2008
March 15:
Pabst
Theater--Milwaukee,
WI
March 22: Vernal
Cabaret at the Gershwin Hotel, Saturday, March
22nd, 8-12 PM
Press Release:
There will be an evening of poetry and music
to celebrate the vernal equinox&emdash;and with
it, the return of farmers carting their green
wares to the city. Proceeds will benefit
Nesenkeag Farm and the New Farmer Development
Project in New York. The Vernal Cabaret will
take place in the Gershwin Hotel Living Room, 7
East 27th Street, New York City, starting at
8:00 PM , bringing together poets, artists,
stand-up comics, musicians, urban agriculture
activists and other visionary spirits for an
evening of high-falutin' sustenance and fun.
Suggested donation at the door is $10.
The lively line-up of performers includes
David Abel, Bare Hand Wolf Chokers Association,
Lee Ann Brown, Scott Chaskey, Andy Clausen,
Grant Hart, Brenda Coultas, Jason Eisenberg,
Russ Gershon, Kim Lyons, Edgar Oliver, Simon
Pettet, Nicole Peyrafitte, Janine Pommy Vega,
Eero Ruuttila, Sparrow, Steven Taylor, Laki
Vazakas, and George Wallace (see below for
bios).
The benefit is grateful for the support of
co-sponsoring organizations, including the Chefs
Collaborative, the NY Food Museum, and the
Northeast Organic Farming Association of New
York (NOFA-NY). In making the Living Room and
Lounge available for this benefit, the Gershwin
Hotel continues its mission of supporting
innovative arts and culture in New York
City.
Nesenkeag Cooperative Farm, located on the
Merrimack River in Litchfield, New Hampshire,
has established itself as a model of
cutting-edge organic agriculture and community
outreach. Marketing its high-value specialty
crops directly to top chefs in Boston and
Southern New Hampshire, Nesenkeag Farm donates
more than $10,000 of food to the New Hampshire
Food Bank each year, with the support of Share
Our Strength. The farm has a strong relationship
with the large Cambodian immigrant population in
and around Lowell, Massachusetts, employing farm
staff from this community and participating in
market-garden projects involving the Coalition
for a Better Acre, the New Immigrant Farmer
Project and the United Teen Equality Center.
Farm Manager Eero Ruuttila has won
recognition for pioneering bio-intensive
sustainable methods and is a well-known speaker
at organic farming conferences throughout the
Northeast region. He is a poet and photographer,
as well. "I have been inspired to find common
ground with practitioners of alternative
agriculture as well as those of the alternative
arts," he says. This inspiration is evident
every fall at the Annual Nesenkeag Farm Day,
where visitors tour the fields, sample Cambodian
cooking, and then gather to listen to featured
poets and musicians. Even without tractors or
bonfires in the background, this Nesenkeag Farm
benefit cabaret will produce the same kind of
green alchemy that results when artistic
inspiration mixes with activist consciousness.
Ruuttila is also happy to offer recognition and
financial support to the New Farmer Development
Project.
The New Farmer Development Project, with
support from the Council on the Environment's
Greenmarket program and the Cornell University
Cooperative Extension, works with agriculturally
experienced immigrants in the NYC region,
encouraging them to start their own
environmentally sound farms through classroom
and practical training, access to New York
City's farmers markets, and small credit
opportunities.
We would appreciate it if you would help get
the word out about this event. Any questions can
be addressed to Lorna Smedman
(ljsmedman@mindspring.com) or Kimberly Lyons
(kimlyons32@gmail.com).
Vernal Cabaret Performers
David Abel is a poet, editor, and bookseller
in Portland, Oregon, where he organizes the
Spare Room reading series
(www.flim.com/spareroom). David was the
proprietor of the Bridge Bookshop in New York
City (late 1980s), and Passages Bookshop &
Gallery in Albuquerque (mid 1990s). His recent
publications include Twenty- (Crane's Bill
Books), Let Us Repair (with Anna Daedalus; wax
paper scissors), and Black Valentine (Chax
Press).
Bare Hand Wolf Chokers make "comedy" in "New
York", where they have set audiences chortling
at venues such as the Upright Citizens Brigade
Theater. Their current artist projects include
wrestling with such ideas as "Is it worth it?",
"What time is it? I'm tired", and "Seriously, is
it worth it?" Spotlighted recently by The New
York Times
(laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/bare-hand-wolf-chokers/
), they'll be here, live.
Author of Polyverse (Sun Moon Press) and The
Sleep That Changed Everything Wesleyan
University Press), as well as song cycle The
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lee Ann
Brown loves to sing her poems and read them out
loud. She teaches at St. John's University
(NYC). This coming summer, she will be starting
The French Broad Institute (of Time & the
River) in Marshall, North Carolina and teaching
at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, along
with trips to Burning Man and Rome, Italy.
Scott Chaskey is a farmer, poet and educator,
who learned to garden in the Cotswolds and in
Cornwall. Employed by the Peconic Land Trust as
a steward of land, he has farmed garlic,
potatoes, greens (and fifty other crops) for
eighteen years at Quail Hill Farm, one of the
original Community Supported Agriculture farms
in the country, and currently serves as
President of the Northeast Organic Farming
Association of New York. In 2005, This Common
Ground, Seasons on an Organic Farm was published
by Viking/Penguin.
Andy Clausen's many books includes 40th
Century Man: Selected Verse 1996-1966
(Autonomedia), Without Doubt (Zeitgeist Press),
The Streets of Kashi (Roadkill) & Songs of
Bo Baba (Shivastan). He also coedited Poems for
the Nation (Seven Stories Press), a collection
of contemporary political poems compiled by the
late poet Allen Ginsberg.
Brenda Coultas is the author of A Handmade
Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003) which won the
Norma Farber Award from The Poetry Society of
America, and a Greenwall Fund publishing grant
from the Academy of American Poets. Other books
include Early Films (Rodent Press) and A Summer
Newsreel (Second Story Press). Her writing can
be found in Conjunctions, Explosive, Brooklyn
Rail, and Bombay Gin. A resident of the East
Village for the past ten years, Brenda currently
is a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA)
fellow, and was featured reader at Nesenkeag
Farm Day in 2007.
When he's not traveling the galaxy as Space
Ambassador of Love, performance artist Jason
Eisenberg appears in many outrageous
incarnations. He has engaged and enraged
audiences at venues including New York's Bitter
End and The Bowery Poetry Club, the Lowell
Celebrates Kerouac festival, Boston's Institute
of Contemporary Art, Cambridge's venerable Club
Passim, London's Hackney Empire Theater, and
Canada's Atlantic Jazz Festival. He often
performs with his Jazz Orchestra of the Royal
Court and with David Amram.
Grant Hart was the drummer and co-songwriter
for the seminal Midwest indie punk band
Hüsker Dü he founded with Bob Mould
and Greg Norton in 1979. Most recently, he's
released solo albums, including Ecce Homo (1996)
and Good News for Modern Man (1999), and is
recording a new album in Montreal. Hart is a
visual artist, poet, and master of classic
Studebakers as well as a vocalist and guitarist,
and comes to the Gershwin Hotel by slow-train
from Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Russ Gershon is a renowned jazz saxophonist,
who founded Cambridge's Either/Orchestra and the
recording label Accurate Records. Russ was
nominated for a Grammy for his arrangement of
the E/O recording of "Bennie Moten's Weird
Nightmare," from The Calculus of Pleasure CD.
His study of African jazz led him to Ethiopia
where the band performed at the Ethiopian Music
Festival. Russ's most recent recordings include
Neo-Realism, and Ethiopiques 20 - Live in
Addis.
Kimberly Lyons is the author of Saline
(Instance Press, 2005) and Abracadabra (Granary
Books, 2000). Phototherapique is forthcoming
from YoYoLabs/Ketalanche Press. She has recently
had poems in EOAGH
(chax.org/eoagh/issuetwo/lyons.htm), Critiphoria
(www.critiphoria.org/Issue1), and OCHo. She is a
clinical social worker and a cook. Favorite
vegetable: eggplant.
Long-time denizen of the East Village, Edgar
Oliver is a playwright, poet, actor, and author
of the novel, The Man Who Loved Plants (Panther
Books). His plays have been staged in many
downtown theatres in New York, and he appears in
two recent independent feature films, That's
Beautiful Frank and Henry May Long.
Simon Pettet, English-born poet and long-time
resident of the Lower East Side, most recently
published More Winnowed Fragments (Talisman,
2006). His Selected Poems is available from the
same publisher and a new volume of poetry
(tentatively titled Hearth) will be out in the
fall. Simon is also the author of two
collaborations with photographer-filmmaker Rudy
Burckhardt, Conversations About Everything and
Talking Pictures.
Nicole Peyrafitte (www.nicolepeyrafitte.com)
is a multimedia performance artist who was born
in the mountain town of Luchon in the French
Pyrenees amidst the hustle and bustle of the
family's hotel and restaurant (her family has
been in the food business since 1789!). Nicole
carries her passion for food and art into her
performances which include cooking and serving
food to the audience, singing, painting,
filming, and even yoga. She was awarded "Best
Performance Artist of the Capital City 2005" for
her one-women show "La Garbure Transcontinentale
/The Bi-Continental Chowder."
Janine Pommy Vega had her first book of poems
published by City Lights in 1968, and has since
published over a dozen more, including Tracking
the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents (1997),
Mad Dogs of Trieste (2000), The Green Piano
(2005), and most recently Across the Table
(2007) a CD recording of her performances with
musicians from Woodstock, Bosnia, and Italy. She
also translated the poetry of Latino migrant
farmworkers, presented in Estamos Aquí
[We Are Here] (2007). She has been a
member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee, and
continues to teach in prisons.
Eero Ruuttila, poet, farmer, photographer,
and organic agriculture activist, is as likely
to show up at a Touareg Music Festival in the
Sahara north of Tombouctou as to give the
key-note address to an assembly of organic
farmers at Desert Island, Maine&emdash;when he
isn't out on his tractor at Nesenkeag
Cooperative Farm where he's served as manager
for the past 21 years. Editor of Sitting Frog
Magazine in the early days of the Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder,
Colorado, his most recent work can be found in
Uncontained, Writers & Photographers in the
Garden and the Margins (edited by Jennifer
Heath) and on display in Boulder's Norlin
Library.
Sparrow divides his time between studying
French, doing Sudoku, and running for President
of the United States. (Look for his campaign
literature on
http://www.groundreport.com/sparrow.) Sparrow
plays ocarina and mop handle in the band
Foamola. (See them on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDUvCICER1Y.) He
owns one (pink) watch, which he bought at a
99¢ store, and which is 2 hours and 36
minutes slow.
Steven Taylor is a musician and writer who
has been a long-time collaborator with many
poets including Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders,
Kenward Elmslie, and Anne Waldman. Since 1984 he
has been a member of the Fugs, and he has been
on the faculty of the Kerouac School at Naropa
University since 1995. In 2004 Wesleyan
University Press published his False Prophet:
Fieldnotes from the Punk Underground, a memoir
of touring with the New York alternative rock
band, False Prophets.
Laki Vazakas is a video maker and educator.
His video work includes "Huncke and Louis,"
"Burma: Traces of the Buddha," and "Cherry
Valley Arts Festival 1998." He is Video Artist
in Residence at Yale-New Haven Children's
Hospital and is a visiting artist at the
Clifford Beers Family Guidance Clinic in New
Haven.
George Wallace is the author of sixteen
chapbooks of poetry, including Summer of Love
Summer of Love (Shivastan Press, 2008), and
editor of Poetrybay and Polarity. He has read at
the Beat Museum, the Woody Guthrie Festival,
Howlfest, Insomniacathon, Lowell Celebrates
Kerouac, and the Dylan Thomas Center in Wales,
and was guest reader at Nesenkeag Farm Day in
2004.
