December 17, 2011: Colleen Lookingbill

Last weekend Colleen Lookingbill joined us live in the studio and read from her recent book a forgetting of (lyric& Press). Among a flow of topics focusing on Colleen’s poetry and art, we discussed her writing and collage/assemblage processes, writing from the dream world, “silence as an idea of composition,” illness and the body and how it “teaches about itself,” language poetry, writing towards the “unknown,” and working with a palette of “found" objects.

In the second half, Colleen read two discursive pieces that she wrote during the Bay Area language poetry heyday, “Dream Body” and “Writing the Written”
that were published in Peter Gizzi’s Writing from the New Coast (O-blek) in 1993.

Colleen left us not only thinking about the various possibilities that arise when we play with both image and word, but she left us with several actual “vispo” (visual poem) pieces that include a variety of objects like GG Park leaves, puzzle pieces, poem fragments, antique figurines, sea pods, and wasp nests. Thank you Colleen! Click here to listen.

December 3, 2011- Poetry for the People!

This past Saturday we played Poetry for the People, an open reading taking place at Oscar Grant Plaza on Sundays at noon. This amazing series is being organized by Sara Larsen and David Brazil, who also publish TRY! Magazine. Listen to both poets and passersby read their own work, or the work of others. We want to give a shout out to Andrew Kenower for generously sharing his amazing recording of the event. Poetry for the People is still taking place at Oscar Grant Plaza, just off the 12st BART in Oakland. Please go check them out.

Click here to listen