Join Commune Editions (Juliana Spahr, Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes)
and The Public School Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon for a discussion
about the limits and possibilities of militant publishing and poetics.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
1pm
The Public School @ 951CKR
951 Chung King Rd
Chinatown, Los Angeles
Part 2 of a two day event with Commune Editions.
Saturday night: Poetry
Sunday afternoon: Discussion
We will discuss the essays by Commune Editions recently posted on Jacket2:
http://jacket2.org/commentary/jasper-bernes-joshua-clover-and-juliana-spahr
Commune
Editions publishes poetry and other writings antagonistic to capital
and the state. In the struggle against these entrenched adversaries,
poetry is no replacement for concrete forms of action: strikes,
blockades, occupations and riots, as well as the meetings, houses,
libraries, and shared resources that enable them. But poetry can be a
voice for these activities and their companion. Like Kanellos, the riot
dog of Athens, Commune Editions accompanies the movements of the
streets, providing support and strangeness, and perhaps, on occasion,
biting the leg of a cop threatening a comrade.
~
Juliana
Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the
collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people and Commune
Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. With David Buuck she
wrote Army of Lovers, a book about two friends who are writers in a time
of war and ecological collapse and also the symposium Beyond Oakland.
She has edited with Stephanie Young A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some
Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of
Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), with
Joan Retallack Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary
(Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine American Women Poets in the
21st Century (Wesleyan U P, 2002). With Joshua Clover, she has twice
organized somewhat free schools, the 95 cent Skool (summer of 2010) and
the Durruti Free Skool (summer of 2011), written on politics, on
manifestos, applied for a job at the Poetry Foundation, and organized,
with Chris Chen too, the conference Poetry and/or Revolution.
Joshua
Clover is working on a book about forms of struggle, Of Riot (Verso.
2016); his book of poetry, Red Epic, will be published in 2015. He has
collaborated on poetry, critical writing, and conferences with Chris
Nealon, Chris Chen, Aaron Benanav, Annie McClanahan, Louis Schwartz,
Jasper Bernes, and Juliana Spahr; with the lattermost two, he edits
Commune Editions.
Jasper Bernes is a lecturer in the English
Department at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Starsdown (2007). Recent
poems and essays can be found in Modern Language Quarterly, The American
Reader, Lana Turner, Los Angeles Review of Books and Endnotes. He is
presently at work on a long poem, We Are Nothing and So Can You, a
selection of which he published as a chapbook in 2012. With Juliana
Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune Editions.
