POETRY TO THE INFINITIVE POWER(S)
Join us for an evening in celebration of ISSUE Project Room featuring dozens of literature’s finest poets followed by a bacchanalian celebration and performance by These Are Powers.
Proceeds will benefit ISSUE Project Room’s move to 110 Livingston.
At 7pm — The Way of the Word
Poetry Extravaganza curated by Bob Holman, Suzanne Fiol, and Kenneth Goldsmith
featuring the amazing poets:
Bob Holman
Ken Goldmith
Jonas Mekas
Anne Waldman
Judith Malina
Abiodoun Oyewole (of the Last Poets)
Hettie Jones
Jeff Wright
Esther K. Smith
Georgia Luna Faust
Michael Carter
Kathy Engel
Kimiko Hahn
Beau Sia
Holly Anderson
Max Blagg
Frank Lima
Betsey Andrews
Mike Topp
Steve Dalachinsky
Yuko Otumo
and the FLARF POETS:
Gary Sullivan
Sharon Mesmer
Drew Gardner
Katie Degentesh
Jordan Davis
Brandon Downing
Nada Gordon
At 9:00pm — These Are Powers Dance Party
Live performance by These Are Powers with debut screening of their new music video for “Candyman”, featuring the new single off of their forthcoming release with RVNG Intl. Filmed at ISSUE’s future home, the Beaux-Arts 110 Livingston, “Candyman” is a surrealist dinner party where every course served consists entirely of sugar and the guests overindulge in an alternately comedic and nightmarish story. Conceptualized by These Are Powers and director Joseph Krings, the video was produced by a team assembled by Knowmore resulting in a bizarre, fun and colorful video that makes a perfect companion piece to an already infectious song.
TAP’s live performance will feature live AV projections by SECRET PROJECT ROBOT and will be followed by DJ sets by Ryan Sawyer, and Matthew Radune and Jeremy Campbell. Opening the event, immediately after the way of the word, is the duo Lone Wolf and Cub (drummer Ryan Sawyer and trapeze artist Suzanne Rogalsky).
About the TAP Dance Party artists:
These Are Powers
These Are Powers take the familiar and channel it back from the future primitive. We are a language all our own. It is club beats played live, found sounds, pulses, blips, collage, oscillations, electronic watercolor, decay, regeneration and every vibration in between. Whatever it sounds like is not what you think. Look twice. These Are Powers hail from the dual ports of Brooklyn, NY and Chicago, IL.
We are Anna Barie (sings, electronics), Pat Noecker (prepared bass, sings), and Bill Salas (electroacoustic drums, sings). We create movement in freedom, infinity in possibility.
Secret Project Robot
http://www.secretprojectrobot.org/
Secret Project Robot: Art Experiment is a not for profit dedicated to the documentation and proliferation of contemporary art and current cultural trends in music, performance, dance, the party and social theory.
Lone Wolf and Cub
http://www.myspace.com/ryanlonewolfsawyer
Listen to Bob Holman perform his Spoken Word Poem “Walking Brooklyn Bridge” for the Urbana 10th Anniversary party at the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC Oct 2007
Angela Jaeger, Byron Coley + Gary Panter, Devin Flynn & Ross Goldstein
THE RIDICULOUS NO
A running quest for word slap ingénue, songstress/ poet Angela Jaeger joins forces with underground textsmith extraordinaire Byron Coley for an evening of sporadic talk – to no one, to each other, to you. A collection of psychedelic chants, words, sights and sounds will bounce between these 2 college buddies in what might otherwise be explained as unknown chemistry. See for yourselves.
After that, Brooklyn’s own Gary Panter and Devin Flynn (with Ross Goldstein “Sittin’ In”) will conjure up whiffs of the sweetly-scented musical gangaroo that is theirs alone. This evening’s performance will be in celebration of the newly released “Gary and Devin Go Outside” CD, and will draw from the rich tradition of world psychedelia, as well as blazing ragged pathways through jungles of freshly-scorched synapses. They may be collaborated upon as well. Hear for yourselves.
Angela Jaeger
Angela Jaeger is a New York-based singer and poet who has collaborated with a diverse group of musicians including PigBag, The Drowning Craze, Bush Tetras, Billy McKenzie, David Cunningham, Amy Rigby, Jim Sclavunos and Alan Licht. She has published with glass eye books, Green Panda press, the Brooklyn Rail and is currently working on an edition for Principal Hand. She gave a debut joint reading of her Punk Diary project with writer/journalist Byron Coley at Issue Project Room in 2007 and is currently shaping this material into a graphic text book form.
