Poetic Research Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2009-07-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

A Benefit Reading for Palm Press
with Rob Halpern, Kristin Palm, David Buuck, Harold Abramowitz & Dana Teen Lomax

Friday, July 17 2009 at 7:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm

$5 donation requested

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya Books, 2004) and Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2009). His collaboration with Taylor Brady, Snow Sensitive Skin (Atticus / Finch 2007), will soon be reissued by Displaced Press. Music for Porn is also forthcoming. Currently, he’s co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the second of which, “Commitment or the Crisis of Language," appears in the Review of Contemporary Fiction alongside his own essay on Perec. Rob is an active participant in the Nonsite Collective. He lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Kristin Palm’s book, The Straits (two long poems about Detroit, her former hometown), was published last year by the serendipitously named Palm Press. Her writing has also appeared in various journals, including Boog City, Chain, There, Dusie and LVNG, the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), and numerous magazines and newspapers. Kristin lives in San Francisco, where she works at a children’s art museum and teaches poetry in the public schools.

David Buuck lives in Oakland. He is the author of The Shunt & several booklets of cross-genre writing. He is the founder of BARGE (the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics) & a writing teacher.

Harold Abramowitz is a writer and editor from Los Angeles. His books and chapbooks include Not Blessed (forthcoming Les Figues Press, 2009), Sin is to Celebration (collaboration with Amanda Ackerman, House Press, 2009), Dear Dearly Departed (Palm Press, 2008), Sunday, or A Summer’s Day (PS Books, 2008), and Three Column Table (Insert Press, 2007). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs, and co-curates the experimental cabaret event series Late Night Snack.

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Disclosure (Dusie, 2009), Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006), Room (a+bend press, 1999), and the co-editor of Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). She is currently editing Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children and teaching at Marin Juvenile Hall and San Francisco State University.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2009-06-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

K. Lorraine Graham, Amaranth Borsuk & Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Saturday, June 27 2009 at 4:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 4:00pm
Reading starts at 4:30pm

$5 donation requested

We will be celebrating the release of K. Lorraine Graham's new book TERMINAL HUMMING just out from Edge Books.

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, June 2009) and several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take Home Project. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. She currently lives in southern California with her partner, Mark Wallace, and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at terminalhumming.blogspot.com

Amaranth Borsuk is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is currently collaborating with Gabriela Jauregui on translations and transversions of Oulipo poet Paul Braffort's My Hypertropes. Selections from that project have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Denver Quarterly, Pool, Columbia, ZYZZYVA, and CRATE, among others. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Writing Technologies, Slope, and International Journal of Women's Studies. She is interested in digital poetics and textual materiality, and works part time in the letterpress studio at Otis College of Art and Design.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and two chapbooks, Sorcery (Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv) and The Great Wheel (MaCaHu Press). He teaches in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2009-06-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

BRUCE ANDREWS & DEBORAH MEADOWS

Friday, June 26 2009 at 7:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm

$5 donation requested

Bruce Andrews is "a performance artist and poet whose texts are some of the most radical of the Language school; his poetry tries to cast doubt on each and every 'natural' construction of language" (The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English). A founding editor of the key journalL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Andrews has maintained a consistent position at the radical edge of the literary avant-garde. Author of over thirty volumes of poetry, and a collection of innovative critical essays (Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis, with a load of books, shorter texts, interviews, essays, recordings & commentary online at the Electronic Poetry Center, Ubu, PennSound, Eclipse, Jacket & Wikipedia). He has lived in New York City since 1975, teaching political science at Fordham University (see YouTube for his 5 minute dust-up with Bill O’Reilly), and since the mid-80s has been Music Director & sound designer for Sally Silvers & Dancers. [Sally, by the way, is in town performing with Yvonne Rainer at Red Cat this week, June 25 to 28.]

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her most recent book of poetry is from Shearsman Press entitled Goodbye Tissues. Other works of poetry include: involutia (Shearsman Press, UK, 2007), The Draped Universe(Belladonna* Books, 2007), Thin Gloves (Green Integer, 2006), Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004), and two chapbooks, Growing Still (Tinfish Press, 2005) and “The 60’s and 70’s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (Tinfish Press, 2003). Her Electronic Poetry Center author page is located: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/meadows/

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2009-05-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

BRIAN KIM STEFANS, BRANDON DOWNING & STAN APPS

Saturday, June 6 2009 at 4pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 3:00pm
Reading starts at 4pm

$5 donation requested

Wine and snacks served before the reading

Brian Kim Stefans' recent books include Kluge: A Meditation, and other works (Roof, 2007), What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), and Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2007). His digital works such as "The Dreamlife of Letters" and "Star Wars, One Letter at a Time" have been shown in gallery settings worldwide; many of these can be found at his website, www.arras.net. He is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA, specializing in poetry and electronic writing.

