Please join us for an evening celebrating the legendary, intertwined feminist experimental poetry / inter-genre journals HOW(ever) and How2! This event will explore issues of feminist archive-making, gender and poetics writ large, and perspectives on modes of collaborative practice and publishing. A conversation will take place between Susan Gevirtz, an original member of the HOW(ever) editorial collective and contributor to How2, as well as Judith Goldman and Bianca Messinger, who are both part of the in-progress HOW(ever) & How2 Digital Archive Project, an open-access, scholarly re-issuing of the journals.
Running from 1983-1992, HOW(ever) was a print literary journal that appeared as a 16-page newsletter in 24 issues, while How2, the born-digital “daughter” serial following HOW(ever), was an online journal usually featuring 100+ literary and scholarly items, with 15 issues put out from 1999-2009. Unique in spanning three decades, and both print and digital contexts, these groundbreaking publications had an explicit premise: to connect women as writers and readers of experimental poetry to each other in a non-hierarchical, collective-minded, expansively participatory literary community—using the journals as platforms for highly active, creative, and intellectual interchange regarding innovative approaches to poetics as inflected by gender, as well as by class and race. They are extraordinary, fascinating documents of a number of major women writers from early stages in their careers, as well as repositories of intergenerational affiliation and exchange between established and emerging poets.
Published and edited by feminist experimentalist poet, critic, and educator Kathleen Fraser, HOW(ever) had many distinguished co-editors and guest editors, including Myung Mi Kim, Susan Gevirtz, Beverly Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Adelaide Morris, and Chris Tysh, among others. Also published by Kathleen Fraser, How2’s managing editors included Ann Vickery and Redell Olsen, with guest editors Renee Gladman, Jeanne Heuving, and Sawako Nakayasu, among others. Distinguished contributors across the journals include Barbara Guest, Dodie Bellamy, Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Nicole Brossard, Norma Cole, Rosmarie Waldrop, Alice Notley, Marjorie Welish, Leslie Scalapino, Joan Retallack, Etel Adnan, Harryette Mullen, Hoa Nguyen, Tisa Bryant, Jen Bervin, Elizabeth Willis, Carla Harryman, Brenda Hillman, Robert Glück, Juliana Spahr, Bhanu Kapil, Caroline Bergvall, Evie Shockley, Eileen Myles, among many others.
Et al.
2831a Mission St, SF
Et al.'s exhibition spaces are on the ground floor; the entrance and bathrooms are wheelchair-accessible.