The Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge Festival--the 3 Ps of poetry: Ping-Pong, Parachute and poetrycrush!

Big Sur in Brooklyn? Well, a little piece of the wonder that is the Henry Miller Memorial library happens May 12-19. For a full schedule of events go here: HENRY

Ping-Pong, Parachute, and Poetry Crush brings you the first night's offering of poetry, performance, and prose. (with apologies for the alliteration, but hey, we're all poets over here).

These amazing folks will be dazzling us with their brilliance:

Monday, May 13^th, 7:00 pm--til at the City Reliquary

Big Sur/Brooklyn Bridge night of poetry, prose and performance is hosted by Ping-Pong, a journal of art and literature published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library, the Coney Island performance festival Parachute, and the Brooklyn-based poetry blog: poetrycrush.

Jonathan Ames has varied his creative output in recent years to span numerous media. He published another well-received collection of autobiographical essays in 2006 entitled I Love You More Than You Know; in 2008, he collaborated on The Alcoholic, a semi-autobiographical graphic novel with artist Dean Haspiel and launched Bored to Death, an HBO series about a creatively-blocked Brooklyn writer named Jonathan Ames (played by Jason Schwartzman) who reinvents himself as a private investigator; and in 2009, Ames published yet another collection of gonzo essays, entitled The Double Life Is Twice as Good.

Todd Colby has published four books of poetry: Ripsnort, Cush, Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Writings, and Tremble & Shine, all published by Soft Skull Press.  He was also the editor of the poetry anthology Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology (St. Martin’s Press). Colby serves on the Board of Directors for The Poetry Project, where he teaches poetry workshops. Colby has given readings at The Poetry Project, The Rubin Museum, New York University, The New School for Social Research, Brooklyn Public Library, Cornell University, The Kingston Writers Conference, The Whitney Museum of American Art, PS 122, and more. He posts new work on

gleefarm.blogspot.com.      

Amanda Deutch’s poetry has appeared in Esque, Denver Quarterly, Delirious Hem, Boog City, 6x6, Watchword Press and elsewhere.  She is the author of four chapbooks:  Gena Rowlands (Sounds Nice) (forthcoming), Box of Sky: Skeleton Poems (Dusie Kollektiv 4), Motel Drift, and The Subway Series. As a poet, she has collaborated with musicians, video artists, installation artists, sculptors, theatre companies and her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Deutch is the recipient of a 2007 Footpaths to Creativity Fellowship to write in the Azores Archipelago. In 2009, she founded Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival, a literary non-profit that hosts a festival, free writing workshops, and innovative poetry happenings in Coney Island. www.ParachutePoetry.tumblr.com She lives in Brooklyn and plays skee-ball in her spare time.

  

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and several chapbooks, including Nonstop Pop (Bloof Books, 2013) andMerrily, Merrily (Lame House Press, 2013). She co-founded the feminist poetry press Switchback Books and is a member of the outreach committee for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Becca is currently a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University, where she is writing a dissertation on U.S. avant-garde women's poetry, feminism, and the everyday. She grew up in Milwaukee, WI, and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

J. Hope Stein is the author of the chapbooks [Talking Doll]:  (Dancing Girl Press 2012), Corner Office (H_NGM_N BKS 2012) and [Mary]:  (Hyacinth Girl Press 2012).   She is also the author of poetry/humor site eecattings.com, editor of poetrycrush.com.

Maria Garcia Teutsch is a poet and the editor-in-chief of Ping-Pong magazine published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library, and also The Homestead Review published by Hartnell College. She has been published in The Café Review, Southern Poetry Review, Poets and Writers, Prairie Schooner, Whole Beast Rag, The Cold Mountain Review, Two Review, and many others. She serves as President of the Board at Henry Miller Memorial Library. She spends half of her time in Penang, Malaysia and half in Santa Cruz, California. More here: marialoveswords.com

Edwin Torres is a bi-lingual poet rooted in the languages of both sight and sound. A native New Yorker, he's received a number of fellowships and acknowledgements over his lifespan as a poet and has traveled the world seeking like-minded mind-travelers. He has work in the forthcoming anthologies; "Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2" (Norton) and 'Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poetry, Stories and Songs for Children" (Black Radish Press) and is the author of seven books of poetry including, “Yes Thing No Thing” (Roof Books), “One Night: Poems For The Sleepy” (Red Glass Books) and the forthcoming collection "Ameriscopia" (University of Arizona Press).

Los Angeles based artist TimYoud will be “performing” the entirety of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn over a two week period May 9-19 in New York, the setting for Miller’s classic and outrageous novel.  The performance consists of Youd reading aloud and typing the novel on an Underwood Standard, the same model typewriter used by Miller.  This sustained performance will begin on May 9 at the Pulse Art Fair in Manhattan and culminate over the course of the week long Henry Miller celebration at the City Reliquary in Brooklyn.  Youd is represented by Coagula Curatorial gallery in Los Angeles, in whose booth at Pulse the performance will commence and run through May 12.  He will move to the Reliquary from May 13-19.

