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New MindfulU Podcast episode: The Journey of a Poet with poet, Naropa Summer Writing Program faculty, and Brown University professor Eleni Sikelianos. In this episode, Eleni shares the unconventional path that led her to a life of poetry—from hitchhiking around the world to synchronistic events that brought her to Naropa for an MFA. She reflects on how her writing has transformed over the years, the beauty and importance of ecopoetics, the practice of deep listening, her thoughts on AI, and the many unexpected places she draws inspiration from. Special Guest: Eleni Sikelianos.
Humans are one species on a planet of millions of species. The literary collection Creature Needs is a project that grew out of a need to do something with grievous, anxious energy—an attempt to nourish the soul in a meaningful way, and an attempt to start somewhere specific in the face of big, earthly challenges and changes, to create a polyvocal call to arms about animal extinction and habitat loss and the ways our needs are interconnected. The book's editors, Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent, are joined here in conversation.More about the book: Creature Needs is published in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Creature Conserve. The following writers contributed new literary works inspired by scientific articles: Kazim Ali, Mary-Kim Arnold, Ramona Ausubel, David Baker, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender, Kimberly Blaeser, Oni Buchanan, Tina Cane, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Thalia Field, Ben Goldfarb, Annie Hartnett, Sean Hill, Hester Kaplan, Donika Kelly, Robin McLean, Miranda Mellis, Rajiv Mohabir, Kyoko Mori, David Naimon, Craig Santos Perez, Beth Piatote, Rena Priest, Alberto Ríos, Eléna Rivera, Sofia Samatar, Sharma Shields, Eleni Sikelianos, Maggie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Tim Sutton, Jodie Noel Vinson, Asiya Wadud, Claire Wahmanholm, Marco Wilkinson, Jane Wong.About the editors:Christopher Kondrich, poet in residence at Creature Conserve, is author of Valuing, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal. His writing has been published in The Believer, The Kenyon Review, and The Paris Review.Lucy Spelman is founder of Creature Conserve, a nonprofit dedicated to combining art with science to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation. A zoological medicine veterinarian, she teaches biology at the Rhode Island School of Design and is author of National Geographic Kids Animal Encyclopedia and coeditor of The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes.Susan Tacent, writer in residence at Creature Conserve, is a writer, scholar, and educator whose fiction has been published in Blackbird, DIAGRAM, and Tin House Online.Episode references:The Lord God Bird by Chelsea Steubayer-Scudder in Emergence MagazineThinking Like a Mountain by Jedediah Purdy in n+1Praise for the book:A thought-provoking and emotionally resonant read that stands out for its lyrical prowess and formal innovation, making it a significant contribution to contemporary literature as well as a key volume bridging the gap between the worlds of science and art.”—Library JournalCreature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Today's poem is To Do: Write Cephalopod Poem by Eleni Sikelianos. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today's poem beautifully speaks to the notion of writing toward a future self, and understands that the echoes, even, of one's breathing, are found in patterns of our thinking.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp
City Lights presents LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs, Eleni Sikelianos, and Anne Waldman reading new poetry and celebrating their three new books of poetry from Coffee House Press: "Village" by LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs – "Your Kingdom" by Eleni Sikelianos – "Bard, Kinetic" by Anne Waldman. This event was originally broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Peter Maravelis. You can purchase copies of "Village" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/general-poetry/village-4/ "Your Kingdom" here: https://citylights.com/general-poetry/your-kingdom/ And "Bard, Kinetic" here: https://citylights.com/general-poetry/bard-kinetic/ To learn more about the authors, visit: https://citylights.com/events/coffee-house-press-extravaganza-with-latasha-nevada-diggs-eleni-sykelianos-and-anne-waldman/ Coffee House Press creates new spaces for audiences and artists to interact, inspiring readers and enriching communities by expanding the definition of what literature is, what it can do, and who it belongs to. They are one of the nation's leading independent literary publisher, and demonstrate a vision for the future of literature through innovative off-the-page programming that broadens and deepens literature's relevance to the world. Visit https://coffeehousepress.org/ This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation
City Lights in conjunction with Naropa University and Nightboat Books present Anne Waldman with Emma Gomis, joined by Alan Gilbert, Cedar Sigo, and Eleni Sikelianos, celebrating the publication of "New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive," edited by Anne Waldman with Emma Gomis and published by Nightboat Books. This event was originally broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Peter Maravelis. You can purchase copies of "New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/story-anthologies/new-weathers-poetics-from-the-naropa-a/ Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, literary curator, cultural activist, has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with "Marriage: A Sentence," "Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble," "Manatee/Humanity," and "Gossamurmur," all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus "The Lovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment" (Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist “cultural intervention” taking on war and patriarchy which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. Recent books include: "Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Born" (Coffee House 2016) and "Trickster Feminism" (Penguin, 2018). She has been deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publishers Weekly for her ethos as a poetic investigator and cultural activist, and was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. She