Tag: Poetry

How To Exi(s)t: Truong Tran & Mimi Tempestt at Beyond Baroque

A neurodivergent gay war refugee navigates academia, racism, and indeed life itself as a poet, artist, and teacher

How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir is an experiment in nonlinear autobiography by the author of the American Book Award-winning Book of the Other, Truong Tran. Poet and scholar Mimi Tempestt will join the author for a reading & conversation in The Wanda Coleman Theater.

Beginning in the present–at a writing residency in the aftermath of this success–How to Exi(s)t moves back and forth in time, in bursts of brief poetic essays grouped by theme. The duality of the title thematizes a dilemma at the heart of the book: how does a poet separate himself from the academic career to which he’s devoted his professional life and what does being a teacher mean outside of it?

Unpeeling the layers between present and past, Tran proceeds in reverse as he explores crucial events and figures in his life, including the reaction to the publication of Book of the Other, the dynamics of whiteness and power framing his repeated rejection for a tenure track position, the profound effect of his dyslexia on his evolution as a writer and artist, the repercussions of being outed by a newspaper after winning an undergrad poetry prize, traumatic episodes growing up in the Vietnamese diaspora in San Jose, and complicated relationships with both his family and his chosen family. Attempting to fathom these experiences and connect them to his present self, Tran examines and reexamines key details rather than dispensing with them in neat anecdotes, reflecting the volatile process of imagination and memory.

Unsparing, even caustic in its instance on racism as a dominant note of American life, but marked by surprising tenderness and humor, How to Exi(s)t is a compelling portrayal of Tran’s pedagogical philosophy as well as an interrogation of a poetic language that conceals as much as it reveals.

About the authors

Truong Tran is a poet, visual artist, and teacher born in Saigon, Vietnam. His book-length poetry project Book of the Other: Small in Comparison (2021) received an American Book Award in 2022. He is the author of seven other collections, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words, 100 words (with Damon Potter), and Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking (with Damon Potter). He has also written the children’s book Going Home Coming Home and an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems and books have been translated into Spanish, French, and Dutch. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant, and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting, and even gardening, are his ways of thinking through the conscious of the times we live in. Truong lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Northeastern University, Oakland.

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a M.A. in Literature from Mills College, and a Ph.D in Literature & Creative/Critical Writing from UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press (2020). Her second book, The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals, is published with City Lights (2023). She is currently finishing an essay collection, Wanda, Why Aren’ t You Dead?, on the Los Angeles literary icon Wanda Coleman. Her works can be found in Foglifter, The Brooklyn Rail, and at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Fiction & Memoir Generative Surge

A generative prose workshop with Dylan Landis

For writers at all levels who wish to advance work in progress or launch something new. This workshop is structured around a timing and intention-setting method that helps writers work in highly productive bursts with enhanced focus. Prompts will be provided to those who find them useful. During a break, we’ll also engage a deep relaxation method that segues, for each writer, into a silent interview with a chosen character (fictional or real), deepening access to our own subconscious material.

About the Facilitator

Dylan Landis is the author of List of All Possible Desires and Normal People Don’t Live Like This, both novels in stories, and Rainey Royal, a novel and New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and her essays in Harper’s Magazine and Modern Love. She lives in Los Angeles.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the workshop, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Workshop attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our workshops, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Palm Tree Punk Book Launch + Open Mic Night

Celebrate the book launch of Palm Tree Punk, M. Lopes da Silva’s debut poetry book from Alien Buddha Press, with a night of food, fun, and poetry at the North Figueroa Bookshop! Karla Lamb will be hosting our open mic, so be sure to sign up on the list when you arrive if you want to read! Featured poets Tiffany Michelle Brown and Eve Harms will be reading. Free snacks, beverages, and handmade stickers will be provided. Book signings too!

Double Book Launch: Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman

An evening of poetry and non-fiction at Beyond Baroque

Join us for an evening celebrating new books by Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman in The Wanda Coleman Theater at Beyond Baroque.

Robert Hass’s A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World, published by Copper Canyon Press, traces a literary and ecological lineage through poets, writers, landscapes, and traditions. In A Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography—from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage.

Brenda Hillman’s Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation, published in the Wesleyan Poetry Series, brings together meditations on time, domestic spaces, childhood, family, and non-human life. Each of Brenda Hillman’s books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century.

Doors Open: 7:00 PM I Readings: 7:30 PM

About the authors

Robert Hass—poet, critic, and teacher—is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics until his retirement in 2019.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Poet Film Stage: Double Exposure

The third Poet Film Stage production at Beyond Baroque

Lobby opens 7:00 PM I Theatre doors 7:20 PM I Performance 7:30 PM

A mysterious suitcase moves through a cinematic world of poetry and performance.

Double Exposure, the third Poet Film Stage production at Beyond Baroque, brings poetry into dialogue with film, live performance, and an original score.

Created and directed by Kathleen Florence and Rich Ferguson, the 80-minute live production features California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, Los Angeles actors, performers, poets and live percussion by Butch Norton.

Opening film

The production opens with a short film featuring Amy Raasch, Harry E. Northup, Rich Ferguson, Benin Lemus and Joseph Paulson, directed by Kathleen Florence.

Live Percussion Score by Butch Norton

Butch Norton is a Los Angeles drummer and percussionist. A founding member of Eels, Norton has toured and recorded with Lucinda Williams, Tracy Chapman, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Michael Penn, Tracy Bonham and others. For Double Exposure, Norton performs an original live score that responds in real time to the film, poetry and action on stage.

Featured Performers

Joseph Paulson and Amy Raasch return to Poet Film Stage following their performances in Outlaws & Angels. Paulson is known for his recent performance and lead role in Enemy of the People at the Odyssey Theatre, as well as film and television roles including Mad Men, Catch-22 and I Am the Night. Raasch is a poet, actor, performer, director, and musician, and a recipient of the Linda J. Albertano Poetry Fellowship from Beyond Baroque.

California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick opens and closes the production. Actor and poet Harry E. Northup, whose film career includes Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and The Silence of the Lambs, makes a special appearance in the opening film and on stage. He is the author of 13 poetry books and host of Harry’s Poetry Hour at MPTF.

Corinne Conley, whose career spans film, television and stage, makes a special appearance.

Also appearing: Kim Shuck, Conney Williams, Suzanne Lummis, S.A. Griffin, Michelle Bitting, Rich Ferguson, Luivette Resto, Pam Ward, Benin Lemus, AJ Luxton, Dennis Cruz, jimmy vega, Nicelle Davis, Elaine Mintzer, Dig Wayne and Kathleen Florence.

Cast in Order of Appearance:

Lee Herrick

Harry E. Northup

Kim Shuck

Conney Williams

Suzanne Lummis

Joseph Paulson

Corinne Conley

S.A. Griffin

Michelle Bitting

Rich Ferguson

Luivette Resto

Pam Ward

Benin Lemus

AJ Luxton

Dennis Cruz