Byron Coley
Byron Coley lives in Massachusetts and has worked as a writer, archivist, editor & collector for over 30 years. His most recent book was a collaboration with Thurston Moore called “No Wave” (Abrams). In the works are “Pants Down, Earthlings!” (Gladtree), “The Moisture of Diapers” (L’Oie de Cravan) and others. He currently runs the Ecstatic Yod Collective and glass eye books, writes a few columns, authors liner notes aplenty, and contributes to various periodicals.
Gary Panter
Long one of his generation’s great visual artists, Gary Panter also has a long history as a musician. He began recording and issuing records on his own back in the ‘70s, but he is probaby best know for the “Tornader to the Tater” single, engineered & backed by the Residents, which came out in ‘81, and the Japanese LP, “Pray for Smurph,” which has recently been reissued in deluxe digital format. His sound is always woozy, but he can play a guitar just like stealing a bell. And considering his history – from Jimbo to Pee Wee’s Playhouse to Dal Tokyo to Pink Donkey and onward – well, what would you expect? His most recent book is the massive “Gary Panter” two-volume monograph issued by Picture Box. Amazing.
Devin Flynn
Devin Flynn is another guy whose visual presence is better known – for now – than his “footprint musicale.” A master of animated insanity, his most revered project may well have been the “Y’all So Stupid” series, which destroyed the line beyween surrealism and Asperger’s Syndrome with all thumbs blazing. What is less known is his deft-ass handling of all-known musical instruments, no matter how obscure. How deft? Deft enough to make Gary sound more like Paul McCartney than a walrus. Which is defter than hell.
Ross Goldstein
Ross Goldstein is the new “secret weapon,” whose presence explodes the duo-infinity of the Panter/Flynn Union into triangulated perfection. Based in upstate New York, Goldstein has evolved into that region’s answer to many questions posed (imperfectly, it seems) by Van Dyke Parks. His first LP, “Trail Songs” (Specific Recordings) is a puff & chug of special merit. His photograph remains classified.
Andrew Lampert, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo
Andrew Lampert, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo
GET THIS PICTURE HERE
Old friends Andrew Lampert, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo invite one and all to Issue Project Room for the world premiere of their new collaborative film:
JACKA SPADES (a.k.a. GET THIS PICTURE HERE)
2009, Super 8mm, 34 minutes, black and white, sound.
Steve Dalachinsky, with the aid of Yuko Otomo and cinematographer Andrew Lampert, is given the chance to direct his dream film. This is not that, but rather the result of what they shot that day presented in real time as they filmed it. In the end, this is always what the film was supposed to be; what Steve wanted is another story heard on the soundtrack of the images gathered within. Shot last February on the streets of Soho, and mostly edited in-camera, this movie is never shown the same way twice. It will change forms with each subsequent presentation. JACKA SPADES (a.k.a GET THIS PICTURE HERE) is the second installment in Lampert’s ongoing TABLES TURNED trilogy. In this series, the filmmaker (Lampert) hands over direction of the movie to his subjects. “I think I always wanted to be the actor, not the director.” – Steve Dalachinsky from the soundtrack.
Also expect to hear Dalachinsky and Otomo read selections from recent writings, a new and still untitled film performance from Lampert, additional audio surprises, a potential guest star and, of course, door prizes.
For more information: read again.
Bios:
ANDREW LAMPERT, film/video/performance, born St. Louis, lives in Brooklyn. Regularly concocts performances involving projectors, people and text; super 8 and 16mm portraits, home movies and found footage; videos of domestic matters and disjointed narratives; audio recordings on various subjects including those mentioned above and more; other stuff, too. Works have been seen/performed/exhibited here, there including Whitney Museum of American Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, British Film Institute, The Kitchen, The Getty Museum, Kill Your Timid Notion festival, New York Film Festival, Sculpture Center, The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, Cinema Project, Diapason, Issue Project Room and many other venues. He was Director of Programming for the New York Underground Film Festival for many years and is currently Archivist at Anthology Film Archives. Lately he has been reading early Lawrence Block books, listening to Ornette Coleman bootlegs and working on a forthcoming comedy record with musician/writer Alan Licht.
