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.

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.

This event is part of “Everyday Experimental,” a series drawing inspiration from commonplace activities and inconsequential sounds of the everyday.

There will be a pre-performance reception at 7:30, with a gallery viewing of Alison Knowles’ work.

Loose Pages engages with the sculptural potential of the book through performance. Originally produced in collaboration with master paper maker Coco Gordon, Loose Pages translates the book spine into human form; flax and cotton paper pages from a portfolio opens up into pages for the body, arm flaps, leg flaps, hat and slippers. A performer (usually Knowles’ daughter, Jessica Higgins) dresses in the pages, which sound as the body moves about the space. Meghan DellaCrosse will assist Knowles in this performance.

Loose Pages will be followed by Alex Waterman, who will perform one of Knowles’ Bean Scores on cello. Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble.

Everyday Experimental is made possible, in part, through support from the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. The Littoral Series is made possible by 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.

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.

The feminist reception and production of pornography has had a complicated & fascinating trajectory, a discourse of representation often bound by the logic of the male gaze. The Hole Picture brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by artists Barbra Hammer, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner that celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body. Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this screening and panel discussion will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and erotics, dissecting the trope of pornography itself. Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, moderated by art historian Kelly Dennis, author of Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. This event is presented in collaboration with MIX NYC.

Dyketactics, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Menses, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Multiple Orgasm, 1976, 6 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Women I Love, 1976, 22 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Superdyke Meets Madame X, 1977, 20 minutes, Barbara Hammer
Community Action Center, 2010, 69 mins., A.K. Burns + A.L. Steiner

Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner. The piece incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films of the 70′s which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler.

Because the video contains sexually explicit content, the term ‘porn’ is relevant and the artists have an interest in exploring the trappings of the term itself. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. Queer sex and feminist agency is a shared acknowledgment of reciprocal penetration. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music and original compositions by artists culled from the worldwide sisterhood. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. Using the gallery to exer/exorcise the mystical and discreet lost spaces of homosocial configuration, the artists have created a reason and a space to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality. The work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.

Menses, 1974 by Barbara Hammer

Women I Love, 1976 by Barbara Hammer

Dyketactics, 1974 by Barbara Hammer

Since 1987, MIX NYC has presented the latest in queer experimental film and previously unseen works from legendary figures in avant-garde cinema. In addition to our vanguard screenings, exciting interactive installations, and infamous parties, MIX NYC also provides year-round community screenings, a summer media workshop for queer youth, film preservation projects, and the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, documenting how collective action transformed AIDS activism, queer identity and health care in America.

The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

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.

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.

The Brooklyn Rail turns ten this year and that is certainly cause for celebration. Please join Rail Fiction/Intranslation editor Donald Breckenridge as he hosts an epic night of readings from some of the most innovative authors and translators brightening the literary landscape.

“As a self-taught writer and ardent reader of formally experimental fiction, my goal over the last decade has been to highlight the talents of emerging writers, many of whom live in Brooklyn, as well as to showcase the current writing of established authors who have been marginalized by an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven publishing industry.”–Donald Breckenridge

Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments,including her groundbreaking work of hyper-fiction, Patchwork Girl. She is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy and the novel Half Life. Her work as appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, and The Paris Review.

Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World, KambyBolongo Mean River, and the forthcoming Asunder. His work has appeared in Bomb, The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, and Nerve.

Lewis Warsh is co-founder, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books. He is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, most recently, Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005, and the novel, A Place in the Sun. He is director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University.

Johannah Rodgers is the author of Sentences, a collection of short stories,essays, and drawings and the chapbook, Necessary Fictions. Her stories, essays,and reviews have appeared in Fence, Bookforum, Fiction, CHAIN Arts, Pierogi Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches writing and literature courses at CUNY, where she is an assistant professor in English.

Dawn Raffel‘s short story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, was just released. She is also the author of Carrying the Body and In the Year of Long Division. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Art & Letters and numerous other periodicals and anthologies.

Joshua Cohen is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Eugene Marten is the author of In The Blind, Waste, and Firework. He lives in New York City.

John Reed is the author of five novels: A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance,The Whole, All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare, and Tales of Woe. He is the Books Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.

Fran Gordon, founder of the National Art Club’s PAGE reading series, also directs FDU’s MFA in Writing reading series. Her novel, Paisley Girl, was a finalist for QPB’s New Voices Award. She teaches in The New School Writing Program, and for The Pan African Literary Festival.

Yasmine Alwan is the author of Elsewhere and co-editor of Tantalum, a magazine for new prose.

Douglas Glover is one of Canada’s finest writers. In 2006, he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award,he was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005, and the recipient of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 2003. He is the author of eight books of fiction and essays, including The Enamoured Knight, his elebrated book on the character of Don Quixote and its eponymous novel. He lives in upstate New York.

Sarah French has had her fiction works published Bomb, The New Review of Literature,and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently working on a novel.

Susan Bernofsky is the translator of four books by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The 2006 recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, she has also received awards and fellowships from the NEH, NEA, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently writing two books: a biography of Robert Walser, and a novel set in her hometown, New Orleans.

Translator Alyson Waters teaches literary translation and contemporary French language literature at Yale University. In the past few years, she has won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant, a PEN translation grant, and a “bourse de sejour aux traducteurs estrangers.” She lives in Prospect Heights with her husband and daughter.

