Chax Newsletter Fall 2021 |
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September 26, 11 am - Tengour with Joris & Swensen, & Riggs with Borel & RobertReading by Habib Tengour with translations by Pierre Joris & Cole Swensen, & a reading by Sarah Riggs with translations Marie Borel & Jérémy Robert |
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This reading will take place at 11am in Tucson, 2pm in New York, & 8pm in Paris. Habib Tengour, poet & anthropologist, was born in 1947 in Mostaganem, Algeria, & raised on the Arab and Berber voices of marketplace storytellers. He has spent most of his life between Algeria & France & has published over 20 books of poetry, prose, theater & essays. His poetry has been translated into a number of languages. In the US, Pierre Joris edited & translated Exile is my Trade, A Habib Tengour Reader (Black Widow Press, 2012), Marylin Hacker translated a collection of poetry, Crossings (The Post-Apollo Press, 2013) & Cole Swensen has also been translating Tengour for the Tamaas Poetry Translation Seminar (available online: click here). His most recent works are: Odysséennes/ Odissaiche, (a bilingual French-Italian edition, translated by Fabio Scotto, Puntoacapo, Torino, 2019 ; Ta voix vit/Nous vivons, (with drawings by Hamid Tibouchi, Apic, Algiers, 2020) & an expanded edition of La sandale d’Empédocle, (Non lieu, Paris, 2021.) Sarah Riggs is a poet, filmmaker, translator and artist (www.sarahriggs.org). She is the author of seven books of poetry in English: Waterwork (Chax, 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street, 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck, 2012), Pomme & Granite (1913 Press, 2015) which won a 1913 poetry prize. Inspired by filming the dance of Stéphane Bouquet, choreographed by Mathilde Monnier for the Essaouira section of Six Lives, she is making a film about four NY dancer choreographers. Her most recent books of poetry are Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and Murmurations (Apic, 2021). |
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October 24, 5 pm - Yan with Chen & Xisheng, & FischerReading by Yan An with translators Chen Du & Xisheng Chen, & a reading by Norman Fischer |
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This reading will take place at 6pm in Tucson, 9pm in New York, & 9am on the 25th in China. Yan An is one of the most famous poets in contemporary China, author of fourteen poetry books including his most famous poetry book, Rock Arrangement, which has won him The Sixth Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top four literary prizes. As the winner of various national awards, he is also the Vice President of Shaanxi Writers Association, the head and Executive Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Yan River, one of the oldest and most well-regarded literary journals in Northwestern China. In addition, he is a member of the Poetry Committee of China Writers Association. Chen Du has a Master’s Degree in Biophysics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, SUNY at Buffalo, and another from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She revised more than eight chapters of the Chinese translation of the biography of Helen Snow, Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China. In the United States, her translations have appeared in Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Pilgrimage, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. A set of three poems co-translated by her and Xisheng Chen was a finalist in the 2020 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. Find her online at ofsea.com. Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator and educator. His educational background includes a BA and an MA from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and a Mandarin Healthcare Interpreter Certificate from the City College of San Francisco, CA, USA. His working history includes: Adjunct Professor at the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University), Angola, Indiana. As a translator for over three decades, he has published a lot of translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad. Norman Fischer has published twenty-one books of poetry and six books on Buddhism. His poetry has been anthologized in The Wisdom Anthology of North American Poetry, Basta Azzez enough, What Book? and many literary magazines. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Masters in Buddhism from the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a Zen Buddhist priest for more than 40 years, serving as co-abbot for the San Francisco Zen Center from 1995-2000. Founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation, he is one of the most highly respected Zen teachers in America, regularly leading Zen Buddhist retreats and events around the world. His essays have appeared in such notable collections as Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2010) and are frequently included in Best Buddhist Writing (Shambhala). His collections of essays on writing, Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language and Religion (University of Alabama Press) and on Buddhism, When You Greet Me I Bow (Shambhala) are widely read, as is his translation of the Hebrew psalms, Opening to You. |
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November 21, 2 pm - DuPlessis, Gottlieb, & MandelReadings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Michael Gottlieb, & Tom Mandel |
