WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15 AT 7PM

WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER is the fourth collaboration in a decade from poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs. Veering away from the stuttering, profoundly fragmented seance of their Frolic Architecture (2011), Howe and Grubbs present a sound work that germinates from text collages and other material now published in Howe’s recent collection Debths (New Directions, 2017). This performance work was created while the material (Tom Tit Tot, Childe Roland, Paul Thek, W.B.Yeats, Isabella Stewart Gardner, etc.) in Debths was being arranged; it combines Howe’s reading with the resonant sounds and represented spaces of Grubbs’s piano playing and field recordings made in Boston’s Gardner Museum.

About the Artists

Susan Howe’s collection of poems That This, won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017 she received the Robert Frost award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth and Souls of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives was published by Christine Burgin and New Directions. New Directions also published selected essays The Quarry in 2015 and Debths new collection of poems in 2017.

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording and the forthcoming Now that the audience is assembled (both titles on Duke University Press). Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 180 releases, the most recent of which is Creep Mission (Blue Chopsticks, 2017). In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody, visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina, and choreographer Jonah Bokaer, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, a member of the Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.