February 23, 2014

Stephanie Strickland & Alan Bernheimer


Sunday, February 23
7:00 pm  --  please note earlier starting time

Glyph Café and Art Space
804 NW Couch (North Park Blocks)
Portland, Oregon
503-719-5481

$5 suggested donation


Stephanie Strickland's seventh book of poems, Dragon Logic, was published by Ahsahta in 2013. Other books include True North and The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil. She has also collaborated on nine electronic poems.  V: WaveTercets / Losing L'una, a new edition of her 2002 Penguin volume, will appear in 2014 from SpringGun with accompanying app for iPad. A member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, she co-edited Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1. For more information on her work you can visit her web site here.

Alan Bernheimer's most recent book is The Spoonlight Institute (Adventures in Poetry, 2009), which, Stephanie Young writes, "Brings me very close to the frayed hem of shared speech acts, ways of thinking. Brings me, with generosity and delight and some sadness, to the eroded edges of things, including words." Bernheimer's recent work has appeared in TRY!, Big Bell, Dreamboat, and Sal Mimeo. He grew up in NYC and emigrated in the late 1970s to the Bay Area, where he was active in Poets Theater and produced a poetry radio program on KPFA. He maintains an ongoing portrait gallery on flickr of poets reading, is a board member of Small Press Distribution, and has translated a memoir by surrealist Philippe Soupault.


Burning Briar Scanning Tunnel
 
there is a zombie at the wheel

who finds acceptable all risk

( his flesh looks like mine )

a crinkle monkey in the swamp

mind tricky and brisk

( his moves feel like mine )

headless mannequin draped

white print snakeskin dress

( pale fakery filling me with dread )

a boneless man used up

by apparatchik juggernaut

( scrivener like me )

the one who hoped to poach

cockroach strategy adrift

( like me time-amnesic overreaching )

cord-cut all beyond the call

to heal or heel fold molt

( wormhole crush crash course )

Stephanie Strickland



from The Spoonlight Institute

Brightness has fallen from my interior air
with false starts galore and imitation empathy
 
for the ethereal hacker
syncing feeling to digital hugeness
 
angry and owl shaped
in the diaphanous mirror
 
that undiscovers solitude
in a crowd of countryside
 
an emotional Chihuahua
mincing perfectly toward
 
nothing in particular
Old men in old hats

Alan Bernheimer