An Evening of Nice: On David Melnick
Reading
Talk
Small Press Traffic celebrates the life and work of David Melnick (1938-2022), whose Nice: Collected Poems was just released by Nightboat Books. Join visiting writers Benjamin Friedlander, J. Gordon Faylor, and Jo Aurelio Giardini in discussing the underground queer world of one of the Bay Area’s most uncategorizable poets.
Nice collects Melnick’s four books, spanning twenty years of experimental writing across sound poetries, homophonic translation, queer private languages, music, mathematics, and more. We are delighted to take part in the recirculation of Melnick’s work with experts, scholars, and friends.
This program is in collaboration with Nightboat Books and The Poetry Center.
REGISTER
This event will be simultaneously livestreamed.
WHEN
Thursday, February 15 | 7:00 pm, Livestream at 7:30 pm
Thursday, February 15, 2024
7:00 pm
WHERE
Et al.
2831a Mission St, SF
NOTES ON ACCESsIBILITY
Et al.'s exhibition spaces are on the ground floor; the entrance and bathrooms are wheelchair-accessible.
J. Gordon Faylor
J. Gordon Faylor is the author of Fort Discloses Guests If You Wait Enough (Smiling Mind Documents) and Sun Shelter Gray (Zahir Editions), among other works. He is the former editor of Gauss PDF, and the former managing editor of SFMOMA's Open Space. He currently lives in Queens, NY.
Jo Giardini
Jo Giardini lives in Baltimore, by way of Vancouver, and is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at Johns Hopkins. They are write on the politics of communalism and separatism in the 1970s, and working on a critical history of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, its relationship to trans communities in Baltimore, and its often noxious effects on access to trans care and affirmation.
Benjamin Friedlander
Benjamin Friedlander is a poet, scholar, and editor. His poetry collections include The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress, 2007), One Hundred Etudes (Edge, 2012), and Some Cares (Spuyten Dyvil, 2024). With Alison Fraser, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman he edited Nice: The Collected Poems of David Melnick (Nightboat, 2024), and he has also edited the writings of Larry Eigner, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Since 1999 he has taught American literature and poetics at the University of Maine, where he edits the scholarly journal Paideuma.