Jenny Zhang is the author of the poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012.) Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Fence, Bomblog, HTMLGIANT, Glimmertrain, Altered Scale, Pen American, Coconut, Octopus, Pinwheel, Sink Review,Jezebel, The Guardian, and Vice. She writes for teenage girls at Rookie magazine, and teaches high school students in the Bronx. She's currently a writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Beat Museum Loves Henry Miller!!! Ping-Pong journal Party!!!

PRESS RELEASE:  WEST COAST PING-PONG JOURNAL LAUNCH PARTY

The Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California is pleased to announce the annual publication of Ping•Pong, a journal of the arts.  The editors continue to serve up the best artists from the global art and literary scene by publishing a vibrant group of poets, writers, artists, and photographers. This issue continues Ping•Pong’s commitment to a cultural dialogue between contemporary artists and the aesthetics set forth by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

Miller was and is as much an international literary figure as he was/is an American one; therefore, Ping•Pong reaches beyond our shores in order to bring unknown, or lesser known, writers from around the world into more prominence in English.

The 2011 issue of Ping•Pong features an interview with Ruth Stone, and international collections from French-Canadian poet Guy Jean as well as translations from Japanese. Ping•Pong offers the finest in American writers including Brian Henry, Eleni Sikelianos, Katie Farris, Bruce Covey, and Sesshu Foster, among many other luminaries.

Ping•Pong’s award winning writers and artists have been featured in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, Time, The New Yorker, and Newsweek and have exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The Ping•Pong West Coast Launch Party will take place at the Beat Museum on Saturday, October 22nd and will feature the notable MC Magnus Toren, with readings by Jesse Nathan, Dana Teen Lomax, Christine Hamm, Daphne Gottlieb and Sean Labrador Y Manzano, with a screening of Maria Garcia Teutsch's Cinepoem: Chronicles on Violence, based on poems published in the anthology: Conversations at the Wartime Cafe. Readings will begin at 7:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Ping•Pong’s release party is in conjunction with Conversations at the Wartime Cafe anthology.

Come by and have a glass of wine with us and marvel at the wonder of the  Beat Museum,
and swing your hips to the music of DJ Dan Guerra.

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Book information:

Ping•Pong
A Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library
2011
ISSN #1083-0944
Paperback, 220 pages, $12.00

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Contact Information:

Maria Garcia Teutsch, Editor-in-Chief


Highway One, Big Sur, CA 93920
www.henrymiller.org

Christine Hamm, Poetry Editor

Reader Bios:

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press), Room (a+bend press), and the co-editor of Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008).  Her documentary poetics manuscript Disclosure is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in 2011.  Her work has most recently appeared in UbuWeb, Jacket, Poets & Writers, The Bay Poetics Anthology and will be included in Against Expression (Northwestern University Press, 2010).  She is working on a book of poems entitled Shhh! Lullabies for a Tired Nation, editing a Small Press Traffic-related project, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children, and teaching writing at San Francisco State University and Marin Juvenile Hall.

Jesse Nathan’s poems have appeared in the Nation, Agriculture Reader, Hot Metal Bridge, and a number of other places. He is co-editor, with Dominic Luxford, of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series, and managing editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading. He’s also poetry editor at California Northern. He was born in Berkeley, grew up in Kansas, and lives now in San Francisco.

San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author and editor of nine books, most recently the poetry book 15 Ways to Stay Alive as well as co-editor (with Lisa Kester) of Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words.? She is the editor of Fucking Daphne: Mostly True Stories and Fictions and Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, as well as the author of the poetry books Kissing Dead Girls, Final Girl, Why Things Burn and Pelt, and as the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious with artist Diane DiMassa.

Sean Labrador y Manzano has an MFA in Poetry from Mills College (2007). His column "Conversations at a Wartime Cafe" appears at http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/wartime/.  He is the poetry editor of Tea Party Magazine and the San Francisco literature editor for L.A.-based Forth Magazine. He is published in Beeswax, Leonard Cohen: You're Our Man, Chain, Bay Poetics, The Best American Poetry 2004, and elsewhere.
Dana Teen is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006) and Room (a+bend, 1998), a chapbook which was awarded the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award. She is a is a fourth generation Californian who teaches poetry and writing at several institutions. Her writing has been supported by the California Arts Council, the Peninsula Community Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Marin Arts Council, and others. Currently she is making Q, a series of "home movies" about raising her daughter on the grounds of a prison. She lives with her family in northern California.

Christine Hamm, serves as Ping-Pong poetry editor. She is a PhD candidate in English Literature. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript, Children Having Trouble with Meat.  She teaches English at CUNY, and has performed all over the country. She has three books, The Transparent Dinner, Saints & Cannibals, and her recent book is now out: Echo Park.  Christine was a runner-up to the Poet Laureate of Queens. 

Maria Garcia Teutsch is Editor-in-Chief of Ping-Pong magazine. She also serves as president of the board of directors of the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Ca. She is widely published, and has four poetry chapbooks, Surrender Dorothy, Fractured Fortunes and there are no cars on this highway, and Chronicles on Violence. She is an MFA candidate at New England College.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”- Anaïs Nin.

A Day of Poetry! A Night of Films! A day and night of poetic films!

