Speech is Not Free Festival: Poetry/Performance
Opening reception, Poetry Reading and Performance: Jan Wagner, Jean-Nöel Chazelle, Aliah Rosenthal, Adrian Nichols, Shelley Marlow, Maria Teutsch, River Tabor and Brenda Coultas
Performance Artist Tim Youd will be typing Margaret Atwoods‘ „A Handmaid’s Tale,“ on an IBM Selectric as part of his 100 Novels Project www.timyoud.com
Exhibition of William S. Burroughs’ Art; Allen Ginsberg’s photography and Jean-Nöel Chazelle’s paintings.
Special thanks to Yuri Zapancic, Peter Hale, and to Lars Dreiucker at Sprechsaal, the Allen Ginsberg Estate, the William S. Burroughs Estate and Ping-Pong Free Press.
This is the 5th Annual Speech is not Free Event. The first was held at the Coagula Curatorial Gallery in Los Angeles and McCabe’s Guitar Shop featuring Paz Lenchantin and other musical guests. The second at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California featuring Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye and a screening of Howl. The Third was also at the HML with a staged reading of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and featuring musical guests Al Rose and poet Brenda Coultas. The fourth was at the Howl! Happening Gallery in NYC with poetry readings by Pamela Sneed, Joanna Fuhrman, Kate Lutzner, Maria Teutsch, Jameson O’Hara Laurens, J. Hope Stein, Brenda Coultas, Shelley Marlow and others.
For more details visit: www.marialoveswords.com
Author’s Bios:
New York City based poet 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). In November, she was a featured blogger for Harriet, an online publication of the Poetry Foundation.
Peter Hale, Ginsberg Trust: „I was a student at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado taking classes at their summer writing program in 1985. I was more a fan of (William) Burroughs at the time and knew very little about Allen. I was stopping by Burroughs‘ summer apartment (as one could do, those days at Naropa)and had just missed him, but Allen was there cleaning up the place. We’d met a few times before, but this time I had him alone! Since he had quite a reputation around Boulder for always being on the make, I feared I might be warding him off but instead, since I’d read little poetry, he sat me down and gave me a reading list and suggested I sit in on his classes.Afew weeks later we did e (ecstacy) together. Gregory Corso had given Allen some, and it was just about to be made illegal here in the States. Allen had a little left and suggested we try it. He always started any drug, especially psychedelic/psychotropic type with 45 minutes of sitting meditation, Zen style.He definitely did not take this sort of thing lightly. Sitting next to old bard, Allen Ginsberg on the meditation cushion when the e kicks in about twenty minutes in, now that’s a life-changing moment! Allen was confused as to why it was called „ecstacy“, and insisted „empathy“ more accurate.
Yony Leyser is a Chicago-born writer, director and photographer. He is known for his documentary WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN (2010) which premiered at Slamdance to immediate acclaim, going on to play at over 60 film festivals. His first fictional feature, DESIRE WILL SET YOU FREE (2015), an expression of Yony’s life in Berlin and of his philosophy as a filmmaker, was selected at multiple film festivals like Guadalajara IFF, Montreal World FF and !f Istanbul in 2016.
Shelley Marlow is author of the novel Two Augusts In a Row In a Row, with Publication Studio, Portland (2015); and the art edition of Two Augusts In a Row In a Row with drawings and paintings by Marlow, with Publication Studio, Hudson; and the purple London Publication Studio art edition(2017). Marlow was awarded an Acker Award for avant garde excellence in writing. For the Two Augusts In a Row In a Row book launch in NYC and London, 2015, Marlow hosted multigenerational writers and artists to perform scenes from the book. Marlow has taught creative writing workshops, and was the fiction editor of Ping Pong Magazine out of the Henry Miller Library. Marlow has read and exhibited their visual work extensively and appear in publications including LTTR (Lesbians To The Rescue), alLuPiNiT,an environmental magazine, Drunken Boat,Zing magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Saint Petersburg Review. Marlow wrote the lyrics to the musical, UnKnotTurandot, La Mama Theater, NY. Marlow presented an interactive project, International Witch Stories in the Italian Pavilion with Oreste, for the 48th Venice Biennial.
Sailesh Naidu is an artist and development consultant based in Berlin, Germany. He has spent the past ten years working in the fields of gender/sexuality, migration, and international education. After spending a year under the mentorship of German Chancellor Angela Merkel with the German Chancellor’s Fellowship Sailesh permanently moved to Berlin to pursue his idea of bringing empathy as model for social change to the development world. His unique style of deep listening and developing practical yet creative solutions has garnered the attention of publications such as the New York Times and clients/roles at some of the top NGO’s in the world such as the International Rescue Committee, Nike Foundation, Open Society Foundation, and Mercy Corps.
adrian nichols was born to two dancers in New York City and began contributing essays and reviews to the Ballet Review in 1993. He studied the classics and worked as a lawyer for five years. Since 2001, he has lived as a translator in Berlin, where he has three children in school. His poetry and translations have appeared in Illuminations, Knockout, Noon: Journal of the Short Poem, Ping-Pong, Hotel Amerika, Here/There: Poetry, Sand, the dance blog of the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, Basalt, and No Man’s Land.
AliahRosenthal poet/performer was born in a 5th floor tenement walk-up in the East Village of NYC. He is the godson of Allen Ginsberg, and works for the Ai Weiwei Studio in Berlin, Germany. His third book of poems comes out in April 2019 via YP Press, New York.
River Atwood Tabor studies art history at Bard College Berlin. He has served as art director of Ping-Pong journal of art and literature and Poet Republik Ltd.
Maria Garcia Teutsch is an award-winning poet, editor and educator. Her collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, received the Minerva Rising Chapbook award, Judge: Heather McHugh. She serves as editor-in-chief of The Homestead Review, Poet Republik Ltd. and Ping-Pong Free Press. She served as president of the board of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California for 10 years and also served as editor-in-chief of Ping-Pong Journal of Art and Literature. She is an associate professor at Hartnell College where she received the Gleason Award for teaching excellence. Ilya Kaminsky says of Maria’s poetics: “The voices in her poems are direct and yet there is a certain mystery to this directness, this clarity of address. Clarity, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish taught us, is the first mystery. She understands this too. Her poems can be devotional, or political or sexy, but there is always this sense of direct address, of clarity that isn’t all that simple, that contains a kind of tenderness, a kind of playfulness that is clear and mysterious at the same time.” www.marialoveswords.com
Jan Wagner is a German poet, essayist, and translator. His collections of poems include Guerickes Sperling, Achtzehn Pasteten, Australien, and Regentonnenvariationen, for which he was awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair. The Art of Topiary is the most recent translation of Wagner’s work into English. The editor of two influential anthologies of German language poetry, including, with the poet Björn Kuhligk, Poetry of the Now: 74 Voices, Wagner is also the German translator of several British and American poets, including James Tate, Matthew Sweeney, and Charles Simic. He is the recipient of the Mondsee Poetry Award, the Anna Seghers Award, the Ernst Meister Awardfor Poetry, the Mörike Preis, and the first Arno Reinfrank Award. In 2017, he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. He lives in Berlin.
Tim Youd is a performance artist currently working on his 100 Novels Project. He will begin typing Margaret Atwoods‘ „A Handmaid’s Tale,“ on an IBM selectric typewriter during the event. He is represented by the Cristin Tierney Gallery in NYC. For more about his project please visit: www. timyoud.com