Tuesday February 28, 7pm – Poetry
Anne Waldman author of The Iovis Trilogy – Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ($40.00 Coffee House Press) & Thom Donovan author of The Hole ($19.95 Displaced Press)
Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry.
The Iovis Trilogy, Waldman’s monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman’s themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history.
“Waldman takes you by the collar and slams you down with language, image, and message, leaving you breathless and shattered in the aftermath of her incantatory vision. . . . The poems repeat themselves, wrap around themselves, glide through linguistic holes that only the poet herself could have seen. They trumpet, blare, and whisper vision upon vision of a world gone crazy with war and patriarchal mores, then proceed to share another vision, one of healing and peace. . . . This is a book of action, a poetic clarion call. Huge and weighty, it will be compared to The Cantos and Paterson. It is neither. It is Iovis; it is an act of incendiary love, and it stands alone.”—Powells.com
Thom Donovan author of The Hole ($19.95 Displaced Press)
“The book I have in mind is a kind of model for forms of attention and exchange (i.e., distribution) that already exist and which can be dramatized and focused through a book’s form (something book artists have been aware of for a long time now, but which has also been a part of our Modernist heritage since the mid-twentieth century, if not from the very ‘beginning’—think of certain movements of Zukofsky’s “A” for example or Williams’s Paterson). The book as a site for our sociality, our socialism. The book as a site for the examination of complicity, process, exchange. The book as a place where communal issues become shaped and reshaped. The book as a powerful circuit of mutual regard, conviction, and care. The book as a model of radical and extensive participation. The book as…”—Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan edits the weblog Wild Horses of Fire, now in its 7th year! And co-edits ON: CONTEMPORARHY PRACTICE, a print journal for critical writings and conversations about one’s contemporaries. He also edits the web archive Others Letters, featuring correspondence about contemporary practices across the arts, and co-curates The Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior, a live interview series and video archive concerning the immanence of possible futures. He is currently revising a book of essays and statements provisionally titled Sovereignty and Us.
—Powells.com
Visit http://youtu.be/zdW04DMYBi4 to watch the first of a series of this event on video, which will be completed over the next few days. Enjoy!