#lara durback

[psoakland]

December 11th Lara Durback reading at The Poetry Project

Lara Durback is reading with Aldrin Valdez this Friday, December 11th, at The Poetry Project in New York, NY. Her book A Lizard, A Smashed Safe, And A Pillow (Encounter On A Walk In Oakland) is forthcoming with Publication Studio Oakland. A handful of advance copies of will be available at the reading.

For more information, visit the website for the reading here: http://www.poetryproject.org/events/lara-durback-aldrin-valdez/

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Chris Nealon reading at Hearts Desire Reading Series with Sean Labrador Y Manzano and Lara Durback July 18th, 2013 at the Bay Area Public School

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LARA'S TOP FIVE PICKS

Top 5 Things to Entirely Rattle How You Look at the World (in no particular order):

So this is topic is related to writing, right? I hope?

  1)     The Occupy Oakland BBQ & Speakout #4! Saturday April 7, 2012. (Rain or shine!)

At 18th & Adeline Lil Bobby Hutton (Defremery) Park

For 4 consecutive Saturdays, OO is holding collaborative events in different neighborhoods in Oakland. www.oobbq.org (Plus April 14 will be Oakland Occupy Patriarchy’s own excellent version http://oaklandoccupypatriarchy.wordpress.com)

-Various committees of Occupy Oakland teamed up with People’s Community Medics to serve up some “solidarity not charity.” AND serve up 200 pounds of chicken on the grill, with Jabari’s special sauce. Plus hamburgers, hot dogs, tons of vegetarian stuff, potato salad, desserts, lemonade, coffee…all made by the organizers themselves together in their own kitchens and totally free to everyone.

-People who have been shot, or who watched people get shot, and who have loved ones that died from being shot (without proper response time from police or paramedics in Oakland) speak out about their experiences. Two of these women make up the People’s Community Medics. They chose to educate others about how to handle gunshot wounds, so others don’t lose the ones they love in the same way. As these teach-ins are in process, people from the community step forward to add their input, creating a collective knowledge in action. Not the usual suspects mouthing off. It’s more intuitive and flowy. Medical response kits are distributed.

-Last week, at 52nd and MLK’s BBQ, the New Black Panthers made an appearance, folks spoke out about police violence, and there was a march to Santa Fe school, one of the schools set to close in Oakland. Teachers described ways that it became difficult to organize as teachers: one-year contracts, large decisions made in summer when school is out, etc. This week, the BBQ happens after an It’s About Time BPP http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com event at the West Oakland library, in celebration of Lil Bobby Hutton Day. There will be Know Your Rights training plus all of the other things mentioned above.

-Brooke from Foreclosure Defense spoke & passed out flyers about ways that OO can help with people going through foreclosure. It is so nice to hear someone say out loud: “If you are being foreclosed upon, it is not your fault.”

-As I describe this, I can imagine that people would think this kind of quickly thrown-together organizing by people who definitely disagree about some things and come from crazy different backgrounds would be a disaster. Instead it works more like what happens when the gusting wind tries to blow the easy-up tents away (like last week): all the arms go up at once and secure the poles and the BBQ goes on.

-And there is a massive dance party that just goes on and on. A portable sound system to go on the marches. And face-painting, and nail painting, free publications, and and and…you are somewhere between awe and tears and sadness and depth and lightness the whole time. And uncommon clusterings of people feel like best friends for a while…

  #2: Stanley Place, between Fairmount Ave. and Kempton Ave. in Oakland.

Go to this place, right near the Harrison St. exit of 580. It is near the painted giraffes on the pillars of the freeway underpass. Go on foot at dusk or darker.

When someone first told me about this, I did not believe that cats and raccoons could live together in harmony on this street. When I walked to a friend’s house, I passed them: there they were. About 5 raccoons and 4 cats, all sitting there together over the lawns and sidewalk, glowing eyes, moving together in a pack as they avoided me. They don’t run toward me, they just hang out and stay together. What are the conditions that need to exist for this to happen? Something about mildly isolated location, a nook not much traveled by cars? About the houses they are near? The lush abundance of trees over near Kempton? Electromagnetic or spiritual presence?

