SpokenWord Paris

BENJAMIN ALESHIRE is based in New Orleans, and travels the world as a poet-for-hire, composing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter in the street. His work has appeared recently in Iowa Review, Boston Review, El Mundo (Spain), NEON (Germany), Havana Times (Cuba) and on SinoVision TV (China). His artist-book of visual poems, Currency, is now in its second edition, and he recently released an audio-chapbook of poems with sound collage. Ben serves as assistant poetry editor to the Green Mountains Review, and has received awards from the Vermont Arts Council, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of New Orleans.

www.poetforhire.org

John Jack Jackie (Edward) Cooper comes from New York. Currently alive and living in Paris, he has — not necessarily in the following order — been a puppet (entirely in self-defense), a sometime pauper, always wanted to be a pirate, been frequently a pawn (though, for the most part, unwillingly), abdicated even the thought of ever becoming king, and is now settled in the one constant role left to him and endured throughout — a poet. He is the creator of These Are Aphorithms (https://aphorithms.blogspot.com), author of Ten (Poets Wear Prada, 2012), Ten … More (Poets Wear Prada, 2016), and translator of Wax Women, with French texts of the original poems by Jean-Pierre Lemesle (International Art Office: Paris, 1985). His work has appeared widely, in print and online. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he is editor and co-publisher of Poets Wear Prada, a small press based in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Sophia Lucia is an artist from Chicago, IL, USA. She received a BA in Performing Arts at University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently studying théâtre at Cours Florent in Paris. Sophia has been writing ever since she was a child- poetry, short stories, songs, pros, etc. Throughout high school and University she worked (as a waitress, naturally, and,) as a stage actress, performing in classical and contemporary plays throughout Chicago. For the past couple years, she has been mostly interested in performing her own materials. Chiefly, she creates from her stream of consciousness. Making sense of it, or not. She believes that art is alive, and in turn, a performance can never arrive same way twice. It is a collaboration with the space, the audience, the ambiance, the day of the week, what she had for breakfast that morning… The culmination of her creations is entitled, Freak Show Cabaret! (w/ free samples). Next Monday, Sophia Lucia Presents: iNtErNeT – un petit goût du Freak Show Cabaret. For more details, please attend the party!  Everyone is always invited. #dontmissthismeal

Cecilia Woloch is the author of six collections of poems and a novel. She is an NEA Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in the Best American Poetry series. The text of her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, has been the basis for multi-lingual, multi-media performances across the U.S. and Europe. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in rural Kentucky, she has traveled the world as a teacher and writer.

”Celia Dropkin’s poems are erotically frank and emotionally unabashed, deeply engendered, relentlessly truthful. Like songs, they are terse and musical and carefully constructed to explode with maximum impact. They reveal the relationships between women and men in a way that was unprecedented in Yiddish literature. Although they were mostly written in the 1920s and 1930s, they feel utterly contemporary, which is why we are just now catching up with her.” – Edward Hirsch, writing in the foreward to The Acrobat: The Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin. More here.

Celia Dropkin’s poems will be read by her granddaughter, Francis Dropkin, who just happens to be the reason why Celia was smiling so much when this photo was taken – she was holding baby Francis.

SpokenWord theme – Grandmothers

Win Harms is a poet who thought that meant she could drink herself to death in Paris. Instead, she is the rebel-in-chief of an underground press, Rough Night Press and edits Rx Magazine. Originally from somewhere in the middle of nowhere, USA, she moved to a French town where she heard Sylvia Plath lived. She then followed her heart to Amsterdam, where she is the mistress of mayhem of the underground poetry scene hosting readings and performing rebel acts of light. Win used to sell her Ritalin to cheerleaders and has been a decade without an address. She published a few books of teen angst poetry that now she doesn’t care for and she is often misidentified as a feminist. Let her guide you through the rough night of the soul.

https://roughnightpress.com/

https://winharms.com/

Henrik Aeshna/Eros en Feu is a multimedia artist, poet, polyglot translator living in Paris. He is the founder and editor of Paris Poets, Tsunami Gang (wild art & poetry magazine) and Paris Surréaliste, the nomad poet/fire thief of the Great Wild Night of language where the Verb is born from an exploding star. Poet of wine-stained journals and nuits blanches sewn with orgasms and silences, unsent letters to dawn. Notebooks streaked with apocalypstick and graffiti, seismic shifts, unknown voices, violent tattoos, purple scars. Scars as proverbs. Wandering poet of rock gigs and jazz joints. Beach bum and dandy poet of cafés and parks, hotel rooms, opium dens and cul-de-sacs, endless plateaux and madhouses (where “modern plague doctors transform Ayahuasca visionaries into Abilify zombies and wind-up turtle men”). Electric poet of dreams and violated innocence, plastic prophets and digital alienation. Shaman-poet of chaos and Amour Fou. Imagine a hypnotic assemblage of Isadora Duncan or Vaslav Nijinsky dancing slow-motion to the Sex Pistols while the ghost of Tyler Durden, such as a Loa in trance, convulses around speaking in tongues and drawing symbolic veves on the ground, reciting the language of the birds, unveiling « the secret of flowers and floods ». Incandescent poetry, visceral and hallucinating. Henrik Aeshna’s presence is an invitation to insurrection, – resurrection of Magic & Wonder from the hypocrisy-reality show of our time. A daily war which often grinds down and reduces the artist (the sublime creator or Sacred Clown from faraway tribes and shores) to a cornered cardboard scourge, a ‘knocked out philosopher’ (lo-fi and off-key) bleeding a philosophy torn to pieces – the scream of the dragonfly: a last liberating laughter, a cicada’s last cry; – and that is their tragedy, their beauty, their contradiction, their truth, their challenge. Nevermind! http://www.parispoets.org

Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. She is presently on a European performance tour — with stops in Dublin, Padova, Forli, Menton, London, Paris and Venice at the Biennale.