Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383; mleventhal@colum.edu
Chicago, November 2003 - David Trinidad and Jeffery Conway will read selections from Phoebe 2002 at Columbia College on Monday, December 8 at 5:30 pm in the Conaway Center, 1004 S. Wabash. The program is free and open to the public. Call 312-344-8138 for information.
Phoebe 2002 is a 600 page three-year collaboration among Trinidad, Conway and Lynn Crosbie, intertwining their responses to the Bette Davis cult film All About Eve. Their mock epic bursts with allusions to literature, film, pop culture and mythology. Sporting sonnets, sestinas, ballads, haiku and villanelles, not to mention e-mails, fairy tales, recipes and soliloquies, it is a hypertext-like exploration of the associations of an ideal viewer these fifty years after the fact.
"The result--full of obsessive detail, zany tangents, cinephile gossip, rejuvenated poetic forms, literary 'visitation' and true confession--is an audaciously original work to which the only fitting response is wild applause," says Jeanne Marie Beaumont.
Jeffery Conway's poems have appeared in journals such as The World, The Portable Lower East Side, and No Roses Review. His work also appears in the anthologies Plush, The World in Us, and The Brink: An Anthology of Postmodern Poetry from 1965 to the Present. His chapbook Blood Poisoning was published in 1995. He is the author, with Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad, of Chain Chain Chain.
David Trinidad has published eleven books of poetry. Plasticville (Turtle Point Press, 2000) was hailed as "a delicately calibrated formal poetic construct" on "the obsessive aspects of popular culture-collectibility, relentless camp, larger-than-life power dynamics--and the odd way they reflect the poignant complexities of making choices." His earlier books include Answer Song, Hand Over Heart: Poems 1981-1988, and Pavane. He edited Powerless, the selected poems of Tim Dlugos; and, with Maxine Scates, Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harper's and Paris Review as well as anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 1991 and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Trinidad is Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago, where he also coordinates the Graduate Poetry Program.
The Poetry Series, which is sponsored by the English Department of Columbia College Chicago, will continue in February. All programs will take place at 5:30 p.m.