24th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival

A poetry reading in the Widow Jane Mine, curated by Edwin Torres

Sunday, August 24, 2014 from 1pm - 4pm 

The Widow Jane Mine
at Century House Historical Society
668 Route 213
Rosendale, NY  12472-0150

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit http://www.centuryhouse.org/

"Like" Century House Historical Society on Facebook! 

This event is a benefit for CHHS, and is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc., with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Featuring:

Bruce Andrews + Sally Silvers + Pooh Kaye
The Yogurt Boys (Todd Colby + Marianne Vitale)
CA Conrad
Brenda Coultas
Latasha Nevada Diggs
Edwin Torres + Sean Meehan
Cecilia Vicuña
Dana Ward
About the participants:

Bruce Andrews is an experimental poet & performance writer, literary theorist, & music/sound designer for Sally Silvers & Dancers, and just-retired from 38 years as a left-wing political science professor. Most recent of a dozen big books is You Can’t Have Everything... Where Would You Put It!, followed by a chapbook, Yessified (Sally’s Edit) celebrating the Andrews Symposium & its expanded archive still online at http://www.fordhamenglish.com/bruce-andrews, with links to interviews, performance texts, poetry, collaborations, & critical essays on his work. Another online archive (& interactive project) materializes on April 1, 2014 as a curated 25 hour ‘twitter sculpture’ [Twitter.com @BruceAndrews25h], a 300 poem sequence.

Todd Colby has published five books of poetry: Ripsnort, Cush, Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Writings, and Tremble & Shine, all published by Soft Skull Press. Flushing Meadows was published by Scary Topiary Press in 2013.  Colby’s next book, Splash State will be published by The Song Cave in 2014. He posts new work on gleefarm.blogspot.com. 

CAConrad is the author of seven books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010).  A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.  Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

Brenda Coultas is the author of The Tatters, a collection of poetry, recently published by Wesleyan University Press, and she is a contributing fiction editor at Black and Grey.  Her other books included The Marvelous Bones of Time (2008) and A Handmade Museum (2003) from Coffee House Press. 

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna* 2013). She has been published widely and her performance work has been featured at The Kitchen, Exit Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney, MoMa and The Walker Center. As a curator/director, she has staged events at El Museo del Barrio, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Symphony Space and BAM Café.  A recipient of several awards, LaTasha, along with Greg Tate, are the founders and editors of Coon Bidness, yoYo and SO4.

Sean Meehan began performing in the late 1980s at the Amica Bunker series for improvised music, located at the Anarchist’s Switchboard and later ABC No Rio. For nearly twenty years he and Tamio Shiraishi have put on their summer concert series, always in different playful and devious locations throughout New York City. He is currently working on an audio book of Hermann von Helmholtz’s classic text from 1863, On the Sensations of Tone.

Sally Silvers has been choreographing, performing, teaching (improvisation,composition, repertory), writing (poetry, essays, scores), filmmaking (2 dance films), dancing in the recent & historical works of Yvonne Rainer (2006-2011), and receiving awards (6 NEA’s, 2 NYFA’s, Meet the Composer with John Zorn and Bruce Andrews, a “Bessie”, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among others) for almost 30 years.

Edwin Torres is the author of Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press, 2014), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books, 2011) and In The Function Of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books, 2010) among others. Anthologies range from Aloud; Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café (Hoyt, 1994) to Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems, Plays and Songs For Children (Black Radish Books, 2013).

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, visual artist and filmmaker born in Chile. Her Spit Temple, Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, Edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá, Ugly Duckling Presse, was runner-up to the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She lives between Chile and New York. www.ceciliavicuna.org

Marianne Vitale was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has shown her work regularly in New York, the U.K., and throughout Continental Europe. She is the recipient of a 2013 Frieze Projects commission as well as a Performa 13 commission. Marianne Vitale is represented by Zach Feuer Gallery. http://www.zachfeuer.com/artists/marianne-vitale/

Dana Ward is the author of Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader (Flowers & Cream), The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (Edge Books), & This Can't Be Life (Edge Books). He lives in Cincinnati, OH.