Brandon Downing is a videomaker, visual artist, and writer originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry collections include The Shirt Weapon (Germ, 2002), and Dark Brandon (Faux, 2005). An online gallery featuring his photographic work can be seen online at http://brandondowning.org. A feature-length DVD collection of recent video works, Dark Brandon // Eternal Classics, was released in 2007, and a monograph of his literary collages, Lake Antiquity, will be published by Fence Books this fall.

Stan Apps writes poems and essays. His books include: God's Livestock Policy (Les Figues, 2008), Handbook of Poetic Language (eohippus labs, 2008), Grover Fuel (Scantily Clad e-book, 2009) and Info Ration (Make Now, 2007). A chapbook of Sonnets is forthcoming soon from Peachpit Press, and his essays will be collected as The World As Phone Bill (Combo Books) late this year. Stan's poetry emphasizes direct statement, obviousness, economics, and the phatic nature of the self-explanatory.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2009-04-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI, JOCELYN SAIDENBERG & THÉRÈSE BACHAND

Saturday, May 9 2009 at 5:30pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206
Doors open at 5:00pm
Reading starts at 5:30pm

$5 donation requested

MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI lives in Durham, NC, where she is studying 19th-century American literature at Duke. Her first book The Bruise, out now from Fiction Collective Two, is the winner of the 2006 Ronald Sukenick prize for innovative fiction.

JOCELYN SAIDENBERG is the author of Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series), CUSP (Kelsey St. Press), winner of the Frances Jaffer Book Award, Negativity (Atelos) and Dispossessed (Belladonna). She is the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in San Francisco and works as a catalog librarian for the San Francisco Public Library.

THÉRÈSE BACHAND is the author of the just published luce a cavallo, chosen by Luigi Ballerini for a Green Integer Gertrude Stein Award. She has been anthologized in various PIP Anthologies, and her collection Daughter of the Ephemeral Word is forthcoming from i.e. press. Her poems have appeared in the journals Area Sneaks, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Rail, Chain, and Primary Writing, among others; Ms. Bachand--as her 4 to 6 year old students at the UCLA Lab School know her--lives in Los Angeles.

David Lloyd & The PRB present...

2009-03-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

A Benefit Reading for the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund

featuring:

Will Alexander
Guy Bennett
Paul Vangelisti
Diane Ward
Ben Ehrenreich
Ara Shirinyan
Andrew Maxwell
Sesshu Foster
Douglas Kearny
Roberto Leni
David Lloyd
Estrella del Valle
Seth Michelson
Dennis Philips
Saba Razvi
Martha Ronk
Matthew Shenoda
Daniel Tiffany
Molly Bendall
& more?

Sunday, March 29, 2009
Free, but please donate generously!
Event starts at 4pm.

The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Rd.
Glendale, CA
91204
www.poeticresearch.com

The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund is a medical charitable organization providing humanitarian and medical services to children in Palestine and the Middle East. The P.C.R.F. is a registered non-political, non-profit, 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization that was established in 1991 by concerned people in the U.S. to address the medical and humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian youths in the Middle East. It has since expanded to help suffering children from other Middle Eastern nations, based only on their medical needs. The P.C.R.F. helps to locate free medical care for children from the Middle East who are unable to get the necessary and specialized treatment in their homeland.

Their website is www.pcrf.net

Les Figues & the PRB present...

2009-01-17T23:22:00.000-08:00

MY THREE SONS

With
Lisa ROBERTSON
Yedda MORRISON
Sophie ROBINSON

Saturday, January 31, 2008
$5 suggested donation
Doors 7:00pm
Reading starts at 7:30pm
compactspace
105 East 6th St., Los Angeles, CA 90016
www.compactspace.com

LISA ROBERTSON’s books include Debbie: An Epic, XEclogue, The Weather, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from The Office for Soft Architecture, The Men. Coach House Press, in Toronto, is about to publish Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, a miscellany of poems. Robertson is currently a visiting artist at California College of the Arts. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Montreal based writer and visual artist

YEDDA MORRISON is the author of Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Editions, 2008). Her other books include My Pocket Park (Dusie Press, 2007), Co (Collaborations with Bruce Andrews, Roof Books, 2006) and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). From 1998-2005 Morrison co-edited Tripwire: a Journal of Experimental Poetics and Visual Art. Morrison has exhibited her visual work throughout the US and Canada and is represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC.