STEVE DALACHINSKY was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946 right after the last BIG WAR and has managed to survive lots of little wars. He has been writing poetry since he was a child and though he has grown older he has never grown up. He has been listening to, inspired by and influenced by music most of his life along with visual art, primarily surrealism and abstract expressionism. His great love is LOVE though he has been called a big curmudgeon. He feels that his poetry is an act of spontaneity and tries rather than to simply describe the “thing”, the “other,” to transform it. What he likes to think of as a kind of descriptive transformation and commingling of everything he encounters both internally and externally. His work has appeared in journals on & off line including; Big Bridge, Milk, Unlikely Stories, Xpressed, Ratapallax, Evergreen Review, Long Shot, Alpha Beat Soup, Xtant, Blue Beat Jacket, N.Y. Arts Magazine, 88, Helix and Lost and Found Times to name a few and is included in numerous anthologies such as Beat Indeed, the Haiku Moment and most notably The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. His most recent chapbooks include Trial and Error in Paris (Loudmouth Collective 2003), Musicology (Editions Pioche, Paris 2005), , Lautreamont’s Laments (Furniture Press 2005), In Glorious Black and White (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), St. Lucie (King of Mice Press 2005), Are We Not MEN & Fake Book (2 books of collage – 8 Page Press 2005). Dream Book (Avantcular Press 2005), Totems (Unarmed Press 2008) and Christ Amongst the Fishes ( a book of collage Oilcan Press 2009). He has written many liner notes for such luminaries as Charles Gayle, Roy Campbell, Matthew Shipp, James “Blood” Ulmer, Anthony Braxton, Rob Brown, Sabir Mateen, Rashied Ali, Roscoe Mitchell, Hamid Drake, Mat Maneri, Assif Tshahar and Derek Bailey. His books include A Superintendent’s Eyes (Hozomeen Press 2000) and his PEN Award winning book The Final Nite (complete notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook, Ugly Duckling Presse 2006) and Logos and Language, co-authored with pianist Matthew Shipp (RogueArt 2008 ). His latest book is Reaching into the Unknown, a collaboration with French photographer Jacques Bisceglia (RoguArt 2009). His CD’s include Incomplete Directions (Knitting Factory Records with many great musicians 1999), The End of the World with drummer Federico Ughi (577 Records 2002), Phenomena of Interference with pianist Matthew Shipp (Hopscotch Records 2005), Merci De Votre Visite with Didier Lassere and Sebastian Capazza (Amor Fati 2006), and Thin Air with Loren Mazzacane Connors (Silver Wonder Press, recorded 2001, released 2007). He has read his work throughout American including New Orleans , San Francisco and the N.Y. area in venues such as the Poetry Project and The Bowery Poetry. He has also read extensively Japan, Britian and Europe, including France (posesie bienniale, Paris, Musee d’Aquintane, Bordeaux, C.I.P.M., Marseilles, Maison d’Poesie,Nante) and various institutions throughout Japan and Germany. He has little formal education and has been called a Jazz- poet, a post-beat poet, a street poet etc. All of these he flatly denies. He’s also been called lots of other things, some of which he is and some of which he is NOT. Or as he likes to see it: HE SIMPLY IS… or as Monk once stated, ” I don’t know I just do IT.”
YUKO OTOMO is a visual artist & a bilingual poet (poetry & haiku) who is of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays & does translation. In visual art, she has been concentrating herself on the study of “pure abstraction” & has created a body of work covering over 3 decades. Her work has been shown in various gallery spaces; such as Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128, Knitting Factory & Vision Festival. As a poet/writer, she has read her work in venues such as St. Marks’s Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club, Tonic, The Stone, Knitting Factory, NY Public Library, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Nest, Pink Pony, Nuyorican Poet’s Café etc. She also has read in Germany, France & Japan. She has been published in many magazines & literary publications such as Recluse, 6×6, Long Shot, Appearances, The Unbearables Assemblage Magazine, Downtown Anthology, Senritsu & others. Her books include “ Garden: Selected Haiku” (Beehive Press), “Small Poems”, “The Hand of the Poet” (by Ugly Duckling Presse), “Cornell box Poems”, “Genesis”, “ Fragile” (by Sisyphus Press). She also has a huge volume of critical writing on art such as “On Artist & Studio”, “On Artuad: Writing & Drawing”, Henri Michaux: Untitled Passage”, “Vermeer & the Deft School”, “ Being as an academician versus being an intellectual”, “Victor Hugo” & etc
Bob Holman + Anne Waldman w Peter Gordon + Kit Fitzgerald
Bob Holman is best known as a free-wheeling impresario of new poetry:
slams, hiphop, performance. But he’s also written eight books, most
recently A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with
Chuck Close published by Aperture, teaches at NYU and Columbia, and is
the Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. He’s made recent trips to
the Kolkata Book Fair, Banff Arts Centre, the Costa Rican
International Poetry Festival, and the Naropa Summer Writing Program.
