this performance is part of the City of Los Angeles Cultural Grant Program
The poetry of City Arts Fellows Jen Hofer & Gabriel Spera
About Jen Hofer’s program
“Everyone talks about the movies,” writes live film narration instigator, curator and performer Konrad Steiner in Camerawork. “Why not talk back to the movies? Make speech graffiti.” As a new take on an old form, live film narration, sometimes called neo-benshi, invites poets and filmmakers to talk back to the movies, performing new scripts to muted scenes from feature films. Jen Hofer will perform alongside Douglas Kearney and Stalina Villarreal in a multi-voiced drought-song set to a collage of scenes from Roman Polanski’s 1974 film “Chinatown.”
About Jen Hofer
Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and literary activism collaborative Antena, which recently had a large-scale installation at the Blaffer Art Museum at University of Houston. Her latest translations include the chapbook En las maravillas/In Wonder (Libros Antena/Antena Books, 2012); Ivory Black, a translation of Negro marfil by Myriam Moscona (Les Figues Press 2011, winner of translation prizes from the Academy of American Poets and PEN); sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a translation from Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008); and lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano’s lobo de labio (Action Books, 2007). Her latest homemade books include Denotative Skies (DIY edition, 2013) we do not see what we do not see (DIY edition, 2013), When We Said This Was A Space, We Meant We Are People (collaboration with John Pluecker, Libros Antena/Antena Books, 2013), and Shroud: A Piece Of Fabric Sewn To A Piece Of Paper By Way Of A Map (collaboration with Jill Magi, DIY edition, 2013). Her visual-textual work can be found online at Alligatorzine, The Drunken Boat, and Public Access, and in Exhibit Hall 1 at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover site. Her poems, essays, and translations are available from a range of small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, Counterpath Press, Insert Press, Kenning Editions, Litmus Press, Little Red Leaves (Textile Series), Palm Press, Subpress, and Ugly Duckling Presse. She teaches poetics, translation and bookmaking at CalArts and Otis College.
About Gabriel Spera
NEA recipient Gabriel Spera has published two books of poetry. The first, The Standing Wave, was a National Poetry Series selection and also received the Literary Book Award in Poetry from PEN USA-West. The second, The Rigid Body, received the Richard Snyder Publication Prize.
This performance is part of the City of Los Angeles’ Cultural Grant Program