ANNE WALDMAN – poet, performer, editor, professor – is the author of numerous books including Outrider (2006 La Alameda Press), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin Poets) and In the Room of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press). She is chair and artistic director of The Summer Writing program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
BARBARA HENNING is the author of two novels and six books of poetry including My Autobiography (United Artists, 2007), Black Lace (Spuyten Duyvel, 2001), You, Me, and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005) and Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvel, 2001). She is Professor Emerita at Long Island University in Brooklyn and presently living in Tucson, Arizona.
BOB PERELMAN has published over 15 volumes of poetry, most recently The Future of Memory,and Ten to One. His most well-known critical work is The Marginalization of Poetry. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
CAROL RADSPRECHER was born, and still lives in Brooklyn, with a Manhattan studio. She got her MFA in painting from Hunter College, CUNY, in 1988 having received BFA in painting in 1985, also from Hunter. Her work has been included in many group shows, and she’s had several solo exhibitions. Reproductions of her paintings have been published in art and literary magazines and journals. She has also received several awards for her work.
CHARLES BERNSTEIN is the author of 39 books of poetry, criticism, libretti and translations. He was co-editor of the famous and controversial journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and in 2006 was elected to the American Academy of Artsand Sciences. He lives in New York with his wife Susan Bee, and teaches in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.
CLAUDIO BERTONI was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1946 and studied philosophy at the Universidad de Chile. His books include El cansador intrabajable (1973), El cansador intra- bajableII (Santiago: Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, 1986), Sentado en la cuneta (Santiago: Ed. Carlos Porter, 1990), Una carta (Santiago: Cuarto Propio 1999), Ni yo (Santiago: Cuarto Propio 1999), Jóvenes buenas mozas (2002), and Harakiri (Santiago: Cuarto Propio 2004), from which the poems published here were taken. His anthology Dicho sea de pasowas published in 2006. He lives in Con-cón, on the Chilean coast.
COLE SWENSEN has published eleven books of poetry, most recentlyThe Glass Age(Alice James, 2007). Her volume Goest was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Awards, and others have won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Award, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. In addition, she’s received two Pushcart prizes and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and edits La Presse, which publishes contemporary French poetry in English.
Born in Dublin and a lifelong resident of New York’s West Village, DERMOT MCEVOY reviews Anglo-Irish literature for Publisher’s Weekly. His first novel, Terrible Angel: A Novel of Michael Collins in New York, was published by Lyons Press, 2004.
DORETTA LAU studied writing and English literature at the University of British Columbia and is currently completing her MFA in writing at Columbia University. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Event, PRISM International, subTERRAIN, Prairie Fire, Writer’s Block,Turf, RicePaper, and Broken Pencil. At the moment, she is living in New York, where she finds the winters punishingly cold despite being Canadian.
Allen Ginsberg once referred to ELIOT KATZ as “another classic New Jersey bard.” Eliot co-edited the anthology (published in France) Changing America: Contemporary U.S. Poems of Protest, 1980-1995 and now lives in New York City where he is poetry editor of the online quarterly Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture.
FANNY HOWE received the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2000). She has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Poetry Foundation. Her novel, Nod(Sun & Moon Press, 1998), won the American Book Award.
GARY SNYDER is the most seminal and most influential American buddhist thinker and artist in North America in the 20th and early 21st centuries. He has published sixteen collections of poetry and prose, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He lives in the South Yuba River watershed of the Sierra Nevada.
GLORIA FRYM’s most recent book of poems is Solution Simulacra (United Artists Books, 2006). Her previous collection of poems, Homeless at Home (Creative Arts Book Company), won an American Book Award. She teaches at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.
HANK LAZER has published twelve books of poetry, most recentlyThe New Spirit (Singing Horse Press, 2005). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press, where he also teaches literature and criticism.
JEAN DETHEUX was born in Belgium, where he received his academic training (Académie royale des beaux-arts et Institut supérieur d’architecture de Liège). He immigrated to Canada in 1971 and taught at various art schools in Canada and the U.S. until 1984. Since then, he has devoted himself primarily to his own work. Since the 1960s he has exhibited his work in solo and in group shows, in both Belgium and North America. He has a passionate interest in philosophy, and in 1981 he was elected a member of the Husserl Circle. He has given numerous talks about the phenomenology of vision and the process of creation. In 1996, as a result of serious allergies from his use of painting materials, he gave up natural media for digital technology. This shift brought on an intense period of creativity that has led him to animated film.
For the past thirteen years JESA DAMORA’s art has focused on enormous drawings of flowers, the vitality and wildness in nature and in ourselves. Under the pseudonym Belle Wether, she does enormous drawings of men’s balls, which begs the question what do we really experience when we look at things?, as well as addressing the waywardness of the male nude in art these past 150 years. Jesa is enormously entertaining to have dinner with. She is married to the Zen priest-poet John Bailes. Her work can be seen at www.jesadamora.com.
