Arts Listings

San-Francisco-born, Los Angeles-based poet and translator Paul Vangelisti will give a rare East Bay reading from his new book, Days Shadows Pass (Green Integer 129, Los Angeles), and share the rostrum with “multimedia fiction” writer Debra Di Blasi and her The Jiri Chronicles (FC2 Books/U. Alabama Press), part of her sprawling “transmedia” project of over 400 individual works taking many forms, 7:30 p.m. Monday at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Ave. Admission is free. 

“Both writers are on the edges of the avant-garde,” said Owen Hill, programmer of the Monday at Moe’s series. “They’re not particularly members of any group, and are unusual, sounding different to the ear than much experimental writing. The influence of the Italian Neo-Avantgarde on Paul’s poetry gives it a different sound, more musical than we’re used to. Debra’s work is more lyrical, too, than most contemporary prose. They’re both different, yet both are, I think, easier to pick up on for those who don’t normally read experimental writing.” 

Debra Di Blasi is based in the Midwest, although she lived in San Francisco in the late ’80s, contributing to SOMA Magazine. Edward David Hamilton of the Iowa Review coined the “multimedia fiction” monicker for her writing, which the New York Times Book Review characterized as “clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor.” Previous books include novellas Drought and Say What You Like (New Directions), which won the Thorpe-Menn Book Award, and short stories Players of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press). Di Blasi founded Jaded Ibis, a transmedia corporation, and also produces work in poetry, music, painting, video, visual art, websites, audio interviews, clothing, jewelry and, most recently, “celebrity scents.” 

Paul Vangelisti was born in SF’s North Beach, brought up in the Marina, attended USF and Trinity College in Dublin, and has lived in Los Angeles since 1968. He’s published over 20 books of poetry and almost as many of translation, as well as co-editing Invisible City/Red Hill Press with John McBride (of Berkeley) in the ’70s. 

Currently, he edits the New Review of Literature and heads the Creative Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design. His visits to San Francisco are called “elusive,” though recently he was heard reading Jack Spicer’s poetry with his co-editor Luigi Ballerini at New College during a program of readings by San Francisco contributors to their remarkable bilingual anthology of postwar American poetry, in volumes city by city, published by Mondadori in Italy, Nuova poesia americana. 

Days Shadows Pass is “a different book from my others,” said Vangelisti, “Only two of which are made up of short poems, the others being longer work or long sequences. It looks elegiac—several poems are inspired by, dedicated to, dead poet and artist friends who were important to me—but they’re really about exile. Not exile from anything, but towards a hope for meaning. In the elegiac sense, they’re full of different forms of constraint—and we live in a time of absolute constraint. The only way I can approach a political question like this is to deal with constraint as a poet, perpetrate poetry like perpetrating a crime. To situate the strength of poetic language in a given time and place—that is exile, my natural position.” 

Sound of hard freight before dawn 

a few lights and chill in the arroyo, 

considering the lie of the strangers 

and later on the flock of pigeons 

at noon soaring and tumbling 

silver then white then sunlight 

against the weight of air. 

—Paul Vangelisti 

an excerpt from “Absolutely Like Spring,” Days Shadows Pass