From peachesandbats at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 20:10:55 2011 From: peachesandbats at gmail.com (Sam Lohmann) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:10:55 -0800 Subject: [Living Room list] invitation to participate in Barbara Guest marathon reading, 2/11-12/2012 Message-ID: * Dear friends, the Spare Room reading series is in the habit of hosting a marathon reading of a book-length work each winter. For 2012 we're planning a two-part marathon reading of Barbara Guest's Collected Poems on the afternoons of February 11 and 12, at YU in Portland. We're looking for readers to lend their voices to passages from the book, and hope you'll consider it. No prior familiarity with Guest's work is necessary. The text will be divided into comfortable portions, assigned to readers ahead of time, and readers and listeners are welcome to come and go as needed or to stay for the whole duration (4-5 hours per session). Both sessions will take place in the cozy kitchen space at YU, where we held the last part of our Maximus Poems marathon last January. If you're interested in being one of the readers, please email me at peachesandbats at gmail.com. Let me know if you have a preferred date or any other scheduling requirements. I plan to contact all the readers in late January with an assigned portion of the text and a (very approximate) time-slot, and can provide a scans or photocopies from the text at that time, as required. A public announcement of the event appears below. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think might be interested in participating. Thanks, and happy winter, Sam Lohmann for Spare Room www.flim.com/spareroom a marathon reading of Barbara Guest's Collected Poems February 11-12 3-8 p.m. each day in the kitchen at YU 800 SE 10th Ave., Portland free On Saturday and Sunday, February 11-12, YU and Spare Room will present a two-part marathon reading of The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan, 2008). Now in its tenth year, Spare Room organizes a monthly reading series at various locations in Portland, focused on experimental poetry. In recent years they have hosted marathon readings each winter, inviting members of the community to lend their voices to a new rendition of an existing text. Recent marathons have been devoted to single book-length poems, including H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text, and Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; this year's marathon presents the lively and varied life's work of an influential poet who worked mainly in shorter forms.* **Barbara Guest (1920-2006) was a poet, art critic, novelist and biographer often associated with the New York School(s) in poetry and painting. Her work reflects a lifelong engagement with modernism in visual art and music as well as in literature, and is marked by a unique combination of audacious abstraction, vivid synesthesia and comic energy. Her posthumous *Collected Poems* brings together over twenty books published between 1960 and 2005. Readers from Portland's poetry community will read the book from beginning to end over two afternoon sessions, each beginning at 3 p.m. and continuing till about 8, at YU's spacious kitchen table. Listeners are encouraged to come and go as they please, stopping by for a few pages or a few hours. ************** * * * understanding what it means* * to understand music* * * *cloudless movement beyond the neck's reach* * * *an hypnotic lull in porcelain water break mimics* * * *tonality crunch of sand under waddling* * * * * * **a small seizure** * * from monumentality* * * * **does not come or go with understanding* *--Barbara Guest, from "Dissonance Royal Traveler"* * * *Guest's language does not merely describe, it presents the reader with the means to see in an entirely new way. * *--Erica Kaufman, **Poetry Project Newsletter* * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20111220/c264b3f1/attachment.html