Cedar Sigo at the Parkside Lounge, Reading on April 27, 2025 part of Ann Stephenson’s reading series, Readings at Parkside hosts West Coast poet Cedar Sigo
Siren of Atlantis, poems by Cedar Sigo, published 2025 by Wave Press
Last night at the Parkside Lounge on Houston Street in New York, West Coast poet Cedar Sigo gave a moving and beautiful reading of poems from his new book, Siren of Atlantis, published by Wave Books, Seattle. I haven’t seen Cedar since 2002, when he and Kevin Killian and I did a video shoot for my writer’s series and created the short video, Kevin and Cedar.
Cedar Sigo and Cecilia Dougherty at Cedar’s reading from his new book, Siren of Atlantis, at Parkside Lounge in NYC
Cedar looks amazing, as you can plainly see. Siren of Atlantis is a book he wrote in part as a walking back into writing, “keeping a hand in,” after having experienced a stroke in 2022. A truly remarkable achievement. Yes. Energy, motivation, love, excitement. All are a part of this book, and of course, its author.
Ann Stephenson introduces Cedar Sigo, who is going to be reading from his new book, Siren of Atlantis. Parkside Lounge, NYC.
I went to the reading alone and ran into the artist Elise Gardella, who lives nearby and who had not yet met Cedar. Eileen Myles was there and I spied Justin Vivian Bond at a table across the room. Enough gossip! Cedar Sigo is an accomplished poet, treadding carefully yet delightfully and appreciatively through the language. After the reading, Ann and Cedar talked about his life and his work.
After the reading, Ann and Cedar had a conversation about Cedar’s work, the efforts and joys of writing, and the uses and meaning of reading and writing poetry at this time of political oppression.
Cedar Sigo & Anne Stephenson at Parkside Lounge, NYC, having a discussion and Q&A after Cedar’s reading.
As you listen, the particles of sound (phonos) decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. The relationship is symbiotic.
-Pauline Oliveros
Curator’s Statement, Jamie Chan:
I wanted to see a collection of artworks together that could speak about daily life and art but outside of categories or commentary, sort of like a stream of water, a walk, a place to rest the mind. Thereness, but not at all reductive. Works that communicate intimately to the viewer through stories with a soft focus. Doesn’t represent a dialog, but represents the relationship between thought process and idea formation. A circle is a thought pattern. Not fiction or nonfiction, neither formal nor informal. Works that are grounded in specific places, groups of people, and rest in fluid qualities of time. A sense of resolution that lingers.
Works not exactly being in service of “process” – not ephemera or document – but concretely living and direct. The form of the works themselves is materially lightweight, diffuse and comprises accumulated gestures, yet is emphatically manual and sourced from the materiality of life and the senses. The works also all resemble piles – larger trajectories and practices exceeding the sense of time that they exist in. These artists capture our attention in both the front and back of our minds, skillfully folding time into a narrative movement that smolders, and the implication of that movement circles us back to elemental and early experiences of the earth and of place, individuals in groups connecting back to the source. JC
Cecilia Dougherty’s small drawings (pencil and conté crayon on paper, various sizes, 2021-22) have been created as the background drawings for episodes from the story she has developed over several visits and much research into the Paleolithic cave art in Spain and France. The story follows Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons on a migration through France, Italy, the Balkans and southward to what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, to a site called Shanidar, the location of the well-documented Neanderthal flower burial. Cecilia Dougherty is a visual artist living in New York.
In the work of Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, two decaying leaves reveal their venation patterns where hidden traces suggest a map of movement. She brings landscape to the foreground–the words root, rot and rotation are repeated in her ritual typewritings, and her drawings are made upon uneven ground. Lucía is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Mexico City, and the editor of diSONARE, an experimental editorial project. Her time-based practice explores the fluidity of language through investigative poetics, resulting in a corpus of visual, sonic, and text-based works. Her expanded poetry practice involves an engagement with the environment and collecting natural and found objects.
Anthony Leslie’s 2014-22 sound diaries are the products of an ongoing daily practice that combines field recording, concentrated listening and first-person narrative. They represent an extensive and growing archive of his sound memories, mostly from his time spent living, working and caregiving in and around Los Angeles. They contain public sounds, domestic sounds, sounds from the world of nature and of music, the voices of friends, family, people on the street, poets, protestors, and others.
