March 4, 2017

Steven Seidenberg & Norma Cole

Spare Room & Passages Bookshop present a poetry reading by 
Steven Seidenberg & Norma Cole 
as part of the opening reception for 
BERLIN PIPEVALVES: Photographs by Steven Seidenberg

Saturday, March 4
7:30 pm
(reception from 6:00 - 9:00 pm)

Passages Bookshop
1223 NE MLK


Photographer, painter, and writer Steven Seidenberg has exhibited and read his work in the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Japan. He is known for his photographs in series, the subjects of which include the adhesive tape found on the floors and walls of Tokyo subway stations, cemetery dumpsters in Prague, and discarded hospital furniture in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is the author of Itch (RAW ArT Press); a work of lyric, philosophical prose; Null Set (Spooky Actions Books), a collection of lineated verse; and numerous other chapbooks of verse and aphorism. Pipevalve: Berlin is the first book primarily focused on his photographs.

Norma Cole's books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988--2008, Spinoza in Her Youth and, most recently, Actualities, her collaboration with painter Marina Adams. TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks appeared in 2010. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert's It Then, Collobert's Journals, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited and translated by Cole), Jean Daive's A Woman with Several Lives, and Daive's first book, White Decimal. Cole lives in the sanctuary city of San Francisco.


Still Today

    for Bill Berkson


It's still today
Be still

Is it far where you are?
Beyond the furthermores and the afterwards

Sway me now
Notice the hook

Or failed star
Or jailed target

The force of it
User interface blindsided

Or neurological space
It has a logic to it, you could

Force an elegy: social practice
The war, the cold river water

Formation, disruption, the lamp
Suddenly begins to flicker

So keep on
Proposing paradise

Norma Cole



from Troth

No affect of ascendancy, no claim to prepossession. This fable will not yield up
its prerogative to an inventory of its narrator's traits--and that, again, not for
some daring ruse of deference, but for knowing that such claims must first
mistake the happy circumstance of prescience for the parasitic fealty of a
selfdom fit to size. She must progress, who finds a path, she must march
stalwart into . . .

Steven Seidenberg