Steve Dickison & Susan Gevirtz

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College  presents

Eye of the Ear: Jess and the Poets    a lecture by Steve Dickison

Saturday, July 19, 7:00 pm   Reed College Chapel, Elliot Hall   Admission free

    and

Spare Room presents a poetry reading by

Steve Dickison & Susan Gevirtz

Sunday, July 20, 7:30 pm
Concordia Coffee House  2909 NE Alberta   $5 suggested donation

Full details below!

"Jess: To and From the Printed Page" is currently on view through Sunday July 20
at the Cooley Art Gallery, Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00 - 5:00 pm

This traveling exhibition brings together collages, paintings, drawings, illustrated books, video, audio, and archival materials, to give an overview of the activity of California artist Jess Collins, lifelong partner of poet Robert Duncan and one of the great twentieth century
practitioners of collage and allied arts.

As part of a closing event for the show, on Saturday July 19th members of the Flash Choir will perform a new choral work by Sarah Dougher (based on the Robert Duncan and Jess book Caesar's Gate), commissioned by the Cooley Art Gallery.

Following this performance, Steve Dickison, Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, will give a lecture on Jess and the poets, illustrated with slides and audio excerpts from the Archives:

This talk illuminates the world and work of the poets in response to whose poetry Jess made original art, from the early post-World War II San Francisco milieu till the mid-1990s. By featuring original audio recordings from the Poetry Center Archives, audiences hear rare recorded voices of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, visitors to San Francisco such as Charles Olson, and Jess himself, alongside later inheritors of that tradition. The talk will also situate Jess among other local artists who created original works in response to and in collaboration with poets, Jess's contemporaries Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Fran Herndon, Robert LaVigne, among others, and pay tribute to the innovative publishers who made the actual books, too often overlooked as artists themselves.

The lecture will be followed by a reception on the Reed College Lawn, with musical guests Tim DuRoche & Co.

The event is free and open to the public.


Then . . . Spare Room presents a poetry reading by

Steve Dickison & Susan Gevirtz

Sunday July 20, 7:30 pm

Concordia Coffee House
2909 NE Alberta

$5.00 suggested donation

Steve Dickison has directed the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University since 1999. A poet and writer, with special focus on the history of poetry and related arts in San Francisco, he curated the exhibition "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004" at the California Historical Society, during Winter 2005, and more recently the exhibition "Recent Visitors: Poets & Publishing on the Bolinas Scene in the Seventies" at the Book Club of California. Editor-publisher of the small press Listening Chamber, he also co-edits, with David Meltzer, Shuffle Boil, an occasional music magazine with poet/artist/musician contributors. Disposed, a book of poetry, was published by Post Apollo Press in 2007.

Susan Gevirtz's most recent books include THRALL (Post Apollo) and Omatic & After St. John (dpress), and she has books forthcoming from Kelsey Street, Trafficker, and eohippus labs. She was an assistant professor for ten years at Sonoma State University, and now teaches in the MFA in Poetry program at Mills College. With Greek poet Siarita Kouka she runs The Paros Symposium on the island of Paros, an annual meeting of poets and translators from Greece and the United States.

'the friend'

that the bird with the enormous velvet nerve-body
articulated legs more like an insect than I knew
greedy mouth wanted to feed out of my mouth
apparently they are always hungry
"what they are screaming is ada ada the word for pain"
the verb was the same as in spanish ayudar
echo'd "are you there?" or in arabic wadada

"tears become pears for mothers to feed their children"

19iii08 for McN

Steve Dickison


In this place which Legend Posits

A silence fell upon the land. More quiet than a map. The sounds of place
having to do with the irreducibility and seamlessness of story. Airlines
want us to forget this. One body feeds sleep to the one next to it. And
the next imagines it as her own. For example.

Susan Gevirtz