Ping-Pong Free Press’ 4th Annual Speech is Not Free gathering: Writers Against Fascism and for Freedom of the Press. Ping-Pong Free Press  and Poet Republik Ltd. gathered at the Howl! Happening Gallery in the Bowery to feature readings by writers who oppose fascism and dictatorships, and who are for freedom of the press and against totalitarian notions of state-sponsored propaganda. Read More >

Ping-Pong Free Press’ 4th Annual Speech is Not Free gathering: Writers Against Fascism and for Freedom of the Press. Ping-Pong Free Press and the Henry Miller Memorial Library are proud to feature readings by writers who oppose fascism and dictatorships, and who are for freedom of the press and against totalitarian notions of state-sponsored propaganda.

Ping-Pong Free Press and Poet Republik Ltd. will also feature readings from their newest releases:  Occasionally, I Remove your Brain Through Your Nose, by J. Hope Stein; Invitation to a Rescue, by Kate Lutzner; and Medeaum, by Jameson O’Hara Laurens, with presales of No Ledge Left to Love, by Dylan Krieger.

Readers include: Dylan Krieger, Brenda Coultas, Joanna Fuhrman, Christine Hamm, Kate Lutzner, Jameson O’Hara Laurens, Shelley Marlow, Eleni Sikelianos, Pamela Sneed, J. Hope Stein, and Maria Garcia Teutsch.

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

6 East First Street (between Bowery & 2nd Avenue)

New York, NY 10003

(917) 475-1294

contact@howlarts.org

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project blog here

Henry Miller Memorial Library Blog Here

The Life Fact Shines

Eleni, don’t drive so fast

˜˜˜˜˜˜ Read More >

Jesse Goodman has been producing benefit concerts for the Henry Miller Memorial Library since he brought Patti Smith there in 2004. The past few years he has been bringing poets in as the opening acts of these shows, which as you can imagine, pleases us here in the Republik of poets to no end. This year he is bringing in legendary San Francisco poet, David Meltzer to open for Pink Martini in this year’s benefit on December 8th at the Golden State Theatre in Monterey, California. Get your tickets baby, they’re going fast . . . So, to honor Jesse’s mad genius we are featuring his story as well as poems by David Meltzer and his wife, the poet Julie Rogers. Scroll down for his story, but first: the poets. Enjoy. Read More >

I will be reading with Eleni Sikelianos at the Loudon Nelson Center in Santa Cruz, California on October 3rd at 7:30 pm, room 5.

Poet Eleni Sikelianos, the great granddaughter of the Nobel-nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, was briefly a biology student in her undergraduate career, drawn to oceanography and microbiology.  Although those formal studies were abandoned, the language of wild oceanaria and cellular activity continues to inform her writing.  As a young woman, Sikelianos spent nearly two years traveling (often by thumb) through Europe and Africa (from London to Ankara, and from Haifa to Dar-es-Salaam).  She has lived in Paris, San Francisco, New York, Athens, and now, Boulder.  In addition to Body Clock (Coffee House, 2008), her two most recent books are a long poem in and around the history and sites of her home state, The California Poem (Coffee House, 2004); and a hybridized memoir about her father, heroin, and homelessness, The Book of Jon (Nonfiction; City Lights, 2004).  Earlier books include The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, National Poetry Series prize, 2003), Earliest Worlds  (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN: April 2001), The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo) and To Speak While Dreaming (Selva Editions). She has been conferred numerous awards for her poetry, nonfiction and translations, including the National Poetry Series, residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow, at La Maison des écrivains étrangers in Britanny, and at Yaddo, a Fulbright Writer’s Fellowship in Greece, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, the James D. Phelan Award, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, the New York Council for the Arts Translation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry.  She currently teaches in and directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver, and spends her days with her husband, the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter, Eva Grace.

Welcome to the world of Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poetic brain. Featured here is the winning poem for the inaugural poetry competition of Ping-Pong, journal of literature and arts published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The challenge here is to write an imitation of this beautiful piece. And thank-you Lina for playing along!

We Can Be Heroes
You are the rodent,

an open window.

A man is but a product of his thoughts.

Be regulated                but not homogenized.

You know the tightrope trick.

Everyone plays it like Slinky or derivatives.

Stretched out—but you cannot see

you. 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 >