David Abel, Michael Ruby and Steven Seidenberg

Saturday, March 15, 2014 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Poet, editor, and bookseller David Abel is the author most recently of the chapbooks Elysian Ellipses and Shawarma Tractor. Three new books appeared in the summer of 2012: Float, a collection of collage texts (Chax Press); Tether, a chapbook of poems (Barebone books); and Carrier, a hypergraphic visual sequence (c_L Books). A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its thirteenth year, with Sam Lohmann he publishes the Airfoil poetry chapbook series. He was an inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art, and is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop; recently he curated the exhibitions Chax Press: Publishing Poetics for Pacific NW College of Art and Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

Michael Ruby is the author of five full-length poetry books: At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010) and American Songbook (UDP, 2013). His trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes Fleeting Memories, a UDP web-book. He is also the author of two chapbooks, The Star-Spangled Banner (Dusie, 2011) and Close Your Eyes (Dusie, 2013), and is serving as an editor at Station Hill for Bernadette Mayer’s forthcoming collected early books. A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.

Steven Seidenberg is a San Francisco based writer, artist, and photographer. His first book of lyric, philosophical prose, Itch, was released from RAW ArT Press in January 2014. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, including Null Set from Spooky Actions Books, and is co-editor of the poetry journal pallaksch.pallaksch.

In the Gallery at R&F:

The Gallery at R&F is pleased to present Gestural Record, a solo exhibition of paintings by Visiting Artist, Kim Bernard. This exhibition will be on view from February 1st – March 22nd, 2014.  Please join us on Saturday, March 22nd, from 5-7 pm for a closing reception and gallery talk by the artist. This event is free and open to the public.

Inspired by the Sumi brush paintings of Zen masters, this recent body of 2 dimensional encaustic works are an attempt to capture movement:  fluid, gestural, spontaneous, whole body movement, as in a dance. The results are sumptuous abstract encaustic paintings that utilize a minimal color palette and repetitive imagery, thick layers of translucent and opaque wax, paper prepared with batik markings and hand rubbed oil stick combined to create multi dimensional panels.  Adopting this approach to mark making, I place the panel flat on the floor, and allow the spiraling, gestural marks to become a record of my own whole body movement, in much the same way that the Zen master allows the ink to flow off the tip of his Sumi, committing to paper the extension of his Chi, as a culmination of summoned energy.  The method that I’ve developed allows me to make marks and “erase” the ones that don’t yield the desired results.
        
Kim Bernard makes sculpture, installations and encaustic paintings which she exhibits widely at venues including the Portland Museum of Art, Currier Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, Art Complex Museum, Saco Museum and UNH Museum of Art.  Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe and Art News and featured in 100 Artists of New England. Bernard is the recipient of the 2011 Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant and several Maine Arts Commission Grants.  She received her BFA from Parsons in 1987, her MFA from Mass Art in 2010 and currently teaches at the Maine College of Art and Plymouth State University.  Bernard gives presentations, lectures and offers workshops nationally as a visiting artist but makes her home and work in Maine.

Mikhail Horowitz and erica kaufman

Saturday, February 8, 2014 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Mikhail Horowitz is a poet, performer, paranomasiast, and provocateur whose day job is impersonating an editor at Bard College. He is the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978), The Opus of Everything in Nothing Flat (Red Hill/Outloud, 1993), and Rafting Into the Afterlife (Codhill, 2007), and his performance work has been featured on a dozen CDs, including The Blues of the Birth, a collection of his jazz fables (Sundazed Records), and the anthology album Bring It On Home, Vol. II (Columbia Records). None of this provides any consolation for the fact of his encroaching decrepitude.

erica kaufman is the author of INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books, 2013) and censory impulse (Factory School, 2009). she is also the co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards. Prose and critical work can be found in: Rain Taxi, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket2, Open Space/SFMOMA Blog and in The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations (ed. Mark Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). she is the Associate Director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College.

In the Gallery at R&F:

The Gallery at R&F is pleased to present Gestural Record, a solo exhibition of paintings by Visiting Artist, Kim Bernard. This exhibition will be on view from February 1st – March 22nd, 2014.  Please join us on Saturday, March 22nd, from 5-7 pm for a closing reception and gallery talk by the artist. This event is free and open to the public.

Inspired by the Sumi brush paintings of Zen masters, this recent body of 2 dimensional encaustic works are an attempt to capture movement:  fluid, gestural, spontaneous, whole body movement, as in a dance. The results are sumptuous abstract encaustic paintings that utilize a minimal color palette and repetitive imagery, thick layers of translucent and opaque wax, paper prepared with batik markings and hand rubbed oil stick combined to create multi dimensional panels.  Adopting this approach to mark making, I place the panel flat on the floor, and allow the spiraling, gestural marks to become a record of my own whole body movement, in much the same way that the Zen master allows the ink to flow off the tip of his Sumi, committing to paper the extension of his Chi, as a culmination of summoned energy.  The method that I’ve developed allows me to make marks and “erase” the ones that don’t yield the desired results.

Kim Bernard makes sculpture, installations and encaustic paintings which she exhibits widely at venues including the Portland Museum of Art, Currier Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, Art Complex Museum, Saco Museum and UNH Museum of Art.  Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe and Art News and featured in 100 Artists of New England. Bernard is the recipient of the 2011 Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant and several Maine Arts Commission Grants.  She received her BFA from Parsons in 1987, her MFA from Mass Art in 2010 and currently teaches at the Maine College of Art and Plymouth State University.  Bernard gives presentations, lectures and offers workshops nationally as a visiting artist but makes her home and work in Maine.

Ian Dreiblatt, Anna Gurton-Wachter and Tamas Panitz

Saturday, January 18, 2014 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Ian Dreiblatt is a poet, translator, legal commentator, & musician.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lungfull!, Web Conjunctions, The Agriculture Reader, Harp & Altar, Sink Review, and Pallaksch. Pallaksch., and his translation of Gogol's The Nose is forthcoming from Melville House Books.  He's currently working on a manuscript of poems conceived in relation to the writing of Osip Mandelstam, and another on the misconduct of the NYPD.  He lives with Anna Gurton-Wachter in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Anna Gurton-Wachter is a poet, photographer, and student of library science and history. Her long poem: CYRUS is currently available as a chapbook from the Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Sunset Park where she parks her sunset.

Tamas Panitz was born Csongor Külina and lived as such for several weeks in Budapest, Hungary. He is a poet and student of Written Arts at Bard College.  His first book, provisionally titled Blue Sun is forthcoming with Inpatient Press.

 

In the Gallery at R&F:

The Gallery at R&F is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Visiting Artist, Lisa Kairos. This exhibition will be the artists’ first show in the Hudson Valley, and will be on view from December 7th, 2013 – January 18, 2014. Please join us on Saturday, December 7th, from 5-7 pm for an opening reception and gallery talk by the artist. This event is free and open to the public.

Cartography for Daydreamers alludes to the associative-mapping aspect of the art of Lisa Kairos, who explores dynamics between materialism and transparency, weight and buoyancy, construction and organic growth. Kairos creates floating narratives of decentralized imagery suspended in layers of transparent beeswax. Instead of being about a specific moment in time, these paintings are sensory landscapes, pools of accumulated memory and perception.

Evelyn Reilly and Paul Stephens

Saturday, November 16, 2013 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints

84 Ten Broeck Avenue Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Evelyn Reilly’s books of poetry include Apocalypso and Styrofoam, both published by Roof Books.  Essays and poetry have recently appeared in Omniverse, Jacket2, the Eco-language Reader, and Verse, as well as the &NOW Awards2: The Best Innovative Writing and The Arcadia Project: Postmodernism and the Pastoral.  She lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York, and is also pleased to have work included in the upcoming In|Filtration: A Hudson Valley Salt Line from Station Hill Press.

