26: "Union" -- a collaboration between Jim Spitzer and Michael Rothenberg (Friday, July 31)
MICHAEL ROTHENBERG BIO
Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, and editor and publisher of Big Bridge magazine online at www.bigbridge.org. He is a recent recipient of a grant from the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund. His poetry books include Man/Woman, a collaboration with Joanne Kyger, The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press), and most recently CHOOSE, Selected Poems (Big Bridge Press). His poems have been published widely in small press publications including, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, First Intensity, Fish Drum, Fulcrum, Golden Handcuffs Review, House Organ, Prague Literary Review, Tricycle, Van Gogh’s Ear, Vanitas, Zyzzyva, JACK, and Jacket. He is also author of the novel Punk Rockwell. Michael Rothenberg has edited the selected works of Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer and Ed Dorn (Penguin Books). He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Philip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press.
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JIM SPITZER BIO
Jim Spitzer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the year 1936. He studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, earning BS, MA, and MFA degrees under the tutelage of a variety of well-known masters: Alfred Sessler, Dean Meeker and Warrington Colescott. Early in his career, he taught at Colleges and Universities in New York, Arizona, and Wisconsin, but turned to full-time drawing, painting, woodcut and sculpture.
Spitzer has shown extensively from coast to coast with solo shows at Carus gallery in New York City, New York University, Cornell College, Ithaca University, University of North Carolina, Southern Florida University, Sonoma State University, etc. Spitzer lives in Santa Rosa, California.
His works are varied. They include large murals in wood-cut, wherein the woodblock itself becomes the final work, large muralistic paintings in acrylic, and large scale to tiny pen and ink drawings on paper. Woodcut on paper, an early favorite medium, occupied a recent period with 90 new works the result. Currently he is working in acrylic medium in a variety of transcendental themes that defy nomenclature. He completed several small works in bronze. Fifty of Spitzer's drawings were featured with 50 of Michael Brenner's sketches in a joint showing of 100 drawings. This catalog is available from J. C. Leissring Fine Arts Press.
To listen to an interview with Michael Rothenberg and Jim Spitzer, click here: http://tinyurl.com/mshjng.
