Barbara Barg (April 29, 1947 — May 22, 2018) was a poet, writer, and musician. Barg was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in

Forrest City, Arkansas Forrest City is a city in St. Francis County, Arkansas, United States, and the county seat. It was named for General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who used the location as a campsite for a construction crew completing a railroad between Memphis and Litt ...

. After studying with poet

Ted Berrigan Ted Berrigan (November 15, 1934 – July 4, 1983) was an American poet. Early life Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army. After t ...

Northeastern Illinois University Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) is a public university in Chicago, Illinois. NEIU serves approximately 9,000 students in the region and is a Hispanic-serving institution. The main campus is located in the community area of North Park w ...

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 The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was foun ...

Bowery Ballroom The Bowery Ballroom is a New York City live-music venue located at 6 Delancey Street in the neighborhood of Bowery in Manhattan. The Bowery Ballroom holds something of a cult status among musicians as well as audiences. ''Rolling Stone'' magaz ...

, St Mark's

Poetry Project The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan by, among others, the poet and translator Paul Blackburn. It has been a crucial venue for new and experimental poetry f ...

Bowery Poetry Club The Bowery Poetry Club is a New York City poetry performance space founded by Bob Holman in 2002.Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. (2008). ''Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam.'' Chapter 26: What the ...

Nuyorican Poets Café The Nuyorican (Puerto Rican New Yorkers) Poets Cafe is a nonprofit organization in Alphabet City, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip ...

, Fez,

CBGB CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan's East Village. The club was previously a biker bar and before that was a dive bar. The letters ''CBGB'' were for '' Country'', '' BlueGrass'', and '' Blues'', Kri ...

Luna Lounge Luna Lounge was a bar and music club located at 171 Ludlow Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Opened in 1995 by Dianne Galliano and Robert Sacher, it was a popular venue for local bands and stand-up comics (the rock band Interpol played there ...

, Sidewalk Cafe's The Fort,

Mercury Lounge The Mercury Lounge is a live music venue in the Lower East Side of New York City. Like its brother venue The Bowery Ballroom, The Mercury Lounge is celebrated as an iconic indie venue due to its acoustics, its fostering and even launching of upc ...

, 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 Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Ce ...

Elliott Sharp Elliott Sharp (born March 1, 1951) is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released ...

Z'EV Z'EV (born Stefan Joel Weisser, February 8, 1951 – December 16, 2017) was an American poet, percussionist, and sound artist. After studying various world music traditions at CalArts, he began creating his own percussion sounds out of indust ...

Janene Higgins Janene Higgins is a graphic designer and video artist based in New York City. Her work spans several genres, from video performance in the experimental music scene to videos for Saks Fifth Avenue, and the design of several hundred CD packages for ...

Monique Buzzarté Monique Buzzarté (born 1960 in San Pedro, California, United States on August 26, 1960) is a composer, trombonist, and activist was a key part of an international protest on behalf of the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) again ...

and other experimental artists and musicians. Her poetry is attuned to notions of poetic ethnologies, and what she called "voluntary evolution" ("evolution for the hell of it") and "whatever other notion I get in my head". Barg most recently lived in Chicago, and was on faculty at The Chicago School of Poetics, and was writing screenplays for Jump Room Films.

Death

On May 22, 2018, Ellen Floren's official Facebook page revealed in a post that Barg had died. She was 71.

Books

* ''The Origin of THE Species'', photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe (

Semiotext(e) Semiotext(e) is an independent publisher of critical theory, fiction, philosophy, art criticism, activist texts and non-fiction. History Founded in 1974, ''Semiotext(e)'' began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylv ...

) * ''Obeying the Chemicals'' with photographs by

Nan Goldin Nancy Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is '' The Ballad of Sexual Depend ...

(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 )

Literary Anthologies

Barg's works have appeared in the following literary 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 Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Genera ...

, 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

at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery; 1966-1991'' (Crown Publisher, Inc). Edited by

Anne Waldman Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political acti ...

(with foreword by

) * ''The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book'' (

Southern Illinois University Press Southern Illinois University Press or SIU Press, founded in 1956, is a university press located in Carbondale, Illinois, owned and operated by Southern Illinois University. The press publishes approximately 50 titles annually, among its more t ...

) Edited by Charles Bernstein and

Bruce Andrews Bruce Andrews (April 1, 1948) is an American poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets (or '' L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' ''poets'', after the magazine that bears that name). Life and work Andrews was born in Chicago and studied ...

Audio Anthologies

Barg has contributed to numerous

sound art Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, sound a ...

anthologies, including

's multi-artist compilation CDs ''State of the Union'', ''Beneath the Valley of the Yahoos'', ''Phone Noir'' (with Fem Noir), ''Late 20th Century Sexual Practices'', ''One World Poetry'' (a multi-artist compilation recorded at Amsterdam's ''One World Poetry Festival''), and ''Sugar Alcohol & Meat'' (produced by

John Giorno John Giorno (December 4, 1936 – October 11, 2019) was an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, i ...

Poetry Systems). Barg's audio work features in three multi-artist compilation cassette tapes: ''

Noise Fest Noise Fest was an influential festival of no wave noise music performances curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at the New York City art space White Columns in June 1981. Sonic Youth made their first live appearances at this show. In mid ...

'' (with the band Avant Squares), and twice on ''

Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the ''Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine'' utilized the audio cassette medium to distribute no wave downtown music and audio art and was in activity ...

'' (in #1 and #5) (both with

Barbara Ess Barbara Ess (born Barbara Eileen Schwartz; April 4, 1944 – March 4, 2021) was an American photographer. She often used a pinhole camera and was known for her No Wave musical and editorial work. Education Ess earned a B.A. at the University of ...

).
Barbara Ess and Barbara Barg, ''You Who Know No Pain'' (7:07) track on ''

'' #1

References

External links

Barbara Barg official site

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery

The Allen Ginsberg Project

* ttps://www.jumproomfilms.com/ Jump Room Films official site {{DEFAULTSORT:Barg, Barbara Poets from Arkansas 20th-century American women writers Writers from Little Rock, Arkansas Northeastern Illinois University alumni Musicians from Little Rock, Arkansas 1947 births Living people Musicians from Memphis, Tennessee Musicians from New York City American women poets 20th-century American poets 21st-century American women