Completion of The A B Series Second Season & Looking Ahead to Season Three

Four upcoming events promise to make for a very exciting completion to The A B Series second season (autumn 2008 to spring 2009). The first is a reading by Christian Bök taking place today at 5pm in The Canadian Tulip Festival's beautiful Mirror Tent.

bill bissett reads on May 23rd at The Mercury Lounge. On the evening's program is a set of readings by a varied cast of performers to be given in bill's honour.

Paul Dutton reads on June 6th at The University of Ottawa and on June 7th at Galerie Montcalm in Gatineau, Quebec.

Following a pause for the summer, The A B Series is back on October 3rd for the commencement of season three (autumn 2009 to spring 2010) with a performance by American sound poetry ensemble, The Be Blank Consort.

ABSERIES.ORG

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CHRISTIAN BÖK in The A B Series
Presented in association with The Canadian Tulip Festival
Saturday May 16 at 5pm
Host: Max Middle

Tulip Festival - Mirror Tent
Festival Plaza
110 Laurier Avenue West
Ottawa, Ontario

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On Saturday, May 16th, The A B Series presents CHRISTIAN BÖK's first reading to take place in Ottawa since 2002! Produced in association with The Canadian Tulip Festival, the event starts at 5pm in The Festival's beautiful Mirror Tent.

BÖK is the author of Eunoia, Coach House Books' bestselling work of experimental literature, and winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. The book is a is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Last year, Eunoia was published in the UK where it quickly went to the top of best selling lists for poetry. His first book, Crystallography, was published by Coach House Press in 1994 and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

BÖK has created artificial languages for two television shows, Gene Roddenberry’s 'Earth: Final Conflict' and Peter Benchley’s 'Amazon'. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the ‘Ursonate’ by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit 'Poetry Plastique'. He is working with scientist, Stuart Kaufmann, to compose "living poetry" whereby short verse is encoded into a sequence of DNA to be implanted into a bacterium. He plans to document the progress of the publishing experiment and make related artwork for subsequent exhibition in galleries. Bök is Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

BÖK's reading will be followed by a brief Q&A.

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The City of Ottawa and The Canada Council for the Arts.

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For more information, see The A B Series web site at ABSERIES dot ORG or contact A B Series Artistic Director, Max Middle, by telephone (613) 237 4309 or email: director at abseries dot org.

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TICKETS available at the Mirror Tent Box Office

Adult $16

Student $12

Reserved Section $28

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a reading by bill bissett followed by a tribute in bill's honour!

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Doors open 7:00pm

Performance at 8:00pm
Venue: The Mercury Lounge

Cost: $10 at the door

Host: Max Middle

originalee from lunaria a far distant planet way past venus 312 bill came 2 eryh on th first childrns shuttul from ther ovr 400 yeers ago in lunarian space time kontsrukts hes bin sent as an impressyunist onlee altho he wud love 2 undrstand erthling wayze he askd wudint yu 2 ths end he has alwayze wantid 2 xploor langwage in all its wayze at leest in poetree n wantid alwayze 2 spell mor n mor closelee on th page how each word sounds in that pomes ear a life time at leest devosyun most recent book sublingual 2nd most recent book ths is erth thees ar peopul both from talonbooks n from red deer press deth interrupts th dansing a cd with pete dako followd by ths is erth thees ar peopul also with pete dako musician extraordinaire n luddites 86- 91 remix cd just releesd also a paintr most recent show upstares galleree toronto summr 09 now a doktor from tru universitee n resipient uv th george woodcock life time acheevment award hes working now on nu book n nu paintings evree 6 months or sew th lunarian assemblee remoovs th filld tapes uv impressyuns from bills hed n he starts agen emptee hedid 4 a whil

"I know who the great poets are. William Bissette of Vancouver. An Indian boy. Bill Bissette, or Bissonnette." (Jack Kerouac, 1967)

Margaret Atwood's "astral twin" and James Reaney's "one-man civilization", living legend bill bissett comes to Ottawa for a feature reading in The A B Series.

bill's READING WILL BE FOLLOWED BY A POETIC TRIBUTE to be made BY SEVERAL SPECIAL GUESTS READING FROM bill's OEUVRE and from the anthology, 'radiant danse uv being: A Poetic Portrait of bill bissett' edited by Jeff Pew and Stephen Roxborough.

radiant danse uv being and books by bill bissett will be available for sale.

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for this event. This event is also made possible by The Writers' Union of Canada.

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The A B Series is looking forward to hosting two performances by Paul Dutton. The first performance will take place on the evening of June 6th, and will be presented in association with The University of Ottawa English Department.

Paul Dutton evening performance
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Doors open 7:30pm / Performance at 9:00pm
Venue: 1848 - University of Ottawa Campus Bar
$10 at the door (free for U of O English Dept students)


Paul Dutton matinee

2pm
Sunday, June 7, 2009

Venue: Galerie Montcalm

Free (a hat will be passed)

Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist, and oral sound artist who is internationally renowned for both his literary and musical performances. Throughout the last four decades he has published, recorded, and performed his work in various contexts, solo and collaborative, in print and film, on TV, radio, and the Web. He has taken his art to festivals, clubs, concert halls, and classrooms throughout Canada and across the United States, Europe, and South America. Dutton’s artistic focus continues to be the exploration of consciousness and perception through the creation of multisensory works, employing written poetry and prose, visual poetry, and the sonic dimensions of language and oral expression. He was a member of the legendary Four Horsemen sound poetry quartet (1970–1988), along with Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery, and the late bpNichol. He joins his soundsinging oralities to John Oswald’s alto sax and Michael Snow’s piano and synthesizer in the free-improvisation band CCMC (1989 to the present). He recently formed Quintet à Bras in company with two French poets and two French instrumentalists. The most recent of his six books is a novel, Several Women Dancing (Mercury Press, 2002), the latest of his five solo recordings is the CD Oralizations (DAME Records, 2005).

For a taste of what they might expect of at the performance, the following Web sites provide samples of Paul's published writing and of his sound recordings, plus commentary on other of his published works:
http://www.chbooks.com/archives/online_books/aurealities/
http://www.ubu.com/sound/dutton.html
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/dutton/ldutton1.htm
http://www.actuellecd.com/en/cat/am_130/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dutton.html
http://www.unlikelystories.org/dutton0107.shtml

The A B Series gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for this event.