KAREN RUSSELL’s debut collection of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published by Knopf in 2006. Her fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The New Yorker.
LOU HARTMAN is the Zen priest-poet, husband, father, seaman, cook, radio writer, as well as chief candle-cleaner and New York Timesdispenser at the Zen temple, Page Street, San Francisco.
MARK ALAN STAMATY is the creator of numerous comic strips, including: MacDoodle St.for the Village Voice; Washingtoon for the Washington Post op-ed page and syndication; and Boox for the New York Times Book Review. He is the author-illustrator of children’s books and graphic novels, including Who Needs Donuts? and Alia’s Mission. He has worked as a cartoon reporter for various publications, most recently covering the 2005 Los Angeles Mayoral
Campaign in a series of comic strips commissioned by the Los Angeles Times. His illustrations and cartoons have appeared in many major publications including Slate, The New Yorker, Newsweek, GQ, Time, Esquire, The New Republic, etc. Among the awards he has received are two Gold Medals and one Silver Medal from the Society of Illustrators and the 2007 Augustus Saint Gaudens Award for Art from The Cooper Union.
MATVEI YANKELEVICH is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-edits 6x6, a poetry periodical. His translations of Daniil Kharms have appeared in many literary journals and are forthcoming in a book from Overlook Press. He is the author of The Present Work (Palm Press, 2006).
Living and working in New York City, MAX GIMBLETT investigates the purity of material and form in his work, focusing primarily on canvas, paper from all countries and wood panels with gold leaf gilding. Max’s Pacific Rim ideology is apparent in his strong yet subtle works. Intrinsic to Gimblett’s practice is the influence of Asian art, particularly ink painting and calligraphy. He exhibits in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan, among other places. A major monograph was released in 2003 and the catalogue The Brush of All Things was published in 2004. Gimblett’s work is in many prestigious collections including: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Auckland Art Gallery – Toi O Tamaki, Auckland. His website is www.maxgimblett.com.
MICHAEL DAIRYU WENGER was born in Brooklyn in 1947, and started practicing Zen meditation in 1967. He moved to the bay area in 1972, and has practiced at the San Francisco Zen Center since then. Dairyu (“Great Dragon”) is married and has a monster (in the best sense of the word) son Nathan. He is author of 33 Fingers: ACollection of American Koans, editor of The Wind Bell: Teachings From the San Francisco Zen Center 1968-2001, and edited, with his teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman, Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai by Suzuki Roshi. He calls his brush work “inklings,” beings creat- ed by a stroke of the brush.
MICHAEL SOHN. He eats, he sleeps, he reads, he teaches, he occasionally writes. He loves the comma and the dash. He likes to think the page for him is marginless, although he knows otherwise. He, in a past life, worked long and hard on contemporary French poetry, its relation to the page and to the visual arts. In fact, he wrote a dissertation on André du Bouchet’s writing on painting. Presently, he teaches composition at Long Island University in
Brooklyn, where he continues to speak of himself in the third person.
NOAH FISCHER a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Fischer’s work tackles issues of truth and politics variously through photography, kinetic sculpture, painting, sound and theatre. He attended Rhode Island School of Design (BFA 1999) and Columbia University (MFA 2004) and received a Fulbright to the Netherlands in 2005 where he joined the experimental theatre group and company&Co as artistic director and performer. Fischer’s first solo show in New York, Rhetoric Machine, opened at the Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery in late November 2006 and the artist will tour Europe with and company&Co for their new performance, Time Republic,in Summer/Fall 2007.
NORMA COLE has published poetry, text/image works, essays, and translations. Cole is a recipient of the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award and Gertrude Stein Awards, as well as awards from The Fund for Poetry. Her George Oppen Memorial Lecture, “Poetics of Vertigo,” won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. Cole and Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins won the Purchase Award for their photo/text collaboration, “They Flatter Almost Recognize.” Residencies include the Center for Poetry and Translation at Djerassi, Intersection for the Arts SF, the Fondation Royaumont, Bureau sur l’Atlantique, Louisiana State University, Kootenay School of Writing, Naropa University, and Brown University. She teaches in the Bay Area and in the MFA program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived since 1977.
NORMAN FISCHER was abbot of San Francisco Zen Center from 1995-2000. He leads Zen retreats and workshops in the U.S. and abroad, some of them combined with Jewish tradition. He is the author of several volumes of poetry and prose, including the poetry collection I Was Blown Backfrom Singing Horse Press, 2005.
