SVMA hosted a live webcast poetry series, presented in conjunction with its fall exhibition Ed Ruscha: Travel Log, an assemblage of some of the Los Angeles artist’s most iconic photographs and prints spanning the length of his career. The poets and speakers selected for this series from across the U.S. also have labored over projects that connect the written word with photography, history, and personal-turned-epic journeys.
OCTOBER 28, 2020 – 6PM, PT
Sonoma to MoMA
Last West with Tess Taylor and Sarah Meister, Curator of Photography, Museum of Modern Art
Tess Taylor, a Bay Area native, spent two years following the trail of Dorothea Lange through California, revisiting Lange’s notebooks, and the sites she photographed as a lens for understanding California now, which resulted in Taylor’s book LAST WEST Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange. In this event, patrons will have the chance to visit the virtual views of the DOROTHEA LANGE: WORDS & PICTURES exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and talk about poetry, photography and Lange’s legacy with Taylor and MoMA curator of photography Sarah Meister.
NOVEMBER 11, 2020 – 6PM, PT
Poems, Photography, and the (Open) Road with poets Elizabeth Bradfield and
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Both poems and photographs lend themselves to being documents and evidence of travel. Ruscha, for instance, is an enthusiast and now collaborator with Jack Kerouac. How do we tell the stories of the worlds we pass through and encounter? How do we both voyage and belong? Elizabeth Bradfield, a naturalist and poet whose recent photographic and poetic work documents her time working on boats in Antarctica, is joined by noted photographer and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, based in New York, who will discuss the ways that poetry and photography help locate the body in landscape, community, and place.
DECEMBER 2, 2020 – 6PM, PT
Bring it Home, Oklahoma with poets Jennifer Foerster, Dean Rader and Nicole Callihan
With a nod to Ed Ruscha’s hometown of Oklahoma City and countless trips and photographs via Route 66 to California, three published poets with Oklahoma roots read poems for their home state, and for this moment.
Jennifer Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer is the author of two books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press.
Dean Rader has written, edited, or co-edited eleven books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Recent work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, New England Review, Waxwing, Kenyon Review, Terrain, Southern Review, BOMB, Ploughshares, SF Chronicle, and Best of the Net. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.
Born in North Carolina and raised in Oklahoma, Nicole Callihan has several volumes of poetry, including SuperLoop and Downtown, and a novella, The Couples, which was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. ELSEWHERE, her latest poetry collection, a collaboration with Zoë Ryder White, won the 2019 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize and was released in March 2020. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, Nicole is a Senior Language Lecturer at New York University.