New York Festival of Song is thrilled to share their new recording of a rare musical collaboration between two literary greats: Paul Bowles and James Schuyler. A Picnic Cantata is an unpublished vocal chamber piece with music by Bowles and a libretto by Schuyler, and NYFOS Records recently released the first recording of the piece since its debut in 1953. The term “hidden gem” gets tossed around with some frequency, but the crazily inventive Picnic Cantata truly earns that descriptor. I've attached the press release, and if you'd like further information there are expanded liner notes online. The album is available to stream or you can order a physical copy here. The entire work is under 30 mins, but if you just have time for a taste, NYFOS recommend starting with track 3—when the ladies finally tuck into a feast worthy of Zabar’s.

Maureen Owen's new book, let the heart hold down the breakage   Or   the caregiver's log is out now from Hanging Loose Press; Cassandra Gillig has written a review of it for the upcoming issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter.  

Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life, translated by Lindsay Turner - three poems, one play, and three short stories - is out now with Nightboat. Boutquet's poem 'Without', translated by Turner, has been Poem of the Week (Jan 25th) at The Yale Review, and you can read it here.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs & Anne Waldman read at the Poetry Project on Wednesday, March 29 at 8:00 pm. What counter-geographies and subterranean archives does the poet assemble? In their recent works – Village and Bard, Kinetic, both out with Coffee House Press – LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Anne Waldman trace related constructions of place and memory, the imperiled and essential wavelengths at the edge that propel and hold our communities across time.

Nick Sturm will be talking with Anne Waldman about the mimeograph print culture at The Poetry Project on Friday 10th March at 4pm ET to celebrate the release of three new small press bibliographies from the Among the Neighbors pamphlet series. More info // register here: http://library.buffalo.edu/among-the-neighbors. 

Evan Kindley's group biography of the New York School, Still in the Published City, telling the intertwined stories of Ashbery, O'Hara, Guest, Koch, Schuyler, and Baraka, has been acquired by Knopf.

John Godfrey, Vincent Katz, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman read at the Guggenheim in celebration of Alex Katz’s engagement in theater, dance, and poetry, which was on view in two exhibitions, Alex Katz: Theater and Dance, at the Colby College Museum of Art, and Alex Katz: Gathering, the retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

City Lights Press will be publishing Clark Coolidge's Crystal Text in November 2023.

Finally, The Flow Chart Foundation's Ashbery Resource Center (ARC) -- a custodian of large portions of the John Ashbery archive and collections, and a repository for items and objects relating to his work -- is building its critical papers collection. They are seeking:

1. Paper print outs of dissertations and theses -- preferably permanently bound -- that focus on or have substantial engagement with Ashbery and his influence, or the New York School and its influences in general. These will be formally cataloged and shelved and will be accessible for in-person user research. Please MAIL dissertations or theses to the below address - if you would like to also include a PDF version, please send to nina@flowchartfoundation.org (Please Note: to be formally cataloged, your dissertation or theses must be printed and mailed to us, preferably in a permanently bound format)

The Flow Chart Foundation
Attn Jeffrey Lependorf
348 Warren Street
Hudson, NY 12534

2. Electronic PDFs of published critical articles that focus on or have substantial engagement with Ashbery and his influence, or The New York School and its influences in general. Please email digital PDFs to: nina@flowchartfoundaton.org. 

New York Festival of Song is thrilled to share their new recording of a rare musical collaboration between two literary greats: Paul Bowles and James Schuyler. A Picnic Cantata is an unpublished vocal chamber piece with music by Bowles and a libretto by Schuyler, and NYFOS Records recently released the first recording of the piece since its debut in 1953. The term “hidden gem” gets tossed around with some frequency, but the crazily inventive Picnic Cantata truly earns that descriptor. The press release is here, and if you'd like further information there are some wonderful expanded liner notes online. The album is available to stream or you can order a physical copy here. The entire work is under 30 mins, but if you just have time for a taste, NYFOS recommend starting with track 3—when the ladies finally tuck into a feast worthy of Zabar’s.