His new project is a film documentary on the Poetry of Endangered
Languages, starting with his recent two month shoot in West Africa,
“On the Griot Trail,” and another on Ginsberg in India
watch
Anne Waldman
“She is the fastest, wittiest woman to run with the wolves in some time”- Ken Tucker,
The New York Times
Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She grew up on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village where she still lives, and bi-furcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 when she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. Allen Ginsberg has called her his “spiritual wife”. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text: Outrider which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. Manatee/Humanity will be published by Penguin in 2009 and she will be on a reading tour in April. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2010. She is editor of The Beat Book(Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. A book translated into Chinese is forthcoming in 2009.
Waldman has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay.She has been active in the current election, along with countless young people and elders and artists. She took a vow at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 to devote her life to poetry and artistic “community”. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace.
She has been a student of Buddhism since 1962, a feminist, and an ambassador for the oral revival of poetry, appearing on stages from Berlin to Caracas , from Mumbai to Beijing. She has been instrumental in encouraging poetry projects world-wide and has helped organize programs in Vienna and Indonesia. She has also collaborated with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis and Pat Steir as well as dancer Douglas Dunn, filmmaker Ed Bowes, and her son, musician/composer Ambrose Bye. Her extensive historical literary, art and tape archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Some of her performances may be viewed on YouTube.
Some Responses to Anne Waldman’s Poetry:
“It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat an despair, Anne Waldman comments in Civil Disobediences: Poetic and Politics in Action. Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.”- Forrest Gander. The Harriet Blog, National Poetry Foundation, Chicago
“Here is a voice from the frontlines of poetry’s improvisational traditions”- Peter Gizzi
“She’s the fastest, wisest woman to run with the wolves in some time.” Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review
“From St Marks in the early sixties, to her stewardship of Naropa, to her worldwide travels, Anne Waldman has shown herself to be one of the key players on the U.S.A. poetry scene. Her energy, her total commitment to her art, and her cultural work are a wonder to behold. Wherever it happened, Anne was there.” - Marjorie Perloff
All 3 below from an essay by Ravi Shankar, in the Quarterly Conversation 2008:
“The apocryphal rumor that she started – started- the phenomenon of Poetry Slams when she and Ted Berrigan donned shiny trunks and boxing gloves to verbally pummel each other with uppercuts of verbs and roundhouses of metaphor.. Her prodigious proliferation: publishing a book of poems a year, not to mention translations, edited anthologies, sound recordings, cameo appearances in Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara, performances with Allen Ginsberg, Meredith Monk in the documentary Cooked Diamonds, fried Shoes, collaborations with artists Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, with musicians Steven Taylor and Steve Lacy, the co-founding with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired educational institution in America, two-time winner of the International championship Poetry Bout in Taos, New Mexico, recipient of many of the country’s major grants and literary awards, onwards…
***
“Waldman is a transpersonalist and Maximalist. [Her] choice of deity is Kali, Hindu goddess of time and ferocity, meat and skulls, remover of the advidya (the ignorance that makes us fear death), a creative and destructive force that wears a girdle of severed arms, a bracelet of cobras, corpse-earrings, and a mouth darkened with blood…Waldman is a Flame.”
