Flowers & Cream is a small press / independent POETRY publishing imprint founded by Sonic Youth songwriter Thurston Moore. The press aims to feature work of young, emerging poets steeped in contemporary poetic practice and investigation/illumination.

Living betwixt Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City, Thurston Moore has been involved with editing the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal since early 2000. His own verse has been published in various anthologies and by a number of imprints since Water Row Press first presented Alabama Wildman, a collection of scattered writings from the 1970s and 80s. He has been on faculty at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University.

Moore will be joined by Elaine Kahn as the assistant poetry editor and business facilitator of Flowers & Cream Press. Elaine is a poet and songwriter with work published by Glass Eye Books, Big Baby Books, Ecstatic Peace Library, as well as being featured widely in various journals. She has worked as an intern for Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, CA and as the Poetry Buyer for City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently resides in Northampton, MA.

Flowers & Cream recognizes the diversity of resonance in the contemporary poetry scene, a community charmed with reference to earlier schools, waves, gestures, pronouncements, and inks all with eyes both forward and askance.

Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan (born 1972 in Chicago, Illinois) is a poet and teacher. He grew up inNew York City, where he currently resides with his wife, poet Karen Weiser. From 2003 to 2007, he served as artistic director at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. He is a co-chair of the writing program at the Bard College summer MFA program and a professor at Wesleyan University. His newest work, which is a book-length poem called Notes From Irrelevance, will be released on September 1st, 2011, through Wave Books.

John Coletti

John Coletti is the author of Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs, 2005), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further, 2008), and Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010) which is available now in pre-release at http://rustbucklebooks.blogspot.com/. He recently finished serving as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Ben Estes & Elaine Kahn

Ben Estes is the author of the chapbooks Lamp like l’map (Factory Hollow Press) and Cymbals (The Song Cave). He has been educated by the Kansas City Art Institute, the University of Iowa, and is currently enrolled in the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. With Alan Felsenthal he is the editor and publisher of The Song Cave (a series of singular things) and the journal Sea Ranch. He currently lives in Northampton, MA.

Elaine Kahn is the author of the chapbook Customer (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2010). She is the assistant editor of Flowers & Cream Press and co-curates the LOOT performance series at Flying Object. Work has

appeared or is forthcoming in the Agriculture Reader, Elimae, NOÖ Journal, La Petite Zine, Supermachine & Jubilat. Elaine also performs music under the name Horsebladder.

Thurston Moore / Samara Lubelski duo

Thurston Moore is a founding member of NYC weird rock groop Sonic Youth. He also releases records and publishes books under the Ecstatic Peace rubric. His writing has been published through various small presses.

Samara Lubelski is a musician, native New Yorker, solo recording artist. She has played with MV/EE, White Out, Metal Mountains a.o. She has recorded with Thurston Moore for his ‘Trees Outside The Academy’ and ‘Demolished Thoughts’.

The Littoral Series is made possible by support from The Casement Fund, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Readers include: Ross Benjamin, from Archipelago; Lonely Christopher, from Akashic; Irina Reyn, from Habitus; and John Surowiecki, from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Join free103point9, PAJ Publications, Issue Project Room, and Electronic Music Foundation in celebrating the publication of Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves by Galen Joseph-Hunter with Penny Duff, and Maria Papadomanolaki (PAJ Publications. In association with free103point9.) This event will feature performances from Todd Merrell, Kabir Carter, Terry Nauheim, Lázaro Valiente, Joel Chadabe, and others.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this ground-breaking look at a new art genre, Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves brings together a genealogy of 150 artists and artworks—and more than 250 images—from 1921 to the present that encompasses performance, video, radio theatre, sound art, media installation, networked art, and acoustic ecology. Here is a fascinating account of the ingenuity and creativity of artists who have made new discoveries in broadcast, public works, performance composition, sound, and text, stretching the boundaries of both transmitter and receiver. At a time when public access struggles with corporate control of the airwaves, artists have combined activism and communications technologies to represent alternative worlds on the electromagnetic spectrum. Click here to order Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Todd Merrell’s work illustrates a fascination with the imperceptible environment of electromagnetic radiation that shortwave radio and processing can capture, and transform into an immersive, musical environment. http://www.www.toddmerrell.com/

