Tuesday, January 31: Mohsen Emadi

No Ban:
An Evening of Poetry and Protest
with
Mohsen Emadi

Following President Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations, Phoneme Media is proud to announce an event featuring exiled Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi, who will not be permitted to return to the United States following his departure on Friday, February 3rd, 2017.

No Ban: An Evening of Poetry and Protest, will take place at 7.30 PM on January 31, 2017, at the Poetic Research Bureau in Chinatown (951 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

Mohsen Emadi, who has been in exile from Iran for eight years and now resides permanently in Mexico, will be introduced by Phoneme’s founding editor David Shook before reading from his English-language debut Standing on Earth, translated from the Persian by American poet Lyn Coffin. Books will be available for purchase.

Called “one of the brightest stars of twenty-first century Persian poetry” by Sholeh Wolpé, Emadi is renowned for his inspired performance of his own work. His poems have been praised by Jerome Rothenberg, Sam Hamill, and Nathalie Handal, who writes, “The poems in his unforgettable collection ground us, and give us flight.”

Review copies of Standing on Earth are available, and Mohsen Emadi is available for interview. Contact David Shook at david@phonememedia.org.

***

Doors open 7:30pm

Reading at 8pm 

***

Poetic Research Bureau

951 Chung King Road

Chinatown, Los Angeles

Magra Books Launch: Sunday, January 29 at 4pm

 

 

Please join us Sunday, January 29, from 4 to 5pm, at the Poetic Research Bureau in celebrating the inaugural season of titles from the independent publisher, Magra Books.

Reading from their new books will be Martha Ronk, The Unfamiliar Familiar, and Dennis Phillips, Desert Sequence.

Part of the presentation will be a memorial tribute to Ray DiPalma (1943-2016), whose For a Curved Surface is also one of Magra’s initial offerings.

Based in Los Angeles and Tuscany, Magra Books is a series of chapbooks, printed in editions of 300 copies, featuring unique works by important writers. Each volume, typically 32 pages in length, presents writers who are up to the all-encompassing challenge of producing work that strives to make “news that stays news.” Writers who are passionate about language, language that knows no borders.

Hosting the event will be Paul Vangelisti and Sean Pessin, part of Magra Book’s editorial staff.

Saturday, Jan 21: Stacey Tran & James Gendron

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

STACEY TRAN & JAMES GENDRON

Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, OR. Her work can be found in The Fanzine, diaCRITICS, GRAMMA, and The Volta, among others. Wendy's Subway is releasing her first chapbook, FAKE HAIKU (February 2017). www.staceytran.com

James Gendron is the author of Weirde Sister and Sexual Boat (Sex Boats), both from Octopus Books. His poetry has appeared in Tin House, The PEN Poetry Series, Fence, Witch Craft Magazine, and The Fanzine. His aura is purple.

* * *

Saturday, January 21 2017
Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Poetic Research Bureau

951 Chung King Rd

Chinatown, Los Angeles

Sunday, Dec 18th @ Hammer Museum: "@SEA #12, BORDERLESS"

The PRB's final event of 2016 is at the Hammer Museum this Sunday afternoon from 11am to 5pm. We present the twelfth installment of @SEA, our live magazine of interdisciplinary art and performance.

This Sunday's theme is the BORDERLESS.

11:30 a.m.: Patty Chang & David Kelley, Flotsam Jetsam

Patty Chang (1972, San Leandro, CA) lives and works in Boston, MA.  Chang works primarily with performance and video.  She has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the New Museum, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museet Moderna, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Fri-Art Centre d'Art Contemporain Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland.  She is a 2014 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.

David Kelley’s work is a hybrid of experimental documentary and ethnographic practices that make use of imaginary, choreographic and performative strategies. His work has been shown in galleries throughout the world. Recently, he has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, White Box in Portland Oregon, and Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. Other recent exhibitions include The Bank in Shanghai, New Art Center, the de Cordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Brisbane Australia, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. A 2010 -11 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, Kelley received a Master of Fine Art from University of California, Irvine. He is currently based in Boston, Massachusetts and is Associate Professor in the Roski School of Art and Design at USC.

Noon: Kate Dollenmayer

Kate Dollenmayer is a filmmaker and the Audiovisual Archivist at the Wende Museum in Culver City, which collects and preserves art, artifacts, archives, films, and personal histories from Cold War–era Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union relating to the period 1945–1991. Her illuminated lecture COLD WORM (time, auto-corrected) was performed at the Velaslavasy Panorama earlier this year.

