Upcoming events:

Tuesday, August 25th: John Curl, with guitarist Howard Barkan at 7:00pm

John Curl has been a member of Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop in Berkeley for over thirty years, and has belonged to numerous other cooperatives and collectives. His historical writings include the History of Work Cooperation in America (1980). Memories of Drop City (2007) is his memoir of the 1960s commune movement. He is a translator and biographer of Inca, Maya and Aztec poets in Ancient American Poets (2006). His seven books of poetry include Scorched Birth, Columbus in the Bay of Pigs, and Decade: The 1990s. He is a longtime board member of PEN, chair of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies, a social activist, and has served as a city planning commissioner. He is a professional woodworker, and resides in Berkeley.

With an expansive sweep and breathtaking detail, For All the People examines each of the definitive cooperative movements for social change--farmer, union, consumer, and communalist--that have been all but erased from our collective memory. John Curl, with over forty years of experience as both an active member and scholar of cooperatives, masterfully melds theory, practice, knowledge and analysis, to present the definitive history from below of cooperative America.

"It  is indeed inspiring, in the face of all the misguided praise of  'the market', to be reminded by John Curl's book of the noble history  of cooperative work in the United States."    Howard Zinn

Howard Barkan has been a performing guitarist for more than 40 years. He started playing and performing on the East Coast. After moving to Chicago, he studied blues guitar with Buddy Guy and played blues on the South Side with members of the Buddy Guy - Junior Wells Blues Band. He also recorded and performed Latin music ( 'Salsa' ) with the 'Orchestre Magic du Chicago'. After moving to California, Howard began studying and performing jazz, Brazilian, and classical music. He studied jazz guitar and theory with Dave Craemer, a former member of the Miles Davis' ensemble.

Thursday, September 3rd: Poetry Flash presents C.S. Giscombe & Kit Robinson

C.S. Giscombe's new book of poems is Prairie Style. Marjorie Perloff says of it, "In a series of dense, aphoristic, interrelated meditations, Giscombe unearths a unique 'Afro-Prairie' world of love and loss. Inland's what I can memoirize and recite, the poet tells us. This is a haunting and beautiful book." His other books of poetry include Postcards, Here, and Giscombe Road; he's also published a book of essays, Into and Out of Dislocation. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Kit Robinson's new book is The Messianic Trees, his selected poems. Tom Raworth praises it: "The Messianic Trees (organ cue) is a xylophone for the soul, the music as he passes poems that refresh eye and mind and shift for a second glance." One of the core members of Bay Area literary renaissance and Language movements, Robinson performed with San Francisco Poets Theater and produced "In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets," a weekly radio program of live readings and interviews with co-host Lyn Hejinian on KPFA in Berkeley. He's published seventeen books of poetry, and his honors include a Fund for Poetry Prize and an NEA fellowship.

Thursday, September 10th: Poetry Flash presents an Anthology Reading for Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease

featuring contributors Dan Bellm, Sybil Lockhart, Andrena Zawinski & Mary Zeppa.

Beyond Forgetting is an unusual collection of poetry and short prose about Alzheimer's disease written by one hundred contemporary writers whose lives have been touched by the disease. Edited by Holly J. Hughes, with a moving foreword by poet Tess Gallagher.

Wednesday, September 16th: Jim Powell

Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever That Made The World and the translator of The Poetry Of Sappho and Catullan Revenants. He was awarded a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship (1993-1998), and was the Sherry Poet and Lecturer at the University of Chicago in 2005. He is a fourth generation California native and lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay region.

Substrate, his first collection in twenty years, examines the indigenous habitat of Northern California, treating history as a kind of sediment. Fascinated by the first person, he turns to eyewitness historical accounts and primary witnesses to create a portrait assembled of samples from twenty-five "strata" in the "substrate" of the region. Nearly every poem in Substrate is derived from a specific primary source.

The poems in Substrate are largely narrative. They re-embrace this tradition, borrowing tools from prose and contemporary oral narration. The title poem summons twenty-five witnesses from oral and documentary history, ethnology, archaeology, ethnobotany and linguistics, all providing a composite cultural history of California.

September 29th: CoolMelt, featuring David Meltzer and Clark Coolidge

David Meltzer is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. -- from Wikipedia

Clark Coolidge is often associated with the Language School, his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects--including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac , and movies--often finds correspondence in his work. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California. -- from Wikipedia

Thursday, October 1st: Poetry Flash presents Denise Newman & Sandra Stone

Denise Newman's new book of poems is Wild Goods; Liz Waldner praises it: "Speculative, tender, droll, fierce, attentive, intelligent, precise, aware, deft, tough, and contemplative, it's poetry that makes Flannery O'Connor's tenet, the imagination is a moral faculty, sing awake." Denise Newman's first book of poems is The Human Forest. She is also the translator of Danish poet Inger Christensen's The Painted Room.

Sandra Stone's first book of poems, Cocktails with Breughel at the Museum Café, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Award. A subtle, edgy writer whose language is syntactical and representational, in its dreamy, slippery fashion, and yet folds musically back on itself. She won the 2007 Dana Award in Poetry for her cycle of poems, "A Comparison of Silt," and she was honored with a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts for her short fictions.

Tuesday, October 13th: Oran Canfield

Oran Canfield, 34, is the son of Jack "Chicken Soup for the Soul" Canfield. Oran was raised by his psychologist mother in Central America and the San Francisco Bay area. In his early twenties, while attending the San Francisco Art Institute, Oran began his career as a drummer and became heavily involved in San Francisco's flourishing underground music and art communities. Along with his involvement as a drummer for a countless number of bands in the nineties, he also owned and operated a recording studio and co-operated a music venue featuring experimental and creative jazz music. He has held jobs as a bike messenger, piano restorer, housecleaner, and limo driver. Early in 2000, after seven separate stints in rehab, he got clean off drugs after attending an experimental treatment center in the Virgin Islands. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works as a freelance art handler and audio installer for art galleries and designer Donna Karan.

Tuesday, October 20th: Paul Hoover and Norman Fischer

Paul Hoover is the author of twelve books of poetry including Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishers, 2008). With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008). Beyond the Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai, edited and translated with Nguyen Do, will be published by Counterpath Press in 2010.

Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, writer, and senior Zen Buddhist priest from the San Francisco Bay Area.   His latest poetry collection is Questions/Places/Voices/ Seasons, just out from Singing Horse Press in San Diego, and his latest prose work is Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls (Simon and Schuster, 2008).  Norman lived at the San Francisco Zen Center temples for twenty-five years, and served as an abbot of the Center from 1995-2000. In 2000 he founded the Everyday Zen Foundation. He lives with his wife Kathie on a cliff in Muir Beach.

Thursday, October 29th: Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem will be reading from his new novel, Chronic City.