Host Ariana Reines and special guest, filmmaker and author Irv Broughton, present a rare screening of the 1974 film, It Wasn't a Dream, It Was a Flood. The film, a dream-like documentary about poet Frank Stanford, won the NW Film and Video Festival in 1975.
Broughton will also read from his just-completed novel, The Levees that Break in the Heart, loosely based on Stanford's family years growing up in Memphis and in levee camps along the Mississippi and other rivers. The book documents Stanford's adoption by a single woman, Dorothy Alter, and the later cultural milieu of levee-camp life, where his father worked the river as a levee contractor. Living side-by-side in the camps, Whites and African-Americans together, clearly helped shape Frank Stanford's unique vision, his life and work.
Irv Broughton is a filmmaker, writer and teacher known for discovering the poet Frank Stanford. Through Mill Mountain Press, his small-press operation, he served as publisher for nearly all of Stanford's books during the poet's life. He is considered a major chronicler of American life from his work in capturing on film and tape the memories and recollections of writers, producers, fliers and lots of everyday people. Author of more than a dozen books, his most recent publication is The Lost Peninsula: Adventures in Florida as Told by the People Who Lived There.
Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, and translator, currently teaching at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); and Mercury (2011). Her poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (2011) and Gurlesque (2010). Known for her interest in bodily experience, the occult, new media, and the possibilities of the long or book-length form, Reines has been described as "one of the crucial voices of her generation" by Michael Silverblatt on NPR's Bookworm. Reines earned a BA from Barnard College, and completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy.
