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.

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.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

Sandra Simonds & Joseph Thomas

Thursday, August 13 2009 at 8:00pm

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

Doors open at 7:30pm
Reading starts at 8:00pm

$5 donation requested

Sandra Simonds is the author of one poetry collection, Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008) and several chapbooks. Warsaw Bikini was a finalist for many poetry book prizes including the National Poetry Series. Her poems have been published in Fence, Columbia Poetry Review, Lana Turner, Verse and others. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband, two dogs and newborn son.

A libertine of unimpeachable taste, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. is an assistant professor of English at San Diego State University’s National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. He is the author of two books, Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry (Wayne State UP, 2007) and Strong Measures (Make Now Press, 2007). Poetry’s Playground was named a 2009 honor book by the Children’s Literature Association.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

A Benefit Reading for Palm Press
with Rob Halpern, Kristin Palm, David Buuck, Harold Abramowitz & Dana Teen Lomax

Friday, July 17 2009 at 7:00pm

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

Doors open at 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm

$5 donation requested

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya Books, 2004) and Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2009). His collaboration with Taylor Brady, Snow Sensitive Skin (Atticus / Finch 2007), will soon be reissued by Displaced Press. Music for Porn is also forthcoming. Currently, he’s co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the second of which, “Commitment or the Crisis of Language," appears in the Review of Contemporary Fiction alongside his own essay on Perec. Rob is an active participant in the Nonsite Collective. He lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Kristin Palm’s book, The Straits (two long poems about Detroit, her former hometown), was published last year by the serendipitously named Palm Press. Her writing has also appeared in various journals, including Boog City, Chain, There, Dusie and LVNG, the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), and numerous magazines and newspapers. Kristin lives in San Francisco, where she works at a children’s art museum and teaches poetry in the public schools.

David Buuck lives in Oakland. He is the author of The Shunt & several booklets of cross-genre writing. He is the founder of BARGE (the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics) & a writing teacher.

Harold Abramowitz is a writer and editor from Los Angeles. His books and chapbooks include Not Blessed (forthcoming Les Figues Press, 2009), Sin is to Celebration (collaboration with Amanda Ackerman, House Press, 2009), Dear Dearly Departed (Palm Press, 2008), Sunday, or A Summer’s Day (PS Books, 2008), and Three Column Table (Insert Press, 2007). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs, and co-curates the experimental cabaret event series Late Night Snack.

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Disclosure (Dusie, 2009), Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006), Room (a+bend press, 1999), and the co-editor of Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). She is currently editing Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children and teaching at Marin Juvenile Hall and San Francisco State University.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

K. Lorraine Graham, Amaranth Borsuk & Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Saturday, June 27 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

We will be celebrating the release of K. Lorraine Graham's new book TERMINAL HUMMING just out from Edge Books.

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, June 2009) and several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take Home Project. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. She currently lives in southern California with her partner, Mark Wallace, and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at terminalhumming.blogspot.com

Amaranth Borsuk is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is currently collaborating with Gabriela Jauregui on translations and transversions of Oulipo poet Paul Braffort's My Hypertropes. Selections from that project have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Denver Quarterly, Pool, Columbia, ZYZZYVA, and CRATE, among others. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Writing Technologies, Slope, and International Journal of Women's Studies. She is interested in digital poetics and textual materiality, and works part time in the letterpress studio at Otis College of Art and Design.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and two chapbooks, Sorcery (Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv) and The Great Wheel (MaCaHu Press). He teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

BRUCE ANDREWS & DEBORAH MEADOWS

Friday, June 26 2009 at 7:00pm

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

Doors open at 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm

$5 donation requested

Bruce Andrews is "a performance artist and poet whose texts are some of the most radical of the Language school; his poetry tries to cast doubt on each and every 'natural' construction of language" (The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English). A founding editor of the key journalL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Andrews has maintained a consistent position at the radical edge of the literary avant-garde. Author of over thirty volumes of poetry, and a collection of innovative critical essays (Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis, with a load of books, shorter texts, interviews, essays, recordings & commentary online at the Electronic Poetry Center, Ubu, PennSound, Eclipse, Jacket & Wikipedia). He has lived in New York City since 1975, teaching political science at Fordham University (see YouTube for his 5 minute dust-up with Bill O’Reilly), and since the mid-80s has been Music Director & sound designer for Sally Silvers & Dancers. [Sally, by the way, is in town performing with Yvonne Rainer at Red Cat this week, June 25 to 28.]

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her most recent book of poetry is from Shearsman Press entitled Goodbye Tissues. Other works of poetry include: involutia (Shearsman Press, UK, 2007), The Draped Universe(Belladonna* Books, 2007), Thin Gloves (Green Integer, 2006), Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004), and two chapbooks, Growing Still (Tinfish Press, 2005) and “The 60’s and 70’s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (Tinfish Press, 2003). Her Electronic Poetry Center author page is located: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/meadows/

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

BRIAN KIM STEFANS, BRANDON DOWNING & STAN APPS

Saturday, June 6 2009 at 4pm

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

Doors open at 3:00pm
Reading starts at 4pm

$5 donation requested

Wine and snacks served before the reading

Brian Kim Stefans' recent books include Kluge: A Meditation, and other works (Roof, 2007), What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), and Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2007). His digital works such as "The Dreamlife of Letters" and "Star Wars, One Letter at a Time" have been shown in gallery settings worldwide; many of these can be found at his website, www.arras.net. He is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA, specializing in poetry and electronic writing.

Brandon Downing is a videomaker, visual artist, and writer originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry collections include The Shirt Weapon (Germ, 2002), and Dark Brandon (Faux, 2005). An online gallery featuring his photographic work can be seen online at http://brandondowning.org. A feature-length DVD collection of recent video works, Dark Brandon // Eternal Classics, was released in 2007, and a monograph of his literary collages, Lake Antiquity, will be published by Fence Books this fall.

Stan Apps writes poems and essays. His books include: God's Livestock Policy (Les Figues, 2008), Handbook of Poetic Language (eohippus labs, 2008), Grover Fuel (Scantily Clad e-book, 2009) and Info Ration (Make Now, 2007). A chapbook of Sonnets is forthcoming soon from Peachpit Press, and his essays will be collected as The World As Phone Bill (Combo Books) late this year. Stan's poetry emphasizes direct statement, obviousness, economics, and the phatic nature of the self-explanatory.