20th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival

including: Cara Benson, Steve Cotten, Geof Huth, Maryrose Larkin with Eric Matchett, Sharon Mesmer, Wayne Montecalvo, Lori Anderson Moseman with Tom Moseman, Michael Peters, George Quasha, Richard Rizzi, R. Dionysius Whiteurs with Phillip Levine and David Wolach

Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 1pm

The Widow Jane Mine
at Century House Historical Society
Rosendale, NY 12472

A $5 donation is suggested. This event is a benefit for CHHS.

For directions, kindly visit the website for Century House Historical Society.

The Poets/Perfomers:

Cara Benson is author of a book of interconnected pre-elegiac prose poems for humans animals plants and earth called (made), now out with BookThug. Protean Parade, a book-length meditation on historical, biological and cosmological evolution, is forthcoming later this year. She teaches poetry in a NY State Prison and is a member of Black Radish Books, an international poet-publisher collective which attempts to make all decisions by bumpy consensus. Benson's "Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation" won the 2008 bpNichol Award. She edited the interdisciplinary book Predictions for Chain Links and edits the online text and image journal Sous Rature.

Steve Cotten is an instrumental finger-style guitar player who blends many musical styles and guitar techniques into a unique and engaging musical experience. Steve's first CD, All or Nothing, was nominated in 2006 for Best Solo Guitar Album and Best Solo Guitar Song by the independent music organization, Just Plain Folks. Steve lives in Western MA where he continues to write, record and perform his music.

The scope of Geof Huth's poetic production includes handdrawn and computer-generated visual poems (some of them wordless), one-word poems, extemporaneous poems recorded in the act of living, and poems performed in a language that doesn't exist with melodies created as the audience listens. For this year, the year that he is fifty years of age, he is writing each day a poem that is also a letter to someone he knows. He mails each poem out to its intended recipient and posts it to a blog entitled 365 ltrs. He writes almost daily on visual poetry and the textual imagination at his blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics. His latest book is ntst: the collected pwoermds of geof huth, a book of 775 one-word poems.

Maryrose Larkin lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a freelance researcher. She is the author of Inverse (nine muses books, 2006), Whimsy Daybook 2007 (FLASH+CARD, 2006), The Book of Ocean (i.e. press, 2007), DARC (FLASH+CARD, 2009), and The Name of This Intersection is Frost (Shearsman Books, 2010). Maryrose is one of the organizers of Spare Room, a Portland-based writing collective, and is co-editor, with Sarah Mangold, of FLASH+CARD, a chapbook and ephemera poetry press.

Sharon Mesmer is a Fulbright Specialist and a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. Her most recent poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008) and The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008). Other poetry books are Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna, 2006), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Japan, 1997). Fiction collections include In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose, 2005 and 2000) and Ma Vie a Yonago (Hachette Litteratures, France, 2005). Her art book collaboration with painter David Humphrey, Lonely Tylenol, was published in 2003 by Flying Horse Editions/University of Central Florida. She teaches undergrad literature courses and fiction workshops, as well as MFA poetry seminars, at the New School in Manhattan.

Wayne Montecalvo was born in Edison, New Jersey and is now based in Rosendale, New York. He attended the School of Visual Art in New York City, where he earned a BFA in Sculpture. Montecalvo is an inter-disciplinary artist whose works involve video, audio, story telling, painting and sculpture. In addition to showing work in fine art galleries and museums, Wayne has worked with local performance groups, Blackbird Theater and Cave Dogs. His awards and honors include two full fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, and an Artists At Work: Community Projects Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Wayne currently teaches in the Art Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Lori Anderson Moseman and Tom Moseman founded Stockport Flats Press and the High Watermark Salo[o]n after Federal Disaster #1649, a Delaware River flood. Anderson Moseman's poetry books are Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain Press), Persona (Swank Books) and Temporary Bunk (Swank Books). Her Doctorate of Arts in writing is from the University at Albany; her Masters in Fine Arts in poetry is from the University of Iowa. Her work is also in literary journals: 13th Moon, Confrontation, Denver Quarterly, divide, dislocate, Epoch, Harpur Palate, Feile Festa,Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, Little Magazine, Passages North, PEEP/SHOW, Phoebe, Portland Review, poeticdiversity, Praxis, SEEDS, Sing Heavenly Muse! , Slab, Terra Nova, Tonopah Review, Water-Stone, and Wising Up.

