iPrincess Diaries

New Video

2013-09-28T18:33:00.002-07:00

This past week, I showed a new video piece at the &Now Festival of Innovate Writing in Boulder, CO, at a panel with some of my favorite writers/friends. The dress I wore is the Teen Girl Dress by amazing designer Peggy Noland, whose work truly blows my pink frilled socks off.

At the &NOW Festival in Boulder, CO: Off the road, behind closed doors, late at night, and all over the internet, the teenage girl learns to speak, to write, and to make. Alternately resisting and indulging the materials and tools of a hyperrational, commercially saturated, world-wide-webbed social reality, she uses tarot cards, Tumblr, fashion, and her own bedroom walls. As her body is marked by race, class, age, pregnancy, and/or illness, she holds onto the behaviors, languages, and affects of girlhood. She knows how to codeswitch--to act, dress, talk, and feel like a girl, or a woman, or a man. In this slumber party ritual, we will conjure the girl. As we move from sleeping bag to lectern to Internet to ouija board to Q&A, we will interrogate who or what is speaking when we speak, possessed by our own ongoing girlhoods. We will create a space in which teenage girls’ and writers’ uses of occult practices collide, recalling the compositional strategies of Yeats, H.D., di Prima, Merrill, Plath, and Dickinson. This ritual recognizes girls as sorcerous subjects whose practices of radical apathy, noncompliance, superstition, magic, and other-worlding resist the logics and power structures of the rational world. In letting her speak through our bodies, we become the girls we already are.

Featuring: Becca Klaver Carmen Gimenez Smith Danielle Pafunda Kate Durbin K. Lorraine Graham Lara Glenum Marisa Crawford Tim Jones-Yelvington

Here is the video:

Conversation with Ben Fama in Lemon Hound

2013-09-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

Had a great conversation with Ben Fama for Lemon Hound. We discussed the teen girl tumblr aesthetic, E! Entertainment, Spencer Pratt, my public and private scandals, and more. He asked all the right (and wrong) questions.

"I definitely think the most exciting art being created now is by young women on the Internet. That’s what my tumblr project, Women as Objects, is about, gathering that work and calling attention to it. It’s also an anthropological project. I curated the Girls, Online gallery as kind of a best-of the work on Women as Objects, both from girls who self-identify as artists (like Molly Soda) and girls who maybe don’t self-identify that way, but who are doing amazing work (Plastic Pony, Lynne Teen Porno, and countless anonymous tumblr users). I didn’t want the work to get lost in the Internet ether–particularly the work of those who are not identifying as artists but who are inspiring a lot of people and getting copied by Urban Outfitters."

gURLs in The Daily Beast

2013-09-23T22:28:00.002-07:00

Ana Cecilia Alvarez wrote a great piece on online feminist art and the show gURLs that I was a part of in NYC for The Daily Beast.

Click on the excerpt below for the full piece:

Girls performing as girls online often find themselves slipping between object and subject. Indeed, particularly within Tumblr, nostalgic imagery of women “posing” in the name of sexual objectification—cheekily documented in gURLs performer Kate Durbin’s Tumblr project “Women as Objects”—becomes the primary source imagery for online girl culture. As gURLs performer Ann Hirsch writes in her essay “Women, Sexuality and the Internet,” “The women who self-represent often portray the same conventions of television, films, and magazines […] illustrating a cycle of identification and internalization of stereotypes, rather than subversion.” Much like real life, performing female sexuality comes at the unavoidable price of sexual predation. Just like women walking in short skirts “ask for” sexual harassment, artists performing femininity on the web must share their space with pornography. These female artists find a way to appropriate objectified stances with a wink, deploying humorous irony and theatricality to begin to subvert, and all the while condemn, objectification.

Portraits by Organ Armani

2013-09-23T22:24:00.001-07:00

Internet artist Organ Armani has created several portraits of me, based off of an image from my NO BIKINI photo project. Check out more of his incredible work here.