“Anne Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis. Orality is crucial to her. She is a force of nature. Needed to be in order to hold her own in the male-dominated world of the Beats. And her work is an specially potent example of Helen Cixious’s idea of ecriture feminine, female writing that overcomes the limits of Western logocentrism and male patriarchy, or in Waldman’s own words, “body poetics and politics, right now.” Her erudito, which she wears like a mantle, is deeply eclectic and one feels that all of the turbulent waves of the late 2oth century have washed over her From Olson to Oulipo, from Sappho to Diane di Prima, from apperceptions of genocide to sexual empowerment that enclose menstruation. Waldman’s a sponge who has soaked up art and drips what she’s absorbed into splotches of color. She also leans Eastward, using Buddhist concepts and Sanskrit words in a way that doesn’t feel like dilettantism or mere shrubbery in her poems, but something meditated upon over a course of years, studied and given breath to breathe.”- Ravi Shankar, the Quarterly Conversation
Of IOVIS:
Iovis is a monumental improvisation, epic length, major work by a major poet, Anne Waldman” - Allen Ginsberg
“A marvelous mytho-poetic collage of self-and-other, male an female, in demonstration of a female universe (”open system”) packed with seed. The Goddess considers the role and power of Jove in detail, in cosmic gossip and multiple language. Anne Waldman’s vast poem is a net of language and spirit that opens out the possibilities of writing and our enactment of
Archetypes in one long breath” – Gary Snyder
“Waldman’s chapters are fuid and ever-changing-like life. Hers is a pedagogic poetic that teaches as much as it complicates, enlightens as much as it mystifies, is filled with stories and myths, personal reflections and homages. Because the poem moves through time, contained among clusters of practical information are also elegies for the deaths of loved ones, ritual practices, erotic wishes… Waldman is carrying on the 20th century epic tradition…” Poetry Project Newsletter
Of Vow to Poetry
“Waldman’s utopianism a good antidote to current militarism. Vow to Poetry is an enticement to vocalize, to make ideological interventions with language. Deluged as we are by agenda-hiding, mendacious rhetoric of profiteering, I is good time to read Waldman. She has spent a lifetime artfully hexing and arguing against violent territoriality. The utopian imagination is embodied in this stellar poet whose heart has an interstellar wingspan.” The Sunday (Boulder Daily) Camera, Boulder, Co.
Of Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble:
“Waldman accomplishes an open alliance between the bodhisattva path and her radical poetic and artistic determination. In this marvelous volume, Waldman makes a vow to poetry. [The poem] upholds the complexity of being human in the entire bubble-shaped world that it confronts..Waldman leaves her readers with a sense of provisional hope, conditioned by our participation in making the possible world possible.”-The Poetry Project Newsletter
PETER GORDON is a seminal figure in the New York music community. He first gained attention with his Love of Life Orchestra, which helped define the fusion of experimental composition with punk and jazz infused dance music. Gordon has worked some of the most influential artists and musicians of the past decades, including Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Foreman, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Flying Lizards, David Van Tieghem, Stephen Petronio, The Talking Band and Chuck Berry. His work in film and television is featured on the soundtracks of “Desperate Housewives”, “Joe Versus the Volcano”, “Déjà Vu” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. His collaborations with video-artist Kit Fitzgerald at venues such as DTW, La Mama and BAM/Next Wave Festival have pioneered live video performance.
Gordon’s music has been released on the Lovely Music, CBS Masterworks, Warner Brothers and Newtone Record labels. Recent releases include: LCD Soundsystem James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s remix of LOLO’s “Beginning of the Heartbreak” on the critically acclaimed “Fabriclive 36″ mix album; Gordon’s opera collaboration with Lawrence Weiner, “The Society Architect Ponders the Golden Gate Bridge”, on the “Crosstalk” anthology (Bridge Records); and the re-release of Gordon’s debut album “Star Jaws” (Lovely Music). Peter Gordon is currently working on a new retrospective LOLO album to be released in the fall by DFA Records. Gordon’s collaboration with Bob Holman, INDIA JOURNALS, will be appearing in the new issue of Rattapallax.
Kit Fitzgerald is a media artist and director working in video art, live performance, digital painting, and music video. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been presented in the Whitney Biennale, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave, the Hetmusiktheater (Amsterdam) and LaMama E.T.C. Ms. Fitzgerald has collaborated with composers Peter Gordon, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Max Roach; poet Seiku Sundiata and choreographers Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, and Bebe Miller. Her hi-definition video, Painted Melodies, won 1st prize at the Electronic Cinema Festival in Montreaux. The Deadman, her film adaptation of Bataille’s Le Mort, won second prize at the Riccione Film & TV Festival. Ms. Fitzgerald has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the NHK Foundation of Japan. She is a graduate of the American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women and Director of the Department of New Media and Digital Production at Concordia College, New York.
Amiri Baraka and Henry Grimes with special guest Atiba Kwabena-Wilson
ISSUE Project Room is proud to host its first Littoral Reading Series event of 2009 featuring:
Amiri Baraka and Henry Grimes
$10 – buy tickets
In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Home–long out of print–features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of 1960s social and political essays.
Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span–a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X . . . each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.
Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities, from 2002-2004. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic, 2007), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.
Henry Grimes
Master jazz musician (acoustic bass, violin) HENRY GRIMES has played more than 3OO concerts in 23 countries (including many festivals) since May of ‘O3, when he made his astonishing return to the music world after 35 years away. He was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended the Mastbaum School and Juilliard. In the ‘5O’s and ‘6O’s, he came up in the music playing and touring with Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, “Bullmoose” Jackson, “Little” Willie John, and a number of other great R&B / soul musicians; but drawn to jazz, he went on to play, tour, and record with many great jazz musicians of that era, including Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Sunny Murray, Sonny Rollins, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, and Rev. Frank Wright.
