Saturday, September 5, 2015 at 2:00 pm
JH 100, Jackman Humanities Building, University of Toronto
170 St. George Street
With talks by Lillian Allen, Gary Barwin, John Bell, David James Brock, Liz Howard, Kaie Kellough, Jenny Sampirisi, Natalie Zina Walschots
**Anne Lesley Selcer & Hoa Nguyen @CPRG Home Edition**
You’re invited to a house poetry reading + talk + optional dancing.
Sunday April 26th, 7:30 pm.
267 St. George Street Apt 301
Anne Lesley Selcer is an art writer and poet working in the expanded field. Recent work includes from A Book of Poems on Beauty chosen for publication by Dawn Lundy Martin, poems in Fence and Armed Cell, and a residency culminating in a soundpiece on form at Krowswork gallery. She wrote Banlieusard, a book published in tandem with an exhibit at Artspeak gallery. SFMOMA’s Open Space commissioned a series of essays on language & the moving image, plus a site specific essay to accompany the 2013 SECA awards. Other writing on art appears in catalogs or anthologies for the galleries Centre A, the Or, the Belkin, and the Helen Pitt, plus TV Books and Fillip magazine. Other poems appear in Dusie, Where Eagles Dare, Action Yes! and Try. She was a member of the now defunct Nonsite Collective in San Francisco & in Vancouver created the interdisciplinary Chroma Reading Series. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home of 14 years. She is the author of nine books and chapbooks including As Long As Trees Last (Wave, 2012) and Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Wave, 2014). She currently lives in Toronto where she curates a reading series, reads tarot, and teaches poetics. Accessibility info: 3rd floor apartment with roomy elevator, bathroom en suite. https://cpresearchgroup.wordpress.com/
You’re invited to a
special Saturday night
edition of the CPRG with
Rachel Zolf (accompanied by Liz Howard and Margaret Christakos)
&
Divya Victor
with introductory remarks
by Eric Schmaltz
on
May 2nd, 7:30 pm
@ Videofag
187 Augusta Ave.
Toronto, Ontario
Rachel Zolf’s artistic practice explores materialist questions about memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her five books of poetry include Janey’s Arcadia (2014), Neighbour Procedure (2010) and Human Resources (2007), all from Coach House Books. She has won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and been a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Raymond Souster Memorial Award. Her film version of Janey’s Arcadia has shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and other venues. Among her many collaborations, she wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami; and she conducted the first collaborative MFA in Creative Writing ever, The Tolerance Project. She has taught at New York’s The New School and the University of Calgary and is completing a PhD in philosophy at the European Graduate School.
Divya Victor is the author of Things To Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, 2014), and Unsub (Insert/Blanc, 2015). She is also author of the Partial series (Troll Thread), Punch (2011), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (2012), and Swift Taxidermies (2014), all from Gauss PDF; and the chapbook Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011). She divides her time between the United States and Singapore, where she is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Nanyang Technological University.
ACCESS INFO
– Videofag’s entrance has four stairs
– Both the venue & bathroom are on the same floor
– Seating will be available
– FREE (with option of donation)
You’re invited to
hear readings by
Jocelyn Saidenberg
&
Brandon Brown
on
March 25th, 7:30 pm
@ Videofag
187 Augusta Ave.
Toronto, Ontario
Jocelyn Saidenberg’s books include Mortal City, Cusp, Negativity, Shipwreck and most recently Dead Letter published by Roof Books in 2014. She is the founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books and one of the twelve curators of Right Window. Born and raised in New York City, she has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1994.
Brandon Brown is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Top 40 and Flowering Mall (both from ROOF). His poems have appeared in Fanzine, Abraham Lincoln, West Wind Review, Sprung Formal, Elderly, Industrial Lunch, Berkeley Poetry Review, Dusie, Where Eagles Dare, Maggy, and many other journals. He writes about art and culture for Open Space, the magazine of the SFMOMA, as well as reviews and longer form art pieces for Bay Area journal Art Practical. In 2015, Big Lucks will publish a book of prose pieces, Shadow Lanka. He is an editor at Krupskaya, and occasionally publishes small press materials under the imprint OMG!
ACCESS INFO
– Videofag’s entrance has four stairs
– Both the venue & bathroom are on the same floor
– Seating will be available
– FREE
Contemporary Poetry Research Group welcomes…
Craig Dworkin (talk & reading)
&
lindsay cahill (reading)
on
March 12th, Doors at 7:00pm
@ Videofag
187 Augusta Ave.
Toronto, Ontario
Craig Dworkin, Professor in the English Department at the University of Utah, is the author of No Medium, Reading the Illegible, and the editor of Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (MIT Press).
lindsay cahill is a Toronto-based editor, visual poet, and remixer. her most recent publications include Lemon Hound, Stroboscope: a magazine of versioned poetics, and TheVolta.org’s feature on The Women of Visual Poetry. pieces from her Simpsons remix project were published in Jonathan Ball’s anthology WHY POETRY SUCKS, and in early September, 2014 she curated HOMER’S ODYSSEY: a Simpsons art show at Videofag gallery in Kensington Market. her first major performance piece – “THE ROAD” – will be featured in the In The Soil Arts Festival in April, 2015.
This will be the first in a series of events called PLANNING: A Series of Micro-talks in which we ask 8-10 people to give 3-5 minute micro-talks prompted by a question.
Presenters/speakers will include:
Bänoo Zan
Jess Taylor
Aisha Sasha John
Hoa Nguyen
Joan Guenther
Nicole Brewer
William Kemp
Shannon Maguire
Jay MillAr
Jacqueline Valencia
More TBA
For our first event, we’re asking participants to respond to the deceptively simple question: what is a reading?
This could be interpreted a bit more specifically, but we also don’t want to over determine the responses. We are interested in conducting mutual research about what a poetry/performance/reading currently is in Toronto (and elsewhere) and what you think it could be or needs to be but isn’t necessarily or always?
We are also interested in hearing your ideas about what the barriers to these changes might be, if any, and any ideas you might have about how to make these hypothetical changes a reality..
The talks will be followed by a Q&A, that will be facilitated to make sure every one who wants to talk is heard from and to make sure no one is talking over anyone else.
We’ll also be asking audience/participants for feedback about what the next question/micro-talks might address.
Contemporary Poetry Research Group 