Paul Stephens is the author of The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press). His current project is a work of fiction titled A Climber's Guide to the Catskill High Peaks; an excerpt is forthcoming in In/Filtration: A Hudson Valley Salt Line. He edits the journal Convolution, and has published numerous essays on poetry and new media. He taught in the literature program at Bard from 2005-2009, and now teaches in the American Studies program at Columbia.

In the Gallery at R&F:

A solo exhibition of paintings by Visiting Artist, Howard Hersh. This exhibition, entitled In My Shoes, will be on view from October 5th – November 16th, 2013. In this exhibition, Howard Hersh expresses a lifelong passion for nature and beauty, which is clearly reflected in his art. Throughout these various series of paintings, Hersh has remained dedicated to the core impulse to assemble and depict relationships between art, nature, architecture, and spirituality; “A world we create, and a world by which we are created.” Born in Los Angeles in 1948 and currently living in San Francisco, Howard Hersh is a third generation artist who has exhibited his work widely around the country, with fifty solo shows and over one hundred group exhibits. Hersh’s work is featured in prominent public spaces and collections in the United States, Japan, China, Indonesia, and Africa.

Lynn Behrendt and John Bloomberg-Rissman

Saturday, October 19, 2013 at 2pm 

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue Kingston, NY 12401 
 

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website. 

Lynn Behrendt's work has appeared in How2, No Tell Motel, & others. She is the author of 4 chapbooks: The Moon As Chance, Characters, Tinder, and Luminous Flux. A full length collection, petals, emblems, is available from Lunar Chandelier Press. She co-edits the Annandale Dream Gazette, a chronicle of poets' dreams and co-curates the electronic journal Peep/Show. She is the editor and publisher of the micropress LINES chapbooks, which has published works by authors including Kimberly Lyons, Robert Kelly, and Ron Silliman. She lives with her son in Red Hook, NY, and works at Bard College doing institutional research.

John Bloomberg-Rissman is just past the halfway point of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch pasting stuff to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press). In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he is in the midst of two collaborations (one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick) has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He has also published (gasp!) lyrical and conceptual work. He is learning to play the viola and he blogs at www.johnbr.com (Zeitgeist Spam).

 

In the Gallery at R&F:

 

A solo exhibition of paintings by Visiting Artist, Howard Hersh. This exhibition, entitled In My Shoes, will be on view from October 5th – November 16th, 2013. Please join us on Saturday, October 5th, from 5-7 pm for an opening reception and gallery talk by the artist.

 

In this exhibition, Howard Hersh expresses a lifelong passion for nature and beauty, which is clearly reflected in his art. Throughout these various series of paintings, Hersh has remained dedicated to the core impulse to assemble and depict relationships between art, nature, architecture, and spirituality; “A world we create, and a world by which we are created.”  Born in Los Angeles in 1948 and currently living in San Francisco, Howard Hersh is a third generation artist who has exhibited his work widely around the country, with fifty solo shows and over one hundred group exhibits. Hersh’s work is featured in prominent public spaces and collections in the United States, Japan, China, Indonesia, and Africa.

23rd Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival

A poetry reading in the Widow Jane Mine...

Sunday, August 25, 2013 from 1pm - 4pm 

The Widow Jane Mine
at Century House Historical Society
668 Route 213
Rosendale, NY  12472-0150

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit http://www.centuryhouse.org/

"Like" Century House Historical Society on Facebook!  This event is a benefit for CHHS.

Cara Benson is the author of the books (made) and the forthcoming Funny. Considering how heated it was.  Her poems have or will appear in the New York Times, Boston Review, Best American Poetry, and Fence. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and is the current Chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee.

 
Brenda Iijima’s latest book is Going Blooming Falling Blooming (Delete Press). She has a body if work forthcoming from 1913 Press called Untimely Death is Driven Beyond the Horizon. From Brooklyn she runs Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs.

