CARLA HARRYMAN, PATRICK DURGIN, POET'S THEATRE

Big Night, Halloween Edition, OCTOBER 30th, 8 pm

• Poetry by Carla Harryman
• Buffalo Poets Theater presents Harryman's Memory Play
• More poetry by Patrick Durgin
• Food by Geoffrey Gatza

Free for members of Just Buffalo, CEPA, WNYBAC, Big Orbit and UB Students with ID. Free food, cash bar.

Memory Play stars Morani Kornberg-Weiss, Robin Brox, Nava Fader, Tina Žigon, John Hyland, and Soma Feldmar, and is directed by David Hadbawnik.

Carla Harryman, is a poet, essayist, and playwright, known for genre-disrupting poetry, performance, & prose. She has published thirteen single-authored works, including Adorno's Noise (Essay Press, 2008). Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (2001). She is co-editor of Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker and special issue editor of Non/Narrative forthcoming from the Journal of Narrative Theory. Her poets’ theater and interdisciplinary performance works have been performed nationally and internationally. She is currently working on a new play, “Romanian Play,” and a text/music collaboration with the Jon Raskin Quartet, which will be released as a CD in 2011. A frequent collaborator, she is co-contributor to the multi-authored experiment in autobiography The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of Language Writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay area between 1975-1980. The Wide Road, a multi-genre collaboration with poet Lyn Hejinian is forthcoming from Belladonna. She lives in the Detroit Area and serves on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University. “Reading Carla Harryman,” a special feature on her work can be found in the most recent issue of HOW2.

Patrick F. Durgin teaches cultural studies, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His latest publications include a hybrid genre collaboration with Jen Hofer, The Route (Atelos, 2008), and essays on "post-ableist" poetics in Contemporary Women's Writing and the Journal of Modern Literature; also, poems in Aufgabe and Jacket. He is concluding work on a critical monograph entitled Indeterminacies and Intentionalities: Toward a Poetics of Critical Values, as well as a play on the subject of failed bilingualism entitled PQRS: A Drama. As series editor and publisher, he has just finished work on The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil, recently published by Kenning Editions (2010).

Geoffrey Gatza, a Gulf War veteran, is a poet and the publisher of Blazevox Books. A former sous-chef at the Mansion on Delaware Ave., he has a degree from the Culinary Institute of America (C.I.A.)

Hoa Nguyen, Poets' Theatre, Gut Flora, Gatza du Jour this Saturday!

We'd be foolish not to include this great photo of our upcoming BIG NIGHT poet and January's BIG NIGHT poet, Linh Dinh.

Robin Brox's stellar preview for Saturday's events:

On Saturday (Feb. 27), Just Buffalo Literary Center presents an art-party designed to entertain: poet Hoa Nguyen, music by Gut Flora, and Buffalo Poets Theater doing Jack Spicer’s Troilus and Cressida.

“One of America’s best contemporary poets that you may not have heard of,” Hoa Nguyen, born in Saigon, grew up around Washington, D.C. and earned an MFA from New College of California. Describing her work, she says, “I don’t dispense with the wacky! I like humor in poems…I think about audience a lot and I want poems that I would want to read and one of those things is to risk saying something…even if that honesty is about how you and everything feels [messed] up.” (Her name is pronounced “Hwa Win;” she says it with an American accent.) Nguyen’s Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey)—from which she’ll read—and Kiss a Bomb Tattoo (Effing Press) came out last year; she lives in Austin and co-edits the small press/poetry journal Skanky Possum, from which Robert Creeley selected poems for The Best American Poetry 2002. An essay is forthcoming in Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa).

Buffalo Poets Theater is an amalgamation of city and academic talent that continues the tradition of poets working with drama begun in 1950s New York and still thriving in San Francisco. In 2009 BPT staged an excerpt from Eileen Myles’s Hell to honor her Big Night reading and hosted Kevin Killian at the Burchfield-Penney. Spicer’s Troilus takes a comical, contrarian stance to issues of resistance, change, understanding reality—Zeus says in the prologue, “The Trojan War has been going on for the last 3,000 years and it hasn’t stopped yet. All the stories you’ve heard about the destruction of Troy are just daydreams Ulysses invented to keep himself sane. You’ve probably dreamed like that yourselves, waiting for a war to come to an end. One thing, though—the people in the play don’t seem to know how long the war has lasted. They have the idea that it’s only been going on for nine years or so. I don’t know why. Human beings don’t have a very good time sense.”

Gut Flora makes music on spare parts, rusty tanks, weed-whacker line, bells, whistles, even toys. Members Gabriel Gutierrez and Patrick Cain say, “The aim of our music is to be music. We sound out into sound. We birth the possible from cans and strings, metal and wood.” Experimental but crafted, Gut Flora uses instrumentation to construct an improvisational ambiance that invites and challenges to one listens.

Geoffrey Gatza, a Gulf War veteran, poet and publisher of BlazeVOX [books] with a degree from the Culinary Institute of America (C.I.A.), concocts feasts of epic, edible beauty, connecting with featured artists in delightful, delicious fashion. Big Night’s buffet, cash bar, live music, theater, and poetry, begin at 8pm at the Western New York Book Arts Center, 468 Washington Street at Mohawk. Only $5, free for Just Buffalo, WNYBAC, Big Orbit, and CEPA Gallery members.

—robin brox