Full program
Highlight clips: Charles Alexander | Susan Thackrey
Poets Charles Alexander and Susan Thackrey read new work and converse with the audience.
Charles Alexander is a poet, bookmaker, and founder/director of Chax Press, author of 5 full-length books of poetry and 11 chapbooks, editor of one critical work on the state of the book arts in America, author of multiple essays, articles, and reviews. His most recent books of poetry are Pushing Water, published by Cuneiform Press, and the chapbooks Some Sentences Look for Some Periods, a chapbook, and Two Pushing Waters, both from Little Red Leaves Textile Series. He has taught literature and writing at Naropa University, University of Arizona, and elsewhere, and currently is Poet & Designer in Residence at the University of Houston-Victoria, where he directs the MFA Creative Writing Program and manages the UHV Center for the Arts. He is a past recipient of the Arizona Arts Award, and has participated in the TAMAAS Poetry Translation Project in Paris. In January 2016 served as a faculty member for US Poets in Mexico. He lives in Victoria, Texas, with his partner, the painter Cynthia Miller.
Susan Thackrey, a poet who lives and works in San Francisco, began to compose poetry at the age of three. She was an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980, and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima over a number of years.Thackrey has given invitational lectures on Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the George Oppen Conference in Buffalo, and most recently on Duncan’s The H.D. Book for The Poetry Center. Since reading Homer In Greek over a five year period with Robert Duncan and some of her poet contemporaries, an important and lively part of her life in poetry has included variously focused and long-lived reading groups with other poets. She has earned her livelihood in various ways, including as co-founder and co-director of the art gallery Thackrey and Robertson in San Francisco, and for a number of years as a Jungian analyst in the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. There she has taught, spoken and published, focusing especially on art, recently publishing a talk and essay on Jung’s paintings for The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus (Routledge). Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, and her books include Andalusia (Chax), Empty Gate (Listening Chamber), and George Oppen: A Radical Practice (O Books and The San Francisco Poetry Center).