By Jason Smith 

​ 
EXIT 66 STREET & BROADWAY
 
    With half-an-hour to spare before going
        to work
    You twist the poles and adjust the shades
    Letting in a shuttered light that falls
        upon your outstretched body,
    As if forming a farewell letter that
        shapes against the high-ridged skirting.
    And as you speak about our future together
    Those sentiments settle like toxic ash
    As you arch gracefully against the wall
        and reach up towards the ceiling,
    Whilst standing upon an orange-coloured
    Circular, Ege Rya rug that is dashed
        with occasional flecks of grey
    (Upon which the bride once stood, and wrapped
    Around him did the fisherman hunt!)
    In contrast to a question mark that
        defines our age and place in life.
    And having released that built-up tension
    You lift up the sheets and jump into bed
    And rest your head against his pyjamas,
    Which was stipulated that I should wear,
    Laying down an ultra-fine excretion
    Through a mantle of protective strata
    Against contaminants, impact and stress,
    Whilst floating dust, like ocean krill, is caught
        within this emerging light.
    And just before you drift back to sleep you
    Ask me to stop that parting caress, which
    Symbolises a hazardous wind  
    Booming through a subway tunnel and
        raggedly striking your hair …
    Like an unexpected speck striking the eye
    That cannot be found but feels like a stone.
    And as you resume your little snores,
    In a movement of infinite recession,
    An erased consciousness glanced past you.
    But for most of that night I lied awake
    Desperate to leave the dangerous shoals of
    A broken heart and all those messages
        left on your phone
    After seeing us together on the
        sidewalk alone.
    But I didn’t have the strength for such
        brutal abruptness,
    And sheer exhaustion just overcame me.
    But as we walked, that morning, between the
    Lion sentinels, down Bailey Avenue
    And over the Major Deegan Expressway
    Towards the 1 Line, on 238 Street,
    Liminal space opened up between us,
    As if we were walking on parallel
    Girders that have a definite endpoint,
    Enveloped within a granular cloud
        that grinds between our teeth,
    As a chill wind sends old news scuttling past
        black plastic bags.
    And whilst releasing the steam from a
        cappuccino, its distinct aroma
        filling our nostrils,
    I listened pensively to what you said:
        “Something bad is going to happen today …
        I can just feel it!”
    Periodically, we cough up these words,
    Which blow into our face their detached echo,
    Like a spate of coughing heard in response
        to a tension commonly felt.
    But I’m still a witness to the noise, the wind,
        its approach and your departure
    That informs me with a pain that overwhelms
    That every voice raised is in jeopardy
        of silence …
    The silence in the look that said:
    Our paths have crossed but will not converge!
    And yet always shall I hear you say:
    “Have you noticed how many great songs
        they’re playing?”
    Samba Pa Ti … that was it … Samba Pa Ti!
    Inspired by a drunk carrying his
    Saxophone, staggering about, on the
    Streets of New York, one Sunday afternoon.
    And there will always be the memory of
    Those two-shared packs of devoured Doritos,
    As we crunched into each other’s lives in a cab
    On Henry Hudson Parkway, our knees touching,
    Bringing to mind Jamaica Bay’s whale mouth
         that consumes voraciously countless words
    Upon the tides of ‘sentimentology’
    Drifting through our lives and breaking us down,
    Which merely serves to emphasise an acute
    Awareness of absence and loss and the
    Space in-between these scattered boulders that
        shapes our lives in a
    Continuous flow of communication
    As a verbalised map of neural networks,
    Like freshly sprouted and succulent leaves
    Enfolding the sheer grandeur of this place
    With that unfolding sense of a vision revealed.
    And as we sped past the dark looming presence
        of metamorphic bedrock, towering
        above us,
    Projecting its unincorporated
    Memory of an ice-bound wilderness
    Abutting the rocks, sediment and silt
    Moraine, beyond which is the harsh tundra
    Where melt water streams flowed into the plane
    And thence to an icy sea of uncertain,
        grey and restless relations;
    And all that remains are quartz fragments and
    Bioclastic deposits dragged under
        a plover’s claws.
    And as I think of those eyes framed with the
    Hidden intensity of sorrow,
    These tears that have been, deep down, forming
    Will soon fall in amongst the cracks and
    Fissures of this worn-out, striated
    Auden face that I see peering back at me
        like an old friend:
    In Bennett Park, Manhattan’s topographic
    High point, where I reached my lowest low.
    And amidst these scarred and near empty streets
    That echo to an orange-coloured
    Sodium-lamp strangeness, no words can be
    Expressed through a mouth as dry as this;
    No pen can be held with hands as cold as these:
    They have lost their lustre and vibrancy.
    And as tidal formations swell from this
    Critical juncture of interaction,
    I awake to the sound of an insistent
        and lugubrious clunk that threatens
    Disaster, at any moment, as the
        suffocating smell of
    High-powered heat enters my hotel room
        as steam.
    Struggling with a heavy sash window,
    I let in the February wind with its
    Eye watering, buffeting, persistent
        emptiness.
    An anxious hand sliced open your letter,
    Releasing a puff of disintegrated
    Paper that is caught in the light of a
        table lamp,
    As words, heavy with emotion, pull me
        down like leaden weights.
    In retrospect I should not have encouraged
        you to have read those messages …
    How much might have changed if I had said:
    “Fiona, you don’t need to read them!”
    So much in our lives is shaped by the form
        that letters take … the words … the tone:
    For we live in a forest of kelp whose
    Ink-soaked and fibrous landscape has been boiled,
    Compressed, bleached and dried, and so they retain
    Their resonant power when down flows the night
    Of endless concepts upon this lone and
        lifeless plane.
    You said to me: “I know I can trust you …
        I can see it in your eyes.”
    Where is that trust now, and what is it worth?
    Like scattered ashes from the night before:
        “Of Eros and of dust.” (Auden, line 96)
    Reality is morning’s realm not the
    Magic of blue hour’s nocturnal light:
    An impure light, below the horizon,
    That is seen through a dark and convex eye:
    For this is the light of appetence through
        which our fallen souls do see.
    But on that evening of serendipity,
    The place I phoned you from, at the junction
    Of 66 Street and Broadway, expressing
    My disorientation, turmoil
        and disappointment,
    And you, just a few blocks walk away,
    Redeemed me out of that situation.
    We both knew the significance of its
    Synchronicity, acutely aware
    Of its interconnection in our lives,
    As if passing, at great speed, over
        subway switches:
    Its jolting movement throwing us together.
    And you kept on looking, as I was speaking,
    With a look that was beyond the event …
    A kiss on the cheek and then you were gone
    That captured a moment of deep impact.
    Even all these years later and the power
        of it still
    Resonates through my chest with a thumping
        sigh.
    A relationship that never was, and
    Yet has slowly evolved and developed
    Like a grinding, cracking glacier shelf
    Scraping away at our emotions down
    To the bedrock of our identity,
    That exposes a firm foundation,
    Which is the rock of our ascension.
    And upon this rock a confluence
    Of longitudinal stretching, tidal
    Formation, melt water wedging and
    Seismic activity creates the right
    Conditions for a calving event …
    For this birth is an inconceivable
    Gift that has come into this world from
        another dimension
    As a collapsing, awesome, fearful roar
    That reconfigures the atomic weight
        of all these moral elements,
    Played out on a canvas of unified
        stasis in a studio barn in
        Springs, East Hampton,
    Which traces the course of this secret love
        that spells its nameless name.
    And this is where I want to leave it …
    Remembering that brief moment when,
    With our genial driver, as city shadows
    Drift into our cab, we approached the
    Blue-lit expanse of George Washington Bridge,
    And you lyrically expounded on that
        construction marvel:
    Spanning the Hudson … spanning the night.
    
