In May of 2014 I participated in Aller Retour Paris: a week of art, poetry, film, and music in the heart of Paris, celebrating the city’s role in shaping Henry Miller as a writer and raconteur. Ping-Pong literary journal hosted the opening night party at Shakespeare and Company. Reading poetry while looking at Notre Dame Cathedral is kind of wondrous. I hope I never get to that place where I think that isn’t the coolest thing on earth, cuz it kinda is. I figured since I was in Paris I’d see about interviewing one of my favorite poets, Alice Notley, who kindly agreed. J. Hope Stein, my friend and newest poetry editor at Ping-Pong also came along, and together we had tea and conversation with a woman who makes life itself an art, like Henry says is the trick of the whole thing. What follows is a shortened version (you have to buy the print copy of Ping-Pong to read it in its entirety).
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
the (partial) interview with Alice Notley
by: Maria Garcia Teutsch and J. Hope Stein
May 2014 at a café in Paris, France
MGT
I find a playfulness with language and punctuation in your writing with the things that bind our language and in some ways release them. And I’m wondering if in English you find there are more boundaries on the language than you do in the French?
Alice
No (laughs). No, because English is my first language and for me it has no boundaries. But I don’t think one has more or fewer boundaries than the other.
MGT
In French everything is gender, and I know in German everything is gendered.
Alice
In English a lot is gender and nobody notices it. And if you speak a language you don’t notice it. I don’t notice it so much in French. Mostly I strive to master it so I can speak the language. The words you expect to be feminine are never feminine. It never works the way it’s supposed to. It all comes from Latin. I took Latin in high school and I know that gender is always unexpected. (Laughs) Read More >
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 60th 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.
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
Here’s a sneak peak at the interview I conducted with Anne Waldman forthcoming in this issue of Ping-Pong! I am also apoplectic with joy that she will be performing and giving a workshop at our 2 Day Speech is Not Free event!
ARTIST ON THE PULSE: Interview with Anne Waldman
by: MARIA GARCIA TEUTSCH
MGT: What is the role of the artist in the 21st century? Read More >
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 >
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 20th 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 >