Yesterday's poetry events reminded me of why I love this genre, why I love to teach, why I love to be involved with the Henry Miller Memorial Library, both as a board member and as editor of Ping-Pong magazine of art and literature.

The day started off with Christine Hamm, Francesco Levato and Jenn Hope Stein doing a poetry workhshop for my students. Christine introduced them to fragmentation, and many wonderful poems emerged from this exercise wherein they take five poems, exchange them with a partner, that partner picks out 3 lines from each poem, and then they create a poem out of the fragments. A rebirth of wonder for sure.

Next Francesco talked about Cinepoetry and then showed them this most amazing form through two short films, one made by yours truly (you can watch it below if you click the "Chronicles on Violence" link under the Verrückter Schwanz Cinépoetry schedule. We also watched J. Hope Stein's wonderful film based on her manuscript collection, The Inventor's Last Breath, that includes archival footage of the first moving pictures ever made.

Then we moved on to the Poetic Voices Poetry Festival, now in it's 11th year. This festival awards prize money to student poets. The Faith Webster Fraser award doles out 500.00 to two students, not bad. This year's recipients were Karina Hernandez and Alisa Rodriguez. Circo Award winners included Sergio Perez, Galdino Guijosa and Andrei Juezan. The student readings were followed by readings from Francesco Levato, J. Hope Stein and Christine Hamm.

Then we were off to Big Sur and an early dinner at Nepenthe. Big Sur is like this gift you give to everyone who's never been there before. No one can be unimpressed by the power of this beauty.
We went to the Henry Miller Memorial Library where we grooved to the band, Songs that Hotbox Harry Taught Us, munched on sushi, drank wine, and then watched the Cinépoetic masterpieces.

All in all and spectacular way to spend a day.

Verrückter Schwanz Cinepoetry Festival Schedule

Verrückter Schwanz (Crazy Cock) Cinepoetry Festival Schedule: Henry Miller Memorial Library

First Hour 

Variations on Want: Sequence II,  by Francesco Levato 

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, by Antonello Faretta, poem by John Giorno 

Mirror, by Kylie Hibbert, poem by Sylvia Plath 

Love Song for Cells, by Jillian Brall 

Sucks Her with Fiddle, by Jillian Mukavetz 

Two films from The Pond, by Zachary Schomburg 

The Inventor’s Last Breath, by J. Hope Stein 

The Three Organizations of L.R. Levato, by Chris Hefner 

Die Pretty, by LaDonna Witmer 

Who Says Words with my Mouth, by D J Kadagian, poem by Rumi 

Chronicles on Violence, by Maria Garcia Teutsch 

Passage, by Kurt Heintz, poem by Quraysh Ali Lansana 

Tyger, by Guilherme Marcondes, based on The Tyger by William Blake 

Short Intermission/Poetry Reading by Christine Hamm

Second Hour

Entanglement,  by Ed Bowes, poem by Anne Waldman 

PRESS RELEASE

Verrückter Schwanz Cinepoetry Festival at the Henry Miller Memorial Library

The Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California is pleased announce the

Verrückter Schwanz  Cinepoetry Festival, on May 12^th at 7:30 pm, it will be an evening where audience members will meet visual artists at the intersection between cinema and poetry. Cinepoetry is a relatively new genre of visual poetry where the audience is taken on a journey through words and images shot on film. 

This event is brought to you by Ping-Pong, the magazine of art and literature published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The evening’s films will begin at dark and will be preceded by live music provided by Songs that Hotbox Harry Taught Us.

The film festival will feature works by Anne Waldman, Jenn Hope Stein, Francesco Levato and many others. The focus of cinepoetry is as a genre of visual poetry made into a short film and shown on a screen focusing its images and sounds around the poem. This event is curated by Francesco Levato and directed by Maria Garcia Teutsch.

The Verrückter Schwanz festival will take place at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California on Thursday, May 12th, and will feature many films from around the world.   The festival begins at 7:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Food and wine will be served.

The evening of short films also serves as a kick-off of sorts for the soon to start 6th Annual Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series. The final selection of films for 2011 will be posted on www.bigsurfilm.org on May 20. The first screening in our twelve week series is Thursday, June 9th.

Magnus Toren 667-2574 (Henry Miller Library)

Highway One, Big Sur, CA 93920

www.henrymiller.org/ping_pong.html

Poet, translator, and filmmaker Francesco Levato is the author of three books of poetry: Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; and Marginal State. He has translated into English the books of Italian poets Tiziano Fratus, Creaturing, and Fabiano Alborghetti, The Opposite Shore. His work has been published internationally in journals and anthologies, both in print and online, including Drunken Boat, The Progressive,Versal, and many others. His cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

Maria Garcia Teutsch is Editor-in-chief of Ping-Pong magazine. She also serves as president of the board of directors of the Henry Miller library in Big Sur, Ca. She is widely published, most recently her poems have been anthologized by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press’ Eighteens, with forthcoming publications by McSweeney’s Conversations at the Wartime Café, and the Sylvia Plath anthology, Fat Gold Watch. She is the author of three chapbooks: Chronicles on Violence being the latest. mariateutsch.blogspot.com