Kabir Carter’s work moves between performance and installation, and focuses on the physical and emotional effects of architecture and acoustics in private and public spaces. http://www.kabircarter.com/

Terry Nauheim explores sound and visual relationships through digital media, drawing, and installation. http://www.terrynauheim.com/

Lázaro Valiente is sound artist Mauricio Pastrana, his work is comprised of sounds and silence originating in the daily improvisations of life. http://lazarovaliente.org/

 Joel Chadabe composer, author, is an internationally recognized pioneer in the development of interactive music systems. http://www.chadabe.com

ABOUT THE FREE103POINT9

free103point9 is a New York State-based nonprofit arts organization establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists and works informed by an intentional use of space — often the airwaves. free103point9’s major programs include the Transmission Art Archive, an in-progress resource featuring artists, works, and exhibitions and events that define the genre and place it in a historical context; WGXC 90.7-FM: Hands-on Radio, a creative community FM radio station serving Greene and Columbia counties; and the facilitation of a NYSCA Regrant program. http://www.free103point9.org

ABOUT PAJ PUBLICATIONS

Founded in 1976, PAJ Publications has become one of the U.S.’s most important and valuable publishers of drama, criticism, performance texts and documents, including contemporary American writers and works in translation. Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves is the latest volume in PAJ Publications’ Art + Performance series which features individual titles on Yvonne Rainer, Bruce Nauman, Meredith Monk, Gary Hill, and other artists. For subscription information for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, please visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/paj .

ABOUT ELECTRONIC MUSIC FOUNDATION

The mission of Electronic Music Foundation (EMF) is to explore the creative and cultural potential in the convergence of music, sound, technology, and science, and share what is learned through contact and interactions with a large and growing public. http://www.emf.org

Author Jarett Kobek is the son of a Turkish immigrant and a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. In the summer of 1999, 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta defended a master’s thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East, and called for a return to the “Islamic-Oriental city.” Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek’s novel ATTA offers a psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism?

Gavin Everall works at Book Works, on marketing and editing. Past projects include Make Everything New, A Project on Communism, and the Semina series with Stewart Home. Prior to working for Book Works, he worked at Verso.

Books will be available at the event, sold by Mobile Libris.

ISSUE’s Theoretical series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund.

Frolic Architecture is the third and newest collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs.  It follows Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and Thiefth (2005), both of which appeared in the Records of the Year lists in The Wire.  Writing in Artforum, Bennett Simpson described Souls of the Labadie Tract as “a confrontation with history, community, language, and sound that is truly harrowing.” Where the previous works began with prose introductions that contextualized the poems’ embeddedness in history, Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe’s celebrated collage poems.

ISSUE’s Littoral series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

In Syncopated Verse and the Art of Paradox, renowned poet Tyehimba Jess will explore the contrapuntal poem and how poetic form can reflect aspects of Euclidian space, history and geometry.

The Tracie Morris Band features: Tracie Morris (voice/poetry) Val Jeanty (electronic drums) and Marvin Sewell (guitar). Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet, performer and scholar and works as a sound artist, writer, bandleader and actor. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial, Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and the New Museum.