SOPHIE ROBINSON is the author of a, forthcoming from Les Figues Press. In 2006, she received the Phillipa Hicks award for Creativity and Innovation from the University of London, and her first chapbook, Killin’Kittenish! was published by yt communication in 2006. Her creative and critical work has also been published in Pilot, How2, Dusie and the Openned anthology.

compactspace is an international artist collective affiliated with its sister space, compactlab, in Geneva, Switzerland. This innovative organization, previously located in LA’s Pico-Union district, has recently re-located to historic downtown LA, where it promotes a multi-media arts program that features emerging and mid-career artists. compactspace LA is made possible by the contributions of the University of California San Diego’s Visual Arts Department.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2009-01-13T14:29:00.001-08:00

KIT ROBINSON & DIANE WARD
Saturday, January 24 2009 at 4:30pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 4:00pm
Reading starts at 4:30pm

$5 donation requested

Kit Robinson is celebrating the publication of his new book The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). A co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980 (Mode A, ongoing), he is also the author of 9:45 (The Post Apollo Press, 2003), The Crave (Atelos, 2002) and Democracy Boulevard (Roof, 1998).

Diane Ward was born in Washington, DC and currently lives in Santa Monica, California. She has published ten books of poetry including, most recently, Flim-Yoked Scrim (Factory School, 2006), When You Awake (New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), Portrait As If Through My Own Voice (Los Angeles: Margin to Margin, 2001) and Portraits and Maps with Michael C. McMillen (Italy: ML & NLF Editions, 2000). She has been included in numerous anthologies, among them: MOVING BORDERS: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan (New Jersey: Talisman House, Publishers, 1998) and OUT OF EVERYWHERE: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & the UK, edited by Maggie O’Sullivan (London: Reality Street Editions, 1996).

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2008-12-05T15:49:00.001-08:00

DODIE BELLAMY & VANESSA PLACE
Saturday, December 20 2008 at 5:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 4:30pm
Reading starts at 5:00pm

$5 donation requested

Dodie Bellamy's chapbook, Barf Manifesto, is recently out from Ugly Duckling Presse. Other books include Academonia, Pink Steam and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. In January, 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker's clothing for White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art space. She lives in San Francisco with writer Kevin Killian and three cats. She teaches, among other places, in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch, Los Angeles.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence prose piece; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2), and, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming)). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press in 2010.

Upper Limit Los Angeles

The PRB Recommends...

2008-10-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

UNTITLED:
SPECULATIONS ON THE EXPANDED FIELD OF WRITING
Friday October 24th to Saturday October 25th
At REDCAT, The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles CA 90012

The fifth in an annual series of experimental writing conferences at REDCAT, “Untitled” is a two-day conversation about writing which in some manner exceeds the printed page. While we are familiar with visual artworks constituted as a set of instructions, secrets written by visitors in a book, or one artist erasing of another artist's work, what would be their equivalents in the literary world?

“Untitled” is a common title of contemporary art works and also refers to the incipient moment of a new text or idea; it was chosen to convey a sense of openness and process. A variety of writers and artists will discuss the use of language and words and/or their object status, the book and the letter, the question of the "emptiness" vs. the fullness of language as a poetic medium, the pictorial versus the narrative, the incorporation of extra-linguistic symbols and signs (maps, diagrams, formulas, etc.), the question of conceptual writing, and words off the page – performed, sited, projected, incanted, or invoked.

Among the participants is Kenny Goldsmith, an “uncreative” writer who labels himself the “most boring writer in the world” and writes books that include everything he said for a week (Soliloquy, 2001), every move his body made during a thirteen-hour period (Fidget, 1999), and a year of transcribed weather reports (The Weather, 2005).

Artist Young-Hae Chang is part of a “corporate” web art group known as Heavy Industries, whose short Flash texts have mesmerized the art world with their combination of graphic boldness and acute commentary on culture, politics and commerce, yielding a new kind of literary cinema.

