Project Title: Collective Memory
Recipient Organization: The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives
Fiscal Sponsor: San Francisco State University Foundation
Lead Artist: Norma Cole
Genre and Date Awarded: Literary Arts, June 2004
To be Completed: June 2006

In honor of the Poetry Center’s fiftieth anniversary, the organization is collaborating with acclaimed poet and visual artist Norma Cole to create a site-specific gallery installation, opening at December 11, 2004 through April 16, 2005, and a fine press book of text and graphic images.  Together, the Center and Cole will create a new work aimed at exploring and embodying the creative process involved in making poetry.  They write, “The project will openly demonstrate that poetry making is not an insular and isolated activity, acceptable as long as it’s on the perimeter of society, but an integrated art form based in communal exchange, from which we need to learn.”

The cornerstone of the project is a retrospective exhibit, POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954–2004, celebrating 50 years of art by poets, poet-artist collaborations, and artists in poet circles, to be hosted at the California Historical Society.  The exhibit will include a 3-part installation designed by Cole that will take the form of a series of vastly different “writer’s rooms”— Living Room, circa 1950s, rich with stimulation and content; Archives Tableau, evoking the American Poetry Archives circa the 1980s, when housed in a basement room on the San Francisco State campus; and House of Hope, a suspended sculpture (made with Cole’s assistant Suzanne Stein) collecting 426 quotes from other writers, gathered from the artist’s notebooks over the past 20 years.

In these spaces, over the course of 17 weeks, Cole will create a new work of poetry titled Collective Memory, working both on site and off—inviting, responding to, and incorporating into her text the comments, perceptions, and contributions of visitors.  Aspects of the installation will change over time, providing an evolving and adaptable creative space, altered by the objects and people moving through it. 

The Poetry Center will document the evolution of the exhibit and the poet’s new work during the course of the installation.  The culminating product will be a fine-press book titled Collective Memory, published by Granary Books, spotlighting in text and graphic images the creative process of writing poetry within a variety of environments.  Poetry Center director Steve Dickison notes, “The work (installation, writing, and book) will bring the historical focus of both our 50th anniversary and the California Historical Society gallery exhibit very much into the present tense, and demonstrate vividly the vitality of creative, interactive, and collaborative/communal art-making processes related to poetry.”

Norma Cole’s work as poet, literary translator of many works into English, visual artist, teacher, and editor has been recognized and publicly acclaimed over the last 15 years.  Part of that acclaim derives from others acknowledging the exceptional range and acuity of her work, and her openness to traditions and practices, artists and writings, radically divergent from her own.  This project is a departure from her earlier work, extending what has been primarily a written, literary practice to the expanded dimensions of a public space, opening the possibilities for more active exchange with others.

Based at San Francisco State University, the Poetry Center presents a widely diverse and publicly acclaimed literary program.  Its taped archives of literary events are, after the Library of Congress, the largest such public collection in the United States.

Norma Cole

Books of Poetry (Selected)

• SCOUT, text/image work in CD ROM format, Krupskaya (2004)
• A little a & a, Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles (2002)
• BURNS, Belladonna Books, New York, New York (2002)
• SPINOZA IN HER YOUTH, Omnidawn Press, Richmond, California (2002)
• Stay Songs, for Stanley Whitney, Bill Maynes Gallery, New York (2001)
• The Vulgar Tongue, a+bend press, San Francisco (2000)
• Spinoza in Her Youth, A.Bacus, Elmwood, Connecticut (1999)
• Desire & its Double, Instress, Saratoga, California (1998)
• Quotable Gestures, CREAPHIS/un bureau sur l’Atlantique, France (1998)
• MARS, CREAPHIS/un bureau sur l’Atlantique, France (1997)
• Capture des lettres et vies du Joker,  Format américain/Bureau sur l’Atlantique (1996)
• Contrafact, Potes & Poets Press, Elmwood, Connecticut (1996)
• MOIRA, O Books, Oakland, California (1996)
• Catasters, collaboration with Jess Edinburgh, Folio Series, Morning Star Editions (1995-96)
• MARS, Listening Chamber Editions, Berkeley, California (1994)
• My Bird Book, Littoral Press, Los Angeles, California (1991)
• Mon Livre des oiseaux, Foundation Royaumont, France (1991)
• Metamorphopsia, Potes & Poets Press, Elmwood, Connecticut (1998)
• Mace Hill Remap, Moving Letters Press, France (1988); Archived at Duration Press Web Site

