Brenda Hillman City
Brenda Hillman finished off the SPLAB 2011 Visiting Poets Series in fine fashion November 11 and 12 with a brilliant talk on Innovation and Activism in Poetry Friday the 11th (Veterans Day), a workshop that left at least one participant “buzzing all day” and a reading featuring her brilliant new work. One long-time stalwart of the local poetry scene said it was “the best reading I have ever seen her give.”
So, the audio of the reading is here.
Paul Nelson’s intro here. Post-reading Q & A here.
The interview she did with Paul Nelson is here.
Brenda Hillman & Bob Haas
Read about the confrontation she & her husband had with the SWAT team called out to the UC-Berkeley Occupy Rally here.
See video of that confrontation here, with Brenda and husband Robert Hass visible at about the 4:00 mark.
For a woman whose work pushes the art ahead, she surely finds herself in the thick of confronting the injustice of the “American Way.” How many people have so much going on two critical fronts?
Thanks Brenda.
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
