Just in case you're too lazy to click on this here Soon Productions link, here's info on the upcoming reading:

SOON Productions Presents a Poetry Reading featuring Elizabeth Willis and Peter Gizzi.

Ithaca, NY, 3/12/05: Poets Elizabeth Willis and Peter Gizzi will be reading their own poetry at the State of the Art Gallery at 120 W. State Street in downtown Ithaca on Saturday, March 12 at 8:00 PM.The reading is free and open to the public.

Elizabeth Willis was born in Baharain and grew up in the American midwest. She holds a Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo and teaches at Weslyan University in Middletown, CT. She has published three books of poems: Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), The Human Abstract (Penguin 1995: National Poetry Series winner), and Second Law (Berkeley: Avenue B, 1993). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, The Germ, How2, and others.

Peter Gizzi was born in 1959 and grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His poetry collections include Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003); Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); and Periplum (Avec, 1992). In fall of 2004 Salt Publishing in England reprinted his first book with 60 pages of early and uncollected work as Periplum and other poems (1987-92). He has been awarded artist grants from The Fund for Poetry, Rex Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and most recently, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. In 1994 he received the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. His editing projects have included o×blêk: a journal of language arts, the Exact Change Yearbook (Carcanet 1995), and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998).

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc., through a grant it has received from The NY State Council on the Arts.

Also of great interest to poetry-lovers in these parts has to be this reading by Norma Cole happening on Thursday:

NORMA COLE
poet and translator

Reads from her Work

THURSDAY, March 10, 1:30 PM
Guerlac Room
AD White House

(Co-sponsored by The Department of Comparative Literature, The John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, The Society for the Humanities, The Romance Studies Department)



Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her most recent work includes A little a & a (Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles 2002) BURNS (Belladonna Books, New York 2002), Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn Press, Richmond CA 2002). SCOUT, a text/image work, is forthcoming from Krupskaya Editions in CD-ROM format. She is currently working on a new book, Collective Memory, which will come out from Granary Books (2006). Among her poetry books are MARS, MOIRA and Contrafact. Recent translation work includes Danielle Collobert's Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah's The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen, Anne Portugal’s Nude and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. She has edited special issues of both Chain and Avec, and with Stacy Doris co-edited a translation issue of Raddle Moon. Cole has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, as well as awards from The Fund for Poetry. "Poetics of Vertigo," Cole's George Oppen Memorial Lecture, won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. Cole and Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins won the Purchase Award for their photo/text collaboration, "They Flatter Almost Recognize." Other collaborations include “A Library Book” with poet Michael Palmer, “We Address” with painter Amy Trachtenberg, and Catasters, a text/paste up collaboration with visual artist Jess. Residencies include the Center for Poetry and Translation at Djerassi, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, the Fondation Royaumont in France, Louisiana State University, the Kootenay School, the Naropa Institute, and Brown University. She teaches at San Francisco State University, the University of San Francisco and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

And not leastly, this weekend Cornell is hosting a conference on translation featuring a keynote address by Anne Carson called "Variation on the Right to Remain Silent" and a paper by Leslie Scalapino discussing her book Crowd and not evening or light. Should be wicked awesome.

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Finally made the leap and unsubscribed from the Poetics List, inspired to do so by Tim Yu and his passionate and dead-on indictment of the list's slide into a bulletin board mixed with racist collections of bellybutton lint. I'm done with it. If there's another more vital and interesting poetry list out there, I'd like to hear about it; but for now, I'm content to give my "Delete" key a rest.