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This reading will take place at 2pm in Tucson & 4pm in New York. The work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis includes the multi-volume long poem Drafts (1986- 2012), and the collage poems Graphic Novella (2015) and NUMBERS (2018). Her serial poem in book-length episodes, called Traces, with Days, includes Days and Works, 2017; Late Work, 2020; Around the Day in 80 Worlds, 2018; Poetic Realism, 2021; and Daykeeping (submitted). She has written extensively on gender, poetry and poetics including The Pink Guitar (1990, 2006), Blue Studios (2006) and Purple Passages (2012), and on objectivist poetry and poetics, as well as editing The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Michael Gottlieb is a poet and the author of twenty-one books. In addition to numerous collections of poetry, his published work also includes memoirs and essays. His most recent titles are Mostly Clearing (Roof, 2019), What We Do: Essays for Poets (2016, Chax Press), I Had Every Intention (2014, Faux Editions), Dear All (2013, Roof Books), Letters to A Middle Aged Poet (2012, Otoliths), The Dust (2011, Roof Books), Memoir and Essay (2010, Faux/Other). A first-generation member of the Language Poetry school, he helped edit one of its foundational magazines, Roof. He was also the publisher of Case/Casement Books (1981-1999) and started the Last Tuesday multi-media performance series at La Mama in NYC in the 1980s. Several of his works have also been adapted for the stage, including excerpts from Mostly Clearing, adapted by Genée Coreno and The Dust, his authoritative 9/11 poem which the dramatist Fiona Templeton staged at the St. Marks Poetry Project on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. In addition, in the fall of 2021, for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, a new version of The Dust, directed by Genée Coreno was staged along with an adaptation of The Voices, also staged by Genée Coreno, both under the auspices of The Poetry Project. Tom Mandel was born and grew up in Chicago. He was educated in the city’s jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC. He lives in Lewes, Delaware. He is the author of Realism, Letters of the Law, To the Cognoscenti, Erat, Some Appearances, Central Europe, Ready to Go, and other books of poetry, as well as co-author of The Grand Piano. His work has been anthologized in Post-Modern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, In the American Tree, 49+1: Poètes Americain. as well as multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. |
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Yan An is one of the most famous poets in contemporary China, author of fourteen poetry books including his most famous poetry book, Rock Arrangement, which has won him The Sixth Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top four literary prizes. As the winner of various national awards, he is also the Vice President of Shaanxi Writers Association, the head and Executive Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Yan River, one of the oldest and most well-regarded literary journals in Northwestern China. In addition, he is a member of the Poetry Committee of China Writers Association. Chen Du has a Master’s Degree in Biophysics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, SUNY at Buffalo, and another from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She revised more than eight chapters of the Chinese translation of the biography of Helen Snow, Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China. In the United States, her translations have appeared in Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Pilgrimage, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. A set of three poems co-translated by her and Xisheng Chen was a finalist in the 2020 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. Find her online at ofsea.com. Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator and educator. His educational background includes a BA and an MA from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and a Mandarin Healthcare Interpreter Certificate from the City College of San Francisco, CA, USA. His working history includes: Adjunct Professor at the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University), Angola, Indiana. As a translator for over three decades, he has published a lot of translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad. |
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The supernova blaze of Adam Cornford’s poetry fuses surrealism, science, politics, and eros to yield exotic particles of meaning rarely found on Earth. Cornford’s vision, like that of Blake, overleaps the dark Satanic mills of commodity culture to discover a utopia that can only be configured by radical imagery. Here, language becomes a ‘semiotic multiverse’ proliferating toward an emancipated future. With this long-awaited major collection, Cornford affirms his place among that visionary company of poets empowered to chant the re-enchantment of word and world. — Andrew Joron Adam Cornford’s Lalia is his latest lingual spell that burns as a protracted anti-acrostic, as a book-length compendium psycho-geologic in demeanor. These poems seem to writhe as spells kinetic with all manner of exploration, all the while suffused with an interior skill-set susurrant via a penetrant grammar. Indeed, Lalia ignites an inner syllabus absorbing ripples from a Blakean cosmos that seem on the surface opaque with vatic inscription, yet all the while dazzling with lingual texture as vision. — Will Alexander Adam Cornford immigrated to the United States from England in 1979. Since then, he has lived mostly in California but moved to the Philadelphia area in 2020. Cornford led the Poetics Program at New College of California from 1987 until the college closed in 2008. Today he works as a freelance writer and editor. His poetry has appeared widely in print and on the web, including four full-length poetry collections—Shooting Scripts (1978), Animations (1988), Decision Forest (1998), and Lalia (2021). Other works include Liber Ignis (2013), a serial documentary poem with historical photographs, in collaboration with the printer and book artist Peter Rutledge Koch—and several chapbooks, among them ‘Round Midnight (1989), O-Town (2003), Scapes (2010) and Mask Report (2014). He has also written lyrics and libretti for the composer Daniel Steven Crafts, who has set several of his poems. A lineal descendant of Charles Darwin, Cornford focuses strongly on science, notably biology, computer science, quantum physics, and cosmology, in his poetry and thought. He counts William Blake and Surrealism as seminal and continuing influences. |