Rhizome and HTML Giant

2013-09-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

Rachel Rabbit White wrote up the group show, gURLs, that I participated in recently for Rhizome.

Amanda Montei mentions both my performance/internet work and Gaga Stigmata in her piece on Lara Glenum's and Becca Klaver's recent wonderful books for HTML Giant.

A bit of press

2013-09-13T21:31:00.002-07:00

A Gaga Stigmata shout out in Australia's Daily Life magazine that we missed when it came out

Glo-zell tweeted a link to Roland Betancourt's piece on her work in Gaga Stigmata

Buzzfeed, Frederic Aspiras, tumblr fame, and VICE

2013-09-04T00:19:00.000-07:00

Gaga Stigmata was recently featured in Buzzfeed. Frederic Aspiras, Gaga's hairstylist, has also tweeted two of our pieces recently!

I contributed some ideas to Johanna King-Slutzky's interesting VICE article on tumblr fame, in which she talks about (my fav) Molly Soda and Bebe Zeva. Johanna and I talked about the teen girl tumblr aesthetic, and what I find so interesting about personal identity on tumblr (clue: THE GLITCH). I actually have a pretty long transcript of my talk with her, so I may post it here at some point.

Pop Hop with Alex Dimitrov & gUrls at Transfer Gallery in NYC

2013-09-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

Here are flyers and a few images from two recent events I participated in, one in LA with the beautiful poet Alex Dimitrov and one in NY with a roster of amazing women performance artists. I will try and get better about posting events here before they actually happen again!

*Bottom photo by Marina Galperina of ANIMALNewYork

2013-08-17T12:59:00.001-07:00

A nice mention of my first book The Ravenous Audience from Ky-Phong Tran in Huffington Post, in his brilliant piece on the Tsarnaev Rolling Stone cover controversy

Honored to be on poet JD Scott's list of 23 Poets Who Made Me Care About Poetry in HTML Giant

Reading at Annenberg Beach House

2013-08-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Last night I read at the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica with the lovely Helene Cardona and Eric Morago. Brendan Constantine moderated, and Red Hen threw the shindig.

I will post more pictures soon.

*Photo by Tien Tienngern

*Bottom photo features Helene Cardona, and I will post the name of the photographer soon!

Poetry Videos

2013-08-09T21:44:00.001-07:00

Recently I read for The Casserole reading series with the amazing Lara Glenum. The series is hosted by the very cool Chelsea Kurnick. Check out our readings, along with a Q & A session after, below.

Here is a video of me reading The Hills for Similar Peaks' launch party.

Spencer Pratt, Jay-Z, and ABRA-freaking-cadabra

2013-08-09T21:29:00.001-07:00

*Astarte Muerte is Born

Lots of quick updates:

I interviewed the brilliant Rob Wittig and Mark Marino of TempSpence about their e-lit project, where they took over Spencer Pratt's Twitter.

I'm judging Black Warrior Review's annual poetry contest. Here is a little interview they conducted with me.

We conducted a roundtable at Gaga Stigmata about Jay-Z's controversial (and awesome) performance Picasso Baby at PACE gallery in NY.

I have work from The Hills in the newest issue of Denver Quarterly (Volume 47, Number 4).

I have work from my collaboration ABRA, with Amaranth Borsuk, in the latest issue of Spoon River Poetry Review (38.1).

An essay + images about/from ABRA, co-written with Amaranth Borsuk, is up in the current issue of The Collagist.

More News

2013-06-16T18:01:00.002-07:00

Baby Seth Olbaum wrote up my recent trip to NYC for Bambi Muse

I read an excerpt from my novella Kim’s Fairytale Wedding (forthcoming from SporkPress) for a podcast series run by Gorsky Press

Review of The Ravenous Audience

2013-06-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

Rachel Kendall wrote a great review of The Ravenous Audience for Sein und Werden:

"Kate Durbin's Ravenous Audience isn't just a collection of poetry. With its considered formatting and use of (negative) space it has all the elements of an art installation, spread neatly across the page like a centre-fold. Durbin herself is a performance artist so it should come as no surprise that her poetry, written for and about 'the audience' should lift itself off the page, stand on its hind legs and howl for attention."