ISSUE’s Littoral series

Talk, verbal stuff, is taken as a primary component, drawn from materials found in the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on various ancient and modern languages (the so called “Indo-European” languages). The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. The body is where this vocal investigation takes place, digging in the primitive sound matter of language

Jacques Demierre (1954, lives in Geneva), pianist, performer, composer. His musical and sound work takes various directions: improvised music, contemporary music, sound poetry, sound installation. His compositions and sound realisations are concerned with the activity of listening and with sound space, and develop a very cross and interdisciplinary conception of music. He collaborates with many improvising musicians, Barre Philips,Urs Leimgruber, Thomas Lehn, Joëlle Léandre, Axel Dörner, Fritz Hauser, Sainkho Namtchylak, Hans Koch, Brandon Labelle, Jason Kahn, Butch Morris, Carlos Zingaro, Jaap Blonk, Barry Guy, Lucas Niggli, Sylvie Courvoisir, Hann Bennink, Rhodri Davis, Isabelle Duthoit, Dorothea Schürch, Phil Minton,…

Vincent Barras (1956, lives in Geneva), performer, historian, translator. He teaches at the University of Lausanne (history of medicine) and at the High Schools of Art and Applied Art in Geneva (sound, history of the body). He is member of Contrechamps Editions in Geneva (contemporary music and aesthetics) and programmer of sound poetry and art language festivals (La Bâtie Festival and Roaratorio in Geneva). He has published various books, essays, articles, on body theory, medicine and psychiatry, contemporary poetry and music. He has translated books by Galen, Edoardo Sanguineti, Theodor Adorno, Carl Dahlhaus, Georges Seferis, John Cage, Eugen Gomringer, Simon Cutts, Robert Lax.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

A roundtable discussion of the new French writing will include John O’Brien (founder of Dalkey Archive Press), and Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens (founder of Editions P.O.L), as well as writers Mark Polizzotti and Brian Evenson and Brooklyn Academy of Music Humanities Manager Violaine Huisman.

Mark Polizzotti’s books include the collaborative novel S. (1991), Lautréamont Nomad (1994), Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (FSG, 1995), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (British Film Institute, 2006), and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (Continuum, 2006). His articles and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. The translator of over thirty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Roussel, André Breton, and Jean Echenoz, he has been an editor at Random House, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, David R. Godine, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited edition novella Baby Leg, published by New York Tyrant Press in 2009. In 2009 he also published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York’s top books of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.

John O’Brien is the founder and publisher of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction at the Unviersity of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive has published over 60 French titles, and many of these are POL authors.

Photo by Daniel Mordzinski

Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens was born in 1944. After law school, he began working at Christian Bourgois as a trainee where he subsequently became a reader. He was hired in 1970 by Flammarion, and in 1972 he created the “Textes” imprint, in which he published such notable figures as Bernard Noël, Marc Cholodenko, and René Belletto. In 1978 at Hachette, he created the “Hachette-P.O.L” imprint, which became a full department in 1979. There, he published Emmanuel Hocquard, Georges Perec (who won the Prix Medicis in 1978 for “Life A User’s Manual”), Danièle Sallenave (who won the Prix Renaudot 1980 for “The Doors of Gubbio”), Leslie Kaplan’s first book, and one hundred other titles. In 1983, with the support of Flammarion, he created Éditions P.O.L, which he has directed since then and where he has published more than a thousand books over 28 years. Today P.O.L is part of the Gallimard Group and publishes approximately 50 books per year, chiefly novels and poetry.

Violaine Huisman is Humanities Manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Before assuming this position she worked as an editor and rights director with Seven Stories Press and as a literary agent with Sterling Lord Literistic.  She represented POL’s list in the US for several years, helping publish Marguerite Duras, Jean Rolin, and Dumitru Tsepeneag, among others. She has served as an English language interpreter for French writers and artists, and her translations from the French have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times Magazine. She currently moderates monthly discussions with contemporary French authors for “Write about Now” a series co-presented by Bookforum and the Villa Gillet at the French Institute Alliance Francaise.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art, is crashing with friends in November and December, organizing a series of events at like-minded spaces across the city while it relocates to its new home. For more information on these shows, please see their calendar.