Currently teaching in the Writing Program at CalArts, Salvador Plascencia’s first novel, The People of Paper, takes place in the Chicano disapora. Reflecting on the nature of literary characters, some of his people are literally made of paper, and other characters get paper cuts from them.

The conference will include two panels on the topic of “Litterality,” examining how writers use what we normally consider non-linguistic elements, such as symbols, diagrams, maps, or scores placed in the context of writing. We will also look at invented writing systems, and what it might mean to think about the book as an object rather than as a collection of words or sentences.

As in the art world, many kinds of appropriation have been undertaken by experiemental writers in the last several years. The panel on “Appropriation and Citation” will look a these practices, asking questions about whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited or resurrected, who owns texts, and if there is a difference between appropriation and citation.

A panel on “The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language” will examine language as a vehicle of meaning. Rather than look at what texts say, it asks if language simply taken on its own is empty, saturated with meaning, both, or something else.

The fifth panel on “the concept of conceptual writing," looks at the use of writing not to convey meaning or tell stories but to convey concepts, asking how this might be similar, or not, to the work of conceptual artists in the visual arena.

In addition to the five panels, there will be two evening readings. The participants in the conference are Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Latasha Diggs, Johanna Drucker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Grenier, Douglas Kearney, Steve McCaffery, Julie Patton, Salvador Plascencia, Jessica Smith, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Taylor, Shanxing Wang, and Heriberto Yepez.

Organized by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim of the Writing Program at CalArts, and funded by The Annenberg Foundation. See Redcat.org for schedule and ticket information, or email untitled.writing@gmail.com.

Make Now Needs Volunteers

2008-10-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

Hi all!

I am getting together the manuscripts for next year, there will be a lot, and need some helping organizing, editing, designing, etc. I think it will be impossible to complete these tasks on time if i do it on the lonesome.

If anyone is interested in gaining some small press publishing experience, let me know. You do not have to be in the Los Angeles area, though that would help.

Ara Shirinyan

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2008-09-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

Bill Luoma & the Backyard BBQ

Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 2:00pm

Please join us for a special afternoon of backyard poetry, food and conversation on Saturday, September 13, as we welcome poet Bill Luoma.

@ The House of Ara

1305 Romulus Dr.
Glendale, CA
91205

Bill Luoma is the author of Works and Days, Western Love, Dear Dad, and Swoonrocket. Recent work has appeared in Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Berkeley.

Doug Nufer

2008-08-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Poetic Research Bureau presents....

2008-08-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

A Book Release Party for Doug Nufer

We Were Werewolves published by Make Now Press

Sunday, August 24 2008, 6:30pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Rd.
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 6:30pm
Reading starts at 7:00pm

Note the later than usual starting time!

Doug Nufer writes prose and poetry as a rule, some of which he performs alone or with musicians or dancers, some of which has appeared in Bird Dog, Golden Handcuffs Review, and Monkey Puzzle. His novels include Never Again (Black Square), Negativeland (Autonomedia), On the Roast (Chiasmus), and The Mudflat Man/ The River Boys (soultheft). His recent book is a collection of Oulipian poetry, We Were Werewolves (Make Now).

WE WERE WEREWOLVES uses constraints to open up the English language to deeper and darker humours than any your basic run-of-the-mill prosaic verse can begin to imagine. The insistent permutations of alphabetical sounds, the severe word love run through film noir-based tonalities, & the small-to-epic scale of reordering found in so many of these Nuferian arrangements lay bare a gleeful prosody of the nervoussystem. Pleasure level herein: mighty high.
- Anselm Berrigan.

Triumph of the Exegetes

2008-08-18T17:22:00.001-07:00

A professor of negative anthropology and a philosophy of mind professor walk into a bar.

Oof! Who'd guess limbo could be this difficult?

Putting the Cartesian before the horse, Dr. K orients Dr. B: "So here we are. Why the long fascia?"

Dr. B: "It's still a bar in principle. It's your jokes that need a rider."

Dr. K: "Well, on the condition that we've moved beyond all this human guff, I say you make us breakfast."

Dr B: "Ok, I'll be eggs. You be bacon."

Barkeep: "We don't serve breakfast here."

Doctors: "Pish! We're not breakfast! We're poets!"

'Keep: "Then why am I fed up?"