I swear it was a raccoon that used to attack my cat in my old neighborhood. A terrible gash in the cat’s side, twice. People always told me a raccoon would always kill a cat if it could. Not here at Stanley Place.

  #3 Simonides of Ceos…mapping your memory. 

For some reason I always remember the story of Simonides, who is able to identify all these crushed dead bodies sitting around a dinner table when the banquet room fell on top of them. He can identify them because he remembers the position of their seat at the dinner table. I often think of this, because it is a story of mnemonics.

I found that it is a wonderful gift to give yourself, especially if you are anxious at a social gathering, to draw a seating chart of everyone around you. It is an incredible tool to remember everything that has happened during the day. I have tried it with great success in buses, courtrooms, poetry readings, etc. And, you will start to understand things about how the room/space itself functions. And it is a way to teach yourself to think of things socially and nonlinearly.

  #4 “The Human Statutes” by Thiago de Mello

Last week at the Long Haul I heard Chris Daniels read this poem. He read a different translation (his own?) that didn’t goofily and unnecessarily genderize the title like the one in this link:

http://www.southerncrossreview.org/23/decretos.htm

Ah, I do notice that this link has been translated from Spanish to English by “FTS” after being translated from Portuguese to Spanish by Neruda. Hm. Is FTS a robot?

Anyway, here are my notes from the reading from the translation I heard. It seemed uncanny at the time to hear the poem, like it was another good glue pouring all over the room with those who heard it.

“green growth of solidarity” “trust eachother as children trust themselves” “at common table with clear eyes” greatest pain-inability to give love to those you love no more using the word freedom because freedom is already flowing.

I felt like I did many times lately, coming across a new thing that I wish I had read ages ago. And maybe this is not so world-rattling for you, maybe it doesn’t really belong on this list, but hearing it just did something to me. Chris said it’s a very famous poem in much of the world, but not in America. But it seems like you have to really find a good translation, or read many and average the ones you can find…

  #5 Go out the back gate of Mills (you can get the code from Public Safety) with a bike.

Do this during the day, so you can see everything. Ride down Seminary toward Foothill (about 6 or 7 blocks), make a right on Foothill (it’s decently wide and smooth), then a left onto 55th, then a right onto International (you’re gonna ride to the end). Note the colorful signs, the carts selling fruit, and the men with the ice cream carts. It is bustling. Stop and get off your bike and exchange smiles with people too.

Also, I will ask you to look for some young women standing at a corner. The one thing that will be common among them is that you will notice that they have absolutely no possessions, no purse, no bag, no wallet. Probably regular sneakers, definitely a phone. But there are certain spots where the young women always stand, and if it’s a bus stop, the bus will come, and they will not get on the bus. Why not bring one of them a flower, a granola bar, a flyer for Occupy Oakland BBQ, or a cigarette if they happen to ask. Or pretend you’re waiting for the bus and say something kind. I just thought it was important to notice, to say hello, and see that there are young women there, standing in one place, and that they are very very young, and they are standing there for a reason. And they are standing there at all hours of the day. If a man pops out to ask you why you are talking to her, you could get back on your bike and continue the nice ride down International, which will let you out right by Lake Merritt. This interaction was the first step.

Lara Durback (Poetry MFA '07) can be found in & around the Book Arts studios when she's not scavenging throughout Oakland and printing on found matter.

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FACULTY READING

We hope you can join us for an evening of readings and conversation with Mills College English Department faculty and alumna, in celebration of their scholarship, performance and writing. This evening will also welcome our newly admitted graduate students. Wednesday, April 4, 2012 Reception at 6:30 Readings at 7:00 At the Gathering Hall Lokey Graduate School of Business Building please RSVP to Jess Heaney ([email protected]) by APRIL 4, 2011 FEATURING: Elmaz Abinader, Professor of English W. M. Keck Foundation Professorship in Creative Writing The New Anthology of American Poetry (Rutgers University Press) Lara Durback, MFA ’07, Studio Manager: Book Art Program Garbage Research 1: Hoarders and Those Resembling Hoarders (Dusie/NoNo Press), recent writing in Mrs. Maybe and Drift

Ajuan Mance, Professor of English May Treat Morrison Professorship Juliana Spahr, Professor of English Director of Creative Writing, Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Chair Well Then, There Now (Black Sparrow Press)

See you there!