Two Readings in NYC!!

2013-05-30T16:30:00.002-07:00

I can't wait to be in NYC next week! Hope to see some of you NYCers at one or both of the below events. I'm coming for you!

CLMP + WONDER present: SUMMER CRUSH, a fundraiser to benefit CLMP.

~*SUMMER CRUSH*~

WONDER's third and final crush party, SUMMER CRUSH, takes place at 8pm on June 7, 2013 at La Sala in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 58 N 3rd St, Brooklyn, NY 11211. Advance tickets begin at $10. With each ticket purchase, you can anonymously list your crush's name on the crush list, which has been made public at clmp.org/crush.

Hosted by LARA GLENUM, SUMMER CRUSH begins with cocktail hour readings by KATE DURBIN, ROB FITTERMAN, ARIANA REINES, KIM ROSENFIELD, and MAX STEELE. Following the reading, C. RIDER COOLEY & HAZEL (feat. JEFFREY LEPENDORF)will perform an experimental dance on the ceiling of La Sala.

Performances will be followed by an all-night dance party with DJ sets by SILENT DRAPE RUNNERS, ANDREW SHUTA, and WONDER.

Each guest receives a drink ticket and a limited edition chapbook by KEVIN KILLIAN, jointly produced by UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE, ARGOS BOOKS, FUTUREPOEM, andWONDER. The book will only be available to attendees of the event.

Tickets to the ~*SUMMER CRUSH*~ fundraiser as well as the interactive crush list are now available (clmp.org/crush).

Summer Crush has been generously sponsored by The Segue Foundation, with beer lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery.

www.shitwonder.com
♥ ♥ ♥

&Now Innovative Writing Awards Anthology

2013-05-30T16:27:00.004-07:00

I'm really happy to have my "Anna Nicole Show" in the second &Now Innovative Writing Awards anthology, with work by so many writers I admire! You will want to buy this book, teach this book, eat this book. Contributors include: Amber Sparks, Alissa Nutting, Matt Bell, Roxane Gay, Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, Amina Cain, Kim Hyesoon, Gretchen Ernster Henderson, Sandra-Ben Doller, & many more!

Purchase on Amazon here.

Bone Bouquet

2013-05-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

I have work from Abra, my collaboration with Amaranth Borsuk, in the Spring 2013 issue of Bone Bouquet, along with other lovelies such as Gina Abelkop, Khadijah Queen, Sandy Florian, and Olivia Cronk.

You can purchase here.

New Things

2013-05-21T16:00:00.002-07:00

Two reviews of Kept Women in Tarpaulin Sky

A review of my Wives Shows performance at LitFest Pasadena at Radar Productions

It's summertime

LitFest Pasadena

2013-05-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I will be reading from my novella Wives Shows, about reality TV wives, at LitFest Pasadena. I will be casting the audience in roles as "wives."

I go on at 2:55 on the stage, and finish around 3:15. Would love to see you there!

LITFEST PASADENA IS BACK!

Saturday, May 11 * 10am-5pm *

Pasadena's Central Park

Join over 80 renowned authors and performers and 40 exhibitors for a fantastic, fun filled day of readings, panels, and performances for all ages!

View our schedule of events on three stages and exhibitors online now at www.litfestpasadena.org!

The Polished You

2013-05-06T22:51:00.004-07:00

A few years ago I created/conceived of a chapbook for V Places' factory series, called The Polished You, and Amaranth Borsuk wrote about the work for a piece on conceptions of authorship in the digital age for JEP. Writing The Polished You was an interesting experience for me, in that I conceived of using the Nancy Taylor book (which is the same book I used for my Prices Upon Request performance) since I thought it'd be most compelling to appropriate another text as Place would be appropriating mine, and because the Nancy Taylor book's author was "unknown," raising further questions of authorship, and because using this text would allow readers to further the level of appropriation by adding in their own words in the survey section. I had people send in their images of "their" books to me, as was featured in HTML GIANT.

