Barbara Barg
Barbara Barg (born April 29, 1947) is a poet, writer, and musician.
Barg was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Forrest City, Arkansas. After studying with poet Ted Berrigan at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, she moved to New York City and became involved in a number of individual and collaborative projects on the downtown poetry/music scene in the late 1970s-1990s. She performed frequently at venues like The Kitchen, Bowery Ballroom, St Mark's Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poets Café, Fez, CBGB, Luna Lounge, Sidewalk Cafe's The Fort, Mercury Lounge, Galapogos, The Sculpture Center, The Open Center, as well as One World Poetry Festival (Amsterdam) and The International Festival of the Poets (Rome). With writer Maggie Dubris she co-founded the all-women cult band "Homer Erotic" (1991 to 2000), which came to life during a lull in poetry readings in the early 90s. The group was composed of seven women interested in music and poetry as performative art forms. She has also performed with Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Z'EV, Janene Higgins, Monique Buzzarté and other experimental artists and musicians. Her poetry is attuned to notions of poetic ethnologies, and what she calls "voluntary evolution" ("evolution for the hell of it") and "whatever other notion I get in my head". Barg currently lives in Chicago, is on faculty at The Chicago School of Poetics, and is writing screenplays for Jump Room Films.[1][2]
Books
- The Origin of THE Species, photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe (Semiotext(e) )
- Obeying the Chemicals with photographs by Nan Goldin (Hard Press)
Recordings
- Yield (with the band Homer Erotic, 1998 - Creme de la Femme)
- Homerica the Beautiful (with the band Homer Erotic, 1999 - Bobby Previte's Depth of Field label)
- Calling You Home (with the band Coyote Poets of the Universe, 2008 - Square Shaped Records)
- Holding Patterns (with the band Zanana, 2005 - Deep Listening )
Anthologies
Barg's works have appeared in the following anthologies.
- American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century (Four Walls Eight Windows)
- Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems (Seven Stories Press) Edited by Allen Ginsberg with Andy Clausen and Eliot Katz
- AM LIT: Neue Literatur Aus Den USA (Edition Druckhaus / Germany) Edited by Gerard Falkner and Sylvere Lotringer
- Out of This World: The Poetry Project at St Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery; 1966-1991 (Crown Publisher, Inc). Edited by Anne Waldman, forward by Allen Ginsberg
- The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Southern Illinois University Press) Edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews
Barg has contributed to three of Elliott Sharp's multi-artist compilation CDs State of the Union and "Beneath the Valley of the Yahoos", Phone Noir (with Fem Noir), and Late 20th Century Sexual Practices — as well as to One World Poetry, a multi-artist compilation recorded at Amsterdam's One World Poetry Festival, and Sugar Alcohol & Meat, produced by John Giorno Poetry Systems. Barg features in two multi-artist compilation tapes: Noise Fest with the band Avant Squares and Tellus #5 with Barbara Ess.
References
- ↑ Diggory, Terrence Barbara Barg bio The Encyclopedia of The New York Poets (Facts on File, 2009) p.43-44
- ↑ Barbara Barg official site