Lit Fuse Coming Up

LiTFUSE Poets’ Workshop 10.8.10-10.10.10.  LiTFUSE is an annual weekend-long poets’ workshop held in Tieton, WA (near Yakima), for poets of all ages, abilities & styles. LiTFUSE combines writing, performance, meditation, music, camaraderie and natural beauty to IGNiTE your muse.  This year’s featured artist, teacher & poet Ingrid Wendt, leads a faculty with deep experience and varied styles.  Free home stays are available.  For more information and to register, please visit www.litfuse.us, or contact michael@litfuse.us – Northwest Writers, UNiTE!

If you can handle lodging and transportation, I might be able to get you a scholarship. Let me know, Paul 206.422.5002

Posted in Sponsors | Leave a comment

World’s Largest Choral Poem (from Matthew Timmons)

Hello Everybody!

You may or may not know that I have a show up at a phone gallery right now –
the show is The Archanoids at 323 Projects http://323projects.com I’d like
to invite you to contribute to the worlds largest sound poetry choir ever by
Oct 1!

The Archanoids exists as the inaugural exhibition of 323 Projects which you
can visit by calling (323) 843-4652 or (323) TIE-IN-LA. The show is open all
day and all night, every day of the week until October 11, 2010. 323
Projects phone gallery will present a new track from the album, The
Archanoids, every other day and invite callers to participate in a
collective sound poem by leaving a message and following an online score.

CALL NOW! to participate in The Arc of Noise, the world’s largest
collaborative sound poetry choir!

Watch the video score at http://323projects.com and call (323) 843-4652 or
(323) TIE-IN-LA to contribute. You can listen to a track from the album, The
Archanoids then leave a message that follows the score by hitting play on
the video at the beep, you may also press 1 twice to skip straight to
leaving a message.

You can read a write up of The Archanoids by Joshua Morrison at Fine Arts LA

http://www.fineartsla.com/defineartsla-exclusive-poet.html
and a note at TRY HARDER.

Posted in Sponsors | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Almost Genius

Stranger Genius Awards

Stranger Genius Awards

It’s true. Your Wily SPLABMAN made the short list for the Stranger Genius Award in Literature. Is it ironic that the actual winner of the genius award in Literature does not use words? Yes, but an honor nonetheless. Hats off to Brian McGuigan and Karen Finneyfrock who also made that list.

Re: YWS…

Paul E. Nelson

They don’t get much more inventive than this: Paul E. Nelson’s A Time Before Slaughter is a book-length epic poem about Auburn, Washington. (Fun fact! Auburn was originally named Slaughter in honor of fallen U.S. lieutenant William Slaughter. Slaughter residents quickly got cold feet and changed the name.) It’s not the one long, boring spray of stanzas you’re picturing. Nelson split up his epic into dozens of smaller poems, varying in length and content. There are elegies, sonnets, prose poems, images, and even testy e-mail exchanges with easily outraged Auburn civil servants, forming a literary collage of a little city that usually escapes notice. Nelson brings a cacophony of voices together to form a chorus. That chorus sings the stories of dozens of men and women—full of regrets and muddled memories, complaining about traffic while piloting their SUVs, murdering and being murdered, feeling unseen and abandoned. In other words, he has built a city out of words. A city named Slaughter. And Auburn. It’s a brilliant achievement. PC

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Five Innovative Writers from Seattle and Beyond

Friday, September 24, 2010,
7:00 – 8:30 PM
Henry Auditorium
Free

In tandem with the conference Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, sponsored by the UW and Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, five writers read their innovative work.

Jeanne Heuving recently published Transducer (Chax), preceded by Incapacity (Chiasmus), which received a 2004 Book of the Year from Small Press Traffic. She is a professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell and on the graduate faculty in English at UW Seattle. She has published multiple critical works on innovative and avant garde writing and is currently finishing work on a manuscript, The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry.

Hank Lazer has published fifteen books of poetry, most recently Portions (Lavender Ink), The New Spirit (Singing Horse), Elegies & Vacations (Salt), and Days (Lavender Ink). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. For the past four years, he has been working on a handwritten shape-writing project called the Notebooks (of Being & Time). Lazer is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and the Executive Director of the Creative Campus initiative at the University of Alabama.

Robert Mittenthal is author of Value Unmapped (Nomados), Martyr Economy, Ready Terms (Tsunami Editions), and the forthcoming Wax World (Chax). Irrational Dude, a chapbook of collaborative work with Nico Vassilakis, was published last year by tir aux pigeons. Mittenthal was instrumental in creating and curating the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle. For Mittenthal’s blog, see http://rmutts.blogspot.com.

A native of Southern California, Lou Rowan began his writing career in New York City, during the heyday of experimentation circulating through St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. He currently lives and writes in Seattle, where he edits Golden Handcuffs Review. His two recent books are the novel My Last Days (Chiasmus) and a story-collection Sweet Potatoes (Ahadada Books).

Zhang Er, born in Beijing, is the author of four collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Yellow Walls: A String of Doors. She has six chapbooks of her work translated into English, among them, Carved Water (Tinfish) and Sight Progress (Pleasure Boat Studio). Her selected poems occur within two bilingual collections, So Translating Rivers and Cities (Zephyr) and Verses on Bird (Zephyr). She co-edited the bilingual volume Another Kind of Nation: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman). She teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment