Susan Gevirtz & David Abel, Works on Paper

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Susan Gevirtz will read and play voiceover soundtracks from her play Motion Picture Home recently published in the collection Burns from Pamenar Press.

Motion Picture Home was written at the request of Kevin Killian who also directed it for a Poet’s Theatre jubilee in San Francisco. Named after the actual Motion Picture Home for retired stars and workers of the Hollywood movie industry in Los Angeles, it addresses the death there of Gevirtz’s grandfather, and other deaths and schisms such as divorce, wish, and liaisons between dream and film. It is primarily performed off stage by live humans and recorded “voiceover” soundtracks.

The Program Notes for Motion Picture Home ask, What does language without correspondence in the three-dimensional world, not as one-to-one reference but as action in itself, look and sound like on stage and off? Can the boundaries between word, object, and gesture be witnessed in the act of breaking down and repeating? In performing a refusal, an inability to perform, the play enacts a pageant of redundancy, a cacophonous cocoon of thought-life, multiplied to the infinite power.

Susan Gevirtz is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Burns (Pamenar) Hotel abc (Nightboa) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang). She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship, and served on the advisory board for its successor, the online journal HOW2. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities Siarita Kouka she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Arts, as well as in undergrad Writing and Visual Studies. She is currently a writing mentor through Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration. She is based in San Francisco.

David Abel will present a new solo performance work.

David Abel is a writer, editor, multidisciplinary artist, and curator, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its twenty-first year, he was also a cofounder of Thirteen Hats, a collective of Portland writers and artists; a member of the Four Wall Cinema collective; and an inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art. His recent publications include a chapbook of poems, Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque, NM; two books based on verbal performance scores — XIV Eclipses, published by Couch Press in Portland, and Selected Durations, published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada in Reno — and a new edition, published by Redfoxpress in Ireland, of the visual narrative Carrier, which was first released in a limited edition by Portland’s c_L Books. The first volume of an ongoing hybrid serial work, Sweep, is forthcoming in Fall 2023 from Chax Press in Tucson.

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Works on Paper supports activities that use concepts, characteristics, and histories of the book, and entanglements with text, as a frame for exploratory practice across the arts. The spring 2023 series, Experiments in Language and Sound, was curated by Robert Blatt and David Abel. For more information, please visit the Works on Paper site.

The Works on Paper series is funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.