Our podcast of LA-Lit 14b: Will Alexander is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, June 25th at 2pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Will Alexander is a poet and visual artist. Working from Los Angeles, he has updated the alchemy of surrealist vision (found in such poets as Aimé Césaire and Raymond Roussel) to write his own cosmic parables, in his own electric incandescent language. His poetic works include Exobiology as Goddess, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (essays), and The Stratospheric Canticles. He has two works forthcoming: a novella, Alien Weaving, from Green Integer; and a book of poems, Sri Lankan Loxodrome, from Canopic Publishing. His most recent book, a trilogy of novels, Sunrise and Armageddon, is out from Spuyten Duyvil. The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England named Will Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century, and he was also recognized by the Whiting Foundation for exceptional literary achievement in New York. In 2002 Will received a fellowship for poetry from the California Arts Council.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 14a: Will Alexander is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, June 25th at 2pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Will Alexander is a poet and visual artist. Working from Los Angeles, he has updated the alchemy of surrealist vision (found in such poets as Aimé Césaire and Raymond Roussel) to write his own cosmic parables, in his own electric incandescent language. His poetic works include Exobiology as Goddess, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (essays), and The Stratospheric Canticles. He has two works forthcoming: a novella, Alien Weaving, from Green Integer; and a book of poems, Sri Lankan Loxodrome, from Canopic Publishing. His most recent book, a trilogy of novels, Sunrise and Armageddon, is out from Spuyten Duyvil. The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England named Will Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century, and he was also recognized by the Whiting Foundation for exceptional literary achievement in New York. In 2002 Will received a fellowship for poetry from the California Arts Council.

LA-Lit interviews Sawako Nakayasu
Sunday, December 10 at 5pm
At Betalevel

We’d like to invite you to a live radio recording, reading & conversation this coming Sunday December 10 at 5 p.m. at Betalevel in Chinatown. Sawako Nakayasu will be the featured writer on LA-lit, a radio show co-curated by Mathew Timmons & Stephanie Rioux. The show (& hence the recording) lasts a little over an hour and will be about 30 minutes of reading & about 30 minutes of questions & answers/further questions – alternating between the two modes in hopes of creating a space for dynamic conversation.

For information about attending the recording go here.

Sawako Nakayasu is currently writing about, through, on, around and with ants and other insects, but mostly ants. She was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books include Insect Country (A)Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press), So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press), and Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2002). She is currently working on an insect-based collaborative project featuring ants, while editing the journal Factorial, which often features contemporary Japanese poetry in English translation. In 2006 she received a Witter Bynner Foundation poetry translator residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute and a PEN Translation Fund Grant for translations of Chika Sagawa and Takashi Hiraide, respectively. Her own writing has been translated into Japanese and Swedish, and Arabic.

LA-Lit: Bay Poetics + a Salon
Saturday, December 2 at 1pm
At Betalevel

We’d like to invite you to a live radio recording, reading & conversation this coming Saturday December 2 at 1pm at Betalevel in Chinatown. Writers Del Ray Cross, Susan Gevirtz, Suzanne Stein, Stephanie Young and Magdalena Zurawski (whose work appears in the new anthology Bay Poetics edited by Stephanie Young) will be our guests on LA-lit, a radio show co-curated by Mathew Timmons & Stephanie Rioux. The show (& hence the recording) lasts a little over an hour and will be about 30 minutes of reading & about 30 minutes of questions & answers/further questions – alternating between the two modes in hopes of creating a space for dynamic conversation.

For information about attending the recording go here.

After the recording of LA-Lit, please join us for an informal Salon with our guests until 6pm. This will offer you a chance to chat with Bay Poets, there will probably be more readings and other general merriment. Also, please feel free to bring snacks andor drinks.

Del Ray Cross edits Shampoo a sudsy online literary magazine, and thrives in San Francisco. He has a chapbook and a half available from Pressed Wafer (including Cinema Yosemite) and a couple postcard books from Poetry Espresso (with Stephanie Young and Cassie Lewis).