Borsuk writes:

"This contradiction perhaps reaches its zenith in Vanessa Place’s Factory Series, a set of print-on-demand chapbooks written by her contemporaries to which she (with their permission) has affixed her own name. The project’s very title plays on Andy Warhol’s appropriative approach to art, which, like conceptualism, attributed as much value to idea as to artifact.[23] The project itself thus plays with notions of authorship. For example, The Polished You, contributed by performance artist and poet Kate Durbin, appropriates selections from a 1960s finishing school workbook from the four-volume Nancy Taylor Course. Durbin’s source text is aptly chosen for the ways it highlights questions of selfhood and authorship. The book takes the form of a survey inviting “a completely honest self-evaluation” by the reader in the interest of determining “what type of woman you are, and, more importantly, the type of woman you want to be.”[24] Questions range from analyses of one’s face, figure, and interests to considerations of how others perceive one, culminating in an objective “comprehensive picture of yourself.” In every case, the questions are subjective: for example, “Is your face pretty?”, “Do you enjoy making up your face and styling your hair?”, “What subject, other than yourself, are you most interested in?”, and “What do you want most out of life?”. Many also provide a limited range of potential answers: “How do you think you appear to others? Sophisticated? Clean-cut and wholesome? Sexy? Tomboyish? Why do you think you appear this way?” Still others hint at the author’s own values: “Describe the kind of environment you enjoy most. Casual? Plush? Intellectual? Sophisticated? Avant-garde? A combination of these? Some other? Why?” In juxtaposing these questions, the text highlights the absurdity of its own premise and encourages readers to reflect on how the self is constructed (“Do people consider you active, average, or passive? Do you agree with this? Why?”), and, by extension, how authorship is built. Each page provides several blank lines for the reader to respond to these prompts, further complicating questions of The Polished You’s authorship.

Whose text is this—the author listed on the title page, Vanessa Place; her surrogate, Kate Durbin; the reader who fills in the blanks; or the text’s original author Nancy Taylor, who may herself have been a pseudonym for another writer? According to Library of Congress records, the 1971 copyright entry (the edition Durbin used) lists “ITT Educational Services” as the applicant and “Taylor Career Programs” as the book’s author.[25] Was there ever a Nancy Taylor? The secretarial school bearing her name was founded in 1964 by an entrepreneur named Bert Schiff to provide vocational training and finishing classes to women, but Schiff transformed it in the 1970s into the Taylor Business Institute, which currently offers associate degrees in a range of skills including accounting, medical billing, and electronics engineering.[26] A note at the end of the chapbook acknowledges “the author of the texts is unknown,” pointing to the central question of the book: What does it mean to be known, and how do we know ourselves?"

You can read the entire article here.

Megan Milks Reviews Kept Women

2013-05-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

I love this review of Kept Women by Megan Milks for Fanzine:

"Kept Women is quintessential Durbin: strange, beguiling, and funny in a nervous, beyond-ironic way. In these poems, the mansion’s residents have vacated the premises; what we know of them arrives through their rooms and the objects within them."

Interview in The Conversant

2013-05-02T15:06:00.001-07:00

The brilliant Virginia Konchan conducted an intense interview with me for The Conversant. We talked Gaga, Women as Objects, the gurlesque, etc.