PHILIP WHALEN, American Zen monk-poet, was born in Portland, Oregon in 1923 and grew up in The Dalles, on the Columbia River. He died in San Francisco in 2002. He published more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including the collections On Bear’s Headand Overtime.The Collected Poems are just out from Wesleyan University Press. His humor, and unwavering devotion to friends and to the practice of writing enamored him to a large fol- lowing. Whalen’s influence on fellow writers marks a significant moment in 20th century American literary history, for it includes writers as diverse as Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Diane DiPrima, Michael Rothenberg, Charles Bernstein, Joanne Kyger, Lew Hartman, Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fischer, Ammiel Alcalay, Tyler Doherty, John High, Reed Bye and so many others that it would be difficult and somewhat useless to try and list them all.
REED BYE’s most recent book is Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems (United Artists Books 2005). Other published works include Passing Freaks and Graces, Gaspar Still in His Cage, and Some Magic at the Dump. A CD of original songs, Long Way Around was released in 2005 by Farfalla/ McMillan and Parrish. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado, and teaches at Naropa University.
RICHARD SIEBURTH teaches French and comparative literature at New York University. He edited Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos(New Directions, 2003), and has translated Holderlin’s Hymns and Fragments,Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary,and Gerard de Nerval’s Selected Writings. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Spring, 2007.
SIMON PETTET is the author of More Winnowed Fragments and Selected Poems, both published by Talisman. He edited The Selected Art Writings of James Schuyler and collaborated with Rudy Burckhardt on Conversations About Everything and Talking Pictures.
STEPHEN PAUL MILLER is the author of the forthcoming Being with a Bullet (Talisman House), The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press), The Bee Flies in May (Marsh Hawk Press) Skinny Eighth Avenue (Marsh Hawk Press), and Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (Domestic). He was a Fulbright lecturer at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and is Professor of English at St. John’s University, New York City, where he lives with his son Noah.
STEVE BENSON has often incorporated oral and physical improvisation into work presented as poetry readings. Some of the results are legible in Blue Book(The Figures/Roof, 1998) and Open Clothes(Atelos, 2005). For the past ten years, Benson has lived in Downeast Maine.
STEVEN SIEGEL studied art at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. His recent private commissions, site sculptures, and installations include Grass Paper Glassat Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton NJ, in 2006; To see Jennie smile at the North Carolina Museum, Raleigh, NC, in 2006; Stories of Katrina, Nest at Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, CA, in 2005; Did God Make a Worm? at Ingolstadt, Germany, in 2005; Oak at the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, Gong-Ju, South Korea, in 2004; Freight and Barrel at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2004; and Mitochondria at the Buffalo Bayou Artpark, Houston, TX, in 2003.
SUSAN BEE is an artist, editor, and book artist who lives and works in New York City. She shows her paintings at AIR Gallery in NYC, where she has had four solo shows. Bee has published six artist’s books with Granary Books, including collaborations with poets: Bed Hangings, with Susan Howe, AGirl’s Life, with Johanna Drucker, and Log Rhythms and Little Orphan Anagramwith Charles Bernstein and The Burning Babe and Other Poemswith Jerome Rothenberg. She is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, published by Duke University Press in 2000, and the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.She teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism program. Her website is: http://cpc.buffalo.edu/authors.
TIMOTHY GRAY is associate professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He has published several articles on “urban pastoral” motifs in the New York School, the most recent of which, on poet Barbara Guest, is available on-line in Jacketmaga- zine (volume 28, October 2005). His first book, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community, was published in 2006 by University of Iowa Press.
TOMAS URAYOÁN NOEL’s most recent book of poetry is Kool Logic / La logica kool, from the Bilingual Review Press at Arizona State University. He is co-editor, with Guillermo Rebollo-Gil, of an upcoming anthology of poetry from Terranova Editores, Carolina, Puerto Rico. Tomas spends his spare time in the Ph.D. program in Spanish and Portuguese literature at New York University.
WANG PING was born in China and came to the USA in 1985. Her publications include American Visa (1994), Foreign Devil (1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (1998), The Magic Whip (2003), The Last Communist Virgin (2007), all from Coffee House. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College. Poet, novelist, essayist, educator,WILL ALEXANDERlives in Los Angeles. Charles Bernstein has described his latest collection, Exobiology as Goddessas “an exuberant excursion into the hyperreality of the cosmos.”
WILLIE COLE was born in Somerville, New Jersey, and attended the School of Visual Arts as the Art Students League. His awards and residencies include the Lamar Dodd Fellowship of the University of Georgia, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His one-person exhibitions include Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brandsat the Montclair Art Museum, Afterburnat the University of Wyoming Art Museum, and New York: Willie Cole, at the Crossroads at the Miami Art Museum.
JESA DAMORA
SEEDPOD #5
