Susan Howe and David Grubbs

Poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs perform their fourth collaboration, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, recorded live at ISSUE Project Room on October 25, 2013 as part of ISSUE's anniversary series Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain.

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and three of literary criticism, Susan Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. Her recent collection of poems, That This (New Directions), received the 2011 Bollingen Prize. David Grubbs has released twelve solo albums and is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press). Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and he has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, among many others.

Grubbs and Howe were brought together when the Fondation Cartier in Paris proposed a collaborative performance in 2003. Grubbs had been a dedicated reader of Howe’s for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe’s poetry and her voice immediately intrigued. The pair has since created four full-length works that they have presented widely in the US and Europe. Four CD releases have appeared on Drag City’s Blue Chopsticks imprint, and their long out-of-print 2004 first album, Thiefth, will be released for the first time on LP by ISSUE Project Room’s Distributed Objects label in September 2015.