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At last! The essential Michael Gottlieb in one volume. For decades, Gottlieb’s publications and live readings have been accruing admirers from vanguardist writing communities nationwide. From his beginnings as a lexical atomicist to his later staged documentary pieces, this extensive collection will prove Gottlieb to be one of the most forensic poets of our time. Whether closely examining the radical uncertainty of privately lived phenomenon or tracking the nano-moments of accidental public encounters, these works brim with a wit and quirkiness that’s sure to thrill brow-furrowed scholars, roustabout flaneurs, and solitary text trippers in equal measure. — Rodrigo Toscano With a sardonic, razor-edged critique, Michael Gottlieb takes to task (and to heart) the irritants and menaces of quotidian late-capital social life. His forte is to lay bare and examine human fallibility, vulnerability and instability. A momentary clearing is created post-fallout where the ultimate pathos of subjectivity and ego have room to transform. The stakes are high. What does it mean to be a poet, citizen, resident of planet Earth? Throughout his work, he probes all psychic and theoretical valances. Gottlieb’s oeuvre is myriad—the forms the writings take diverse. His Selected Poems spans from late 1970’s work based on chance operations, to recent collaged writings. Now is the necessary hour to challenge the status quo, something Gottlieb has been doing conscientiously for half a century. I am awed by the substantive meanings that reverberate sonically throughout this collection. — Brenda Iijima |
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Tom Mandel’s poetry moves the reader ever closer to a freedom that can only be found in art. — Richard Roundy It seems entirely right that Tom Mandel’s Letter to Poetry should have been occasioned, in part, by his purposive misremembering of a remark made by Harry Mathews. A dark European stripe runs through the work of both writers, and perhaps only they would contrive to chance upon a ripe clinamen in the Florida Keys. But was the letter answered, the reader inquires? Hell—was it ever! The beguilingly odd works visited upon our correspondent evince a rich, comedic music shot through with moments of stark poignance and reflective beauty. Tom Mandel is here to fold you into a rhyme; the note on his door reads, “I’ll be back in no time.” — Miles Champion Tom Mandel’s Letter to Poetry hums, rhymes, and spiels in passages dark and dear. It’s as if Byron had passLettered through postmodernism at warp speed to land in an only slightly recognizable present, tense with chance.
— Charles Bernstein In Letter to Poetry, Tom Mandel finds both Rhyme and Reason under the hood of his Coupe de Ville. Rhyme is sometimes played for winks and Reason cloaked in gentle humor (“Maybe more hot air would make it / safe to cross the brink of this thin ice?”), but the undertones are stoic, Talmudic, and wise. Poetry offers Mandel a vast formal, historical, and even autobiographical toolkit. When he writes that a metaphor is “like a noun no longer / used on that occasion,” his words are both wistful and transporting. Poetry was built to perform this task. — Jean Day |
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Try Selected Poems by Norman Fischer in small pieces, koan-style or parable-length, yet before you know it, his questions on mind, existence, compassion branch voluminously by location and torque the decades. The books meet each other as movements, variations. Here Norman Fischer’s “return in poetry to fact of trees,” to the textures of world, ambition, flawed knowledge, contradictions of love, to thought troubled by re-thought and by re-, re-thought, to how all differ in “what we do and what we intend.” Thus have a hearty laugh from the belly up! Fischer’s generosity lights up his mutual belonging with and to a Zenified version of the Great Conversation. His poems grieve the dead, honor poet-friends, struggle to claim “an era that you love is cancelled.” He stuns us with keen attentiveness to daily life right beside endings and frazzled picture-theory: “In the picture we were given at the beginning/The hole where the tab is inserted . . .” His ethical cry against cruelty of war and torture is meant to move justice forward, show how utterly important moral obligation, yet self-aware that without care, such exposés risk titillation at the expense of victims; scavengers and lawyers feed on flesh to survive: “the rest comes behind, / pelicans following a boat / naked statements of fact.” — Deborah Meadows, author Lecture Notes: A duration poem in twelve parts |
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The several examples selected here continue themes and motifs characteristic of her work: the quotidian, daily life and its oddity, her poetics of ethical poesis, a sense of travel, cosmogony, wonder and the daily news, the insight “everything happening on the side,” and jolts of simultaneous spiritual energy and political pain. These works generally have a granular sense of contemporary history. — Maia Selvès (Philadelphia, 2021) |
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