     
     Auden, W.H. “September 1st, 1939”
 
 
Jason Smith was born in Croydon in 1962. He is married with no children. He has been working on the railways, as a Station Assistant, for twenty years. He is self-educated with no published credits. In 2001-02, he part-financed poetry readings in NYC by withholding his rent payments.
 

'I can't get over / how it all works in together' (James Schuyler, 'February')
​
Our day-long spring festival of poetry continues to take shape. We're delighted to say that Alice Notley, Charles Bernstein, Denise Riley, Robert Hampson, Karen Sandhu, Mark Ford, Agnieszka Studzinska, Peter Robinson, Betsy Porritt, Jeremy Over, and I (! briefly and nervously) will be reading. Geoff Ward will chair our roundtable discussion, which will feature a presentation from Yasmine on our forthcoming book of interviews with New York School poets, from Nick Selby on his forthcoming book on Robert Creeley, from Heleina Burton on 'open reading' and John Ashbery, Martyna Szot on Joe Brainard, Matt Sowerby on poetry organising and performance, Sonia Quintero on the Newham Poetry Group, and Caroline Harris and Briony Hughes on new publishing / editing ventures and publishing communities ... Dell Olsen and Will Montgomery will open the day with a joint talk. The event will be held at Senate House in Bloomsbury, on Saturday 27th May, and is being hosted in conjunction with Royal Holloway's Poetics Research Centre. Details of how to register and attend will be available soon.

We're thrilled to share a long poem written by Jason Smith, 'Exit 66 Street & Broadway'. The poem relates to events that took place in October 2001. The two poems that have particularly influenced its composition are Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings and W.H. Auden's 'September 1st 1939'. Other poems of influence have been John Ashbery's poem 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror', Elizabeth Bishop's  'Sandpiper', Anne Waldman's 'The Lie', Maggie Nelson's 'A Halo Over The Hospital (But your mouth gets so dry)' and Hart Crane's The Bridge.

Nick Sturm joined us for a conversation about the nature of critical storytelling, the energy of the interdisciplinary, the ways in which mimeos and little magazines reorient how we read and teach, the rogue spaces of literary fandom and the ephemera of research, collaboration as love and care, and the unprofessional, informal, and public-facing aspects of writing. You can watch the interview on our website or on our Youtube channel. Thank you Nick!

Jess Cotton's superb critical biography of John Ashbery is out in April and available for pre-order from Reaktion.

Granary Books is pleased to present a short list of books, chapbooks, and broadsides by Joanne Kyger.

Anne Waldman's Bard, Kinetic is out now with Coffee House Press. Anne also has a great article up on Lithub - 'Satyrs and Poets and Jazzmen and Muses: Anne Waldman on Life at Bennington in the Early 1960s'.

Alice Notley's Early Works and The Speak Angel Series are out with Fonograf later this month.

Peter Robinson's Retrieved Attachments is out with Two Rivers Press this month.

Matthew Rana has just published Ardour with Nion Editions (Berkeley). Ardour is a dialogue with Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s (c.1797–1869) Urdu Divan and the latest instalment of Matthew's serial poem ‘The Daud’, an inquiry into Urdu poetry and the ghazal, ongoing since 2003. Copies are available via Small Press Distribution.

Rosa Campbell, Jack Parlett and Joel Duncan edited a special issue of Women's Studies (Vol. 51, Issue 8), Eileen Myles Now, featuring poetry, scholarly essays, reviews, Myles in conversation with Maggie Nelson, and the return to print of Myles's 'The Lesbian Poet'. Contributors include CAConrad, Nick Sturm, Matthew Holman, Stephanie Anderson, Joel Duncan, Jane Goldman, Gina Gwenffrewi, and E. C. Mason.