Good question. Other queries needing answers that may be addressed this weekend:

---"Aaron, you're new novel is called The Mandarin. Are we talking oranges or tyranny?"
---"Franklin, you've unpacked Armed Forces from its working title Emotional Fascism. Now can you tell us what Donald Fagen was talking about when he wrote "Brooklyn owes the charmer under me"?
---And alternately: "Is shame a relationship, a procedure or a unit? And if a unit, is self-possession also a unit, and is it divisible by the shame unit?"
---And again: "You've got good pipes, but how's your foundation?"
et cetera etcetera & etc

Well c'mon.

Aaron Kunin is the only fella we know who asserts that 'idea' is a trisyllable. The ideas in his new book The Mandarin are even stranger. They dispose of the objective world like Jakob Apfelböck disposing of the parental stink; it keeps coming back! Help him kill it off this weekend so we can can get back to bar and be done with these zombies and their bookbags.

Franklin Bruno is the only fella we know who thinks Shangri-la is "undercooked", but he's also famous for his quotations. Here's one: "Being a man, for me, is a bit like being a finite set." Okay, but does the new math sing? Does the drummer have a boyfriend? Can I have the setlist?

Enough questions. The gig is almost up.

AARON KUNIN & FRANKLIN BRUNO

Saturday, August 16 2008 at 5:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau

3702 San Fernando Blvd

Glendale, CA 91206
Blog: http://www.poeticresearch.com/
Map: http://tinyurl.com/upperlimitlosangeles

Doors open at 4:30pm

Reading starts at 5:00pm

$5 donation requested

Aaron Kunin is a poet, critic, and novelist. He is the author of a collection of small poems about shame, Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005); a chapbook, Secret Architecture (Braincase, 2006); and a novel, The Mandarin (Fence, 2008). He is assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College and lives in Los Angeles.

Franklin Bruno is the author of a book of criticism (Armed Forces) and a chapbook of poems (MF/MA). His poems have appeared in The Hat, Faucheuse, Vanitas, and the anthology Intersections: Innovative Poetry from Southern California (Green Integer). He has taught philosophy at UCLA, Pomona College, Northwestern University, and Bard College. A native Southern Californian, he keeps leaving Los Angeles, and keeps coming back.

***

The PRB: While Paul counts the almonds, we steal the cashews.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2008-08-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

AARON KUNIN & FRANKLIN BRUNO

Saturday, August 16 2008 at 5:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau

3702 San Fernando Blvd

Glendale, CA 91206

Let's celebrate. Aaron Kunin's new novel The Mandarin is out.

Doors open at 4:30pm

Reading starts at 5:00pm

$5 donation requested

Aaron Kunin is a poet, critic, and novelist. He is the author of a collection of small poems about shame, Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005); a chapbook, Secret Architecture (Braincase, 2006); and a novel, The Mandarin (Fence, 2008). He is assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College and lives in Los Angeles.

Franklin Bruno is the author of a book of criticism (Armed Forces) and a chapbook of poems (MF/MA). His poems have appeared in The Hat, Faucheuse, Vanitas, and the anthology Intersections: Innovative Poetry from Southern California (Green Integer). He has taught philosophy at UCLA, Pomona College, Northwestern University, and Bard College. A native Southern California, he keeps leaving Los Angeles, and keeps coming back.

Wittgenstein's Daughters Think in Ink and the Mind Follows Apace: Moschovakis & Carter @ the PRB, Sat 4:30pm

2008-07-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

Remember the days when Mallarmé was king and every poem was an archipelago of scattered force where the vehicle of the mind might enter at random and leave roger dodger at will?

Remember when poetry was ambient and sneaky ambiguous and jangled at the touch like mechanical tears on the blushing imago of the "novel form"?

Remember the faux finish, the "new elliptical", the liberation of the "open work", the clouds in the coffee of the post-language reverie gang?

Well, you'll get none of that here.

Not this weekend.

This weekend, proposition in poetry is back. Argument is alright. The didactic is generative. One frank sentence pops into place after another.

And why not? Anna Moschovakis is in town.

Screw the blurb gumbo about both of her parents being logicians and her first book containing sectionals like "The Blue Book", etc. The point is: when her mind pivots at the putative ground truths her notional stylus leads before it, your own mind pivots too, and cumulative pivots mean ice rink fantasia in your cognitive cluster.

You won't forget that action.

Joining her is Northeast LA's very own minister of clean design whose prosodic stumbling blocks stage explanations and illustrations of prototype theory on the robot clover of an inherited typeface ("of the world," she says, "of the world!"). She calls her new book "A Fixed, Formal Arrangement", but you'll be repositioned, I guarantee you. This poetry plays fidget rock.

