October 1^st, 2016 at The Henry Miller Memorial Library

7:30 PM

Come join us in a benefit for Big Sur’s own literary press: Ping-Pong Free Press, published by the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The evening will feature a poetry reading by Brenda Coultas; a staged reading of Henry Miller and Anais Nin’s more salacious writing entitled Miller Out Loud! featuring local actors portraying the roles of Henry, June, Anais and Rimbaud. Chicago musician and Library friend extraordinaire, Al Rose, who just dropped a critically acclaimed CD entitled, Spin Spin Dizzy will close out the evening with a musical set featuring songs that put the free in free speech. Please join us in this celebration, because we believe that without free speech there can be no human rights. Doors open at 6:30, program begins at 7:30.

Poetry Reading by Brenda Coultas

Miller Out Loud! staged reading

Al Rose in performance

Brenda Coultas is the author of four poetry collections, including The Tatters (Wesleyan University Press, 2014), The Marvelous Bones of Time (Coffee House Press, 2008), and A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003). Her honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Al Rose is a striking songwriter and musician with a unique and powerful vision that continues with his seventh and latest release (2016), “Spin Spin Dizzy”. His previous albums have received extensive airplay on AAA and Americana stations throughout the US along with a bevy of critical praise. He is a mesmerizing transformer when performing live as a solo or with any number of his band, The Transcendos, in any configuration. This drives the songs each night, but the songs have always been what drives the musicians in what The Chicago Tribune has called “one audaciously entertaining ride”.

Ron Genauer is an optometrist who has been involved in community theatre for many years. Some of his favorite roles have been Gelman, in Arthur Miller’s “Broken Glass”, the Player, in Tom Stoppard’s  “Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, and Charley, in David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow.”

John Dotson is a writer/producer/director/multi-media artist with Carmel Bay Players. He also works with The Seventh Quarry Drama Group of Swansea, Wales. John’s first acting was in excerpts of Shakespeare directed by Charlotte Perry at Santa Catalina School. He performed at the Forest Theater in The Hollow Crown, directed by Marcia Hovick, and in Robinson Jeffers’ Medea, directed by Nick Zanides. At Cherry Hall in Carmel, John performed Willie in Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Conrad Selvig. John’s three-act play, It’s Always Something, directed by Nancy Pridemore, was staged in Kingsport, Tennessee, his hometown, in 2001. He then wrote and played the leading role in Without Why, directed by Conrad Selvig. With Lisa Maroski, John has written two plays, Touching Distance and Dearly Departing, performed in the US and at the Dylan Thomas Theatre in Swansea.

Susan Roether Zsigmond (Director) is a writer and film maker. She is a friend of the San Francisco Library; North Beach Citizens: American Film Institute; The Actor’s Studio Playwrights Unit; and the Mecahnics Institute Library and Chess room. Her recent novel “Our Lady of West Hollywood” was listed among “Best of the Independent Press, 2014” by Kirkus Review. Susan is also a member of the board of directors of the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

Maria Garcia Teutsch (Producer) The Revolution Will Have its Sky, won the 2016 Minerva Rising chapbook competition, judge: Heather McHugh. She is a poet, educator and editor. She has published over 20 journals of poetry as editor-in-chief of the Homestead Review, published by Hartnell College in Salinas, and Ping-Pong journal of art and literature, published by the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California. She teaches poetry and creative writing online as a member of the faculty of Hartnell College. She serves as president of the board of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, and is the founder and EIC of Ping-Pong Free Press.

Deidre Mccauley has been doing theatre for over 50 years. In Philadelphia she began at Old Academy Players following in her mother’s footsteps onto the stage.
She’s performed at Western Stage, Magic Circle Theatre, The Golden Bough, Outdoor Forest Theatre and Carl Cherry Center for the Arts. Recently she starred in a film called “Laces” which debuted at the Monarch Film Festival. She is part of The Actor’s Collective which is a group of actors who love to fly without a net.

