book of Feral Flora, Unfo Burns a Million Dollars, and the scented pamphlet Air Kissing. Her work focuses largely on the feralscape, divining techniques that allow for communication across species boundaries. With Dan Richert, she is working on a series of projects using biofeedback and multi-sensory techniques that allow plants to create poems. Their olfactory installation Unknown Giants is currently part of The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology’s A New We in Norway’s Kuntshall Trondheim gallery. With Harold Abramowitz, she co-edits the press eohippus labs.

Harold Abramowitz's books include Blind Spot, Not Blessed, Dear Dearly Departed, and UNFO Burns A Million Dollars. Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs, and writes and edits as part of the collaborative projects, SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO. He teaches in the Department of General Studies at Charles R. Drew University in Los Angeles.


~

Collaboratively constructed and conceived, Man’s Wars and Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies and Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, and Ill-Will is a book that sets out to accomplish exactly what it says it does…

Taking as its point of departure allegories and alchemical texts, Man’s Wars and Wickedness dissolves and transmutes a multiplicity of narrative forms into a book of its own kind, a sui generis work of literature. A timely book, Man’s Wars and Wickedness takes on the dangerous fictions that become our collective realities. In the country of Swabia, a place with, among other elements, a paper mill, a new bible, an acting mayor, a doctor, a blue ox, a great war, someone finds millions and millions of pages of manifestos fluttering in the air, and on the street…

//

Man’s Wars and Wickedness is a high drama set in “the healthiest region in all Europe.” A county of rolling hills and crooning cherry trees. A land irrevocably shaped by the great war in its past, its future. Herein lies the drama… Virtuosic, Man’s Wars and Wickedness swerves between narrative voices and forms, offering the reader a rash of mysteries to explore: who is the true bad guy? Is the world really ending? What language can I trust? In this sense, Man’s Wars and Wickedness is a necessary book for our times.

— Elizabeth Hall, author of I Have Devoted My Life to The Clitoris

Now available from Bon Aire Projects

http://www.bonaireprojects.com/mans_wars

Friday, December 16: Be About It + Now That's What I Call Poetry

Now That's What I Call Poetry
& Be About It
present
A Reading in Los Angeles

featuring
PAIGE ELIZABETH GRESTY
JEREMY HIGHT
MEGAN LENT
RACHEL OLSON
MIRANDA TSANG
& VIVA PADILLA

hosted by
ALEXANDRA NAUGHTON
GRANT LEUNING
& YESENIA PADILLA

Friday, December 15 2017

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

~

Paige Elizabeth Gresty is a writer and filmmaker from Washington, DC by way of London, England. She received her MFA in film directing from UCLA. As an emerging filmmaker, she's written scripts for James Franco and is currently a finalist in several competitions such as the Academy Awards' Nicholl Fellowships. Her writing work has been featured in places such as The Guardian. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Chris and cat Bey.

Jeremy Hight has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cal Arts.. He has published two books of prose (What Remains published by Free Dogma Press and I Am The Ghost Here published by Be About It). He is currently making poems from gifs posted on Facebook and working on a novel about a ghost with an existential crisis. He teaches Creative Writing and English Comp and lives with his soul mate Lisa and his amazing cat Samson.

Megan Lent is a writer and filmmaker. You can see her work onvimeo.com/meganlent. Her poetry chapbook I Will Dance When I Am Dead is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl press. She lives in LA.

Rachel Olson is a former urban planner who lives and works in San Francisco. Her previously published works can be found in Be About It Zine #14: The Internet, Be About It online, and Electric Cereal. She enjoys club soda and drives along the coast.
Follow her on twitter @rachelsolson.

Viva Padilla es poeta. She is an editor, writer, and independent publisher. She was born/raised/ is based in South Central Los Angeles. She publishes through her company Ponte Las Pilas Press and runs Dryland: Los Angeles Underground Art & Writing, a literary journal for the people since 2015. She also runs the SoulCentral Writer's Workshop also based in South Central. You can find her sitting somewhere in space. Also on the internet at facebook.com/vivapadillapoeta

Grant Leuning is a writer and artist in the San Diego / Tijuana border region. He is the co-curator of the long-running San Diego reading series NOW That’s What I Call Poetry, filibustero in El Comité Magonista, and the author of three books of poetry; I Don’t Want to Die in the Ocean, A Million Dollars Isn't Cool, You Know What's Cool, A Billion Dollars and most recently, Piss Cameron, a political grotesque.

Miranda Tsang is a writer and educator from San Francisco. She has received scholarships from Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her writing is published in Lumen, Public Pool, The Offing, and New Life Quarterly where she is a columnist and reviewer.

Yesenia Padilla is a founding editor and editor-in-chief of Lumen Magazine, a literary magazine founded for and by women and non-binary people. Yesenia also co-curates Now That's What I Call Poetry, a monthly experimental poetry night in Southern California. Her work has been published in Queen Mob's Teahouse, Complex, and as part of the Websafe2k16 project.