Is it just me, or are all the boys flarfing in the backroom, fussing with collectible captchas and calling it "vis-po" or stealing pixels from the video fireplace like bantamweight prometheans busing data from one bottlenecked formal genre into another to make a claim for "sample culture" and the now sound?

Well, call me stumped. The gals are on it in this weather. The boys better get back to bureau.

***

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS & ALLISON CARTER

Saturday, July 19 2008 at 5:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau

3702 San Fernando Blvd

Glendale, CA 91206

FEEL THE FUNCTION: PRB |---> ULLA

***

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS works with the Ugly Duckling Presse collective as an editor, book and web designer, and letterpress printer. She also translates from French, and has published translations of Gautier, Michaux and Cendrars, among others. Her first full length collection, I Have Not Been Able To Get Through To Everyone, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2006. Anna is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at CUNY's Graduate Center, and currently teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

ALLISON CARTER is an LA-based writer, teacher and designer. Her first book, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, is forthcoming next month from Les Figues Press. Her chapbook, Shadows Are Weather, will soon be out from Horse Less Press. Her work has otherwise been published in P-Queue, 5_Trope, Fence, and other journals. She currently teaches a workshop in hybrid forms at California Institute of the Arts and co-edits P S Books with Joe Potts.

***

Doors open at 4:30pm

Reading starts at 5:00pm

$5 donation requested

***

The PRB: Your frontline against poetry snacks.

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

2008-07-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS & ALLISON CARTER

Saturday, July 19 2008 at 5:00pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau

3702 San Fernando Blvd

Glendale, CA 91206

***

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS works with the Ugly Duckling Presse collective as an editor, book and web designer, and letterpress printer. She also translates from French, and has published translations of Gautier, Michaux and Cendrars, among others. Her first full length collection, I Have Not Been Able To Get Through To Everyone, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2006. Anna is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at CUNY's Graduate Center, and currently teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

ALLISON CARTER is an LA-based writer, teacher and designer. Her first book, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, is forthcoming next month from Les Figues Press. Her chapbook, Shadows Are Weather, will soon be out from Horse Less Press. Her work has otherwise been published in P-Queue, 5_Trope, Fence, and other journals. She currently teaches a workshop in hybrid forms at California Institute of the Arts and co-edits P S Books with Joe Potts.

***

Doors open at 4:30pm

Reading starts at 5:00pm

$5 donation requested

Triple Canopy Does the PRB

2008-06-20T17:23:00.000-07:00

There's a tricky new online magazine that works some of the conceptual digs that magazines like Soft Targets, Cabinet and the Paul Ford-wing of Harper's Online have been staking out this century (in fact, a few of the editors have had gigs at those kindred publications). The joint is called Triple Canopy, dark nod to the private defense contractor of the same name. They've had a few recent coups, including an interview with foreign policy provacateuse Samantha Power and the first complete English translation of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize.

This month in Issue #2 they feature the Poetic Research Bureau extensively, focusing on the Bureau's concern with derivate poetries and unoriginal literature. This includes contributions from the three directors (Mosconi, Shirinyan and Maxwell), and the summer issue of the quarterly PRB's Directors' Dispatch.

Triple Canopy editors will be visiting LA next weekend, June 27th - 29th, and have an Issue #2 launch at SiteLA on Friday night, plus a reading at Family Bookstore on Fairfax Sunday evening. PRB co-director Andrew Maxwell (c'est moi) will be reading from the Literary Product Trials on Sunday at the bookstore event.

The Bureau presents...

2008-06-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

David Buuck & Harold Abramowitz

Saturday, June 28 2008 at 5:00pm

***

DAVID BUUCK is a contributing editor at Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute & the Language & Thinking program at Bard College. Recent booklets include Ruts, Runts, Between Above & Below, Paranoia Agent, and SITE/CITE/CITY. Full-length books are forthcoming from Palm Press and Tangent. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, which this summer will present Buried Treasure Island at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' "Bay Area Now" triennial. He lives in Oakland with his two dogs.

HAROLD ABRAMOWITZ is a writer and teacher from Los Angeles, author of a book, Dear Dearly Departed, forthcoming from Palm Press, a micro-book, Sunday, or a Summer's Day, forthcoming from PS Books, and a chapbook, Three Column Table, from Insert Press. Harold's writing, alone and collaboratively, has appeared in various publications. With Amanda Ackerman, he co-edits the literary project eohippus labs.