Marnie Glazier is a writer, theatre artist and educator. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing, and a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies. She has directed a number of productions – professional and academic – has taught Theatre, Writing, and Communication Studies for more than ten years, and currently serves as Theatre Faculty Lead at Hartnell College in Salinas. Her scholarly writing has been presented at numerous conferences and published in Laconics and the Texas Theatre Journal, and upcoming performances include: Transpiration, at the American Society for Theatre Research Conference this fall in Minneapolis, MN.   Her work is deeply embedded in social practice/physical/visual theatre, ecology, and ecofeminism.

River Atwood Tabor is a poet, photographer, philosopher and other things that begin with the letter “p.” At 20 years of age, he has helped found a press, published a book of poetry, and traveled to 5 countries, and that’s just in the past year.

We are happy to announce Jameson O’Hara Laurens as the winner of the Ping-Pong Free Press Poetry Prize 2016: Judge, Melissa Broder. Her collection MEDÆUM was published Fall of 2016, here is a poem from this outstanding collection. Congratulations Jameson! Read More >

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books poetry, most recently The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). She served as poetry editor for Ping-Pong Journal of Art and Literature.

I Have a Secret Crush on Everyone in the World

When I say I have a secret crush on everyone
in the world, I mean the earth is a fur-covered
fireball, speeding into the expanding spaces
between paragliding atoms. It means I have
a crush on the way your dangling earlobes
say one thing and your elephant, anxious
hips say another– the way you dial the same
number six times before you build up the nerve
to finish. And yes, it means I am seriously
crushing on your chipped gold nail polish,
the way it signifies a desire to make the world
more beautiful, but also the way it displays
a fuck-you approach to beauty. I was going
to email to say I have a crush on your pre-
apocalyptic recipe poems, but it’s 2016
and according to twitter only old folks
use email. Is there anything more crush-
worthy than a manifesto spelled out in
lightly frosted snickerdoodles, or an essay
floating in a lagoon-shaped swimming pool?
I have a public crush on the number 8 bus,
alfresco Thai brunches and dirty Brooklyn
swans. I love all errors and eras equally.
I have a repressed crush on New Jersey
pollution, the way its oil refineries remind
me I have a nose. To have a crush is to crush
out doubt so thoroughly its green, leathery
skin becomes your own, to taste another’s
DNA so purely Januaries dissolve into vats
of frothy vanilla egg creams, spilling into
the cracks of your spine and your loose brain
jelly, into old feet and the cold twitch of your
jaw. To crush is to slide into the neural network
where our wires are made of bird songs
and magenta-colored loss, is to feel the floor
open and the reverberating metallic shivers after.

This poem first appeared in Apogee Magazine

I will be reading and performing part of my new multi-media piece from American Dissident with Henry Miller Memorial Library director, Magnus Toren at the Page Poetry Parlor at the historic home of Geraldine Page and Rip Torn, now an artist’s space for actors, directors and well, unknown poets such as myself. It also happens to fall on my birthday, so cake may be involved–all I’m saying. I do so love being the girl with the most cake.

I will be reading with the wondrous Lisa Samuels who will be flying in from New Zealand to share her poetry.

I am apoplectic with joy to be reading with Lisa Samuels on April 17th for the folks at Torn Page Poetry Parlor

from Wild Dialectics (Shearsman Books 2012)

