July 11, 2015

Kaia Sand & Charles Hood


Saturday, July 11
7:00 pm

503-236-2665

Kaia Sand is the author of A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish, forthcoming); Remember to Wave (Tinfish, 2010); and interval (Edge, 2004), and coauthor with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press, 2008). From 2013-15, she shared an artist's residency with Garrick Imatani at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, investigating surveillance documents the Portland Police kept on activists from the late 1960s through the early 80s. Their collaboration resulted in public installations at the North Portland Branch of the Multnomah Public Library and Portland State University Academic & Recreation Center, and participation in group shows at the Blaffer Museum in Houston and University of Santa Barbara, California. This fall, Sand will hold an international artist's residency at Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro. She documents her work at kaiasand.net.

Charles Hood is a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art and teaches at Antelope Valley College in the Mojave Desert. A reformed birder, Hood's world bird list is a bit past 5,000. He also has seen 594 species of mammals in the wild (from aardwolf to zebra mouse, zorilla to agouti), though that list too is on hold for now while his credit card catches up with his ambition. He has been to 50 countries, to the South Pole, and to within 600 miles of the North Pole. He has been an artist in residence at the Annenberg Beach House, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Playa, and the National Science Foundation. His most recent book, South x South (Ohio University, 2013), is about aviation and Antarctica; he's written about trees for Heyday Book's L.A. Atlas project, is a staff writer for the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, and is circulating three poetry manuscripts, including one about all the moons in the Solar System.


from Air the Fire, a poem triptych

in the bright threat of attention

and the surefire glare

of recognition

you became a public person

mindful of those who live

downriver and downwind

from the malice of power

downtrodden by disregard
upbraided by rancor

    for them, you --
    heart-sure, afire
    with purpose
    -- you became

    a public person

Kaia Sand


I Take Good Notes, Getting Ready to Fly South

An airship or dirigible is a type of aerostat. An aerostat is a type of lighter-than-air aircraft. An aircraft is a kind of bowtie worn by the sky to piss off lakes and swamps, dirt, center-pivot-irrigation, forest fires. Aerostatic aircraft stay aloft by heating gas slowly, over a burner, then using a tube to blow it into shapes, a swan, even a unicorn, what girls like before they like the flammability of boys. The history of flight mostly has to do with blood and ice. No, the history of flight in Antarctica can't be told just now, it is mostly too sad for this time of night, but for example there were once two pilots, I met them in a bar in McMurdo, 

and the first one was telling the second one, shit, I had to turn back. The other one said, well what for. First one, well my hair was on fire. Second one said, I hate when that happens.

Charles Hood
(from South x South)