Noon to finish (6:00 - 7:00 pm)

800 SE 10th Avenue

503-233-7996

Each winter Spare Room hosts a marathon reading, in which a booklength poem or series of texts is animated by a range of voices. As in recent years, the marathon will be held in the cozy kitchen at Yale Union, and we are grateful for their generous hospitality.

You are invited to come and go as you like or to stay for the whole duration; feel free to bring a snack or beverage to share.

For this year's marathon, we will read Jackson Mac Low's Complete Light Poems, edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll, and recently published by Chax Press. (Copies of the book are currently available at Passages Bookshop, and will also be available at the reading.) The sixty poems in the series were begun in 1962 (when Mac Low was 39) and completed in 1988. The first 22 Light Poems were published by Black Sparrow Press in 1968 (a collection long out of print), but other than a few broadsides or periodical publications, the rest of the poems have remained unpublished until now. The readings will be complemented by several performative realizations. (For a very approximate schedule of the readings, see the end of this listing.)

Thanks to Charles Alexander and Chax, we have access to this body of work, which brings together chance processes and autobiographical narratives, friendship and scholarship, sex and politics, in a unique blend of intimacy, humor, and rigor.