12:30 p.m.: C.S. Giscombe

C. S. Giscombe’s poetry books are Prairie Style, Giscome Road, Here, etc.; his book of linked essays (concerning Canada, race, and family) is Into and Out of Dislocation.    Ohio Railroads (a poem in essay form) was published in 2014 and Border Towns (essays on poetry, color, nature, television, etc.) will appear in 2016.  His recognitions include the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award, an American Book Award (for Prairie Style) and the Carl Sandburg Prize (for Giscome Road).  Projects underway include a prose book titled Railroad Sense (having to do with trains and other forms of public transportation) and a poetry book titled Negro Mountain.  C. S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is curator of the Mixed Blood readings, talks, and publication series.  He is a long-distance cyclist.

1 p.m.: Harmony Holiday, Improvising the Mingus School

Harmony Holiday is a poet, dancer, and archivist, mythscientist and the author of Negro League Baseball (Fence, 2011), Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues (Ricochet, 2014), and Hollywood Forever (forthcoming from Fence, fall 2015). She was the winner of a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and she curates the Afrosonics archive, a collection of rare and out-of print LPs and soundbites featuring poetry and poetics from throughout the African Diaspora, both analog at Columbia University's music library and digitally as a Tumblr. Her record label, Mythscience Records, devoted to making titles from the archive available to the public by way of reissues in both vinyl and digital formats, is forthcoming, starting with the reissue of Amiri Baraka's Black Spirits: New Voices in African American Literature LP.

1:30 p.m.: LA Fog

LA Fog is an experimental music group composed of woodwinds and strings. LA Fog is Kelly Coats, Kathleen Kim, Giles Miller and Jonathan Silberman. All four members of LA Fog compose music for the group to play, and the compositions include structures for improvisation along with traditional and non-traditional scores.

2:30 p.m.: Asher Hartman, Da Real Izzard Gizzard, performed by Paul Outlaw

Asher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist whose work at the junction of performance and theater focuses on the understanding of the self in relation to Western histories and ideologies.
 
Paul Outlaw is a performing arts multi-hyphenate who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since the turn of the millennium. Recent collaborators include performance artist Mariel Carranza and the experimental hip-hop trio clipping. For more on Paul, please visit outlawplay.com

3 p.m.: Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines is the author of MERCURY (2011), COEUR DE LION (2007), & THE COW (2006), all from Fence, the Obie-Winning play TELEPHONE (2009), & the translator of Preliminary Notes for a Theory of the Young-Girl by TIQQUN & The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real by Jean-Luc Hennig, from Semiotext(e).  Her performances include MORTAL KOMBAT (2014) at the Whitney, LORNA (2013) at the Martin E. Segal Theatre, & THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD (2013) at Stuart Shave Modern Art in London.  An essay collection from Semiotext(e) & A SAND BOOK, new poems, will be out in 2018.  She astrologizes via lazyeyehaver.com & lives in Queens.

3:30 p.m.: Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (forthcoming, Wave Books April 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books 2009). Julian is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country band The Western Skyline (www.thewesternskyline.org). Currently in Queens, NY, Julian also sometimes lives in California.

4 p.m.: Peter Bo Rappmund, Tectonics

Peter Bo Rappmund is a Dallas-based interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates environments by way of experiments in the perception of time. He has shown at a variety of venues, including: MoMA; Centro Cultural São Paulo; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; National Maritime Museum, London; Musée d'ethnographie, Neuchâtel; California Academy of Sciences; and the New York, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor, CPH:DOX, Jeonju, Viennale, and Locarno International Film Festivals. PBR teaches at the University of Texas, Arlington.

* * *

  

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
90024

(310) 443-7000 

All Hammer Museum programs are free.

December 10: Emily Hunt & Sophie Reiff

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

EMILY HUNT
& SOPHIE REIFF

Saturday, December 10 2016
Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Emily Hunt is a writer and artist living in Oakland, CA. Her poetry collection Dark Green was published by The Song Cave in 2015. Her poems have appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, The Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” Series, The Iowa Review, TYPO, The Volta, Diagram, and elsewhere. Brave Men Press published This Always Happens, a book of Hunt's drawings, in 2013.

Sophie Reiff is a writer and performer living in Los Angeles. She writes about humor, grief, ethnography, botany, and decolonization. She is sometimes a lounge singer in a bowling alley. She studies in the Writing MFA program at Calarts.

