August 15/Linda Norton/Cedar Sigo/giovanni singleton‏

WHAT:

I mean there’s the thing and then what the thing really means. Don’t let what the thing means scare you away from the thing, okay? Linda Norton, Cedar Sigo, and giovanni singleton take on “resistance” in this 13^th installment, and the second season opener, of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Linda Norton is the author of the chapbook Hesitation Kit (Etherdome, 2007) and the essay The Great Depression and Me (Counterpath Press online, 2007). Her collages illustrate both these works, and appear on the covers of other books and magazines as well. Her poem Landscaping for Privacy was set to music by New York composer Eve Beglarian, and is available on the cd Tell the Birds and on iTunes. She is senior editor at the oral history office in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and was for many years the New York publicist and an acquisitions editor at the University of California Press, where she started the New California Poetry series with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, and Calvin Bedient. She is currently in search of a publisher for her recently-completed manuscript, The Public Gardens: Poem and History, and is back at work on her memoir and meditation, My Little Brown Book.

Cedar Sigo is 31 years old and moved to San Francisco in 1999. His books include two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse) and most recently Expensive Magic (House Press). He has given readings at The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, The Bowery Poetry Club, Beyond Baroque, The San Francisco Poetry Center, Small Press Traffic, and The San Francisco Art Institute, among others.

giovanni singleton, a native of Richmond, VA and former debutant, founded nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal committed to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Writers Workshop, and Cave Canem. Over the past 15 years, she has taught poetry at Saint Mary’s College and at museums and schools throughout the Bay Area. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Five Fingers Review, Aufgabe, Proliferation, Chain, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, Alehouse, Beyond the Frontier: African America Poets for the Millennium, the Best of Fence: An Anthology, and What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America (forthcoming).

WHEN:
Saturday, August 15, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.

Coming up next: September 19, 8pm – Julien Poirier, Cynthia Sailers, and Jacqueline Waters on “the un/familiar” . . .

June 20/Melissa Eleftherion/Norma Cole/ Jocelyn Saidenberg

WHAT:
But then you just have to take a deep breath and be like it’s ok. Melissa Eleftherion, Norma Cole, and Jocelyn Saidenberg take on “the incommensurate” in this twelfth installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Melissa Eleftherion grew up in Brooklyn. Her poetry has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Big Scream, Defenestration, Inch, TRY, and Ur Vox, as well as online in Womb and the press gang. Forthcoming work includes a long piece from Letterbox Magazine. She received her MFA from Mills College and lives in Oakland with a gorilla and a phoenix.

Norma Cole’s new work just out: Natural Light from Libellum Press, If I’m Asleep from Mermaid Tenement Press, and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 from City Lights. Forthcoming is 14,000 Things from a-bend press. Among her books are Collective Memory, Do the Monkey, and Spinoza in Her Youth. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert’s Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. Cole has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Jocelyn Saidenberg’s books are: Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series), CUSP (Kelsey St. Press), Negativity (Atelos), and Dispossessed (Belladonna). She is the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books.

WHEN:
Saturday, June 20, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.


Coming up next: August 15, 8pm – Filip Marinovich, Cedar Sigo, and giovanni singleton on “resistance” . . .

May 16/Laurel DeCou/Stan Apps/Bill Luoma

WHAT:

17908eihe oo_*@^Dh;Y**(!@^@*(^#)087j. Laurel DeCou, Stan Apps, and Bill Luoma answer all the “inarticulate” what what what and why why why in this eleventh installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Laurel DeCou thinks Oakland’s tight which is why she lives there. Her poetry has been published in the online journals (thus saving lots of paper) Coconut, There, and Cricket Online Review. Her work is forthcoming in Tea Party magazine as well. The time she spent working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center taught her just what it means to be physically inarticulate or speechless.

Stan Apps is reasonably good at writing poems, essays and emails, and dabbles in genres like plays and memoir. He lives in Los Angeles or Tampa. 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). Stan thinks San Francisco is nice, mostly because of the people. He often posts reviews, drafts of essays and loose thoughts on his blog at nonprovocativeurl.blogspot.com.

Bill Luoma is the author of My Trip to New York City and Western Love. He is a member of the subpress collective.

WHEN:
Saturday, May 16, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.



Coming up next: June 20, 8pm – Melissa Eleftherion, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Norma Cole on “the incommensurate”. . .

April 11/Jennifer Manzano/Brent Cunningham/Stacy Doris‏

WHAT:
Thing significance thing. And to retrieve it. Retains of a particular. Jennifer Manzano, Brent Cunningham, and Stacy Doris recall and recollect “memory” in this tenth installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Jennifer Manzano mothers in Alameda, letterpresses in Oakland, and gets paid in San Francisco. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2007 and co-publishes olywa press with Michael Nicoloff. Recent work is in or on TRY!, the press gang, Cricket Online Review, and this is not a french press.

Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancée and new daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. He works for Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, serves on the board of Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, and helps coordinate the Artifact Reading Series in Oakland. In 2005, he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera, which can be found at hookepress.com.

Stacy Doris writes books in French and English and is also deeply involved with translating. Forthcoming from P.O.L. is Caroline Dubois and Anne Portugal’s rendition of her Krupskaya book Paramour. She is a Creative Writing professor at San Francisco State University.

WHEN:
Saturday, April 11, 8pm

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door). Refreshments provided.



Coming up next: May 16, 8pm – Laurel DeCou, Stan Apps, and Bill Luoma on “the inarticulate”. . .

