August 6, 2006
Stephen Vincent & David Abel
Sunday, August 6th
7:30 pm
New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny Street
$5 suggested donation
Poet, essayist, editor, and long-time resident of San Francisco, Stephen Vincent was founder, publisher, and editor of Momo's Press and Shocks magazine in the nineteen-seventies. During the eighties and early nineties, he was the founding Director of Bedford Arts, Publishers, which became an internationally renowned publisher of art books.
Stephen Vincent's most recent books of poetry include Walking (Junction Press), A Walk Toward Spicer (Cherry On the Top Press), and two ebooks, Sleeping With Sappho (http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/), and Triggers (http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_home.html). Walking Theory is scheduled for publication in 2007.
Vincent maintains a popular blog of new poetry, art, and political commentary, occasionally including photos (http://stephenvincent.net/blog), and has recently returned from a reading tour that included the Soundeye Poetry Festival in Cork, Ireland, and Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland.
David Abel has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese writings of his that he so presumptuously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections. Someone who makes such an effort to be different from others is bound to fall in people's esteem, and I can only think that his future will be a hard one. He is a gifted man, to be sure. Yet, if one gives free rein to one's emotions even under the most inappropriate circumstances, if one has to sample each interesting thing that comes along, people are bound to regard one as frivolous. And how can things turn out well for such a man? (Diary of Murasaki Shikibu)
from Triggers:
Ascend and dive
and don't tell me a thing
I've got a good love on the loose
A wet madrone, skin pealing, its bone bare trunk
Never stop for thought,
especially when the going's good
She's inside me, then out,
tactile as a banana or something to munch
Spasms spring tender illuminations
mauve and pink -
I am a young man now and a young man then:
Live live live.
—Stephen Vincent
Past's coast is peril's shipwreck
Coast's past is shipwreck's peril
Shipwreck's peril is past's coast
Peril's coast is shipwreck's past
Street's father is package's acid
Tube's marker is holiday's chain
Bucket's knot is hearsay's skirt
Shuffle's schedule is solstice's mold
—David Abel