Peephole metaphysics

Listening for you listening notes for right to seek up

futures as a buffer against permanence can you make

actuality not a matter of argument I’m sirry I’m political

ready to drag down changeable as the crew people

jumping in to small boats showing their interest

without necessary attributes to be hot, so hot

sirrah listening to the heart boats bombing are you

new to the names amidst your hectares get along

new to your improves on several hats beside the year’s

tasted aperture months ready to open pour in

astonished to discover mouths underneath the boats

craggy as fashionable creamy broody belts in range

out of range the edges of the heart mouths totally

unsteady drama groovy coming along worth trying

to sell our inherited personalities for settlement when

people came here they planted themselves in utterly familiar

and hills coming along at the edges of the heart

mouths planting the recognizable in water at the moment

falling through the atlas trope sway comprehensive

for another album of highlights everybody getting a little

somefin a tiny mouthful louche over the skin of the teeth

a point especially clear when terms of value broken

across the example becomes clear a like simple

economy of scale transient as the top blend came on

a simple feat hot off the head as hundreds rippled

like scales real as existence marbles tottling on

the edges of the site kept at it fully every rim

consistent turning square to diamante pusher

folly coming along saying flask as catskin blueberry

rich or cast is it what you expectation frag there

slightly animistic with an absolute forearm

or what it means to compromise with cultural life

as you make room make room stead skulldigger

in a roaring mind the trophy on your head your own

juggy code out at the stuck late skin in show

I often kilter or a separately repeated to see how

it changes a man with a fixed expression in plastics

a cast as what you expectation frag there yes

Lisa Samuels is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, with recent experiments in memoir (Anti M, Chax 2013) and the novel (Tender Girl, Dusie 2015). Her poetry is in anthologies such as Out of Everywhere 2 (Reality Street 2015) and has inspired scholarly work and musical scores internationally. Her literary essays include Over Hear: six types of poetry experiment in Aotearoa/New Zealand (TinFish 2015), and in 2016 she is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington Simpson Humanities Center, writing The Civic Unconscious (poetry) and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (prose) and continuing experiments in soundwork. Some of her writing and recordings can be found via the Electronic Poetry Center, academia.edu, and pennsound.

I will be reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach, California on March 11, 2016, with the wondrous Sesshu Foster.

Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. He kicks ass! Check out the Poet Republik edition where he’s featured here!

Valentine’s Day Poetry Reading:

Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium at Old Capitol Books

559 Tyler Street

Monterey (between Pearl and Munras)

$5 admission

I will be reading with Doren Robbins:

Doren Robbins’s poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including The American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, New Letters, Sulphur, and several other periodicals. His books include Driving Face Down (awarded the 2001 Blue Lynx Prize from Eastern Washington UP); My Piece of the Puzzle from Eastern Washington UP (awarded the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award). His current collection, Twin Extra, has been nominated for the 2015 The National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. Since 2001 he has been Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Foothill College, where he is a three-time recipient of the Foothill College Honors Society Appreciation Award for his teaching. He will read from his new collection, Twin Extra, and a variety of poems from his published works.

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 >

The Executioner

stands in a lake

of silence.

Hours termite

into hollow trees.

Published in The Dressing Room Poetry Journal

Read More >

Brian Henry is a poet who likes to play. In the following piece, you will note lines of precisely 5 syllables in length. He once told me he wrote a sonnet a day for a year for fun, I think. Or maybe it was a story Hayden Carruth told about Ezra Pound who once wrote a sonnet a day for a year and then threw them all away. Carruth told the workshop he was guest-teaching, “and if you can’t do that, then you’re not a poet.” Either way, as the wondrous Tomaž Šalamun would say, it’s good mythology. In this vein, I am asking my poetry students to write their own small offerings, inspired by Mr. Henry’s piece (Brian might say here, Mr. Henry is my father), of 5 syllables per line, and at least 5 lines in length. You can play along too…

Thanksgiving

Revenge is no dish

and should not be served

at all, much less cold.

But as a guiding

principle, revenge

can cast quite a light.

Although it begins

in darkness, it breaks,

so timely, toward

any little shine:

may your object of

revenge be standing

or, better, kneeling

in front of you when

that light breaks to sun.

Poet, translator, and editor Brian Henry earned his BA at the College of William & Mary and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His collections of poetry include Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), Graft (2003), Quarantine (2006), In the Unlikely Event of a Water (2007), The Stripping Point (2007), Wings Without Birds (2010), Lessness (2011), and Doppelgänger (2011). An advocate for Slovenian poets and poetry, he has translated Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (2008) and Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things (2010). Henry’s translation of Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers received a 2011 Howard Foundation fellowship.

Henry edited the collection of essays On James Tate (2004). He is the cofounder and coeditor, with Andrew Zawacki, of Verse Magazine. Henry and Zawacki also coedited The Verse Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft & Culture (2005).

Henry’s poems, essays, and translations have been published widely in journals such as Jacket, the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His honors and awards include a Distinguished Educator Award, a Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and a George Bogin Memorial Award. He teaches at the University of Richmond.