653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood

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noon to six

 

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Sunday, March 16th – 2:00 pm
Ivan Arguelles, Jack Foley and Clara Hsu: a Presentation of Poetry Hotel Press

Three titles from this new press will be presented by their authors,
the poets Ivan Argüelles, Jack Foley and Clara Hsu.

Of the press and its intentions, co-publisher (with Clara Hsu)
Jack Foley puts it well indeed:

¶The point of “publication” is to make something public:  “the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.”  Walt Whitman—whom we see sitting in a chair in our own Poetry Hotel—is the patron saint of such activity: the moment when deep interiority finds its way into the world.

¶Clara Hsu and I imagine our Poetry Hotel to be the place in which such a meeting occurs. Paper? Electronic? In Whitman the word “leaves” is a pun: “leaves of grass,” but also each page of a book is a “leaf.” Our “leaves” may at times be nothing but electronic impulses, yet that moment of transformation—“The sound of the belched words of my voice loosed to the eddies of the wind”—is common to all the activities that take place at the Poetry Hotel.

¶We look for work that tells us, as Rilke (or was it Apollo?) did in a famous poem: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life”). Life-changing, transformative, interesting. “The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her introduction to Judy Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman, published by Oakland, California’s Diana Press: “but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”

— from the Poetry Hotel Press website: poetryhotelpress.com

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The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project

Our events are put on under the umbrella of the nonprofit Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (the "BBCLP"). That's how we fund our ambitious schedule of 300 or so concerts and literary events every year.

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The Independent Musicians Alliance

Gigging musicians! You have nothing to lose but your lack of a collective voice to achieve fair wages for your work!
The IMA can be a conduit for you, if you join in to make it work.

https://www.independentmusiciansalliance.org/

Read more here - Andy Gilbert's Feb 25 article about the IMA from KQED's site

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