Tebot Bach Series
Additionally, Tebot Bach sponsors poetry readings and writing workshops for schools Kindergarten through college and marginalized venues such as homeless shelters, battered women's shelters, nursing homes, senior citizen daycare centers, hospitals, AIDS hospices, and correctional facilities. Participating poets include: Photographer: Bob Lanphar | Webmaster: Tom Thomas Reading Note: The Reading for May 18th will be located in Humanities 101. Follow the path to the grassy quad area. You will be facing a two-story building. The event will take place in the room on the lower level. Aby Kaupang
Tebot Bach Presents Aby Kaupang Winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award, 2011 Introduced by Gail Wronsky, Judge Saturday, May 19th 3:00 PM The Ruskin Art Club, 800 South Plymouth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90005 Wine and Cheese Reception Follows $5 Suggested Donation Aby Kaupang, author of Absence is Such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011) and Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2008), has had poems appear in FENCE, La Petite Zine, Dusie, Verse, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Parthenon West, PANK, Aufgabe, 14 Hills, Interim, Caketrain, & others. She holds both an MFA in Creative writing as well as a Master’s of Occupational Therapy from Colorado State University. Patricia Bibby was a beginning poet whose poems expressed her love of life while living with cancer. Her kindness, humor, and optimism inspired the love of many new friends in the poetry community. She died in 2004, at 43, without having been published. In naming the First Book Award after Patricia Bibby, Tebot Bach honors the aspirations and spirit of all beginning poets. PRAISE FOR Absence Is Such a Transparent House Aby Kaupang's poetry demonstrates the effects of passion and will as they collide with the brutalities of the world. In writing that is often startling and idiosyncratic, Kaupang surges to the core of the painful paradoxes that beset all of us; this poet doesn't so much work to resolve contradictions as to force new and courageous energy from their irresolvability. Speaking of loss, Simone Weil states that the presence of an absent or deceased person is "imaginary, but his presence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing." Absence is such a Transparent House is the poetic enactment of this hard won insight. Brave, uncanny, and deeply felt, this book balances the delicacies of attention with the fortitude of continuing exploration. Absence is insatiable, its boundless appetite preys upon the imagination in ways that language can only hint at. Which is perhaps why poetry is a so apt a vessel for responding to absence: its bare branch lines, its chapel whispers, its embodied silences encapsulate loss in ways other forms of art cannot. Aby Kaupang's poems are inhabited by spirits; they literally speak in tongues; they are "a tender haunting in the glass beneath the waves.". Anyone who has borne grief will recognize its teethmarks here: grief not just as an idea in the mind, but gnawing at the body, the place where it is most keenly felt. This poetry is of spirit, sound, and naming. Its efforts are worthy, visible; inscribed with lit-up delicacy on the surface tension holding the subject and her subjects. Love, vision, god, death, surrender. . . surprise! "tragedy too might die/silent rim//silent Eye—" |