Susan Gevirtz was an associate editor of HOW(ever) a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship, on the editorial advisory board of the journal Avec, and the online journal HOW2. Her books include Hourglass Transcripts, Burning Deck, 2001, Spelt, collaboration with Myung Mi Kim, a+bend press, 1999; Black Box Cutaway, Kelsey Street Press, 1999; Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson, Peter Lang, 1996; PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA, Potes and Poets, 1994; Taken Place, Reality Street, 1993; Linen minus, Avenue B, 1992; and Domino: point of entry, Leave Books, 1992.

Suzanne Stein’s works have appeared in the publications Mirage #4/Period[ical], Commonweal, Small Town, The Bay Area Poetry Anthology, and at the venues Refusalon Gallery, the San Francisco Exploratorium, the Berkeley Art Center, Outpost for Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. She is the former co-director and film curator of four walls gallery, San Francisco.

Stephanie Young lives in Oakland and works at Mills College, but she’s also a resident of the internet, and you can find her there at The Well Nourished Moon. She is a board member at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco’s 30-year-old literary arts center. She also hosted a popular series of poetry readings at her house in Oakland for several years, and is the editor of BAY POETICS, an anthology out from Faux Press. Her writing has been published in Pettycoat Relaxer, Five Fingers Review, VeRT, Shampoo, Mirage Period(ical), Cypress Magazine, LIT, can we have our ball back? and Combo.

Magdalena Zurawski is currently working on a novel called The Bruise and she keeps a blog at Minor Americans. She says of herself “I was born in Newark NJ and grew up in Edison NJ but Providence RI feels like my hometown more than any place else because that’s where I started having sex and meeting poets and being a real person in a real world. My major poetic influences are Jack Spicer, Bruce Springsteen and Immanuel Kant (but only the 3rd critique). Early Bruce Springsteen albums make me happier than anything on earth (well, as happy as really really good poetry readings).”

LA-Lit interviews Teresa Carmody at Betalevel on Sunday, November 19th at 3pm. For information about attending the recording go here.

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem, a micro-collection of short stories, which American Book Review calls “a celebratory lament” and poet Carol Muske Dukes calls “a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own.” Other work has appeared in PoetsWest, Stolen Purse, Roar: Women’s Studies Journal, For Here or To Go, and 4th Street. She is cofounder and editor of Les Figues Press, publisher of the TrenchArt series of experimental literature, and co-curator (with Stan Apps and Ara Shirinyan) the Smell Last Sunday Reading series in downtown Los Angeles.

Please note the time change from our normal schedule: doors open at 2:45 p.m. and the reading/recording will begin by 3:15 p.m.

LA-Lit celebrated its 1 Year Anniversary at Betalevel with a discussion of the experimental literary scene in Los Angeles on Sunday October 15 at 3pm.

Previous guests on the show–Will Alexander, Guy Bennett, Anthony McCann, Amar Ravva, Ara Shirinyan, and Diane Ward–participated in a panel discussion from 3pm-5pm, then gave readings beginning at 7pm.

Download the audio files here:
Discussion
Readings

Topics of discussion included:
LA-Lit – is there one?
Is an identifiable literary community important to Los Angeles?
Have old structures of organization become useless to us?
- rhizomatic communities vs bureaucratic organiztion
What are specific methods that could be used to create/grow literary community?
What role can experimental poetics play in the creation of community?
Eccentric or outside, off-center… is there no center?
How to define our own ‘decentered’ spontaneous connectivity?

For additional consideration, a cloud…

political activism • ecopoetics • urban poetics • art in the context of world-wide brutality • art and activism • the art of protest • collaborative art/poetics • poetic people power • social experiments • the poetics of daily life in an urban setting • momentary poetics • poetic manifestos • postwar culture • the public avant-garde • feminisms • post-avant • activist communities • poetic terrorism • anti-poetics • poetic recreation • textual/poetic extremeties • small poetic world/brutal surrounding world • poetic/activist pleasure • urban nature • a world of cities • cultural activism • street poetics • uncontrollable space of the urban event • community fences/border walls

LA-Lit interviews Chris Kraus at Betalevel on Friday, November 3rd at 7pm. For information about attending the recording go here.