Sadly, a trip to the West Coast to work with Al Jarreau and Jon Hendricks went awry, leaving Henry in Los Angeles at the end of the ‘6O’s with a broken bass he couldn’t pay to repair, so he sold it for a small sum and faded away from the music world. Many years passed with nothing heard from him, as he lived in his tiny rented room in an S.R.O. hotel in downtown Los Angeles, working as a manual laborer, custodian, and maintenance man, and writing many volumes of handwritten poetry. He was discovered there by a Georgia social worker and fan in 2OO2 and was given a bass by William Parker, and after only a few weeks of ferocious woodshedding, Henry emerged from his room to begin playing concerts around Los Angeles and shortly afterwards made a triumphant return to New York City in May, ‘O3 to play in the Vision Festival. Since then, often working as a leader, he has played, toured, and / or recorded with many of today’s music heroes, such as Rashied Ali, Marshall Allen, Fred Anderson, Marilyn Crispell, Ted Curson, Andrew Cyrille, Bill Dixon, Dave Douglas, Andrew Lamb, David Murray, William Parker, Marc Ribot, and Cecil Taylor. Henry has also given a number of workshops and master classes on major campuses, released several new recordings, made his professional debut on a second instrument (the violin) at the age of 7O, has now published the first volume of his poetry, “Signs Along the Road,” and has been creating illustrations to accompany his new recordings and publications. He has received many honors in recent years, including four Meet the Composer grants and a grant from the Acadia Foundation. He can be heard on more than 
recordings on various labels, including Atlantic, Ayler Records, Blue Note, Columbia, ESP-Disk, Impulse!, Jazz NewYork Productions, Pi Recordings, Porter Records, Prestige, Riverside, and Verve. Henry Grimes now lives and teaches in New York City.
Atiba Kwabena-Wilson (musician/poet/storyteller) is the founder and artistic director of both Songhai Djeli and the Befo’ Quotet. He was the recipient of a full Scholarship for voice and flute, earning his B.A. in Music from Long Island University. Mr. Kwabena-Wilson studied arrangement and orchestration for jazz ensembles with Calvin Hill (bassist with Max Roach and faculty advisor for L.I.U.). He also studied Jazz Improvisation with the late John Lewis (pianist with the Modern Jazz Quartet and professor at City College).
Atiba visited Jamaica in February of 2004, where he was interviewed by Jean Small, host of “A Festival of Words” on Radio Mona FM 93. He spoke of his life’s journey which has led him to poetry and storytelling.
In 2005, Atiba was featured in “Uptown” magazine, summer issue.
Throughout the years, Atiba Kwabena-Wilson has been involved with numerous projects and programs that have reached out to many people. An abbreviated list of his performance profile is provided below:
* Guest Lecturer at Hunter College (subjects: “African Origins of the Blues” and “African Origins of Hip-Hop”)
* Served as artistic director through Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, 1999-present, of “Music Meets Poetry” series
* Toured schools under the auspices of the Julliard-Lincoln Center Community Out-Reach Program, both as a solo artist and as a member of “Ngoma”, performing traditional songs, stories and dances of Azania (aka South Africa)
* Performed at FESTAM International Music Festival, Inc. in Dakar, Senegal 1998 through 2000
* Filmed with the Grammy Award Winning Rap group ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (MTV Unplugged)
* Featured in “Bum Rush the Page- A Def Poetry Jam”, Edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera, Three Rivers Press 2001 and “New Rain” Vol. 9 Edited by Gary Johnston and Malika M’Buzi Moore, Blind Beggar Press 1999
* Appeared as percussionist/ flutist on “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” Vol.1: A CD focusing on poetry by Tupac Shakur, performed by various artists
* Appeared as a performing artist for the American Museum of Natural History
* Featured on CBS, Traditions
* Provided “Edu-tainment Clinics” for Hospital Audiences Inc.
* Conducted storytelling and music workshops for the New York City Housing Authority
* Provides music, poetry and storytelling workshops, staff development seminars, assembly programs, concerts and lecture/ demonstrations throughout the tri-state area under the auspices of the Caribbean Cultural Center, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. Education Dept. and Henry Street Settlement Cultural Outreach/Ed. Dept.