March 14/With + Stand Reading

WHAT:
Sideways or in a straight line. Contributors from With + Stand - Joshua Clover, Dan Thomas-Glass, Meg Hamill, Jen Hofer, Tim Kreiner, and Juliana Spahr - move in “modern” poetic circles in this ninth installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

With + Stand is a journal of poetry & prose which gestures/thinks in around with through & against histories (of capital & labor flows global markets trade agreements arts forms bodies states cities societies resistances migrations movements ideologies ideas etc.) and systems. With + Stand is individually edited by Dan Thomas-Glass, and collectively edited through an extended game of tag (contributors are it, tag new contributors), mapping the connections (physical, social, aesthetic, formal) between the workers & their work. Through two issues the experiment has included: Ange Mlinko, Anne Boyer, Barry Schwabsky, Ben Lerner, Bill Freind, Chris Nealon, Dan Thomas-Glass, Derek Henderson, Erica Lewis, Francisco Reinking, Jen Hofer, Joshua Clover, Juliana Spahr, Kristen Orser, Meg Hamill, Megan Kaminski, Michael Scharf, Noah Eli Gordon, Phoebe Wayne, Rodrigo Toscano, Tim Kreiner, and Vivek Narayanan. The journal is always spraypainted by a series of hands, and always distributed for free.

Joshua Clover is a former music critic, legal editor, and bookstore clerk. His most recent book, The Totality for Kids, was published in 2006 by University of California, which will also publish his forthcoming cultural history, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About (2009).


Meg Hamill's second book Trillions & Trillions of Heartbeats is sitting in many heavy boxes in her living room. She currently lives in Santa Rosa, California, where she works as a freelance writer/editor, and as a teacher with California Poets in the Schools.

Jen Hofer's recent publications include an epistolary and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin, The Route (Atelos, 2008), a translation of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008), and lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano's lobo de labio (Action Books, 2007). Forthcoming books include from the valley of death (Ponzipo), Laws (Dusie Books) and a book-length series of anti-war-manifesto poems titled one (Palm Press).

Tim Kreiner is a sometime editor, occasional tutor, and reluctant clerk of modernity passing the buck in seminar rooms. In between things, he is the author of some poems.

Dan Thomas-Glass is the editor and publisher of With + Stand. He is writing a dissertation on language poetry and rap music as read through the various lenses of globalization, 1970s urban policy, and the crushed collectives of the 1960s. His poems have appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, BLACKBOX, Caffeine Destiny, Digital Artifact, Shampoo, Kitchen Sink, and others. He has a project on the 880 freeway (which he drives every day to teach 8th grade) forthcoming at Deep Oakland.

Juliana Spahr’s most recent book is _the Transformation_ (Atelos P).


WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($5 at the door)



Coming up next: April 11, 8pm – Jennifer Manzano, Brent Cunningham, and Stacy Doris on “memory” . . .

February 21/Samantha Giles/Brandon Brown/Lauren Shufran

WHAT:
It is true and not real and real and not true. Samantha Giles, Brandon Brown, and Lauren Shufran very or extremely contemplate “vérité” in this eighth installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Samantha Giles recently received her MFA from Mills College where she was managing editor of the literary journal 580 Split. Her work has appeared at/in Deep Oakland, Vert, Work, The Press Gang, Shampoo, and Cricket Online Review.

Brandon Brown is a poet and translator from Kansas City, Missouri. Taxt Press published his chapbook Camels! (2008) and Mitzvah Press is publishing his chapbook Wondrous Things I Have Seen in 2009. He co-curates the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand with Alli Warren.

Lauren Shufran has just rehydrated in order to write this bio. In her more regularly hydrated states, she is reading up on waste theory and working on an essay on gender and olfaction, as well as chasing a perpetual dream of knowing anything about the Arabic language. She received both her M.A. and her M.F.A. from San Francisco State University, where she practiced grammatical dismantling for four years, and now spends her evenings teaching high school students proper syntax. She’s trying to view this not as an ironic turn of events, but rather a digression back into structure.

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($3 at the door)



Coming up next: March 14, 8pm – movements in modernity with readers from With + Stand Magazine, featuring Joshua Clover, Dan Thomas-Glass, Meg Hamil, Jen Hofer, Timothy Kreiner, and Juliana Spahr . . .

January 17/Erika Staiti/Suzanne Stein/Dodie Bellamy‏

WHAT:
Was it divine intervention or did the devil make you do it? Do you blame your first English teacher or that old Beat you met at City Lights? Why are you (gasp) a poet? Erika Staiti, Suzanne Stein, and Dodie Bellamy ponder the nature of “influence” in this seventh installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

Erika Staiti lives in North Oakland. She is currently running a Fassbinder marathon.

Suzanne Stein is a poet. Two of several projects forthcoming this year: a chapbook, Passenger Ship, from Ypolita press, and Signs of Life from O Books. Former co-director and film curator at four walls gallery, she works currently as community producer at SFMOMA. Stein is editor and publisher of the small press TAXT and lives in Oakland. Please visit www.taxtpress.blogspot.com or www.i-caved.blogspot.com

Dodie Bellamy's chapbook Barf Manifesto is just out from Ugly Duckling Presse. Other books include Academonia, Pink Steam, and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. In January 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker’s clothing for White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space. She lives in San Francisco with writer Kevin Killian and three cats.

WHERE:
Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street (at Columbus), SF

TICKETS:
Open to the public ($3 at the door)