***

Five dollar donation requested (for traveling poets).

Doors open at 4:30pm
Reading starts at 5:00pm

Magazines That Work

2008-06-16T01:14:00.000-07:00

1. No magazine should include more than 50pp of work. It should be able to be consumed in one concentrated sitting.

2. No magazine should have a run longer than three years. Magazines should be understood to be ephemeral.

3. A magazine should be the stage for one rather focused idea, or a handful of related themes, rather than a synthetic pulp absorbing everything it touches.

4. A magazine should be issued at least quarterly, to keep its conversation alive.

5. A magazine should be portable, and tend toward smaller formats. Ideally its distribution will be hand-to-hand.

6. A magazine's print runs should be small: no more than 500 copies, and no reprints for at least five years after publication.

7. A magazine is still a fetish object, but its borders needn't necessarily end at the page. It can be germinated publicly in the laboratory of a blog, for example, and pruned at an arbitrary moment when the concentration is right, to maximize the effect or arrival (however accidental) of an idea.

San Fernando Will Not Forget This Moment

2008-06-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

Our previous reminder just didn't cut it––

Even a butcher needs to butt in with the meat.

San Fernando Rd is alive and we don't want to kill it!

So we plant our flunky banner in the street:

Ahem.

Come see Gabriela Jauregui collect herself for the very first time,

in a book no less!

Why would she do it? The narrator puts his monocle on: "by gum, what a strange affair!"

At least 23 artists have cordoned off 23 miles of San Fernando to make the point:

This lady needs a witness!

Or... that's where you come in.

(sound of mental camera a-rolling, crickety-crank)

... ... ...

Walk hard, Starstruck Troopers, and do it our way, cuz as Teddy Bear Berrigan had it:

"My heart Your heart

That's the American Way

& so,

FUCK OR WALK!

It's the American Way"

Which is why all the 'art guerillas' get out

or get out of the way

to make a day of our post-pedestrianism.

What's the sound of 23 Angelenos walking? Can you hear it?!

That's what we've come to find out.

Perloff sez Gabriela has "perfect pitch". But we don't buy it!

The sneakiest poets are sharpies or flat-footed, and make a music of the accidentals.

(Here's a perfect pitch, btw!)

R. Duncan: If you haven't entered the dance / you've misunderstood the event.

Did I paraphrase? Well, fuck or walk, maybe I did: This event is new!

Come tell Gabriela to sing off key!

Unlock that responsibility!

& thusly examine: Controlled Decay.

Published by Black Goat / Akashic Books

A Book Release Party for Gabriela Jauregui

Sunday, June 8 2008, 4:30pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau

3702 San Fernando Rd.

Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 4:30pm

Reading starts at 5:00pm

& San Fernando Road Concert events from 5-9pm.

This gig is free. Save your bucks, and buy a book:

It's yr future:

The PRB Vortex. b/c

We've earned it.

The Bureau presents...

2008-05-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

A Book Release Party for Gabriela Jauregui

Controlled Decay published by Black Goat/Akashic Books

Sunday, June 8 2008, 4:30pm

@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Rd.
Glendale, CA 91206

Doors open at 4:30pm
Reading starts at 5:00pm

Photos from the Rob Fitterman, Jane Sprague Reading

2008-05-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

All photos by Harold Abramowitz

Rob Fitterman Reads

Andrew Maxwell Announces

Jane Sprague Reads

Attention!

2008-05-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

Notorious rogue Gothamite sampler takes unpleasant detour to clean clocks in the Southland!

Rob Fitterman makes an exception! Long Beach bravo Jane Sprague cuts the ribbon!

Come get a peek at the newest guff factory and prose booster on the block, the POETIC RESEARCH BUREAU in the fetal stage, wriggling like a bookworm in its library music. We'll be building the joint out through the summer, with occasional readings under the heatlamp, only to launch 'big time' in the fall, like stuck-up morning-glories with "good hunch disease"!

Meantime, Ara thinks if we grow beards and promote algorithmic poetry, we may just get into a proper argument. Let's see!

Doors open at 6:30. Reading is 7pm sharp in the theater, and first official pub walk at 8 to abuse your organ meats and carry on the debate!

(Note that Atwater is pre-famous for the highest density of post-chic, murky theme bars in the 5-2-134 triangle. You've never felt "almost there" until you've felt Atwater.)