Friedrich Hölderlin

Maxine Chernoff

Paul Hoover

February 20, 2009:

Opening Poet: West County poet Terri Carrion has had her poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography published in many print magazines as well as online, including The Cream City Review, Hanging Loose, Pearl, Penumbra, and Exquisite Corpse. Her collaborative poem with Michael Rothenberg, “Cartographic Anomaly” was published in the anthology, Saints of Hysteria, A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry and her chapbook “Lazy Tongue” was published by D Press in the summer of 2007. Currently, she is collaborating on the translation of a Galician Anthology from Galician to Spanish to English, to appear in all three languages, in February of 2009, on BigBridge.org, for which she is assistant editor and art designer..

The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover

"More than his famous contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, it is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of incessant change and transformation, who today stands as the major poet of his age -- and whose visionary work has remained a plum line that helps us fathom the complexities… of our own age.  In their elegant and fluid translations of this excellent and exhaustive selection of poems Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff capture the work's extreme contemporaneity, what they themselves have called 'the drama of Hölderlin's consciousness, the beauty of his lyrics, and the largeness of his vision." -- Pierre Joris

Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover will present this wonderful new publication, reading their translations from the book Rosmarie Waldrop says "elucidates Hölderlin's complex vision with perfect contemporary pitch."

Following Hölderlin's work, Chernoff and Hoover will read from their own latest books of poetry:

Maxine Chernoff's The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008) turns at the moment 'when we survive our disappearances,' 'when murder chastises history,' in other words, right now -- when all that's left is the leveled playing field of the page, where graffiti scrawled on a wall is just as likely to carry import as Kristeva or Emerson or 'memory or Memorex.'" -- Gillian Conoley.  Chernoff is the author of six books of fiction and ten books of poetry.  Chair of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she co-edits the long-running literary journal, New American Writing.

Paul Hoover's most recent poetry collection is Edge and Fold.  His book, Poems in Spanish, was nominated for the Northern California Book Reviewers Award.  With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry.  He won the 2002 Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review that year.  Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, he edited Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994).  An additional poetry volume, Sonnet 56, will be published in 2009; it consists of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare's sonnet of that number.

David Alpaugh

Mari L'Esperance

March 6, 2009:

Opening Poet: Karl Frederick. Sebastopol poet Karl Frederick's poems are "often physical, yet rooted beyond the reach of time and space. Held to the light, they are infused with longing, appreciation, and mystery." A resident of Sonoma County for ten years, Frederick says he is "one of a couple dozen lost souls who wander from one open mic venue to the next, unmercifully egging each other on."

David Alpaugh and Mari L'Esperance

David Alpaugh’s most recent poetry collection is Heavy Lifting (Alehouse Press, 2007). His first collection Counterpoint won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and his chapbooks have been published by Coracle Books and Pudding House. His essays “The Professionalization of Poetry” (serialized by Poets & Writers in 2003) and “What's Really Wrong with Poetry Book Contests?” (recently posted on the net by Rattle and by poetry.about.com) have spurred wide discussion both on-line and off. A graduate of Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, he has taught at the U.C. Extension and hosts a monthly poetry reading series in Crockett.

Born in Kobe, Japan and raised in California, Guam, and Japan, Mari LEsperance's first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. She has also published an award-winning chapbook titled Begin Here (2000, Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press). L'Esperance's poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Pequod, Salamander, and elsewhere and her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program and a recipient of grants from the New York Times Company Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Hedgebrook, LEsperance lives in Oakland, California.

Camille Dungy

Laura Walker

May 1, 2009:

Opening Poet: Amy Trussell. Sonoma County poet Trussell is the author of Poems in Ursula Minor (Meeting of the Minds Press, 2007); Meteorite Dealers (Moria Books, Chicago, 2007) and Ungulations, with A. di Michele (Surreigional Press, 2008). Her poems have been published widely, including The New Orleans Review, Poetry Flash, and other publications.

Camille Dungy and Laura Walker

Camille Dungy, author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf. She is co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, April 2009), and assistant editor of Cave Canem's Gathering Ground (University of Michigan, 2006). Her second collection, Suck on the Marrow, is forthcoming. She is associate professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Laura Walker grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley. She is the author of rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008) and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in various journals, including 26, Five Fingers Review, Xantippe and Bird Dog. She teaches creative writing at University of San Francisco, UC Berkeley Extension and San Francisco State University..

Clive Matson

Clark Coolidge

May 15, 2009: THIS READING HAS BEEN CANCELED. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR UPDATES.

Opening Poet: TBD

Clive Matson and Clark Coolidge THIS READING HAS BEEN CANCELED.

Clive Matson, (MFA Columbia University) will have his first book, Mainline to the Heart (1966) re-issued in 2009. Members of the Beat Generation were his teachers, and he admits that revisiting his youthful work has been “a challenge. It helps that I hear, in these poems, both an urgent need to connect and full cognizance of the difficulties.” He makes his living teaching creative writing, using his text, Let the Crazy Child Write! (1998), which honors the creative unconscious fully. His seventh volume of poems, Squish Boots (2002), was placed, amazingly, in the coffin of his mentor, John Wieners. Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs (2007) is his current enthusiasm, a passionate, erotic and spiritual voice evolved from the Mainline poems. He likes playing basketball, table tennis, and collecting minerals in the field. He lives in Oakland, California, where he helps bring up his eleven-year-old son, Ezra. Visit Clive at www.matsonpoet.com.

Clark Coolidge: Often associated with the Language School, Coolidge's experience as a jazz drummer and his interest in a wide array of subjects -- including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dali, 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. His publications include Space (Harper & Row); The Maintains (This Press); Now It's Jazz (Living Batch Press); On the Nameways (The Figures); and Far Out West, Adventures in Poetry, among others. His forthcoming book is The Act of Providence to be published by Combo Books in 2009. Coolidge lives in Petaluma, California.

Bart Schneider

Bryan Tso Jones

June 5, 2009:

Opening Poet: Hannah Maggiora: Sonoma County poet Hannah Maggiora has had her work appear in several publications, including Women's Voices. Her poem "Sonnet to Topaz, Utah" won first place in Asian American Curriculum Project, Inc. Maggiora received her MFA in Writing from USF and works at Santa Rosa Junior College in the Communication Studies Department.

Bart Schneider and Bryan Tso Jones

Bart Schneider is the author of the novels Blue Bossa, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Secret Love, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Beautiful Inez, and The Man in the Blizzard. a literary mystery that features Private Eye Augie Boyer and Detective Bobby Sanatini, a man with a "photographic memory for poetry." Schneider grew up in San Francisco and spent the last twenty-five years living in Minnesota. In 1986, he founded the national book and culture magazine, the Hungry Mind Review, which he edited for fifteen years. In 2001, he became the literary director of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where he founded Speakeasy Magazine. He now lives in Sonoma.