March 15: Dada Poetry/Performance Festival @ Cornelia Street Cafe

The Sixth Annual 

NYC Dada Poetry and Performance Salon

featuring the NYC launch of 

Maintenant 7: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art

plus live reading & performances by

• Experimental poet JEROME ROTHENBERG
• Romanian Dada descendent VALERY OISTEANU
• The Duke of Dada PETER CARLAFTES
• Electronica Music/Performance by BANLIEUE QUEENS
• DADAnewyork LOIS KAGAN MINGUS & ROBERT HIEGER
• New Jersey Dada JOHN J. TRAUSE 
• Los Angeles Dada JAN MICHAEL ALEJANDRO

Friday, March 15, 6 pm

Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street (between Bleecker & W. 4th St.)

NEW YORK—Modern day Dada poets, collagists, performers and artists are creating controversial and thrilling work that continues the spirit of the avant garde art movement sprung from disgust with World War I. Their work will be featured at 6th Annual NYC Dada Poetry and Performance Salon—and launch for Maintenant 7: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art—on Friday, March 15, 6 pm at Cornelia Street Cafe. Featured performers include visual/sound poet Jerome Rothenberg, Romanian Dada madman Valery Oisteanu, the maverick Duke of Dada Peter Carlaftes, vibrant DADAnewyork performance artists Lois Kagan Mingus and Robert Hieger, and surprise guests. The event is sponsored by Three Rooms Press.

The first 10 people will receive a free copy Maintenant 7 and all will be eligible to win Dada-related prizes including books, dvds, photographs and more.

Doors open at 5:45. Admission is $12, which includes a free drink. Cornelia Street Cafe is at 29 Cornelia Street, in the West Village, between W. 4th Street at Bleecker (http://corneliastreecafe.com). Reservations and additional information: info@threeroomspress.com. 

Maintenant 7: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art is the sixth edition of an annual collection of contemporary Dada work inspired by Dada instigator and Three Rooms Press spiritual advisor Arthur Cravan. Since 2008, the Three Rooms Press series has collected outsider art, poetry, mail art, collages and more from around the world. This year's issue, edited by Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges, features an essay about Marcel Duchamp's seminal work Fresh Widow by New York gallery owner Francis Naumann, poetry by American writers Gerard Malanga, Andy Clausen, Roger Conover, Charles Plymell, Mike Watt, W.K. Stratton and Jerome Rothenberg, and an expanded selection of work by leading European, Asian and Central American dadaists including Tomomi Adachi, Jaap Blonk, Lucille Calmel, Jelle Meander, Philip Meersman, Ulf Stolterfoht, J.L. Rodríguez Pittí and many more.  

The original Dada movement peaked from 1916-1922, primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature.

The Dada Salon is the latest installment of The Monthly at Cornelia Street Cafe, a unique series curated by Three Rooms Press that brings together leading poets, intellectuals, performers and budding rebels on a different topic each month. Upcoming events include: APRIL 3: ILLEGAL LEAVES OF GRASS (a tribute to Walt Whitman and an exploration of the movement to legalize marijuana); MAY 3: HAVE A NYC 2 (readings of New York-based short stories); JUNE 7: HYDROGEN JUKEBOX (modern poetry performed to live rock band).

Joel Allegretti and John J. Trause Strike Up the Poets at Son of a Pony this Friday 10/19

Three Rooms Press & Cornelia Street Café  present Son of a Pony Poetry Reading Series

Friday, October 19, 2012: Featured Poets: JOEL ALLEGRETTI and JOHN J. TRAUSE; PLUS NYC's Most Lovely Open POETRY Mike; Hosted by Kat Georges

The infamous Son of a Pony Poetry Reading series at Cornelia Street Cafe continues its fall classic with an October 19 reading featuring two of the most unique voices on the East Coast: Joel Allegretti and John J. Trause are featured, plus you are invited to join the stupendous open reading.

JOHN J. TRAUSE, said to be the secret love child of Henri Langlois and Mary Meerson (or is it Marie Menken and Willard Maas?), is the author most recently of Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round (Nirala Publications), as well as Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada), and Latter-Day Litany, the latter staged Off-Off Broadway.  He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, and Jerome Rothenberg and the page with William Carlos Williams, Richard Kostelanetz, Lita Hornick, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, and Pope John Paul II.  Aside from his literary work, his artwork has been exhibited in The MoMA Staff Show and elsewhere, and is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Menstruation.  At various times in his life he has been mistaken for being a priest, a policeman, a pimp, and a pornographer.  One does not know what is more impressive, his book collection or his array of turtlenecks. 

Joel Allegretti is the author of four collections of poetry: Europa/ Nippon/ New York: Poems/ Not-Poems (Poets Wear Prada, 2012); Thrum (Poets Wear Prada, 2010); Father Silicon (The Poet’s Press, 2006), selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006, a list that included novels by Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon; and The Plague Psalms (The Poet’s Press, 2000). Allegretti’s poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, PANK, The New York Quarterly, Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art, MARGIE, Fulcrum and many other national journals, as well as in The Best American Poetry blog.

Plus--the exciting Son of a Pony open reading, hosted by the indefatigable Kat Georges. YOU are invited to read your poetry! Sign up at 5:45 p.m.;  open reading begins at 6 p.m. Admission is $8, which includes a free drink.  Cornelia Street Cafe is at 29 Cornelia Street, in the West Village of New York City (between W. 4th Street and Bleecker). 212-989-9319