Patricia Spears Jones has been interviewing other poets for Poets House Open House on WBAI.99.5 FM (all archived at Poets House), including Angela Jackson, Peter Covino, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Jordan E. Franklin and Jade Yeung, and Brenda Coultas. Patricia herself will be on Molly Twomey's Just to Say later - email jacarpress@gmail.com for the Shareable Zoom link.

Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents Trevor Winkfield: the Solitary Radish (January 28th-March 4th). Peter Gizzi has written a wonderful essay about Winkfield's 'drama of rhythm, of music, of the pleasure of composition', which you can read here.

Music by David T. Little
Libretto by Anne Waldman
Story & Screenplay by Michael Joseph McQuilken
Produced by Beth Morrison Projects

Drawing on the disturbing and complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room.

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her. 

"A Twin Peaks-inspired musical theater piece” – LA Times 
"Complex, layered, thought-provoking, and over the top"--Broad Street Review

Showing soon at Bryn Mawr Film Institute (Delaware County), Ambler Theater (Montgomery County), Princeton Garden Theater (Princeton, NJ), County Theater (Doylestown, Bucks County), and the Colonial Theater (Phoenixville, Chester County).

​Save the date! Our next symposium and poetry reading will take place in London on Saturday 27th May. There's more info on our website but as ever you can expect a day of poetry readings, conversation, and connection in an informal setting. Plans are still taking shape and we'll update you as and when they do, but we're not issuing a Call for Papers for this event. Everyone is welcome to attend, and there will be no registration fee.

Stephanie Anderson and Kristen Tapson joined us in December for a discussion of their new book, All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, which came out in late December, with the University of New Mexico Press. We talked about coterie, friendship, family, mentorship, groupings, self-construction, influence, correspondence as a form, poetry as lived experience, science/geology, thinking and space, and border crossing. Watch/listen here or on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PumGuCtphak. 

Patricia Hope Scanlan's dynamic small press Artery Editions has several gorgeous things either out or in the pipeline: Covodes by Robert Hampson (a series of 19 experimental odes documenting the pandemic, with accompanying music, 2021); Le Madame (a broadsheet with art work by Louise Bourgeois, and poems by Deborah Levy, Mine Kalyan and Scanlan, 2022); The Pente, A Book of Woe by John Wieners (a second edition of Ace of Pentacles incorporating the changes Wieners requested to be incorporated all the way back in 1966 but hadn't been done since, including the title change; with an introduction by Michael Seth Stuart and an afterward from Jeremy Reed, 2023); and Brighton Blues: A Tribute to Lee Harwood with poems by Jeremy Reed, poem by Anne Waldman, letters from Lee Harwood and John Ashbery, an essay from F.T. Prince and art from Derek Jarman., as well as an early recording of Lee Harwood reading his poems.

Tia Shearer Bassett is performing Kenneth Koch's poem-play Edward and Christine this Saturday, 2pm EST (running time approx. 80 mins, on Zoom): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-christine-tickets-296927176177. Tia will also be performing on Tuesday Feb 7th and and Sunday March 5th.

Lisa Pearson from Siglio Press brings us the good news that a second printing of Bernadette Mayer's Memory is in the works and scheduled to be released next fall. Lisa's tribute to Bernadette is here: https://sigliopress.com/readings/thank-you-bernadette/.

Verve Poetry Festival returns in February (15th-19th), a wide-ranging festival of poetry that has much in common with the ethos and aesthetics of the Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and that features a wonderful line-up of events, poets, performers, and more, and things taking place in person and online. The full line-up is here.

There's a great review of John Yau's exciting new book, Joe Brainard: the Art of the Personal (Rizzoli, 2022), at The Brooklyn Rail. 

Two new works from Alice Notley are out in February with Fonograf: Early Works (edited by Nick Sturm) and The Speak Angel Series. Both are available for preorder.

Anne Waldman's Bard, Kinetic,  a multifaceted portrait of her life and praxis as a groundbreaking poet, is out with Coffee House Press this month.  There will be a celebration of the book on February 2nd at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, 6-9pm. She also has a book coming out in Algeria, in French and English with translation by Pierre Joris and Nicolle Peyrafitte, edited by Habib Tengour at Apic.

On January 10th, at the southeast corner of the southernmost grassy field in East River Park, just off the Houston Street entrance, Eileen Myles and Alice O'Malley held a press conference for an octogenarian London Plane Tree and survivor of Hurricane Sandy named Mathilde. Bringing together media, local politicians and educators, artists, community members, environmentalists and activists, the aim was to celebrate and protect the abundant biodiversity of East River Park, home to 120 varieties of birds, squirrels and endangered bumblebees, and offering people of all ages access to green space and the river. You can read more here.

WHO: Mathilde, an 83-year-old London Plane Tree with 1000people1000trees
WHERE: At the southeast corner of the southernmost grassy field in East River Park,
just off the Houston Street entrance
WHEN: Tuesday, 9AM, January 10, 2023
IG @1000people1000trees
Twitter @1000treesNYC

This is a gathering of media, local politicians and educators, artists, community
members, environmentalists and activists to underline the scorch and burn approach
taken by the DDC, City Planning, The Parks Department, the City Council and two
mayors over the past twelve months in the name of Climate Resiliency, wreaking havoc
on the abundant biodiversity of East River Park, home to 120 varieties of birds, squirrels
and endangered bumblebees, offering to people of all ages access to green space, river
views, sports, relaxation and health.

