SAN FRANCISCO -> LOS ANGELES -> LONDON for MERITAGE PRESS AUTHORS!

So that was a lovely reading last night and wonderful crowd; I read from my flamenco hay(na)ku series and they were receptive to my notion of "using as pared-down language as I can muster to manifest the saying, 'Poetry is not words'." But of course the blog is not just about me. It's about Moi, which is to say, about Toi. So here are three upcoming events involving four Meritage Press authors!

GARRETT CAPLES & HU XIN in SAN FRANCISCO

ARTICLE: ART AND THE IMAGINATIVE PROMISE invites you to PULP

Join us at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama Street, San Francisco, for the three part reading/performance/screening series PULP: Mystery! Romance! True Adventure! Hosted by the Bay Area art journal Article: Art and the Imaginative Promise, PULP will present a variety of engaging performances from local, national and international artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers.

Act One is a reading by Oakland poet Garrett Caples accompanied by the paintings of Beijing artist Hu Xin. Garrett Caples is the author of four books including The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle Press/Black Square Editions, 1999) and the forthcoming Complications (Meritage Press). Of his work, the poet Jeff Clark said: "Caples is a polymath. He is, in no particular order, an essayist …; with his partner Anna Naruta he's the maker of films, documentaries, music videos; … he's a connoisseur of hip-hop; he's a love poet, photographer, and collage-maker. His erotica has been anthologized… He's been and likely will remain, as long as he's here--or there--a student of radical Oakland politics and culture."

Hu Xin is a painter living in Beijing. Though trained from an early age in the techniques of traditional Chinese painting, he most often works in oil on canvas. He has studied painting in China and Japan. He and Garrett collaborated in a poem and ink drawing chap, er, um (Meritage Press).

Act Two is a screening of Vancouver filmmaker Jamie Travis' "The Patterns Trilogy". Jamie Travis has built a strong reputation in Canada's independent film scene as a director of precise vision. For "Patterns" (2005), Jamie was awarded the Vancouver International Film Festival's top short film prize—for Best Western Canadian Director of a Short Film. A suspense thriller, a love story, a dreamscape and a musical extravaganza, "The Patterns Trilogy" presents, in three parts, the epic anti-romance of Michael and Pauline. Ion Magazine called "Patterns," "the best stop-motion melodrama satire short you'll ever see."

Eleanor Harwood Gallery is enjoying its first season in its new location. Eleanor Harwood formerly curated the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery.

Article: Art and the Imaginative Promise publishes three times a year. By focusing on the imaginative promise of contemporary practice, Article aims to provide the venue for heartfelt and engaging conversations about art.

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BRUNA MORI in LOS ANGELES:

Bruna Mori, author of Derive (Meritage Press) will have her fiction displayed on a wall at Florencia Pita's show at LAXART--the opening is July 19, 2007!

She also will be a host during tne Friday readings for Feminaissance: A Colloquium on Women, Writing and Feminism, Organized by Christine Wertheim, Matias Viegener and Teresa Carmody, April 27 - 29, 2007, at MOCA and LACE in Los Angeles.

The purpose of Feminaissance is to put writers from many genres in dialogue about issues concerning women writers today. The colloquium is presented in conjunction with MOCA's current show "WACK: Art and Feminist Revolution." It includes a reception, one day of panels and two evening readings and a Consciousness Raising workshop on the final day will take place on Sunday, April 29th at LACE, in Hollywood.

FRIDAY, April 27, 2007
MOCA, 250 S. Grand Avenue, LA, CA 90012
7 pm Reception
8 pm Readings by Caroline Bergvall, Teresa Carmody, Meiling Cheng, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Tracie Morris, Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, and Lidia Yuknavitch

By tne way, I keep receiving unsolicited fan mail raving over Bruna's Derive -- do check it out! At SPD, Amazon and special bookstores!

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ERNESTO PRIEGO in LONDON:

The Parasol Unit poetry series is pleased to announce that a third reader has been added to our previously announced reading on Tuesday, 5 June, at 6:30 PM. In addition to the English poet Michael Glover and the Mexican poet Ernesto Priego, this reading will also feature the distinguished American poet Bill Berkson.

Bill Berkson, poet, critic, and teacher, was born in New York City in 1939. A longtime resident of California, he has for many years taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the author of sixteen books and pamplets of poetry, most recently Our Friends Will Pass Silently Among You (The Owl Press, 2007) and Gloria (Arion Press, 2005, with etchings by Alex Katz). Other recent books include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 (Cuneiform Press, 2007), What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985 with Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press, 2006), and The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings (Qua Books, 2004). As Ron Padgett says: "Bill Berkson's writing is witty, musical, daily, and deep, underpinned by a bracing integrity and shot through with gorgeous abstraction and other brilliant hookups between eye, ear, mind, and heart."

Michael Glover has written art criticism for The Times, The Economist, The Independent, and The Financial Times, among others. He is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, including Amidst All This Debris (2001) and The Bead-Eyed Man (2000), both from Dagger Press, and Impossible Horizons (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995). Of his new book, For the Sheer Hell of Living, to be published this year by San Marco Press, John Ashbery writes, "Michael Glover’s lines unspool gravely and efficiently with few commas like waves that know they are on the way to someplace but without making much fuss about it. They can be piercingly sad and hilariously wry, sometimes at the same time, as: ‘Someone loses the midge swat./ Many glasses are raised.’—this from a poem called ‘Few things happen.’ Few things happen here, true, but those that do are tremendously important even when tiny."

Ernesto Priego is a Mexican poet, essayist, and translator presently living in London. He is the author of Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006) as well as the blogs "Never Neutral" and "The Jainakú Project". A recent interview with him can be found on Tom Beckett’s blog "e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e -s".

The readings at Parasol Unit are organized and introduced by Barry Schwabsky, who is also a Meritage Press author, and that'd be twice over! Previous readers have been Tim Atkins, Guy Bennett, Peter Cole, Kelvin Corcoran, Linh Dinh, Carrie Etter, Allen Fisher, Mark Ford, Lee Harwood, Lyn Hejinian, Sue Hubbard, Vincent Katz, Tony Lopez, Drew Milne, Redell Olsen, Anthony Rudolf, Leslie Scalapino, Barry Schwabsky, John Seed, Simon Smith, Carol Szymanski, Catherine Wagner, and Barrett Watten.

Readings begin at 6:30 PM and are free to the public. Parasol Unit is located at 14 Wharf Road, London N1, near the Old Street and Angel tube stations.