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ART OF POETRY: POG, the energetic, nearly new poetry group in town, is staging one of its typically boundary-breaking events this Saturday night. It's a poetry reading, yes, by out-of-town luminaries Clayton Eshleman and Jerome Rothenberg, but it's also a visual arts slide-lecture by Tucson sculptor Alex Garza. And it's taking place in an art studio in South Tucson, way outside the geographical borders of the usual poetry stomping grounds. The place, Los Artes Studios, 23 W. 27th St., is a sprawling mosaic tile workshop just west of South Tucson's main drag of Sixth Avenue. (Look for the paintings on the exterior walls.) It's here that Garza helps run a remarkable arts program for teenagers who've gotten into trouble or who are otherwise deemed at risk. The artists train the kids in the myriad techniques of tile art, teaching them to design, cut the squares of tile into tiny pieces, and then re-assemble the bits into durable compositions. (On a recent visit to the studios, we were much taken with a ceramic tile low-rider, pictured in extreme perspective, ready to zoom right out of the flat space of the artwork.) Once the kids are equipped with techniques, they're let loose onto real-life public art commissions, where their ideas are made flesh, so to speak. Talk about your self-esteem enhancement! Plus, the kids get some job skills they can really use. On Saturday evening, Garza will give a slide lecture about this fine project and about his own work. He'll describe his sculptures in wood and stone, and his public-art commissions in Chicago and Tucson. Poet Eshleman has written 11 volumes of poetry, including Indiana, Fracture, The Name Encanyoned River: Selected Poems 1960-1985, and Under World Arrest--all published by Black Sparrow Press. That work, notes POG spokesman Charles Alexander, is in a "stunning lyrical mode." But, like Rothenberg, Eshleman does more for the field than compose his own poems. Over the years he's been known as editor of two of the leading literary journals: Caterpillar, from 1967 to 1973; and Sulfur, since 1981. He's translated Antonin Artaud, Cesar Vallejo and others. He's won the National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. "His work as editor of Caterpillar and Sulfur has done no less than usher into our culture a new writing," Alexander notes in an email to Media Mix. "Sulfur's subtitle is 'The Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art.' Whole and on fire, I'd say."
"He brings a lifetime of commitment to the avant garde, which for him goes back quite a long way," Alexander writes. "He's been fascinated with Dadaism and much more. (He has) also a commitment to global poetics, and he has opened many doors for all of us in this way." The free mixed-media POG event begins at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 14, at Los Artes Studios, 23 W. 27th St. Call 620-1626 for more information. PRIMAVERA HITS THE BIG SCREEN: The month-long, multi-media celebration of women in the arts, Primavera, projects into the cinematic realm with two screenings this week at The Screening Room, 127 E. Congress St. The local poetry group Womanspeak offers a program by the same name at 8 p.m. Friday, March 13. The Womanspeak screening is the brainchild of group member (and Doublewide Showroom collaborator) Debra Wright, and will feature eight Tucson poets, women all, reading original works interspersed with five abstract film-shorts by national independent filmmakers. The collage of live spoken-word and filmed images aims to illustrate how cinema works as abstract expression. Admission is $2. And on Saturday, March 14, French filmmaker and part-year Tucson resident Marianne Dissard's Low y Cool celebrates a proper local screening at 6, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Filmed in October 1997, and first seen at a musical pre-screening celebration at the Club Congress, Dissard's documentary of the camaradas low-rider bicycle club of South Tucson has been described as "a surprisingly sincere journey of baroque assimilation and media etiquette in South Tucson."
"What's interesting about the film is that as she started
shooting with them, it created a lot of tension in the Chicano
community," says Arizona Media Arts Center director Giulio
Scalinger. "So the film sort of takes on a life of its own.
While it's a documentary of the camaradas, it also shows
the conflict of a documentarian going into a community...which
is an ongoing struggle." Admission is $4. For information
on either screening, call 622-2262.
A full event schedule of Primavera: A Celebration of Women in the Arts is available online in the March 5 issue of The Weekly (www.tucsonweekly.com).
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Rothenberg has written no fewer than 50 books of poetry. He's
edited some groundbreaking anthologies of poetry, including Technicians
of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium, a two-volume
work recently published by University of California Press. A professor
of visual arts and literature at UC San Diego, he's also a translator
and performer of poetry.
