Fri, Aug. 26, 2016 ⁄ 7:00–9:00pm

Book Release… Against the Picture – Window: A Time of the Phoenix Compendium & My Singularity

Pam Grey and Peggy Terry at Hank Williams village playground

Please join Beyond Repair and Society Editions at The White Page Gallery for the release of Society’s first two publications of poetry at the intersection of political speech: Against the Picture – Window: A Time of the Phoenix Compendium and My Singularity, a new chapbook by Minnesota-based poet, Sun Yung Shin.

Poems will be read. Books will be on offer. Drinks on hand.

————————–——-

TIME OF THE PHOENIX

Time of the Phoenix was a series of chapbooks produced and circulated around the Uptown area of Chicago and further afield from the late 1960s to the mid-70s, which served as a platform for the urban white poor of the neighborhood. Through poetry and other verse, authors articulate their lives in relation to police abuse, living in poverty, domestic violence, addiction and more. A vehicle for a voiceless population to find voice with one another, Time of the Phoenix was a tactical action in print devised by the Young Patriots—a group of radicalized, young southern white migrants living in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Along with “organizing in their own” through projects such as the chapbook series, the YPO went on to help form the Rainbow Coalition with the Young Lords, and Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers.

Working with founding YPO member, Hy Thurman, Society Editions has published Against the Picture – Window: A Time of the Phoenix Compendium, a collection of original works which appeared in Time of the Phoenix, as well as original photographic documents, interviews, commentary, and contemporary poetic works which speak across history and experience to the voices which originally appeared in the chapbook series.

MY SINGULARITY

My Singularity brilliantly graphs the myth of Pinocchio onto the contemporary flux of human identity amid advances in artificial intelligence and the human genome project, crafting a deeply felt extended metaphor for the physical body as site of meaning, a screen onto which multiple stories are at all times being projected. Sun Yung Shin’s intelligence and empathetic reach appear infinite as she imbues a wooden puppet with the kind of pathos we normally reserve for ourselves. The poem demonstrates an ethos at work typified by W.B. Yeats’s claim that “the quarrels we have with others are rhetoric / The quarrels we have with ourselves is poetry.” Allowing the latter to show itself is no small feat in a political climate that engenders discord and factionalism at every turn. Her poem searches the identity of the orphan, the manufactured psyche, the worker, and locates the vulnerable body of the nation-state as it exists as a living, breathing organism.

My Singularity is a single poem published as a chapbook by Society Editions.

SOCIETY EDITIONS

Society is a construction, dismantled and reformed daily, yearly, through our perceptions and public pronouncements, either shouted or whispered. As an expandable publishing platform, Society concerns itself with the intersection where poetry meets speech and where private and public life collide. Society is timely and agile, responsive and responsible, paper and air.
If poetry can act as an ethical barometer of a population in time, Society changes with you and you change Society. Society is a response and then a record.

As an imprint, through a yearly almanac, individual books, chaplets, posters, actions, programs, et al, Society aims to pick away and uncover the role and possibilities of poetry as public speech, how abstract, or seemingly obtuse, texts can engage and decipher very real and timely issues around public life and power.

Society Editions is co-edited by Mary Austin Speaker, Chris Martin, and Sam Gould

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

12363087_709951185806879_6121084519593817094_o

Lacey got our conversation with Emory Douglas down to 1′ and 0’s and we’re in the midst of cleaning it up. I cannot wait to get this out into the world! Here’s a quick taste…

Sam: So, in that way, you have the BPP doing something similar to, say the Wobblies at the turn of the century — of being on the street corner, being visible, saying, “look, here’s this thing and here’s the person attached to it. You could also be that person.”


Emory: Yeah, absolutely. We had a paper — 6:00 o’clock in the morning, people had assignments to go sell the papers. It was at the subway, the bus stations or wherever that may be.

Sam: In that sense was the history and methods of, say, the Wobblies or the black press leading up to your work at the paper in your minds at the time?

Emory: Yes, yes. Because the context and the content was the connection.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

IMG_2019

Not a non-profit, not started through the largess of some grant, Beyond Repair looks – and attempts to make transparent – the varying economies which can support a critical socially engaged art project within the marketplace.

One way we’ve been keeping the doors open is by doing print service work for people. For instance, a karaoke DJ came in not long ago and asked us to print his “karaoke bible” for him – done! We’ve printed wedding invitations for one the bartenders over at Eastlake Brewery next door to us, bound chap books for local artists, and are currently working on printing a book for a local children’s reading specialist organization.

If you have a small print project that you are looking to do, think about Beyond Repair doing the job for you. Not only are we fairly priced for artists, activists, and everyone else, your dollars go towards keeping a complicated, weird, political art project in plain sight.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Wed, Feb. 3, 2016 ⁄ 4:30–5:30pm

South MPLS Society Library

SMSL

The South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) exists as much as a space to enjoy books and the moments they can generate as it does a tool to consider the landscape and actions which often materialize within the space between books, readers, and the publics which are spawned by their convergence. Printed matter, often more visibly than other forms of media, serves as the fill – the rock and soil – of our shared lived experience, and inasmuch, creates a potent and shifting space to critically engage our experiences of living within a shared space and time. Now, in the digital networked age, this potency is not sapped, but heightened and fractured, allowing books and printed materials a special confusing resonance radically altering their specific-use as a technology from what it has been for the most part of the last 500 years.” – text from the South Minneapolis Society Library mission statement (2015, Red76)

In 2015 Red76 housed the South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) in the lobby of Pillsbury House at 35th and Chicago Ave. Anyone who lived in the 9th Ward was welcomed to check-out a growing, and often thematic, selection of books. All titles were sourced from the internet, printed and bound.

Beyond Repair is interested in the idea of resurrecting the SMSL on site in the Midtown Global Market, but how would this incarnation be different, if at all, from the last? How else could get involved, and how would a diversity of “librarians” and bookmakers alter the narrative and possibilities of the lending library?

Join us at the shop next Wednesday afternoon to discuss. All unaffiliated librarians, radical nerdists, bibliofreaks, and lovers of the printed word welcome to attend.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