[placeforwriters]

KATE'S PICKS!

* last weekend i performed in a play written by rachel blau duplessis and directed by lara durback for small press traffic's annual poets theater event. i really had no idea what to expect, either from myself and my co-performers or from the other performances. coming from a theater background myself i was wary of the poets theater reputation for being an unrehearsed mess, but i gotta say i was totally blown away by all of the performances, both from the writerly end and the performative end. each of the performances addressed contemporary society in a way that was truly a poetic investigation: ie. how do we make sense of or draw meaning from the cultural institutions that have constructed our lives? how do we engage with these institutions? how are we implicit in their continued pervasiveness? how can we extract beauty or a sense of community from the commodity culture? all of these questions were really present in my mind, and i was dizzy from the ideas floating around on stage. watching a man drink mustard from a pyrex bowl was really really intense! i'm excited to see what some of these new-to-me voices have to offer. particularly interested in the woman who wrote/directed/starred in the final piece, "tell only one" by corina copp. definitely gonna keep my eyes/ears open to see more of what she's doing. * the san francisco center for the book is currently hosting an exhibit of cuban books that coincides with the 50th anniversary of the cuban revolution. ediciones vigía is a collective of artists who make intensely hand-worked editions of books with really simple and sometimes organic (ie. sticks, sand, leaves, etc.) materials. the exhibit is there until april 16th, and i highly recommend going to inspire your own diy bookmaking. * also at sfcb they're gearing up for the codex symposium next month. if you've ever wondered what this whole book art thing is all about this would be a great event to attend. presses from all around the world come to foster "public recognition the artisanship and the rich history of the civilizations of the book." should be pretty overwhelmingly awesome. * for me writing is increasingly centered around creative/intellectual conversations i'm having with my peers. the process of thinking and writing and talking is becoming more and more primary over the "end product" and i'm starting to see my work as a continually shifting collaboration between myself, whatever i'm consuming (reading/watching/listening to/etc.) and, whomever i'm talking to about it. sometimes i feel like nothing i do is ever truly finished, that it's always open ended and asking for re-visiting. in this vein i've been working on a back and forth epic poem with brittany billmeyer-finn wherein we try to write one line of a collaborative poem each day until we either die or get sick of it. in a way there will be 3 different poems at the end of this process: the raw poem with our lines as they first appear, then each of our personal edits of the collaboration. i'm interested in how other people see their work as being in conversation with the work of others as well as other methods/procedures/experiments that people can think of for collaborating or intertwining different voices. * we're well on our way into planning for the poetry mfa's professional development program. we've been hearing back from a diverse group of bay area poets who are excited to participate and get to know the current batch of mills mfa candidates, and i'm really excited about where that's going to go. * a bit of shameless self-promotion that is meant to encourage more of the same from you all: i've been trying to keep my own blog updated more frequently. what are your blog addresses?! send them to us and we will link to you! * i've been trying to see a lot of movies lately, old and new. both black swan and rabbit hole haunted me for a loooooooong time after i saw them, it's been a long time since i felt that way about a big studio film. i've also been thinking about film's potential as a poetic medium. this was initially triggered by a conversation with a friend about godard and our subsequent viewing of his film made in the u.s.a., but has been greatly augmented by my own re-visiting of some avant-garde filmmakers who, at least in my mind, seem to have more in common with poets than with filmmakers in the traditional (ie. narrative) sense of the word. here are some of my favorite film poems: stan brakhage, "cat's cradle", abigail child, "mercy", maya deren "at land pt. 1", and jean-luc godard, bar scene pt. 2 from made in the u.s.a. (sorry it's in french! couldn't find a clip with subtitles.)