@SEA #8: "CURSES" w/ Kraning, Moriarty, Sequeira & White

The eighth edition of @SEA, the Poetic Research Bureau's monthly live magazine, concludes its spring season with a calling down of the theme of curses: bad luck, bad lots, hexes and misfortune; low speech, profanities, brought down trouble and malediction. A quartet of ensorcellement at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown! 

@SEA #8: Curses! @ Poetic Research Bureau
Sunday, June 5, 2016 – Doors open at 1pm

Event 1:30-3:30pm is free.

• SCREENING: Devil's Gate, a film by Laura Kraning
• TALK:  “Ensorcellment and Hex in Robert Duncan’s Poetics” by Laura Moriarty
• READING: Jessica Sequeira, fiction and recent translations of Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia) and Sara Gallardo (Argentina)
• PERFORMANCE: Ben White presents the performance ritual *Take Away Their Victory*

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, such as New York, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Antimatter, Visions du Réel, and Festival du Nouveau Cinema, among others.  Laura currently teaches in the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts. Tracing the metaphysical undercurrents of a Southern California landscape scarred by fire, her film Devil's Gate unearths a subconscious of the landscape, as the echoes of the past reverberate in the present and infect our perception and experience of place.

Laura Moriarty lives in the East Bay. Her recent books are Fugitive Notebook from Couch Press, Who That Divines and A Tonalist, from Nightboat, A Semblance, Selected Poetry 1976-2007 from Omnidawn and the novel Ultravioleta from Atelos. She has taught at Mills College, Naropa University and elsewhere and is currently Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution.  

Jessica Sequeira, originally from California, attended Harvard and Cambridge, and now lives in Buenos Aires. She has published essays, stories and translations in The Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Modern Poetry in Translation, Berfrois, Litro Magazine, Palabras Errantes, The Missing Slate, Ventana Latina and other publications. Her version of the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's short stories will be published by Dalkey Archive Press later this year, and her collection of Bolivian poetry is out with Smokestack Books in 2017. 

Ben White is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and is host of art and culture show "The People" on KCHUNG radio 1630AM. Take Away Their Victory is a performance exercise in ancient world curses and binding spells, and will allow an opportunity for viewers to ostracize a member of the Los Angeles community for ten years.