i.e. reading series

“Final day for the
Yockadot Poetics Theatre Festival
Staged readings of plays by Brent Cunningham, Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, Ellen Redbird, Thalia Field, and Tina Darragh… and more!

May 5th, at the United States Patent and Trademark Offices in Alexandria.

Please join us for performance and first-ever stagings of plays representative of “poetics theatre”–the application of contemporary experimental poetry practices to performance and theater.

Text performance art by Mark Greenwood begins at 3pm, and will be ongoing.
Adam Good will lead improvisitional tours around the USPTO site intermittently throughout the festival

4pm Show: Dominion Stage
Two short pieces of verbal slapstick by Brent Cunningham:
A bevy of Welcomes and The Gunfight.
SOP DOLL! A Jack Tale Noh Drama by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn

Sop Doll! uses the strict formal values of the traditional Japanese Noh theatere to dramatize an Appalachian “Jack Tale” (Jack, as in Jack and the Beanstalk). These two traditions encounter each other in the fields of oral storytelling and stage performance. Ballad meter, blues structure, and gospel call-and-response create powerful Western analogs to the music and literary values of this Eastern form.

7pm Show: Yockadot’s poetics theatre troupe under the direction of Enoch Chan
excerpt from Verve on Verge, a “jigsaw puzzle play” by Ellen Redbird, poetics theatre theorist and publisher of Nerve Lantern
Hours by Thalia Field
Bad I.O.U , a brand new play by Tina Darragh

USPTO Madison Building, 600 Dulany Street, Alexandria VA 22314. Accessible to King Street Metro station.

Free of charge. Donations accepted. For more information please see http://www.yptfest.org 703-400-2984.”

from SEVEN WORKS by Cathy Eisenhower

Rachel

Bob

 Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet-critic, whose on-going long poem project, begun in 1986, is collected in Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) as well as in Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan U.P., 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnnumbered: PrÈcis (Salt Publishing, 2004). In 2006, two books of her innovative essays were published: Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work on gender and poetics, along with reprinting of the ground-breaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, both from University of Alabama Press. Among her other critical works are a book on modern U.S. poetry from Cambridge University Press, studies of the poet H.D., and the edited Selected Letters of George Oppen. She teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her website is http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/duplessis

Bob Perelman has written 16 books of poetry, including

*Ten to One: Selected Poems* (Wesleyan UP),

*The Future of Memory* (Roof Books),
*Playing Bodies*, a painting/poem collaboration with Francie Shaw
(Granary Books) and, most recently, *Iflife* (Roof Books).

His critical books are

*The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein and
Zukofsky* (California UP) and

*The Marginalization of Poetry: Language
Writing and Literary History* (Princeton UP).

He has edited two collections of poets’ talks: *Hills Talks* and *Writing/Talks* (Southern
Illinois UP). He is a Professor of English at the University of
Pennsylvania.

Jessica listening, Phyllis reading

Jessica & Phyllis

Jessica Grim’s books include Vexed (online from ubu editions, 2002),
Fray (O Books, 1998), Locale (Potes & Poets Press, 1995), and The
Inveterate Life (O Books, 1990).  She lives with her family in Oberlin,
Ohio, where she’s a librarian at the college.

Phyllis Rosenzweig Was introduced to contemporary writing via workshops (with Peter Schjeldahl and Tony Towle) and readings at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York City in the early 1970s. Moved to Washington, D.C. in the Summer of 1974 to work at the Hirshhorn Museum. Met Doug Lang in D.C. and, at his reading series at Folio Books and informal workshops, first met Lynne Dreyer, Tina Darragh, Peter Inman, Joan Retallack, Diane Ward, and was introduced to a larger community of writers. Since 1995, with Diane Ward, has been publishing Primary Writing – – the sixth issue of which (April 1996) was a broadside featuring work by Jessica Grimm and Peter Seaton. Publications include the chapbooks: Seventeen Poems (O Press, 1975); Dogs (Edge Books, 1996); and Reasonable Accommodation (Potes and Poets Press, 1997).