Miscellaneous Contributions to Anthologies

More than 20

Books of Translation (Selected)

• The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, poetry, Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, California (2004)
• Notebooks, Danielle Collobert, Litmus Press (2003)
• Distant Noise, Jean Frémon, with Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky, Cole Swenson, Avec Books, Penngrove, California (2003)
• Nude, Ann Portugal [Le Plus simple appareil], Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, California (2001)
• Crosscut Universe:  Writing on Writing from France, Burning Deck, Providence, Rhode Island (2000)
• A Discursive Space:  Interviews with Jean Daive, Duration Press, Sausalito, California (1999)
• Little Autobiographical Dictionary of Elegy, Emmanuel Hocquard, Instress, Saratoga, California (1999)
• “Postface,” Theory of Tables, Emmanuel Hocquard, O-Blek Press, Buffalo, New York (1994)
• The Surrealists Look at Art, essays by Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Soupault, Tzara, with Michael Palmer, Lapis Press, Venice, California (1990)
• It Then, Danielle Collobart (Il donc), O Books, Oakland, California (1989)

Awards

• The Fund for Poetry (2003, 1999, 1994)
• “Notable Book,” National Book Critics Circle (Spinoza in her Youth) (2003)
• Richardson Award for Non-fiction Prose, “Poetics of Vertigo,” (Denver Quarterly, 2000)
• Gertrude Stein Award (1995-96, 1994-95, 1993-94)
• Purchase Award for “They Flatter Almost Recognize,” collaboration with photographer Ben E. Watkins, Danforth Gallery, Portland, Maine (1994)
• Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry (1992)
• Translation Grant, awarded by the French Ministry of Culture (1992)

Editorial

• Editor, Krupskaya Publishing Collective (1999-2001)
• Aufgabe, inaugural issue, French section, Providence, Rhode Island (2001)
• Chain 5, contributing editor, special issue “Different Languages” (1998)
• If, No. 12 (France), Barbara Guest section, with Michael Palmer (1998)
• Raddle Moon.16:  22 New (to North America) French Writers, with Stacy Dorris (1997)
• Avec 7, guest editor (spring 1994)
• Ribot, contributing editor
• Shuffle Boil, editorial consultant

Boards

• Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, California
• Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, B.C.
• VALA (Visual Arts/Language Arts), Berkeley, California
• ROVA Saxophone Quartet, San Francisco, California

Steve Dickison

Steve Dickison is Executive Director of The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives, a position he’s held since August 1999.  Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1956, he was educated there in public schools and at the University of Minnesota, Duluth (History and English), before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1983.  Subsequent studies were in literature and poetics at New College of California and elsewhere.  He has 17 years experience in non-profit literary arts management (primarily with Small Press Distribution, Inc. in Berkeley, the only non-profit book distributor in the United States), and an intimate working knowledge of the full breadth of contemporary literary writing and publishing.  Since 1999 he has curated dozens of public literary and cultural programs for The Poetry Center and in collaboration with other Bay Area arts organizations and cultural institutes.  He is a lecturer on contemporary poetry in the Department of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Dickison is a poet, essayist, and editor-publisher of the award-winning small press Listening Chamber.  He has presented talks and seminars at the Modern Language Association, American Booksellers Association, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Naropa University, Mills College, California College of Arts and Crafts, and others; and has served on awards panels for Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California and The Loft in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  He has read his own written work—poetry and essays—at public venues in San Francisco, Oakland, New York City, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Providence, and Vancouver.  Recent writings appear in Recovery of the Public World:  Essays on Poetics in Honor of Robin Blaser (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1999), and the magazines Crayon, 26, Shuffle Boil, Zyzzyva, and Fourteen Hills, where he interviewed Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi.

With David Meltzer, he co-edits Shuffle-Boil, a bi-annual music magazine with poet, artist, and musician contributors.  Recent writings by Steve Dickison for the magazine include long interviews with jazz musicians Fred Hersch and Marty Ehrlich, a profile of folk singer Hedy West, articles on painter Bob Thompson, on jazz singer Jeanne Lee, and a survey of jazz clarinet players.

Currently he is working on editing The Unfolded Fold, a collection of talks on poets and poetry by United States-Canadian poet Robin Blaser.  As director of The Poetry Center, he is organizing special programs throughout 2004 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boulder, and New York City, in celebration of The Poetry Center’s 50th Anniversary, 1954-2004.