Mathilde is an 83-year-old London Plane, recognizable in the neighborhood for her
solitary stance at the southern end of the largest field in East River Park. People,
since the half-razing of the park, come to hug and be near her. There’s a new nest at
her top and by state law it is illegal to cut this tree down. One local resident has taken a
photo of Mathilde every day for the last 2 years. We call attention to this tree because of
the violent uprooting of 700 trees before this one; trees are speechless, and we gain so
much from their life-giving powers. A sewer is now being built in the park and with the
enormous resources of our city we are demanding an alternative approach to cutting
down this tree and ask the broader question of how to protect the five hundred and five
trees that remain north of this tree. New York City Parks Dept. is proud of their intention
to expand our city’s tree canopy. By cutting down trees that are seven and eight
decades old, one by one? Is that the way forward?

London planes live for 200-300 years. Mathilde was originally accompanied by seven
other London Planes, all blown down during Sandy, but Mathilde survived. The day after
Sandy, the field she resides in was mostly dry and so this tree stands as an exemplar of
true storm and flood water mitigation. She protects us. In 2013 the Parks Dept. planted 
a row of saplings and this tree was an elder to them, entangling roots and exchanging
nutrients and info with the new family. And those trees were torn out when the city
began its demolition of this park last December under the auspices of a non-
environmentally friendly and deeply unpopular flood protection plan (ESCR). We want to
begin a broader conversation by talking about just one elder tree. The destruction of this
park has often been explained by the city as done in response to an overriding need to
protect the residents of the NYCHA housing across the street. It’s been recently
revealed that there are high levels of arsenic in the drinking water of the same public
housing and even one fatality and it is not being treated like a crisis. We say it is all a
crisis and we know we can do better.

About The Speak Angel Series:

The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new “characters” are incorporated from the news and from the poet’s life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader of it chant if reading aloud, a spiritual sequel to the author’s book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume’s ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition. 

Paperback • 7 x 9.25 ” • 640pp • ISBN: 978-1-7378036-2-1 • Distributed by Small Press Distribution

About Early Works:

Winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Alice Notley is one of the greatest living poets. Nevertheless, Notley’s early poetry—published by small presses and in little magazines—has remained mostly inaccessible to readers. Early Works is the first volume to collect the poetry written between 1969 and 1974 that established Notley’s uncompromising vision. If in Notley’s Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970- 2005 we are encouraged to read her visionary poem “Your Dailiness” as the beginning of her career, Early Works offers a way to see “Your Dailiness” as the culmination of a writing practice that inaugurates her singular voice. Tracing Notley’s time living and writing across the United States and in Britain, Early Works gathers her first four books, 165 Meeting House Lane, Phoebe Light, Incidentals in the Day World, and For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday, as well as a little-known sonnet sequence “Great Interiors, Wines and Spirits of the World” and a large selection of uncollected poems. This work amounts to an unprecedented record of the relentless formal experimentation that Notley engaged in to create her own American poetic tradition. Full of permission to “Be unmetrical Be FRAGRANT,” as she writes in “A Corona,” Notley’s early poetry confirms, in the words of Ted Berrigan, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

​Paperback • 6 x 8.5 ” • 321pp • ISBN: 978-1-7378036-3-8 • Distributed by Small Press Distribution Publicity

Contact: Jeff Alessandrelli • info@fonografeditions.com

Poet and art writer John Yau has a gorgeous new book about Joe Brainard, out with Rizzoli. Yau describes in vivid detail how Brainard produced thousands of lush multimedia pieces radiant with poignancy, wit, intimacy, and a sheer beauty that express Brainard’s unabashed affection for the world.

Tyhe Cooper reviews the book at The Brooklyn Rail.

Ron Padgett: Dot

Featuring Padgett and Anselm Berrigan

Ron Padgett reads from his new book Dot (Coffee House Press), followed by a discussion between Padgett and Anselm Berrigan.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

REGISTER HERE
​
Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, from whom he also received the Frost medal. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. His poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. Padgett will be reading from his new book, Dot (Coffee House Press).

Anselm Berrigan is the poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and author of a number of books of poems, most recently Pregrets, from Black Square Editions.

Poet, artist, publisher, and scholar Bernadette Mayer died on November 22nd 2022, at the age of seventy-seven, at her home in East Nassau, New York. She will be so missed. Here's to her wonderful work being read and performed and taught and loved for a long time to come.

​Artforum have published her obituary: https://www.artforum.com/news/bernadette-mayer-1945-2022-89708.  

We were so sad to learn that Bernadette Mayer died in late November, and send love and strength to those who knew her. Here's to her wonderful work being read and performed and taught and loved for a long time to come. Artforum have published her obituary: https://www.artforum.com/news/bernadette-mayer-1945-2022-89708. 

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Here's a December update from the Network, plus, because it's December, a link to Schuyler's poem and Andrew Epstein's thoughts about it - enjoy.

