readings's blog

19h15, 14th June, Bar Long Island, 47 rue Washington, M George V. THIS IS OUR ALTERNATIVE VENUE.

Pierre Joris most recent publications are his translation of The Meridian: Final Version”Dra&#fb05;s”Materials by Paul Celan. (Stanford U.P. 2011), Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade (poems) as a 2010 Ahadada eBook, Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 and Aljibar I & II (poems). He is working with Habib Tengour on Diwan I&#fb00;rikya: An Anthology of North African Writings from Prehistory to Today, to be published in 2012 by University of California Press. Later this year Chax Press will bring out the complete Mediations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems).

WINTER POEM
This tanker …
On Goethes Flyleaf

19h15, 10th May at Carr’s Pub & Restaurant, 1 rue du Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries.

THIS EVENT IS SPECIAL! Jen will launch Betwixt, her new chapbook. George will launch A SHORT CIRCUIT, his &#fb01;rst poetry collection. Both are published by the new Paris poetry publisher, corrupt press. Greg will bring along The Emperor’s Sofa, which he made earlier.

19h15, 12th April, Bar Long Island, 47 rue Washington, M George V. THIS IS A CHANGE OF VENUE. Some bugger booked Carrs for a week!

Nicole Peyra&#fb01;tte is a performance artist born and raised in the French Pyrenees. She considers herself a Gasco-Rican (1/2 Gascon, 1/2 American) & citizen of Brooklyn. Peyra&#fb01;tte pursues related multi-cultural and multi-media investigations that integrate her voice, texts, visuals and also cooking. She has two CDs out: The Bi-Continental Chowder /La Garbure Transcontinentale 2006 & Whisk! Don’t Churn! 2009. Visit her website for blog/videos and more: www.nicolepeyra&#fb01;tte.com.
Sample poems: January 2010 Golden Evasion, January 7th, 2010 ” For & W/ Georgia OKee&#fb00;e

William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Brofus, New Jersey, where he went to Rutgers University, starting out as a classics major, changing to musicology and &#fb01;nishing with an abnormal psychology, all of which he declined to follow up or to practice. He has worked in many di&#fb00;erent &#fb01;elds of endeavor, including amusement parks, banks, book stores, cinema, door-to-door sales, restaurants, retail sales, taxi driving, telephone sales, warehouses and as a tour guide and was also co-editor of Upstairs at Duroc, a literary review, blowing his chances at working-class hero status. A thirty-four-year resident of Paris, he now earns his living as an English language trainer and translator.
He is the author of several volumes of poetry (all slim), his other principal interests being various forms of boxing, bull &#fb01;ghting and old music. He is Archon of Paris for the Moorish Orthodox Church and a member of various other organizations embracing a few essential beliefs and having even fewer doctrines. He has two young daughters and is thus in touch with the needs, desires and tendencies of today’s teens and pre-teens.
He has read all over Paris over the years, including every year with the original incarnation of this series.
His main in&#fb02;uences are science &#fb01;ction, doo-wop music and a mis-spent youth, along with the usual Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Poe, Catullus, Larkin, Elroy, Doctor Seuss, Beaudelaire and also Emmylou Harris, Roy Jones Jr., Leonard Cohen, Fedor Emilianenko, Bartok and Roy Orbison.
His motto this year is, All dust is gold, but sometimes he forgets.
Sample poems: THE MUSIC, YOUNG IN THE MIND.

David Barnes grew up in the Thames Valley in England in the 70s and 80s. He escaped to Manchester University where he successfully ignored any desire to write for 6 years. He started writing poetry as an adult in the mid 90s and started writing short stories a few years before settling in Paris in 2003, where he created and runs The Other Writers’ Group at Shakespeare and Company and SpokenWord, a weekly open mic poetry series. He won Shakespeare & Company’s Travel in Words prize in 2006 with a short story and has published short stories in 34th Parallel Magazine and Spot Lit Magazine. He has a poem in the current issue of Upstairs at Duroc and edited Strangers in Paris: An Anthology of New Writing inspired by the City of Light, which will be out in the summer. He is also an editor with issue.ZERO magazine which brought out an issue this winter. He currently divides his time between a Masters in psychotherapy, writing short stories and poetry and a day job teaching English and creative writing so that he has enough money to feed himself and his cat and do everything else.
Sample poems: The 2 a.m. high, Septembers, The Corporate Gold&#fb01;sh.

19h30, 15th March at Carr’s Pub & Restaurant, 1 rue du Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries.

Simon Smith was born in 1961 and ran the Poetry Library in London from 2003-2007. He now lectures on poetry at The University of Kent. There are four full-length collections of poetry, the latest is London Bridge (Salt, 2010). In 2009 he was a Hawthornden Fellow, and has translated and published work by Pierre Reverdy, Apollinaire, Catulllus and Martial. He is presently completing a translation of Catullus for Carcanet Press. Here are some of Simon’s poems.

