December 11, 2011

Bill Luoma and Juliana Spahr

Sunday, December 11th
7:30 pm

Open Space Cafe
2815 SE Holgate

$5.00 suggested donation

Bill Luoma's Some Math was released in September 2011 by Kenning editions. The book is described as "a series of sound poems that both employ and interrogate the global language of systems and networks. Astrophysics. Computer science. Short tetrameters. Long dactyls. 9/11. US military strategy. The energy pathways of acupuncture. The fish ladders of Gmail. The wires and electrodes of torture. The swirling products of global capital." Bill is also the author of Works and Days, Dear Dad, Swoon Rocket, Western Love and, with Lisa Jarnot and Rod Smith, New Mannerist Tricycle. Bill was born in San Francisco and now lives in Oakland. He knows a lot about chemistry, classics, comparative literature, computer science, connotation, chiasmus, catachresis and some math.

from Some Math

    The nothing is declaring for spiegarlo
    who's given to nothing the elasticity of hats
    the crowning of spiegarlo for nothing
    of having the low one look inside the doggie maw of kerberos
    into the expert of the elasticity of the nail of task
    task of the thing the power of we
    trading for the expert the power of I
    for a handle I have a descriptor
    for the price of the paragraphs that control it
    reezing to negotiate the unethical behavior
    molto to shut up of dell the approximated he of timing
    the etc example of paragraphs
    the one great difficulty of this one of paragraphs
    of having of I of the word of best of the spiacente to satisfy
    a work under the new of the radical
    within the change of the social
    believing to create the beautiful model.

Juliana Spahr is the author of Well Then There Now (2011); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005); Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You (2001); and Response (1996), winner of the National Poetry Series Award, as well as a book of criticism, Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama Press, 2001). From 1993 to 2003, Spahr co-edited the arts journal Chain, which she co-founded with Jena Osman. She currently lives in Berkeley, California. Publishers Weekly says of Well Then There Now: "Spahr's fifth book of imaginative writing (both poems and prose) should be a blockbuster, a lasting disturbance; a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority..."

From "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache"

We come into the world.
We come into the world and there it is.
The sun is there.
The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown
of the ocean is there.
Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown
and the brown and the blue.
The green of the land is there.
Elders and youngers are there.
We come into the world and we are there.
And we begin to breathe.
We come into the world and there it is.
We come into the world without and we breathe it in.
We come into the world and begin to move between the
brown and the blue and the green of it.