Jordan Davis has a new pamphlet out with Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls Press, Hidden Poems (this is a selection from Jordan's 2023 collection Yeah, No, forthcoming from MadHat): https://samriviere.com/index.php?/together/if-a-leaf-falls-press/. Jordan has also recently written about Ted Berrigan’s exuberant and idiosyncratic prose for the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158608/what-do-i-say-next-fast .

Anne Waldman's Bard, Kinetic will be published in January 2023, with Coffee House Press, and is available for preorder. In Bard, Kinetic, Waldman assembles a layered compendium of essays, letters, poems, and interviews that form a portrait of her life and praxis as a groundbreaking poet. Waldman charts her journey through a maelstrom of radical artistic activity, from growing up in Greenwich Village to creative partnership with Allen Ginsberg and touring with Bob Dylan. She recalls founding the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and later the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and she discusses the political and artistic philosophies that guide her activities as writer, activist, performer, instigator, and Buddhist practitioner. Throughout Bard, Kinetic, Waldman pays homage to friends and collaborators including Amiri Baraka, Lou Reed, John Ashbery, and Diane di Prima. 

Vincent Katz's Broadway for Paul is now out in paperback, with Knopf. Elaine Equi has talked about how this 'virtuoso collection' highlights 'the pleasure of sharing spaces, ideas, and art', whilst Paul Vangelisti describes the poetry as a 'voice in the grand tradition of New York poetry, from Walt Whitman to Frank O’Hara, engaging in ‘equable’ conversation (Whitman’s term) with the city’s people and places'.

Tia Shearer Bassett, a theatre-maker based in the Washington, DC area, performs a one-actor, Zoom theatre version of Kenneth Koch's Edward and Christine. It premiered in the spring of this year, and Tia is now beginning to perform it monthly (and by request). The next show is on Sunday 11th December at 3.30pm EST: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-christine-tickets-296927176177. You can read a review of the show here: https://dctheaterarts.org/2022/05/20/fun-and-intimate-edward-and-christine-plays-live-on-line/.

The Flow Chart Foundation is holding a group reading-through/thinking-through of John Ashbery’s book-length Three Poems. They will read the entire book as a group over 13 days, from December 1st through December 13th. They'll be inviting you later to join them for a concluding live, free virtual event on Friday, December 16th at 1pm EST. Daniel Kane will lead the online discussion, which will take place over Twitter and Instagram. More details here: https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/collectiveashbery. 

In mid-October poet Paolo Javier spent an hour talking about his New York origins story along with his new work: "experiences with language": It was a delight (in every Brainard-esque sense of the word) to talk with former Queens Poet Laureate, sound poet, and visual artist Paolo Javier, author of the spectacular O.B.B. (Nightboat, 2021), the time at the end of this writing (2004), and Court of the Dragon (2015), as well as the forthcoming True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside (Roof Books, November). Our conversation was about conversations - about discovering New York School writers through reading, through personal connection, through moving in and around the city, through writing; about outsider status, the paraliterary, the not-quite-poem; about 'schools' as places of learning, of discovery, of connection, of experimentation, of the childlike; about Queens, resilience, and the spirit of the New Yorker; about Frantz Fanon, Joe Brainard, Frank Lima; about 'unheard rhythms', comics, collaboration, and collage... You can watch/listen to the interview by clicking the image above, or on our Youtube channel.

Alice Notley: A Couple of Things I See in Get the Money!: Alice has kindly shared the opening remarks from our online launch of Ted Berrigan's Collected Prose - her gorgeous thoughts on this gorgeous book can be read here.

New work from Nightboat Books: Chia-Lun Chang's Prescribee (November 15) is in the lineage of Tender Buttons and The Tennis Court Oath, a transformation of the familiar ingredients of everyday life into a wild and alchemical language; Anne Waldman and Emma Gomis meanwhile bring us New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, a series of lectures asking how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world.
 

New work from Coffee House Press: Ron Padgett's new collection, Dot, full of wit and wonder, is out today! Ron is reading this afternoon, 4pm ET, with the Yale Literary Magazine (Zoom link: yale.zoom.us/j/95862472840).


New work from Fonograf Editions: Alice Notley's The Speak Angel Series and Early Works will be released in February 2023 and are available for pre-order now. The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms: it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. Early Works, edited by Nick Sturm, collects Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material, and includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

New work from Two Rivers Press: Peter Robinson's Retrieved Attachments,about people and places, friends and loved ones, mentor poets and artists, will also be published in February 2023, but is available to pre-order now.

Jordan Davis has a new pamphlet out with Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls Press, Hidden Poems (this is a selection from Jordan's 2023 collection Yeah, No, forthcoming from MadHat): https://samriviere.com/index.php?/together/if-a-leaf-falls-press/. Jordan has also recently written about Ted Berrigan’s exuberant and idiosyncratic prose for the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158608/what-do-i-say-next-fast .

Anne Waldman's Bard, Kinetic will be published in January 2023, with Coffee House Press, and is available for preorder. In Bard, Kinetic, Waldman assembles a layered compendium of essays, letters, poems, and interviews that form a portrait of her life and praxis as a groundbreaking poet. Waldman charts her journey through a maelstrom of radical artistic activity, from growing up in Greenwich Village to creative partnership with Allen Ginsberg and touring with Bob Dylan. She recalls founding the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and later the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and she discusses the political and artistic philosophies that guide her activities as writer, activist, performer, instigator, and Buddhist practitioner. Throughout Bard, Kinetic, Waldman pays homage to friends and collaborators including Amiri Baraka, Lou Reed, John Ashbery, and Diane di Prima. 