Chris Kraus is the Los Angeles based author of I Love Dick (1998), Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004) and Torpor (2006), all of which are available from Semiotexte. In 2003 Kraus was cited by the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of the most important new writers to emerge in the past decade. In 1990, she founded the Native Agents new fiction series for Semiotexte, the visionary independent press founded by Sylvere Lotringer at Columbia University in 1972. Kraus writes about art and culture for many international publications including Index, Artext and Art in America. She was nominated for the 2005 Frank Mather Prize in Art Criticism and is presently the Writer in Residence at Colombia College of Art in Chicago.

Please note the time change from our normal schedule: doors open at 6:45 p.m. and the reading/recording will begin by 7:15 p.m.

LA-Lit celebrates its one year anniversary with a discussion of the experimental literary scene in Los Angeles. Previous guests on the show will participate in a panel discussion from 3pm-5pm, then give readings beginning at 7pm.

Also! Poetic Service Announcements!!!

Topics of discussion may include:
LA-Lit – is there one?
Is an identifiable literary community important to Los Angeles?
Have old structures of organization become useless to us?
- rhizomatic communities vs bureaucratic organiztion
What are specific methods that could be used to create/grow literary community?
What role can experimental poetics play in the creation of community?
Eccentric or outside, off-center… is there no center?
How to define our own ‘decentered’ spontaneous connectivity?

For consideration, a cloud…

political activism • ecopoetics • urban poetics • art in the context of world-wide brutality • art and activism • the art of protest • collaborative art/poetics • poetic people power • social experiments • the poetics of daily life in an urban setting • momentary poetics • poetic manifestos • postwar culture • the public avant-garde • feminisms • post-avant • activist communities • poetic terrorism • anti-poetics • poetic recreation • textual/poetic extremeties • small poetic world/brutal surrounding world • poetic/activist pleasure • urban nature • a world of cities • cultural activism • street poetics • uncontrollable space of the urban event • community fences/border walls

Our podcast of LA-Lit 13b: Bruna Mori is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 2pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Bruna Mori is the author of Dérive, a book of New York cityscape poems with sumi-ink paintings by Matthew Kinney, to be published this fall by Meritage Press. Tergiversation, her Ahadada Books chapbook, to be released this spring, is a series of homophonic and ’sensorial’ translations, inspired by the work of the late Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik.

In addition to her poetry and short prose, she writes creative nonfiction about art and architecture. Her most recent essay, for a forthcoming Semiotext[e] anthology, is on Isamu Noguchi’s internment designs for Poston, the camp where Noguchi was [voluntarily] incarcerated during World War 2.

Born in Japan and raised in the U.S., Mori presently lives in Los Angeles, where she edits at the Getty Research Institute, and teaches at Art Center College of Design and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Her own BA and MFA degrees were completed at the University of California, San Diego, and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Our podcast of LA-Lit 13a: Bruna Mori is now online. The interview was originally recorded on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 2pm.

If you need information about how to subscribe to our podcast go here.

Bruna Mori is the author of Dérive, a book of New York cityscape poems with sumi-ink paintings by Matthew Kinney, to be published this fall by Meritage Press. Tergiversation, her Ahadada Books chapbook, to be released this spring, is a series of homophonic and ’sensorial’ translations, inspired by the work of the late Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik.

In addition to her poetry and short prose, she writes creative nonfiction about art and architecture. Her most recent essay, for a forthcoming Semiotext[e] anthology, is on Isamu Noguchi’s internment designs for Poston, the camp where Noguchi was [voluntarily] incarcerated during World War 2.

Born in Japan and raised in the U.S., Mori presently lives in Los Angeles, where she edits at the Getty Research Institute, and teaches at Art Center College of Design and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Her own BA and MFA degrees were completed at the University of California, San Diego, and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.