Nada Gordon consists of a head, neck, torso, two arms and two legs. Since reaching adulthood, her body has consisted of close to 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life. These cells are organised biologically to form her whole body. She is the author of Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, foriegnn bodie, Swoon, Scented Rushes, and Vile Lilt. She blogs at ululate.blogspot.com, the initiatory sentence of which reads: “The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong.”

Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn (Marine Park, Sheepshead Bay, Old Mill, City Line, Crown Heights), studied at CCNY and Columbia (1951-1958); worked with and learned from the wonderful poets of the Lower East Side scene — Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, George Economou, Diane Wakoski, Jackson MacLow, Armand Schwerner — helping develop the Blue Yak bookshop on 10th Street, Trobar magazine, and Trobar Books.  1960-61:  taught at Wagner College on Staten Island.  Soon after the inauguration of John Kennedy, migrated to the Hudson Valley and has lived there ever since, in Annandale, teaching at Bard College.  Among his  many books of poetry (starting with Armed Descent, 1961), are Finding the Measure, Flesh Dream Book, A Common Shore, The Loom, The Convections, A Strange Market, Lapis, May Day, Sainte Terre, Fire Exit, and Uncertainties.  His fiction includes the novels The Scorpions, Cities, and The Book from the Sky, and five collections of short fiction.  Forthcoming are a collection of poems, The Secret Name of Now; five recent plays, Oedipus after Colonus and Other Plays; a cycle of poems on archeo-linguistics, Opening the Seals;  and the long poem The Hexagon.  Pierre Joris and Peter Cockelbergh are editing a two-volume collection of essays by and about RK.   Currently teaches in the Written Arts Program of Bard College, where from 1980 to 1992, he was a founding member of  the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts (1980-1992).  He lives in Annandale with his wife, the translator Charlotte Mandell. 

Mark Nowak, a 2010 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009) and Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004) — a New York Times Editor’s Choice.  A native of Buffalo, New York, Nowak currently directs the MFA program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.  

Kristin Prevallet is a consulting hypnotist certified through the National Guild of Hypnotists and an Integral Life Coach certified through the International Association of Counselors and Therapists. She received a M.A. in Humanities through the University of Buffalo and has received residencies and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN America, the Poetry Society of America, Naropa University, and Spalding University. She currently directs the Center for Mindbody Studies where she leads workshops and works with private clients. Her writings on poetics and consciousness have appeared in a variety of publications including Spoon River Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, and Reality Sandwich as well as the books You, Resourceful: Tap Your Inner Resources to Restore Your Mind and Body and Trance Poetics: Your Writing Mind. She is the author of four books of poetry including I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press) and most recently, Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn: A Four Quartets (Belladonna).

George Quasha, artist/poet/sound artist, explores a principle axiality/liminality/configuration) in language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, & performance. He has performed “axial music” frequently both Upstate and in NYC.  Most recent of his 17 books are Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (2006, foreword Carter Ratcliff); An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings (2009, with Charles Stein; foreword Lynne Cooke); and Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (2011, Zasterle Press). A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow in video art, his art is: Speaking Portraits recording over 1000 artists/poets/composers in 11 countries, appears online at http://www.quasha.com/

Charles Stein's work comprises a complexly integrated field of poems, prose reflections, translations, drawings, photographs, lectures, conversations, and performances. Born in 1944 in New York City, he is the author of thirteen books of poetry including From Mimir's Head (Station Hill Press), a verse translation of The Odyssey (North Atlantic Books), and The Hat Rack Tree (Station Hill Press). His prose writings include a vision of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone Unveiled (North Atlantic Books), a critical study of poet Charles Olson’s use of the writing of C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum (Station Hill Press), and a collaborative study with George Quasha of the work of Gary Hill, An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works & Writings, Ediciones Poligrafa. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Connecticut at Storrs and lives with guitarist, choral director, and research historian, Megan Hastie in Barrytown New York. His work can be explored at www.charlessteinpoet.com