Vincent Katz's Broadway for Paul is now out in paperback, with Knopf. Elaine Equi has talked about how this 'virtuoso collection' highlights 'the pleasure of sharing spaces, ideas, and art', whilst Paul Vangelisti describes the poetry as a 'voice in the grand tradition of New York poetry, from Walt Whitman to Frank O’Hara, engaging in ‘equable’ conversation (Whitman’s term) with the city’s people and places'.

Tia Shearer Bassett, a theatre-maker based in the Washington, DC area, performs a one-actor, Zoom theatre version of Kenneth Koch's Edward and Christine. It premiered in the spring of this year, and Tia is now beginning to perform it monthly (and by request). The next show is on Sunday 11th December at 3.30pm EST: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-christine-tickets-296927176177. You can read a review of the show here: https://dctheaterarts.org/2022/05/20/fun-and-intimate-edward-and-christine-plays-live-on-line/.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the New York School: Online Symposium (September 2022): For pandemic-related and other reasons, lots of our members were unable to travel to Paris for our spring symposium. We held an online symposium in late September, in order to hear from some of the poets and scholars in question. The symposium featured poetry readings from Greg Masters and Matt Proctor, and talks from Wojciech Drag, Jane Hertenstein, Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina, Marcella Durand, and Molly Murray, as well as some free-flowing discussion and questions at the end. The programme of talks and readings is attached, and you can watch the event on our website or our Youtube channel.

Get the Money! Book Launch Event with Alice Notley, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm (September 2022): it was a total delight to host a book launch event celebrating the recent publication of Ted Berrigan's collected prose. If you couldn't make it, you can watch the discussion, featuring short talks from each of the editors followed by open discussion, on our website or Youtube channel.

Anne Waldman has a new book, New Weathers: Poetics from the  Naropa Archive, co-edited with Emma Goimus, out in November with Nightboat. She has also written the libretto for Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little, which premiered this weekend at the Philadelphia Film Center: https://www.operaphila.org/whats-on/in-theaters-2022-2023/black-lodge/. Congratulations Anne and Emma! 

We have two online events coming up in September:

1) Friday September 23rd: we'll be hosting and recording an online panel with presentations and readings by several of our members who were unable to attend the Paris event in April. This won't be a live event but we'll be recording it and will share the discussion and talks/readings as soon after the event as we can.

2) Sunday September 25th, 5pm UK / 6pm Paris / midday East Coast: an online conversation with Nick Sturm, Alice Notley, Edmund Berrigan and Anselm Berrigan about Get the Money!: The Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan, 1961-1983, which will be published by City Lights on September 13th this year. Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/get-the-money-an-online-conversation-tickets-411418232007. We'll record the discussion for anyone who can't watch live and share it on our website in due course.

Below are a few further things that might be of interest:

- Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-frank-o-hara-and-john-ashbery 

- Here's a link to the trailer of Patrick Pfister's wonderful-looking documentary, Poetry, New York: https://www.patrickpfister.com/ny2.

 - Pioneer Valley Poetry Productions announces a series of four unique Zoom Writing Workshops on Wednesday evenings, September 7, 14, 21 and 28 from 7-9 EST. All classes will be taught by Anselm Berrigan. For further information and/or to enroll, contact Anselm at pioneervalpoetry@gmail.com. This class will explore writing by painters (and a few sculptors, filmmakers, and other curiosities) – talks, interviews, statements, essays, notes, lists – in order to engage their questions and methods of composition. Writings by Philip Guston, Stanley Whitney, Amy Sillman, Alice Notley, John Yau, Moyra Davey, Martin Wong, Adrian Piper, Joe Brainard, Rackstraw Downes, Thornton Dial, Kara Walker, Nathaniel Dorsky, Agnes Martin, & Pauline Oliveros, among others, will be considered and utilized. Workshops are priced on a sliding scale between $35-$50 per class session. 

 - The Flow Chart Foundation is hiring! They're looking for a part-time Archivist and Librarian, and a part-time Program Associate. More details on their website: https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/jobs.  ​

Charlotte Rampling, Jean-Luc Goddard, Agnes Varda, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Emma Goldman walk into a Bowling Alley…. 
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Directed by Tony Torn, and produced by Lee Ann Brown, Bernadette Mayer's unpublished play, Famous People, premiered on film at the Boog City Festival in February 2022. In celebration of Mayer's birthday, you can watch the film here: https://vimeo.com/707934586

Bernadette Mayer is the author of over 27 collections, including most recently Works and Days (2016), Eating The Colors Of A Lineup Of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (2015) and The Helens of Troy (2013), as well as countless chapbooks and artist-books. She has received grants from The Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also the recipient of the 2014 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. From 1980-1984, she served as the director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and has also edited and founded 0 to 9 journal and United Artists books and magazines. She has taught at the New School for Social Research, Naropa University, Long Island University, the College of Saint Rose, Miami University and at University of Pennsylvania as a Kelly Writers House Fellow. Her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely.