Tonight in NYC

2013-04-30T18:28:00.001-07:00

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧SILENT DRAPE RUNNERS & ANIMALNewYork PRESENT*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

(✿◠‿◠) G1RLZ NI†E (◠‿◠✿)

*:✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･*

"GIRLZ NITE" is a dance + video art party celebrating fresh video art by local and international artists. It's a shamelessly feminine pop-up art experience co-opting a club aesthetic. Come see selfie and net-based works that are good & a get down time.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

DJs:

PRINCE RAMA
CHIPPY NONSTOP
SILENT DRAPE RUNNERS

+performance by Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Alexandra Gorczynski, Petra Cortright, Carla Gannis, Bunny Rogers, Angela Washko, Casey Jane Ellison, Laura McMillian, Saoirse Wall, Actually Huzienga, Giselle Zatonyl, Mary Rachel Kostreva, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Jessie Stead and more!
+ Kate Durbin, Rollin Leonard, Anthony Antonellis, Systaime...
*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

HOSTS:

Julia Kaganskiy (#ArtsTech, The Creators Project)
Kait "#TheDutchessofKent" Browne
Anthony Tran (BIRFDAY BOI!!!)
Cammisa Buerhaus
Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque
Zoo Lion

･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

FREE
21+
Complimentary drinks via drink ticket between 10 and 11 pm

The DL

95 Delancey St., New York, New York 10002

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

(｡♥‿♥｡) C - U - SOON (｡♥‿♥｡)

Finkelstein Reviews Kept Women for Lemon Hound

2013-04-28T18:36:00.002-07:00

Rachel Finkelstein wrote a really interesting review of my latest chapbook, Kept Women, for Lemon Hound. I like her discussion of the work's "defeat" and "bleakness" (not included in this excerpt), as I think my conceptual strategy lends itself to reading the work ultimately as incredibly bleak/depressing or incredibly liberating, in that it leaves the reader a lot of space to come to their own conclusions.

Here is a snippet. Click through for full review:

Durbin echoes Marilyn Frye’s proposal to “consider the birdcage*.*” One might recall the birdcage as Frye’s visual metaphor conveying oppression as a force of many powers. Durbin’s poems are cages, restricted spaces inhabited by replicated books, sexy devil / angel costumes, insects frozen in amber—women “kept” as objects. The poem “Stone Sanctuary” gives a particularly disturbing portrait of female entrapment: “Modeled on / prehistoric caves in France, the grotto’s glass ceiling is implanted with/panels of prehistoric objects and insects rapt in amber.”

Like the glass slipper in Cinderella, the objects of Kept Women glimmer with a potential magic for enactment. These objects are unable to function autonomously and are positioned for use, such as in “Baronial Bachelor Pad,” “A curved double/staircase, perfect for late night drunken banister sliding or posing for/pre-red carpet event photos.”

Many times an object will crack in presentation, allowing the object to exude subtle defeat. There’s an unexpected sympathy for the sponges in the grotto shower that “once were natural, living creatures,” —a sadness in the performance of designated, fixed roles which are dutifully carried out.

LA Readings Tomorrow!

2013-04-19T16:35:00.003-07:00

I am reading in LA twice tomorrow!

***********

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

A book launch for
THE SONNETS: TRANSLATING & REWRITING SHAKESPEARE
Edited by Sharmila Cohen & Paul Legault

Featuring readings by:

Kate Durbin
Julia Bloch
Kelli Anne Noftle
Martha Ronk
& more

Saturday, April 20 2013
Doors open @ 7pm, reading starts @ 7:30pm

The Poetic Research Bureau @ Telic Arts
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA

The Sonnets, edited by the founding editors of the translation journal Telephone, pairs 154 poet-translators with each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets--literally rewriting history, or at least the great Bard's poetic oeuvre. This collection of English-to-English "translations" includes work by Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Jen Bervin, Paul Celan, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, Donald Revell, Jerome Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, and many others.

In the tradition of Ezra Pound's Cathay or Jack Spicer's After Lorca, these versions explore the themes of their originals while completely re-authoring them--imagining a new Shakespeare, self-described in his dedication to The Sonnets as: "THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER ... SETTING FORTH."

http://distranslation.com/index.php?%2Fthe-sonnets%2Fthe-sonnets%2F