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Howl! Happening reading and launch party!

Join us for a night of poetry, prose, performance and music to celebrate the publication of Ping-Pong journal of literature and art and the launch of Ping-Pong Free Press.

On April 15th at 7:00 pm, Ping-Pong Free Press and the Henry Miller Memorial Library invite you to an evening of reading, ranting and raving to celebrate the release of their magazine and launch of their free press. Readers include: Jean-Paul Pecqueur, Susan Lewis, Alexander Cigale, Sheila Maldonado, Cathy McArthur, Kate Lutzner, Sarah Sarai, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Stephen Boyer, Christen Clifford, Amanda Davidson, Dia Felix, Matthew Sharpe, Robert Marshall, Laurie Stone, Pamela Sneed, J. Hope Stein, Christine Hamm, Maria Garcia Teutsch and Magnus Toren. Special thanks to our east coast curators: Joanna Fuhrman and Shelley Marlow!

Featuring Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye in performance

pc: Jaroslav Kratochvil

Group Reading of Howl, screening of the Telling Pictures film, Howl.

Poetry Reading of The Revolution Will Have its Sky, Maria Garcia Teutsch

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Mike Scutari 667-2764

Speech is Not Free

Howl 60^th Anniversary, choral reading and Film; music by Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye; a benefit for Ping-Pong Free Press/release party for the 2015 journal.

On Friday October 16 the Henry Miller Memorial Library will present their second annual Speech is Not Free Event with apoetry reading from the Library’s literary journal Ping-Pong; a group reading of Howl; a performance featuring Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye followed by a showing of the Telling Pictures film, Howl.

On Saturday the Library will host performance and poetry workshops: 10-11:45, Riot Writing: poems to start a revolution generative workshop with Ping-Pong EIC, Maria Garcia Teutsch; 12-12:30 brown bag lunch. 12:30-2:30-Performance and Poetry workshop with Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye; 2:30-4: Free Speech Presentation and exhibit: informal chat with library executive director Magnus Torén.

On Saturday Evening there will be performances by Grammy award winning artist Ian Brennan, and Bob Forrest of Thelonius Monster.

Allen Ginsberg typing Howl

Saturday 10/17/15 Workshops:

10:00-11:45 am: Riot Writing—Poems to start a Revolution: Poetry of Protest is Poetry of Witness generative workshop with Maria Garcia Teutsch

Poetry is written for any number of reasons, most often having to do with witnessing: the poet sees something so beautiful they want share it with the world, or perhaps the poet sees an injustice they want to give voice to—poetry of social consciousness. Working primarily with poetry of the latter ilk, we will examine Chicano/a poetry, Feminist poetry, Palestinian Poetry, Jewish poetry, Russian poetry, Syrian poetry etc… and then generate and share our own poems of protest.

12:30-2:30:The Poem-in-Performance: A Workshop with Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye

Working with our melopoeia, — the innate music of our writing — we will let our poetry guide us into various performance strategies and modes of composition. We will be working with our voice, our timing, possible instrumentation, collaboration and the like. We will consider methods of sprechstimme (speak-singing), monologue, vocal duets, curses, spells, lullabies, blues, poem-as-libretto, and also consider how to shape the work on the page with its orality in mind. We will begin with some “experiments of attention” and work toward individual pieces we will then record on a CD. Participants may also bring a piece of their choice to class to work on, as well as instruments they can play. Musicianship is welcome! Discussion will include some performance theory.

Sign up for Workshops here: Workshop signup (space is limited)

7:00PM–Saturday evening performances by Grammy Award winning artist Ian Brennan and Bob Forrest (Thelonius Monster).

About the artists:

Anne Waldman The author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, Anne Waldman is an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, and has been connected to the Beat movement and the second generation of the New York School. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997).
Her work as a cultural activist and her practice of Tibetan Buddhism are deeply connected to her poetry. Waldman is, in her words, “drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.” Her commitment to poetry extends beyond her own work to her support of alternative poetry communities. Waldman has collaborated extensively with visual artists, musicians, and dancers, and she regularly performs internationally. Her performance of her work is engaging and physical, often including chant or song, and has been widely recorded on film and video. www.annewaldman.org

Ambrose Bye, musician/producer grew up in the environment of The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, graduated from The University of California, Santa Cruz and was trained as an audio engineer at the music/production program at Pyramind in San Francisco. Working primarily with poets, he has produced four albums with Anne Waldman, “In the Room of Never Grieve”, “The Eye of the Falcon”, “Matching Half”, and “The Milk of Universal Kindness”. He also produced “Comes Through in the Call Hold” featuring Waldman, Thurston Moore, and Clark Coolidge. Recently he produced, “Harry’s House” a compilation from recordings done at Naropa University and is working on Volume Two. www.fastspeakingmusic.bandcamp.com

Maria Garcia Teutsch is an award-winning poet, editor and educator. Her most recent collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, received the Minerva Rising Chapbook award, Judge: Heather McHugh. She serves as editor-in-chief of The Homestead Review, Ping-Pong Magazine and Ping-Pong Free Press. She has been teaching poetry and creative writing classes at Hartnell College for the past 16 years where she received the Gleason Award for teaching excellence. Ilya Kaminsky says of Maria’s poetics: “The voices in her poems are direct and yet there is a certain mystery to this directness, this clarity of address. Clarity, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish taught us, is the first mystery. She understands this too. Her poems can be devotional, or political or sexy, but there is always this sense of direct address, of clarity that isn’t all that simple, that contains a kind of tenderness, a kind of playfulness that is clear and mysterious at the same time.” www.marialoveswords.com

(Last) Letter from the editor 2015

Greetings wonderful reader,

First of all I would like to say that after 10 years of presiding over this wondrous journal of art and letters I am resigning. It’s not that I don’t love the editing process, I actually do. For reals: I edited my undergrad lit journal, The Atlantis, and my grad school journal, The Cold Mountain Review. Then when I moved out to California in 2000, I began editing the Homestead Review out of Hartnell College in Salinas, where I accepted a position on their faculty. Read More >

Dear Reader,

Let me begin with a meditation: speech is not free, someone has paid the tab for you. This year we mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1964 overturning by the Supreme Court of an earlier ruling which found the Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller to be obscene. Henry says:

It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! (Tropic of Cancer) Read More >

Skyscrapers in Full Bloom

An interview with Thurston Moore

By: Maria Garcia Teutsch
Henry Miller Memorial Library

I met Thurston Moore at the Henry Miller Memorial library the day of his concert. My friend, the poet Eleni Sikelianos had worked with him at Naropa and suggested I talk to him about poetry. His knowledge of 20^th Century poetry is vast. He also publishes up and coming poets and is a collector of rare books. Like most people, I only really knew about him through his group, Sonic Youth. When I began to do research on him I became more and more interested in talking to him. As an interviewer, I make a great poet. So when we sat down in the redwood grove that is the Henry Miller library, he helped me figure out how to use the tape recorder on my Ipad, and then we sat back and began to talk about poetry, art, and the creative urge. Read More >