6-8PM, Thursday, August 1, 2024
Catharine Clark Gallery presents an evening of poetry in dialogue with visual art. Beginning at 6:00 PM, guests can experience Amy Trachtenberg's solo exhibition 'Listening Chamber' before the poetry readings commence at 6:30 PM. Acclaimed poets Forrest Gander, Norma Cole, and Robert Glück will each present a 12-15 minute reading, featuring poetry that resonates with themes in Trachtenberg's visual art. The evening also features artist Ashwini Bhat, discussing her contributions to the concurrent group exhibition 'The Sky You Were Born Under: Sharing Stories Through Abstraction.' This rare confluence of literary and visual art offers a nuanced perspective on contemporary artistic dialogue.
Amy Trachtenberg is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes painting, collage, sculpture, language and installation. Utilizing a range of techniques and materials, there is an awareness of natural phenomenon and ideas about disputed memory. While including what exists from the found world, she explores relationships between color, space, architecture and the body. Beyond their abstract leanings, the tension between politics and poetics is a driving force.
Ashwini Bhat: Bhat's interdisciplinary practice reflects an interest in ecology, place, and a metaphysical understanding of nature and self. Her new sculpture series, "Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais" (2024), builds on earlier work that responds to the topography of Marin County and her quest for belonging as an immigrant to the United States. Bhat explains that “Circumambulation is a ritual of moving around a sacred object, a ceremonial practice in Hinduism and Buddhism. Since 2020, my partner, the poet and writer Forrest Gander, and I have circumambulated Mt. Tamalpais, retracing the steps of poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen, who completed their own clockwise hike around the mountain in 1965 as a ritual meditation."
Norma Cole is a poet, visual artist and translator. Her books of poetry include FATE NEWS, Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Jean Daive’s White Decimal, and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited and translated by Cole). Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum. Her film, “By the Turning Bridge,” has been shown at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California. A book of drawings, called DRAWINGS, came out from Further Other Book Works. Her new book of poetry, Alibi Lullaby, will appear from Omnidawn Publishing, 2025.
Born in the Mojave Desert, Forrest Gander is a writer/translator with degrees in geology and literature. He’s received the Pulitzer Prize and Best Translated Book Award. Gander’s has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His book Twice Alive focuses on human and ecological intimacies. In October 2024, New Directions will bring out his long poem on the desert, Mojave Ghost: a Novel-Poem.
Robert Glück is the author of the story collections, Elements and Denny Smith; the novels, Jack the Modernist, Margery Kempe, and About Ed; and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In Commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. He made a film, Aliengnosis, with Dean Smith; an artist book, Parables, with Jose Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero Díaz; and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book of paintings by Frank Moore. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, he edited the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic and associate editor at Lapis Press. He served as director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor. Glück is a potter as well as a writer, and he has shown his ceramics in the USA and in Europe, most recently at Treize Galerie in Paris.