The Cup and the Lip, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1986, 20 mins
Friendly Witness, Warren Sonbert, 16mm, 1989, 32 mins

Though Warren Sonbert has frequently been described as a maker of diary films, the label fails to capture the emotional and formal intricacies at play in his work. In less than twenty films made from 1966 to the mid-90s—his career caught short by his death from AIDS at age 47—Sonbert’s primary method was indeed the creation of dense montages from 16mm shot in the course of daily life. The same images and ideas were often reused in different permutations for new films and, through this process, footage of his friends and colleagues attains an iconic status that transcends its documentary valence, becoming vibrant evocations of Sirkian melodrama. “I think the films I make are, hopefully, a series of arguments,” Sonbert said of his own work, “with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in turn.” The rich use of color and delicately punctuated editing also point to the influence of his mentor, Gregory Markopoulos, and Sonbert’s love of Hitchcock, Kenneth Anger, and opera.

The Cup and the Lip and Friendly Witness both date from the late 1980s, when Sonbert was refining and deepening his use of montage. Amy Taubin noted that The Cup and the Lip “is so dense it’s impossible to apprehend it at a single viewing,” calling it “Sonbert’s darkest work.” Precisely composed of 645 individual shots over 22 minutes, set to girl-group songs and the overture to Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s 18th-century opera Iphigeneia in Aulis, Friendly Witness was Sonbert’s return to sound after two decades of purely silent films. Tonight’s event pairs Sonbert with readings by three poets—Charles Bernstein, Corrine Fitzpatrick, and Carla Harryman—a testament to the fact that, though long-admired as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, he always worked in conversation with other forms, literary and otherwise.

Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). From 1978-1981 he co-edited, with Bruce Andrews L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. In the 1990s, he co-founded and directed the Poetics Program at the State University of New York Buffalo. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound.

Corrine Fitzpatrick is a Brooklyn-based poet, and former Program Coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She is the author of two chapbooks – On Melody Dispatch and Zamboangueña, and her poetry appears in numerous print and online journals. She recently completed the MFA program at Bard College.

Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Recent books include Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001), an experimental novel dedicated to the memory of Warren Sonbert. Forthcoming books include The Wide Road, an erotic picaresque written in collaboration with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna). She is co-contributor to The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of Language Writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay area between 1975-1980. She lives in the Detroit Area and serves on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch will read from their collaborative book Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). It combines a series of sixty-minute, sixty-sentence walks around New York City with a pair of roving dialogues.

Holy Spirits is a Brooklyn-based band with classical guitar melodies, harmonies, handclaps, chants, ambient keyboards, and vibrant percussion. They have been working with Nathaniel Whitcomb, a motion collage artist, to make a series of videos for their recent EP “The Afternoon’s Blood.” Tonight they’ll do a live performance with Whitcomb as he manipulates his motion collage on a screen.

Cotner and Fitch are the authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). They recently completed another collaborative manuscript called Conversations over Stolen Food. Fitch’s Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. Cotner lives in Brooklyn, NY; Fitch, in Laramie, WY, where he’s an assistant professor in the U. of Wyoming’s MFA program.

Praise for Ten Walks/Two Talks:

“Fantastic… A deceptively simple book, Ten Walks/Two Talks demands little but offers much. Cotner and Fitch invite us to experience our city with fresh pleasure and renewed awe.”

Time Out New York

“I’ve noticed more since I read Ten Walks/Two Talks. I’ve listened more. It’s made me feel better. This is a gift, a beautiful book, and nothing in it is forgettable.”

Bookslut

Praise for Holy Spirits:

“Folk illuminations traversed by epic sound swell­­high above a crepuscular landscape, the ghost of Vic Chesnutt floats along to the tempo of a wobbly metronome before melting into a base of hooky songwriting, borrowing its airy movements from the orchestrations of The Microphones.”

­­Altered Zones

“The music is absolutely beautiful. In a similar fashion to Fleet Foxes the vocal harmonies and layering are splendid, the lyrics are poetry, and their sound is some of the most delightful folk music around.”

­­See The Leaves

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.