ON Contemporary Practice 2 East Coast Launch

Please join us to celebrate the East Coast release of

ON Contemporary Practice 2

At Book Thug Nation bookstore in Williamsburg, Bklyn

Friday, June 4th at 8PM sharp

With readings by
CA Conrad
Robert Dewhurst
Brenda Iijima
Robert Kocik
Evelyn Reilly
Michelle Taransky and other special guests

hosted by Thom Donovan, coeditor of ON

Book Thug Nation is located at
100 N3rd St
Between Berry St and Wythe Ave
Williamsbug, Brooklyn.

For more information about ON check out:
http://www.oncontemporaries.org/

ON
Contemporary Practice 2
edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger

Rosa Alcala, Stan Apps, Cara Benson, David Brazil, Laynie Brown, CA Conrad & Brenda Iijima, Corina Copp, Michael Cross, Robert Dewhurst, Thom Donovan, Patrick James Dunagan, Joel Felix, Robert Kocik, Chris Martin, C.J. Martin, Laura Moriarty, Rich Owens, Evelyn Reilly, Michelle Taransky, Dan Thomas-Glass, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Brian Whitener, and Tyrone Williams

on Mónica de la Torre, Stephanie Young, Susana Gardner, Brandon Brown, Lee Ann Brown, CA Conrad & Brenda Iijima, Rodrigo Toscano & Poets Theater, Judith Goldman & Jennifer Scappettone, Dorothea Lasky, Bhanu Kapil, Edmund Berrigan/Jeff Karl Butler/John Coletti, William Fuller, Stacy Szymaszek, John Coletti, Rob Halpern, Conceptualisms, Flarf/Conceptual Writing, Rosmarie Waldrop & Contemporary Womens' Writing, Stacy Szymaszek, Jasper Bernes & Bay Area Publishing, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Dolores Dorantes, Erica Hunt.

COMMONING ON GOVERNORS ISLAND

June 5th and 6th 2010 - 11 AM to 6 PM

COMMONING ON GOVERNORS ISLAND
(a Prosodic Body* Event)
co-presented by Movement Research Festival 2010 HARDCORPS
and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

Following their residencies with Movement Research and the LMCC Swing Space Grant Program Daria Fain and Robert Kocik will present works based on Commoning**. The presentation will include a performance by the Phoneme Choir, an exhibition, talks, and a screening by Iki Nakagawa.

June 5th -- 11AM to 6PM

11AM: door opens

Exhibition (on display all day): drawings and documentation concerning commoning and the Prosodic Body

1PM-3PM: Talks and Discussion with feminist activist, teacher, communalist historian Silvia Federici and the visionary socialist, writer, composer, bandleader, baritone saxophonist Fred Ho, moderated by Robert Kocik.

Silvia Federici: IN PRAISE OF THE DANCING BODY: while recapitulating the techniques capitalism has deployed to reduce the body to a machine, Federici will speak of practices by which we have resisted its mechanization, and the power of dance to articulate this resistance. More on Sylvia Federici

Fred Ho: FUTURE’S END: COMMUNISM AND ECOLOGY, REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION AND IT MUST BE LUDDITE! In this talk Fred Ho will ask: what is revolutionary socialist ludditism? Why is it the only solution? Why is it matriarchal (matri-centric) and indigenous-centric and why must these features be the foundation for a truly effectively revolutionary movement?

3PM-4PM: Performance of the Commons Choir (conceived and directed by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik). This piece is called Re-English—a re-tuning, an atoning for the fact that our current economic, climate and security crises are consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of the English language—by means of phonemes as cosmogony; sound sequences as specific biochemical signaling, a reparation narrative, poetry as protection, and full recovery of the lost optative mood.

With Aretha Aoki, Margot Basset, Chung-chen Chang , Stephen Cooper, Levi Gonzalez, Hazuki Homma, Masumi Kishimota, Dora Koimtzi, Athena Kokoronis, Martin Lanz, Mina Nishimura, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara and Samita Sinha.

4PM-5PM: Screening of Collecting Collective Phase I: Filmic interpretations of commoning directed by Iki Nakagawa with contributions from Caterina Verde and Douglas Manson.

5PM: Q&A

June 6th -- 11 AM to 6 PM

11AM: Door opens——Commons Exhibition and continuous screening of Collecting Collective Phase I: Filmic interpretations of commoning directed by Iki Nakagawa with contributions from Caterina Verde and Douglas Manson.

2PM: Talk and discussion with poet Eric Gelsinger.

PERFECT MONEY: Eric Gelsinger will discuss the origins, history, and ontology of money, and explain its present determination by the U.S. Federal Reserve System. He will illuminate similarities between money and language, propose alternatives to the Fed's monopoly on our currency, and speculate on a "perfect money."

3PM-4PM: Performance of the Commons Choir (conceived and directed by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) This piece is called Re-English—a re-tuning, an atoning for the fact that our current economic, climate and security crises are consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of the English Language—by means of phonemes as cosmogony; sound sequences as specific biochemical signaling, a reparation narrative, poetry as protection, and full recovery of the lost optative mood.