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Road
Chinatown
Los Angeles, CA
900012

Friday, December 9: Andrea Abi-Karam, Emji Spero & Carlé Brioso

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

The Desert Lust Tour
with
ANDREA ABI-KARAM
CARLÉ BRIOSO
& EMJI SPERO

Friday, December 9 2016
Doors 7:30pm
Reading 8pm

Andrea Abi-Karam is a mixed race genderqueer punk poet writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. They recently completed the manuscript EXTRATRANSMISSION a book length piece against how patriarchy and US militarism produce the hypergendered subject. Andrea’s most recent piece THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, September 2016) attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. From 2012-2015 Andrea co-founded with Drea Marina, Words of Resistance a monthly radical queer open floor poetry night aimed at creating space for folks to share their work, especially if unpolished and messy. Andrea is both a writer, printer, & publisher whose founding small press project Mess Editions seeks to publish emerging writing from queers, people of color, and those involved in social movements yet uninvolved in poetry & art scenes.

Emji Spero is a performance artist and writer living in Oakland, California. They are an editor at Timeless, Infinite Light and the author of almost any shit will do. They are currently working on Exhaustion: A Retching, a dry lyric essay that documents the affective weight of the accumulated, subthreshold violences, which daily permeate a body in transition. Code-switching between poetry and essay, Spero explores Jose Muñoz’s notion that “utopia exists in the quotidian.”

Carlé Brioso is a Afro-latine Boricua {ˈtrænz}nonbinary translation artist, poet, painter and linguistics nerd. They illustrated the book, El Mundo No Es Otra Cosa, by La Secta de Los Perros. They are a disabilities advocate, no más muertes volounteer, translator and simutaneos interpreter. They’re very passionate about [persistir] a third, nonbinary pronoun and gender neutralizations to dismantle patriarchal linguistics in Spanish morphology. Proponemos que se utilize “elle” como tercer pronombre no-binario en español.

Their art studies visual aspects of phonology soundwave mappings creating cross-modal content to confront ableisms in oppressive structuralisms and [hjil] heal. Through translation-forms they explore metalinguistic translation theory across tongues, mediums, genders and border lands.

~

Poetic Research Bureau
951 Chung King Road
Chinatown
Los Angeles

December 3: Launch of Angel City Review #4

Celebrating the release of issue 4 of Angel City Review, a free online journal begun in 2014, a series of launch readings begins on December 3rd at the Poetic Research Bureau in Chinatown.

Readers include: Will Alexander, Jian Huang, Sesshu Foster, Rocio Carlos and Mark Valley.

Will Alexander is a poet, aphorist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, and native of Los Angeles. The author of nearly thirty books, his awards and honors include a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001, a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2007, and an American Book Award in 2013 for Singing In Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose, Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture. In 2016 he was awarded the prestigious Jackson Prize for poetry, which is among the most substantial given to an American poet.

Jian Huang’s parents brought her to the United States from Shanghai, China, when she was six years old. She grew up in South Los Angeles and earned her degree in Art History from the University of Southern California. She has worked for several social service organizations, including LA Conservation Corps, Homeboy Industries and LA County Arts Commission. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Los Angeles Review of Books, ALOUD, and Tongue & Groove among others. She is the recipient of a 2016 PEN Emerging Voices fellowship. Jian is currently working on her first memoir about the humorous and lonely journey to the American Dream.

Sesshu Foster’s poems have recently appeared in Párrafo, The Poetry Loft, La Bloga, The L.A. Telephone Book. Vol. 1, CultureStr/ke, Ping Pong, Lana Turner Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A video version of his poem, “The Movie Version: Hell to Eternity,” by artist Aturo Romo-Santillano was exhibited in Washington DC at the Smithsonian’s “Crosslines” May 2016 exhibit. His most recent books are Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook, which won the American Book Award. He has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 30 years. He has also taught writing at the University of Iowa, Pomona College, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Naropa University at the California Institute of the Arts.

Rocío Carlos is the author of A World Below (Mindmade books, 2014) and co-author of ex her pt (wirecutter collective, 2016). Selections of her collaborative work in progress with Rachel McLeod Kaminer, Attendance appear in Cultural Weekly. She lives and works in Los Ángeles.

Mark Valley is an accomplished film and television actor, West Point Graduate and Army Veteran who now lives in Los Angeles, CA. He is a comic and writer as well, slugging it out writing several TV pilots, one of which is being shot in November in his hometown in Northern New York. He is just recently started submitting his stories for publication. He is an advocate for veteran’s causes, mental health, and urban cycling.

~

Saturday, December 3

7:30 - 10:00 pm

Poetic Research Bureau

951 Chung King Road

Chintown 

Open to all. Free.