Kerry Featherstone was born in Lincolnshire, read English and European Literature at the University of Essex, and then completed a PhD on Bruce Chatwin at Nottingham Trent University. He now works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Loughborough University. He spent a year living in the Vendee and another living in Belfort, and has also spent time in the Limousin and in Paris. He writes in French and English (sometimes in the same poem) and also writes songs as part of The Orange (whose album ‘Concealed Exit’ is available on itunes, amazon, etc.). His in&#fb02;uences are Ezra Pound, Carolyn Forche, Peire Vidal and Dar Williams. His book on Bruce Chatwin will be published in 2011 and he is currently translating Ingriod Thobois’ novel ‘Le Roi d’Afghanistan ne nous a pas maris’. Here are some of Kerry’s poems.

Helen Cusack O’Kee&#fb00;e says: “I am part of the Irish diaspora (ie subspecies), I was &#fb01;rst drawn to the other end of Europe, studying Russian literature. I spent several months in Moscow, Siberia and Petersburg. A&#fb05;er some dithering and dabbling at the Refugee Council and similar organisations, I studied a social work MA, researching bereavement in su&#fb00;erers of severe mental illness. Later, I pored over Mesoamerican archaeology for a year, and tried to learn an esoteric Mayan language. Since 2008 I’ve been based in Paris, where I write four days a week, and I regularly read at writers forums. On the other three days I work in a psychiatric team for homeless people in central London. Bitterns Last Folly is a vast nineteenth century thing about the bizarre Bittern family and their various obsessions: chie&#fb02;y exotic archaeology and the rituals of Victorian mourning. An adapted extract from it is being published this April in an anthology of Anglophone writers living in France (Tightrope Press, Canada). ”

Here’s the facebook event.

steve dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo, and Nina Karacosta
NEW VENUE NEW VENUE NEW VENUE
downstairs at Carr’s Pub, 1 rue du Mont Thabor, M Tuileries
7:30pm, 15th February 2011

There’s a facebook event for the facebook addicts.

steve dalachinsky is from Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared extensively in journals on & o&#fb00; line, in many chapbooks, books, and CDs. Yuko Otomo is a bilingual (Japanese & English) poet & a visual artist (in pursuit of Pure Abstraction). Nina Karacosta is an actor and poet, who will launch her new chapbook at Poets Live.

Anne Ortiz Talvaz, Bonny Finberg, and introducing Julianne Sibiski
CHANGE OF VENUE CHANGE OF VENUE CHANGE OF VENUE
to Le Next, 17 Rue Tiquetonne, 75002, M Etienne Marcel
7:30pm, 25th January 2011

Anne Ortiz Talvaz
Anne Talvaz was born in Brussels in 1963 and currently lives in the Paris area with her family. She works as a commercial translator and has lived in China and Brazil. She has published 3 books of poetry, a novel, and a travel book about China, and has translated the work of many poets from English and Spanish into French - in particular John Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” - as well as French into English.

George Vance and Troy Yorke
The Highlander, 8 rue de Nevers, Metro Pont Neuf or Odon
7pm, 16th November 2010

Ohio-born,long-time resident of Paris, George Vance is presently involved in experiments with word/image fusion, tags, & street art. His hybrid language & image video installation, “HEIGHTS”, was exhibited in Brussels in 2006, & he recently designed a ‘totem’ sculpture with a Kanak artist. Author of Bent Time, a chapbook, his poems have appeared in Paris in Pharos & Upstairs at Duroc.

Jerome Rothenberg with Kazim Ali
The Highlander, 8 rue de Nevers, Metro Pont Neuf or Odon
7pm, 26th October 2010

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry and several assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, Revolution of the Word, and Poems for the Millennium, (volumes 1 and 2, with Pierre Joris). A Book of Witness, his twel&#fb05;h book of poems from New Directions, appeared in 2003, and a thirteenth book, Triptych, appeared in 2007. His second collection of literary essays, Poetics & Polemics 1980-2005, appeared at the end of 2008, and new books of poems scheduled for 2009 and 2010 include Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, and Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010.

Rufo Quintavalle, Vivienne Vermes, Dylan Harris
The Highlander, 8 rue de Nevers, Metro Pont Neuf or Odon
7pm, 28th September 2010

Rufo Quintavalle was born in London in 1978, studied at Oxford and the University of Iowa, and now lives in Paris where he is an active member of the Anglo literary scene. He is the author of the chapbook, Make Nothing Happen (Oystercatcher, 2009). His work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he is one of the invited poets for the 2011 Biennale Internationale de la Posie en Val de Marne.