Donald Nicholson-Smith‘s translations include works by Guy Debord, Jean Piaget,Jean-Patrick Manchette, Paco Ignacio Taibo, J.B. Pontalis & Jean Laplanche, Thierry Jonquet, Henri Lefebvre, and Raoul Vaneigem. His most recent translation is of Apollinaire’s letters to Madeleine, as sent from the trenches of Champagne in 1915. Born in Manchester, England, Nicholson-Smith is a longtime denizen of Brooklyn.

Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein, the novels 6/2/95 and You Are Here. His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming.

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.

Amiri Baraka and Henry Grimes

$10 – buy tickets

In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Home–long out of print–features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of 1960s social and political essays.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span–a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X . . . each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities, from 2002-2004. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic, 2007), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.

Henry Grimes

Master jazz musician (acoustic bass, violin) HENRY GRIMES has played more than 3OO concerts in 23 countries (including many festivals) since May of ‘O3, when he made his astonishing return to the music world after 35 years away. He was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended the Mastbaum School and Juilliard. In the ’5O’s and ’6O’s, he came up in the music playing and touring with Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, “Bullmoose” Jackson, “Little” Willie John, and a number of other great R&B / soul musicians; but drawn to jazz, he went on to play, tour, and record with many great jazz musicians of that era, including Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Sunny Murray, Sonny Rollins, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, and Rev. Frank Wright.

Sadly, a trip to the West Coast to work with Al Jarreau and Jon Hendricks went awry, leaving Henry in Los Angeles at the end of the ’6O’s with a broken bass he couldn’t pay to repair, so he sold it for a small sum and faded away from the music world. Many years passed with nothing heard from him, as he lived in his tiny rented room in an S.R.O. hotel in downtown Los Angeles, working as a manual laborer, custodian, and maintenance man, and writing many volumes of handwritten poetry. He was discovered there by a Georgia social worker and fan in 2OO2 and was given a bass by William Parker, and after only a few weeks of ferocious woodshedding, Henry emerged from his room to begin playing concerts around Los Angeles and shortly afterwards made a triumphant return to New York City in May, ‘O3 to play in the Vision Festival. Since then, often working as a leader, he has played, toured, and / or recorded with many of today’s music heroes, such as Rashied Ali, Marshall Allen, Fred Anderson, Marilyn Crispell, Ted Curson, Andrew Cyrille, Bill Dixon, Dave Douglas, Andrew Lamb, David Murray, William Parker, Marc Ribot, and Cecil Taylor. Henry has also given a number of workshops and master classes on major campuses, released several new recordings, made his professional debut on a second instrument (the violin) at the age of 7O, has now published the first volume of his poetry, “Signs Along the Road,” and has been creating illustrations to accompany his new recordings and publications. He has received many honors in recent years, including four Meet the Composer grants and a grant from the Acadia Foundation. He can be heard on more than recordings on various labels, including Atlantic, Ayler Records, Blue Note, Columbia, ESP-Disk, Impulse!, Jazz NewYork Productions, Pi Recordings, Porter Records, Prestige, Riverside, and Verve. Henry Grimes now lives and teaches in New York City.

Atiba Kwabena-Wilson (musician/poet/storyteller)  is the founder and artistic director of both Songhai Djeli and the Befo’ Quotet. He was the recipient of a full Scholarship for voice and flute, earning his B.A. in Music from Long Island University.  Mr. Kwabena-Wilson studied arrangement and orchestration for jazz ensembles with Calvin Hill (bassist with Max Roach and  faculty advisor for L.I.U.).  He also studied Jazz Improvisation with the late John Lewis (pianist with the Modern Jazz Quartet and professor at City College).

Atiba visited Jamaica in February of 2004, where he was interviewed by Jean Small, host of “A Festival of Words” on Radio Mona FM 93.  He spoke of his life’s journey which has led him to poetry and storytelling. 

In 2005, Atiba was featured in “Uptown” magazine, summer issue.

Throughout the years, Atiba Kwabena-Wilson has been involved with numerous projects and programs that have reached out to many people.  An abbreviated list of his performance profile is provided below:

* Guest Lecturer at Hunter College (subjects: “African Origins of the Blues” and “African  Origins of Hip-Hop”)

* Served as artistic director  through Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, 1999-present, of “Music Meets Poetry” series

* Toured schools under the auspices of the Julliard-Lincoln Center Community Out-Reach Program, both as a solo artist and as a member of “Ngoma”, performing traditional songs, stories and dances of Azania (aka South Africa)

* Performed at FESTAM International Music Festival, Inc. in Dakar, Senegal 1998 through 2000

* Filmed with the Grammy Award Winning Rap group ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (MTV Unplugged)

* Featured in “Bum Rush the Page- A Def Poetry Jam”, Edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera, Three Rivers Press 2001 and “New Rain” Vol. 9 Edited by Gary Johnston and Malika M’Buzi Moore, Blind Beggar Press 1999

* Appeared as percussionist/ flutist on  “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” Vol.1: A CD focusing on poetry by Tupac Shakur, performed by various artists

* Appeared as a performing artist for the American Museum of Natural History

* Featured on CBS, Traditions

* Provided “Edu-tainment Clinics” for Hospital Audiences Inc.

* Conducted storytelling and music workshops for the New York City Housing Authority

* Provides  music, poetry and storytelling workshops, staff development seminars, assembly programs, concerts and lecture/ demonstrations throughout the tri-state area under the auspices of the Caribbean Cultural Center, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. Education Dept. and Henry Street Settlement Cultural Outreach/Ed. Dept.