SUSAN HOWE & DAVID GRUBBS: “THIEFTH”

November 8, 2005
Fulton Recital Hall at The University of Chicago
1010 E. 59th Street, 4th Floor
7:00pm

Poet Susan Howe and musician and composer David Grubbs will present the United States premiere of “Thiefth” on November 8, 2005 at 7:00pm at Fulton Recital Hall on the University of Chicago campus. The performance, one of only two to take place in the US, will include electroacoustic performance versions of Howe's poems "Thorow" and "Melville's Marginalia" for voice, computer, and piano. For this performance, Susan Howe will read, accompanied by David Grubbs at the piano and computer.

Drawing from the journals of Sir William Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, “Thorow” both evokes the winter landscape that surrounds Lake George in upstate New York, and explores collisions and collusions of historical violence and national identity. “Thorow” is an act of second seeing in which Howe and Grubbs engage the lake’s glittering, ice surface as well as the insistent voices that haunt an unseen world underneath. "Melville's Marginalia" is an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Herman Melville's own reading and the notations he made in some of the books he owned and loved. The collaging and mirror-imaging of words and sounds are concretions of verbal static, visual mediations on what can and cannot be said.

For more information about the collaboration and for bios of Howe and Grubbs, visit: http://poempresent.uchicago.edu

The performance, which is free and open to the public, is being made possible through the unique collaboration of a group of area institutions. Support for the event comes from: the Chicago Poetry Project, Chicago Review, The Poetry Center of Chicago, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The University of Chicago Committee on Creative Writing, and The University of Chicago Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series.

Fulton Recital Hall is located on the fourth floor of 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Attendees should enter through the courtyard entrance.