has also been a recipient of numerous honors for her work including The Shelley Award for Poetry (from the Poetry Society of America), a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Elizabeth Kray Award from Poets House, NYC in 2019. She was one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, and its Director a number of years and then went on to found The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Diana di Prima in1974 and went on to create its celebrated MFA Program. She has continued to work with the Kerouac School as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of its Summer Writing Program. During the global pandemic she and co-curator Jeffrey Pethybridge have created the online “Carrier Waves” iteration of the famed Summer Writing Program. She is the editor of "The Beat Book" and co-editor of "Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action," and "Beats at Naropa" and most recently, "Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics." She is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. Emma Gomis is a Catalan American poet, essayist, editor and researcher. She is the cofounder of Manifold Press. Her texts have been published in Denver Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, and Asymptote among others and her chapbook "Canxona" is forthcoming from b l u s h lit. She was selected by Patricia Spears Jones as The Poetry Project's 2020 Brannan Poetry Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she was also the Anne Waldman fellowship recipient, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in criticism and culture at the University of Cambridge. To learn more about the other participants, visit: https://citylights.com/events/on-new-weathers-poetics-from-the-naropa-archive/ This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation
This week: Thomas Chapin; Angelika Niescier; Maria Bethânia; Anthony Braxton; Nathamuni Brothers; Nor Dar w. Lakshmi Shankar; Mahmoud al-Idrissi; Sam Rivers; Sanaa Marahati; Abade al Johar; M'pongo Love; James Emery; Youlou Mabiala; Mamady Keita; Eleni Sikelianos; Tinariwen; Gal Costa; Wuta Mayi; Kékélé, much more... Always FREE of charge to listen, stream, download, and subscribe. iTUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/conference-of-the-birds-podcast/id478688580?mt=2 Playlists via WRFI: https://www.wrfi.org/localprograms/conferenceofthebirds/ or via blogspot: http:confbirds.blogspot.com or VIA SPINITRON: https://spinitron.com/m/playlist/view/9931765 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/conferenceofthebirds/?ref=bookmarks Contact: confbirds@gmail.com
This podcast contains nearly the entirety of the works in the print edition of FENCE Magazine 35, Winter/Spring Issue of 2019. Writers include Edgar Garcia, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Tess Brown-Lavoie, Laura Sims, Eleni Sikelianos, Leah Dworkin, Rachel Levitsky, Christopher Patrick Miller, Blake Butler, Tamara Barnett-Herrin, Nora Toomey, Ji Yoon Lee, David Blair, David Alejandro Hernandez, Nawal Nader French, Jenessa VanZutphen, Robin Clarke, Brian Kim Stefans, Wendy C. Ortiz, Jesse Nathan, Abby Minor, Gary Lundy, Margaret Johnson, Amy Lawless, Emmett Gallagher, Matthew Moore, Steven Alvarez, Sam Truitt, Josh Kalscheur, Joanna Fuhrman, Tasia Trevino, James Tate, Nicole Burdick, Desirée Alvarez, Nat Suffrin, Alison Wellford, Liana Jahan Imam, Bonnie Chau, Steffan Triplett, Dan Chu, Serena Solin, Erica Hunt, Timothy Otte, Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, and BC Griffith. Music provided by the permission of Matmos. This audiobook/podcast has been gathered and assembled by Jason Zuzga. He is one of the print journal's two Other/Nonfiction Editors along with Sarah Falkner.In continuous publication since 1998, FENCE is a biannual print journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism that redefines the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. FENCE also publishes a range of books and additional digital content, such as Fence Streaming Posts, Afrosonics/Mythscience, Elecment and The Constant Critic. FENCE is committed to publishing from the outside and the inside of established communities of writing, seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and bedevil all the systems that bring new writing to light. FENCE is edited by Rebecca Wolff. For FENCE's COMPLETE MISSION STATEMENT and FULL LIST OF EDITORIAL STAFF: click and scroll down.Support the show (https://www.fenceportal.org/subscribe/)
"Those are some slow growing fruits." "Lest you be a witch, figure out what a clit is." Beer: Pineapple and Lemon Tritonia Gose from Creature Comforts (Athens, Georgia) Poems: "HISTORIES: A Woman Was Constructed in 20 oz. Antiquity, Certainly She Existed" by Eleni Sikelianos (Earliest Worlds, published by Coffee House Press in 2001, taken from her first book Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing) Girl Crush: Natasha Lyonne (always and forever but particularly in Russian Doll) Also: We mentioned show notes in this episode, but the poem itself isn't online for us to link to, and we aren't ready to navigate the legal grey area that is posting the full text of a poem. If future poems are online for everyone to read, we'll share those links. Bonus points for catching words we pronounced wrong. Cheers!
This month, Recorded live at Literati: Will Schwalbe discusses the genesis of his latest book (about, well, books of course), Books for Living; poet Eleni Sikelianos speaks with fellow poet Raymond McDaniel; novelist Katie Kitamura discusses her debut novel with fellow novelist Natalie Bakopoulos; and Emily Fridlund reads from her debut novel A History of Wolves. Also, bookseller Tara talks to Sam about maudlin go-to recommendations. Produced by: Mike & Hilary Gustafson, with help from Mairead Small Staid and John Ganiard Featured Track: “Orange and Red” by Pity Sex (2016, Run for Cover Records)
President Donald Trump's controversial travel ban has generated a lot of reaction in Colorado -- from approval, to fear. We hear from both sides. Then, for a Colorado curling team, the countdown to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea begins this weekend. Next, we meet an experimental poet, Eleni Sikelianos, who wants readers to tear into her new book “Make Yourself Happy” -- literally. She’s included pages that are meant to be ripped out and turned into three dimensional art. And, the story of two Colorado school districts that share a border, but are worlds apart.