Michael Peters is the author of the sound-imaging poem Vaast Bin (Calamari Press, 2007) and other language art and sound works. Manifestations of work appear in print and on-line journals like SleepingFish, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, and Word for/Word, to name a few. With the musical group Poem Rocket and the Be Blank Consort, sounds appear on labels like Atavistic and Luna Bisonte Prods. Visual works can be found in collections, such as the Sackner Archive, as well as anthologies and galleries. In addition to editing issues of The Little Magazine, Xtant, and Word for/Word, writings include an essay on Charles Olson, entries for Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, and a transcription of Sun Ra’s 1971 lecture for Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone (19). In the Fall of 2009, Peters created a sound-image installation for the &Now Festival of Innovative Literature and Art. Visit him here.

George Quasha works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. Solo exhibitions of axial stones and axial drawings include the Baumgartner Gallery in New York (Chelsea), the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, and at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. This work is featured in the published book, Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance, Foreword by Carter Ratcliff (North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, 2006). In 2006 awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in video art. A new book, An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings, Foreword by Lynne Cooke, is out from Ediciones Poligrafa (Barcelona), in collaboration with Charles Stein (distrib. D.A.P. in US). 14 other books include poetry (Somapoetics, Giving the Lily Back Her Hands, Ainu Dreams [with Chie Hasegawa], Preverbs [forthcoming]; anthologies (America a Prophecy [with Jerome Rothenberg], Open Poetry [with Ronald Gross], An Active Anthology [with Susan Quasha], The Station Hill Blanchot Reader [with Charles Stein]); and writing on art (Gary Hill: Language Willing; with Charles Stein: Tall Ships, HanD HearD/liminal objects, Viewer).

Richard Rizzi was born on January 1st, 1937 in Brooklyn, NY. After serving in the United States Army in occupied Germany he returned to the U.S., settled in New York and began his life long passion and devotion to the study and exploration of music, poetry, visual and performance arts. From the late 1950’s to the 1970’s he played tenor and alto saxophone, performing with several avant-garde jazz groups in New York and San Francisco. He has written poetry continuously from the 1950’s and has been the organizer, founder and co-founder of numerous poetry reading series, benefits for the arts and artistic groups, including the Hudson Valley Poetry Society in 1975 and the poetry/performance group Outists Living in the Country in 1989. His poetry has been published in several literary magazines and publications such as The Poets Gallery, Long Shot, Arson, Thin Air Magazine and a chapbook published by Hunger Magazine and Press. Most recently Richard has traveled to Denmark to perform with the experimental group Trio CHROCH, combining Richards words to the groups eclectic sounds. Richard has been along time resident of New Paltz, NY where currently he resides with his wife Susan.

R. Dionysius Whiteurs has recorded four poems for the Steve Charney "Knock-On-Wood" Show on WAMC Albany Public Radio. He was featured in the biographic film Trapped in Amber by Bart Thrall of Big Time Records. He hosted the 19th Annual Subterranean Cave Reading in the Widow Jane Mine; and has been published in Abraxas, the Rondout Review, the Poets Gallery, Chronogram, Hunger Magazine, Wuzz Buzzin, Arabesque, and Home Planet News.

David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, a former union organizer, and participant in Nonsite Collective. His full-length book of poems, Occultations, has just been released through Black Radish Books. Other recent books are Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth.), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). Critical work on the poetics of spatial practice is forthcoming from Jacket and Sibila: Poesia y Cultura (Brazil). His poetry can be found, or is forthcoming, from venues such as Aufgabe, Dusie, No Tell Motel, 5_Trope, and Little Red Leaves. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College's Workshop In Language & Thinking.

(the photo at the top of this post was taken by Geof and Nancy Huth at the 18th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival in 2008)