November 3, 2013- Camille Roy Live!

This past Sunday we had the great pleasure to welcome Camille Roy to Lightrail Studios to discuss Sherwood Forest (Futurepoem, 2011). We began our interview talking about the relevance of Sherwood Forest and how this fictional place represents a possible underworld or counter-culture. Camille wanted to capture how these spaces are both intimate and under-represented in mainstream art and media. "Sherwood Forest is about what can't be assimilated." This is a wonderful and surprising work of poetry that reveals the fluidity of human identity and experience. She wants to represent narrative in a way that captures actual human interaction. Camille talks about how we never truly know each others complete stories and yet contemporary narrative often assumes that the reader should know the story in totality. Her book works towards a more realistic retelling of story. The book is filled with peril and what she calls the "purity of dread" that we encounter when we are so involved in a situation that we cannot have a distanced perspective. The poems foreground experience rather than intellectualization. In this work, humans, and human bodies are presented in their natural state, as opposed to the stripped down version we tend to present when we privilege the image/visual rather than the sense of smell. We also found out that Camille has a very soothing reading voice, when she shared a few pieces from her book.
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October 20, 2013- Avery Burns discusses the Iliad

On October 20th, we had our first reunion show when Avery Burns returned to talk about Homer's The Iliad. We learned how the story is still relevant today. We started off talking about the varied translations and even began the show reading from four different versions. Avery assigned us certain passages to read and questions to ponder in preparation for the show. We talked about the ways in which we as readers may feel disconnected from the characters and moral code in this story. Avery  helped us see the themes at play in The Iliad and how they connect to our more contemporary concerns, as well as how the story surprises the reader by running contrary to typical hero tales. Here, we see an argument against war, an argument that is very present in our modern-day psyche. Towards the end, we got a little Trojan geography lesson. Thanks Avery!
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October 27, 2013 The Evelyn Avenue Reading

Former guest and all-around beautiful poet, Susanne Dyckman, was gracious enough to invite the three of us to read at her Evelyn Avenue reading series.
Thank you Susanne and everyone who joined us!
Here's what happened:

Jay Thomas 10-27-13

Delia Tramontina 10-27-13

Nicholas Leaskou 10-27-13

We got an underwriter!!!!

Thank you to Green Apple Books for underwriting us!!!

Green Apple Books is a generalist bookstore serving the Bay Area since 1967. On Clement Street in the lively inner Richmond, Green Apple sells new and used books in all subject areas, poetry included, of course. They also sell magazines, journals, LPs, CDs, DVDs, and more. Top-rated on Yelp and a perennial winner of Best of the Bay awards, Green Apple is paradise for booklovers. 

September 29, 2013 Nico Peck Live!!!!

This Sunday the great Nico Peck joined us at Lightrail studios to discuss their chapbooks The Pyrrhaiad (Trafficker Press 2012) and Welter (Queer City, 2012). In Pyrrhaiad they are presenting a "Queer Iliad;" the title character emerged when they read Ulysses in which the characters ponder what Achilles's name was when he lived as a girl. This question led them to Robert Graves who answered this question by naming Pyrrha. This "re-membering" of the classics is part of Nico's own "gender journey" in which the page can be a mirror of that journey. While writing off of the very gendered text of mythology, they employ transgender pronouns. The work includes varied forms, and the chapbook, since it is published by Trafficker Press, includes an interview with Nico at that end. After the break, we talked about the separation of subject and object and how troubling that dichotomy may allow one to move past the world of thought, where we separate ourselves from the world, and into a space where oppression of the other is no longer possible. Towards the end of the interview we discussed Welter, a beautiful chap which is typed in courier font and has old maps as its end sheets. This work tackles etymology as well as Nico's activist spirit as it recounts reading at Occupy Oakland and entering/leaving "temporary utopian zones." They are also involoved in the Bay Area Public School, which is a free school where anyone can teach or take a class. Check it out at bayareapublicschool.org. You can email Nico if you are interested in their chapbooks, through queercity.org.
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September 15, 2013 Hazel White Live!!!

Last week we had Hazel White live in the studio, discussing her book Peril As Architectural Enrichment (Kelsey Street Press 2011). This is her first book of poetry, following her 12 books on gardening and landscape design. We started off talking about peril in landscape and language. She discussed meeting the 'resistance of language' when attempting to write about landscape. Her book grapples with the experience of being in gardens, in landscapes that are created and inhabited by people. Hazel told us about the 'de-centering' that can happen when interacting with the garden and in the potential discomfort of reading poetry.  We learn from our discomfort and de-centering. Hazel transitioned from prose to poetry while attending CCA, when she discovered that one can write about landscape architecture in poetry.
Later in the show, Hazel talked about her collaborative project with Denise Newman, "Botanica Recognita: Signage to Facilitate a Greeting," at UC Botanical Garden's show, "Natural Discourse: Artists, Architects Scientists and Poets in the Garden." In this exhibit, Hazel and Denise created 25 plant signs that re-imagined the content one encounters when learning about plants in a garden. We also learned about her "Site Sonnets," which were presented at the Eco-poetics Conference at UC Berkeley.
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September 8, 2013 - Roundtable Discussion #6- ERROR!

On September 8th, in lieu of a guest, we had our sixth roundtable discussion about error in writing. We started out with a rather apropos error while attempting to negotiate the phone system. We hope to one day be able to interview writers by phone, but sadly, we have yet to master this skill. For those of you who would like to avoid listening to us fumble with the button pushing, you can skip the first nine minutes of this show.
Once we got talking, we spent the remainder of the time tossing around the concept of mistakes.... or perhaps happy accidents. A mistake could be on the spelling or grammar level or on the language or content level. One might see these errors as just an opportunity to get out of the way of the writing, letting the language do its thing without being obstructed by our own overdetermination. On the other hand, sometimes the error is a lack of generatively or productivity. What are the different ways we can inhabit our errors so they serve our poetry? How can we, as Kathleen Fraser says, 'dismantle seductive writing practices?' What examples and parallels can we find in other types of art? In the end, perhaps error is just the beautiful aliens talking through us and onto our page. And if this is the case, there are different ways we can see ourselves as the conduit for these foreign voices. Let us all revel in our awesome accidents!!!!
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