Alexandra Naughton is an author, publisher and organizer. She runs a small press called Be About It and is published widely across the web and in print. Find out more at alexandranaughton.com

Saturday, December 9: Claudia Castro Luna & Margaret Rhee

Claudia Castro Luna & Margaret Rhee
With Lucy Burns, Mark Marino, Sean Pessin, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell & SA Smythe
Hosted by Harold Abramowitz & Andrea Quaid

Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Through readings of robots, bodies, violence and love, a celebration and invocation of two new debut poetry collections by Margaret Rhee and Claudia Castro Luna.

Readers include Lucy Burns, Mark Marino, Sean Pessin, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell and SA Smythe.

Salvadorean and Korean food, along with poetry cake provided. Plus wine.

Special thanks to: Harold Abramowitz and Andrea Quaid

~

Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017) by Margaret Rhee is a collection of love poetry that humanizes our relationship with technology. This vision of an artificially intelligent future reveals and questions the contours of the human, and how robots and humans fall in and out of love.

In Claudia Castro Luna's epic poetry collection, Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) Luna, both poetically and physically, settles spaces that were unclaimed by Latinas. Her inscription of the disappeared women of Juárez is a live cartographic image of struggle and spiritual survival." -- Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Ph.D., A Most Improbable Life, and The Runaway Poems: A Manual of Love

~

Claudia Castro Luna served as Seattle’s first Civic Poet from 2015-201 and is the author of This City (Floating Bridge Press). She is a Hedgebrook and VONA alumna, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant and a Jack Straw Fellow. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, City Arts and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, among others. Her non-fiction work can be read in the anthologies, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the US, (Northwestern University Press); Vanishing Points: Contemporary Salvadoran Narrative, (Kalina Eds) and forthcoming in This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press). Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.

Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar. She is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. Literary fellowships include Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and the Kathy Acker Fellowship. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study.

Lucy Burns’s writings on the racial politics of performance, the performance of race, the Philippines, and Filipino diaspora are published in several journals including The Dance Research Journal, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, The Asian American Literary Review, and The Writing Instructor. Her book, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire is published by the NYU Press (2012). As a dramaturg, Burns has collaborated with notable artists such as David Rousseve (choreographer and theater director), R. Zamora Linmark (writer), and TeAda Productions (theater). Among l m.s.p. b’s writing projects is Personating Robots, Impersonating Humans, a book on the racialization of Asian/Americans as a robot race. IG: @resistancecompanions

Mark C. Marino is a writer and scholar of electronic literature living in Los Angeles. His works include “ a show of hands” (http://hands.literatronica.net/), “Living Will”(http://markcmarino.com/tales/livingwill.html), and "The Ballad of Workstudy Seth"(http://www.springgunpress.com/the-ballad-of-workstudy-seth). His recent work includes Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House (http://markcmarino.com/mrsw/), a collection of interactive stories that he is writing with his children. He is the Director of Communication of the Electronic Literature Organization. (portfolio here: http://markcmarino.com/) He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (http://haccslab.com/), a collaboratory exploring the explication of computer source code. When he is not masquerading as Spencer Pratt or Heidi Montag on social media, Mark writes netprov and makes homemade pasta sauce in Los Angeles.

Sean Pessin has lived in Los Angeles his whole life. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from California State University, Northridge (where he teaches), and an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design. He counts among his projects agape: a journal of literary good will; Magra Books; Red Right Hand Press. His work has appeared in Interfictions Online, The New Short Fiction Series, Liminoid Magazine, and CRAG, and is always fabulous and strange and queer.

Jessica Ceballos (y Campbell) is an indige/me/xicana-afro-euskaldunak interdisciplinary artist, a community activist and advocate. Her interests are centered on exploring the liminal intersections of art and personal narrative, and how those are affected by and inform the spaces we occupy and exist in. Her written work has been published in various journals and anthologies, and she’s published two chapbooks; Gent Re Place Ing: A Response (2016) and End of the Road (2017). She is currently working on a collection of poetry/prose centered on a 1984 visit to Disneyland with her mother after reunification from foster care, tentatively titled, Happiest Place on Earth. www.jessicaceballos.com

SA Smythe is a Black genderqueer writer currently living between London and LA, constantly scheming up new ways for us to get free. SA is the publishing editor for THEM - Trans Literary Journal and associate editor for Scarf Magazine. They have poetry published (and/or have work forthcoming) in phren-Z, the nines, Johannesburg Salon, Strike!, and Black Trans Love Is Trans Wealth: An Anthology. Their writing has been featured in Critical Contemporary Journal, okayafrica, and elsewhere. SA also does translation work in six languages and organises in Black queer and trans abolitionist writing collectives around the world. They are currently working on their poetry collection, tentatively titled but do you have reparations money? Follow them on Twitter @essaysmythe.