M. Mara-Ann
lighthouse

Wednesday, April 17, 8 PM
$5-$8 sliding scale admission

A performative reading of new work by M. Mara-Ann in conjunction with the publication of her first book, lighthouse (Atelos, 2002). Sentence by sentence, line by line, lighthouse casts horizons. A possible allusion to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse can be discerned in the sense of suspense, of preparation and promise that pervades the text, a sense of things underway. But that it is present excitement and expectation rather than some terminus out in the future that is art’s (and life’s?) ultimate achievement is clear from the outset. Of course, one can’t think of a lighthouse without being aware of the slippage of its illumination and the concealment that surrounds what’s revealed. A strange narrative -- a narrative of the strangeness of what is -- comes into view. lighthouse is about the experience of being on the way, distance by distance. We move from part to whole and whole to part again, “the proximity unveiling a subtle inquiry.”

Raised in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, M. Mara-Ann has called San Francisco home for more than ten years. Recent work includes the chapbook forthcoming: ecneles (a+bend press, 2000) and a CD collaboration with composer Sean Abreu entitled Water Rights (2000). She is the publisher of WOOD, an online experimental journal featuring collaborations between poets and visual artists. lighthouse is Mara’s first book.

Atelos was founded in 1995 as a project of Hip’s Road. It is devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate poetry from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact. All the works published as part of the Atelos project are commissioned specifically for it, and each is involved in some way with crossing traditional genre boundaries, including, for example, those that would separate theory from practice, poetry from prose, essay from drama, the visual image from the verbal, the literary from the non-literary, and so forth. The Atelos project when complete will consist of 50 volumes; lighthouse is volume 11. The project directors and editors are Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz.