Hello Everyone!
We are very happy to bring
Rod Smith and Mel Nichols to read to Lawrence & environs. A
The time is
7pm on Friday 2/26. It will be at the same location, essentially, as our other readings, something like 803 Massachusetts Street,
Wonder Fair above/below the old Casbah (the above part is a minor variation).
Rod Smith is the author of Deed, Music or Honesty, Poèmes de l'araignée (France), The Good House, Protective Immediacy, and In Memory of My Theories. A CD of his readings, Fear the Sky, came out
from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. Smith's work has appeared in a whole bunch of magazines and anthologies including American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Anthology of New (American) Poets, TheBaffler, Critical Quarterly, The Gertrude Stein Awards, Java, New American Writing, Open City, Poésie, Poetics Journal, Shenandoah, and The Washington Review.
He is editor and publisher of Edge Books, which has established an international reputation for publishing the finest in innovative writing.
Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press. Smith is currently a Visiting Professor in Poetry at The Iowa Writers' Workshop.
I really like
this article Joshua Clover wrote about Rod Smith in The Nation. I am very much a fan, also, of these two works:
Ted's Head and
Moist Feelings. Mel Nichols wrote this poem for Poetry Magazine,
I Google Myself. Mel’s most recent books are
Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (Edge Books, 2009) and
Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha, 2008). She teaches at George Mason University.
You can listen to this poem:
"You Should be Nice to Call Center Workers." And you should join us! Rod & Mel are awesome! It will be a good time!
your humble hosts,
Anne & Robert
DIANE GLANCY is professor emeritus at Macalester College. She was the 2008-09 Visiting Richard Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. Her most recent books are The Reasons for Crows, A Novel of Kateri Tekakwitha (SUNY) and Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears (University of Oklahoma Press). Forthcoming books are The Dream of a Broken Field, essays (University of Nebraska Press), and Stories of the Driven World (Mammoth Press, Lawrence, KS). She currently is working on an independent film, The Dome of Heaven, with Through a Glass, also in Lawrence. More information about the film is on her website, www.dianeglancy.com. She lives in Prairie Village, Kansas.
Karl Gartung was born in Liberal, Kansas. In 1976 he was hired to run a small press bookstore (Boox, Inc.) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He says this was the beginning of his serious apprenticeship to contemporary literature. In 1979 he co-founded Woodland Pattern Book Center with Karl Young and Anne Kingsbury. At Woodland Pattern, where he retains the title of Artistic Director, he has been involved in the planning and presentation of hundreds of poetry readings, music performances, and art and book exhibits. He has always felt that such activities are as centrally artistic as writing or publishing could have be. These events were (and are) his education. In order to provide the income necessary to see the Book Center through inevitable funding droughts, he took a day job as a truck driver at what has become UPS Cartage Services. He calls this his deal with the devil. After several layoffs, Gartung helped organize his workplace into the Teamsters Union in 1993, and has served as a union steward from the ratification of the first contract to the present. Representing others on the job became a new and satisfying field of work, leading inevitably to more material for writing. He is a reader and writer with deep ethical commitment, vision, and a particular enthusiasm for poetry and visual work in outside traditions. His own work was changed irretrievably by Paul Metcalf, Dick Higgins, Karl Young, and Jerome Rothenberg. Karl’s work has appeared in 26, Five Fingers Review, Convergence, Croton Bug, Convoy Dispatch, and was featured along with Karl Young and Morgan Gibson in a special issue of Gam: Roots of Experimental Writing in Milwaukee. His first full length book of poetry, Now That Memory Has Become So Important, was published in 2008 by Midwestern Writers Publishing House. 
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