With Aretha Aoki, Margot Basset, Chung-chen Chang , Stephen Cooper, Levi Gonzalez, Hazuki Homma, Masumi Kishimota, Dora Koimtzi, Athena Kokoronis, Martin Lanz, Mina Nishimura, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara and Samita Sinha.

5PM: Q&A

*Commoning is a group of poets, performers and persons working together toward the common good. Their foci: history of the enclosure of the commons leading directly to today's privateering, wage stagnation and material inequity; inner and somatic practices as the basis of fairness; the ways in which laws become the means for maintaining imbalance; hypertrophy of the financial sector; language as hegemonic force of globalization; and private determination of public space by 'business' that has always approached 'public' as inimical to its interests.

**The Prosodic Body is an aesthetic science that works with the sonic qualities of language as biochemical signaling; choreography; individual and social transformation; and cosmogony. This experiential field of research was begun by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik in 2006.

More information on HARDCOPRS

The ferry to Governors Island departs regularly from the Battery Maritime Building, Manhattan and Fulton Ferry, Brooklyn. LMCC space will be well-indicated at the ferry dock.

Eleni Stecopoulos' Armies of Compassion

Palm Press is pleased to announce the publication of Eleni Stecopoulos' first full-length collection of poems, Armies of Compassion

2010 | 108 pages | $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-9843099-0-0

This startling work brings something necessary to American poetry: a visceral poetics that transforms diagnosis into a performative linguistic probe in the service of the disturbed body. The body politic’s symptoms and signs are the foundation for Eleni Stecopoulos’s aversive lyrics, whose beauty lies not in the unbearing of a device but in the bearing of our discomfiture in the world and the potency of our imaginary realignments. Armies of Compassion is a talisman, antidote to what ails, spells woven against an engulfing night. — Charles Bernstein

The poems of Armies of Compassion are riveting, threnodic, deeply investigative of our "hieroglyphs of breath" and body. They cut to the marrow of kinetics and philology, our psyche’s doubt, our cellular breakdowns and theatricalities, our ironies and euphemisms, our endless war, pinning evocative Latin and Greek terms to greater mythic dimension and healing ritual. Eleni Stecopoulos is one of our deepest and most rigorous poets whose ethos and intelligence challenge and light up the mind. I am thrilled by out of what ruins and darkness and inspired lexical examination come these rare beauties. — Anne Waldman

"Philosophy never confesses / its delicate condition" writes Eleni Stecopoulos, as she takes on the inherently vulnerable role of investigative poet, asking whether the body, personal and politic, is irrevocably split off in its systemic afflictions. In this book Stecopoulos deploys the paradoxical force/fragility of poetry at all too familiar sites of our abjection. She does this with historically aware wisdom and humor. Can words help, not as palliative or consolation, but as source of transfiguring energy? "Levitating girls" hover over "lines gathering / all the intelligence" of an intellectually astute imagination steeped in, among many aesthetic legacies, that of ancient Greece, where the fact "that the god descends on creaking pulleys in no way undermines the apparition." This poet has the guts and strategy (persistent courage) of what she calls "choric goals…waiting in the echo / for a tone," subtending towards love. — Joan Retallack

Eleni Stecopoulos is among a constellation of contemporary U.S. poets effectively correlating somatics (the everyday practices and conditions of bodies) with geopolitics, through a radical and emergent lyricism. In Armies of Compassion, the poet's body becomes a site allegorizing disasters of "immunity": the principle disaster being the Hegelian-trap which over-identifies 'self' as 'other' and the other as potential outbreak. As the epigraph to “Autoimmunity,” from Antonin Artaud's Theater and Its Double, reads: "The Grand-Saint-Antoine did not bring the plague to Marseille. It was already there." Which is to say: what plagues us is not alterity, but the dangerous fiction that 'self' and 'other' are not in fact coconstitutive, and that identities rather than relationships persist. Discoursing with both ancient and contemporary healing practices, and calling into question the hegemony of modern Western medicine, Stecopoulos opens the field for what bodies can do liberated from the disciplinary triage of military, capital, and clinic. Like Artaud, Robert Duncan, and Hannah Weiner before her, language experiment follows from bodily necessity and contingency. Conditioned by despair, there is somehow hope in "guts." Having guts (courage), but also attending their literal fact (the innards determining how we act, thus will be). —Thom Donovan

Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York, NY, and now lives in Berkeley, CA. She is the author of Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006), and her poems and essays have appeared in journals including CHAIN, ECOPOETICS, Harvard Review, XCP:CROSS CULTURAL POETICS, The Capilano Review, and THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT. She received a Creative Work Fund grant to curate a program series around art and medicine for the SFSU Poetry Center and write a related book. Stecopoulos is a graduate of the University of Virginia MFA program and the Poetics Program at Buffalo. She teaches in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College and sometimes co-directs the Paros Translation Symposium in Greece.
This and other Palm Press titles are available from Small Press Distribution:
www.spdbooks.org

Please visit Palm Press' new website at www.palmpress.org for information about past titles and forthcoming projects including the long-awaited multi-author collection, Imaginary Syllabi and Tina Darragh's intermedia, interactive text, NO RIGHTS OBSERVED

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