Tony Torn is an actor, director, and producer who has worked extensively for the past 30 years in theater, film, and television, in both traditional and experimental projects. Known for his extensive work with legendary theater artists Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony was the founding director of Bill Talen’s Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping (now in its 20th year), and created and starred in the absurdist theater/punk rock mash-up Ubu Sings Ubu with co-director Dan Safer. Tony currently teaches acting at NYU and MIT, and manages Torn Page, a private event space in New York City named in honor of his parents, the award-winning actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.

Lee Ann Brown is the author of Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stéphane Bouquet as Autre Archere (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015),  In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She has taught at Brown University, Naropa University, Bard College, and The New School, St. John’s University, among others. Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France, the Howard Foundation and was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. She lives in New York.

Our Paris symposium was a festival of listening and conversation, gently themed 'what we talk about when we talk about the New York School'. You can find the programme of speakers (including titles of talks, abstracts, and speaker bios) here. There is also a Twitter thread that unfolded during the day on our account (@NYSSNetwork). 

​Things we talked about...
​

• False steps and disappearing staircases
• Freedom, collaboration, and just doing what you think you can’t do
• Artistic coupledom and what constitutes success in art and sex
• Loving, hallucinating, crying, shivering, and falling out of love in the archives
• The cinematic, psychoanalytic feedback loops of Mayer’s Memory
• New York City and the New York School as anti-places
• The things, songs, and yes/and of Ashbery
• The granular genius of the Ashbery Resource Center Catalogue
• Speaking to the unspeakable with/in Ashbery’s poetry
• The conflation of our ideas with the ideas of our bodies
• Magpie poetics, being in the moment of the poem, and writing any way you can
• Theatrical poetry and what happens when poetry actually takes to the stage in multiple iterations
• The brevity, wit, and intimacy of watercolour
• The imperfection of the poetry of that which is at hand, and the encouragement that writers find in reading
• The queer futurity of translated poetry, travelling poetry, ad the hope of ‘wild translation’
• Poetry that’s full of the world, even as the world continually withdraws from it
• The commiserations, gossip, intimacy, and performance of correspondence
• Rethinking the myth of the original and the originary, the variable lineages of the New York Schools playing out in the pages of little magazines
• The frustrations of locating women writers, artists, and editors in relation to their husbands
• Parodic procedures for writing poems
• ‘Dumb’ New York School poetry and trickster appropriation
• The candour and seriousness of Joe Brainard
• Collaborating in all kinds of directions
• Becoming the recipients of the letters we read in archives...

In the evening, we relocated to Michael Woolworth's atelier, where Olivier Brossard read from his translation of The Tennis Court Oath, Abigail Lang read from her translation of A Nest of Ninnies, and Stéphane Bouquet read from his translations of James Schuyler’s poetry. Lindsay Turner then read from Songs & Ballads, A Fortnight, and from new and unpublished work; she also read a translation of a poem by Stéphane Bouquet. Lee Ann Brown headlined the evening, reading poems including ‘Poem for Joe Brainard’, ‘You are Not Gorgeous and I Am Coming Anyway’, and ‘Portal’; she was also joined by Stéphane, who read his translations of three of her poems, and by Sabine Macher, who read her translations of Lee Ann’s work. 

Footage of the symposium talks and of the poetry evening will follow soon! We remain indebted to Olivier Brossard for his stellar co-hosting of this event - thank you Olivier! 

At our inaugural symposium in Paris, in April 2022, Tony Torn discussed his production of both the 1951 and 1953 versions of Frank O'Hara's play Try! Try! presented back to back under the title Try! Try! Try! at the Polyphonic Poetry Festival in 2018. He paid close attention to how O'Hara specifically wrote, and then rewrote, the text in each case to suit his collaborators, including John Ashbery and Violet Lang in the 1951 version, and Larry Rivers in the 1953 version.
​
You can read the play(s) here: try__try__twice.pdf
You can view the performances, featuring Tony himself, here: https://vimeo.com/701534574/3baac71944. 

Tony Torn is an actor, director and teacher based in New York City and Asheville, North Carolina. With Lee Ann Brown, he co-produced the Polyphonic Poetry Festival in June, 2018, presented at Kettles Yard and at the Judith E. Wilson Center at Cambridge University. He has recently been teaching undergraduate acting at MIT and at the Playwright Horizons Theater School (Tisch-NYU).

Where: Zoom - register here
When: Monday 18th April 6PM-7:30PM

Join Poets @ Pace for their Spring 2022 event, featuring celebrated poet and essayist Maggie Nelson as she reads from her work and answers questions in a Q&A. 

Call for Presentations

On the 60th anniversary of the publication of Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, and what would have been Ashbery’s 95 birthday, The Flow Chart Foundation will be hosting an inaugural Gathering at its Ashbery Resource Center and Flow Chart Space (348 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534). We will take a new look at The Tennis Court Oath, and at how Ashbery at 95 continues to inspire, confound, and entrance. How might Ashbery’s work continue to be relevant and inspirational in this moment and beyond?

The Gathering will take place on Sunday, July 31, 2022, pandemic-permitting, following The Flow Chart Foundation’s annual “Night of Neo-Benshi” at Hudson Hall opera house, located across the street and taking place the evening of July 30th.

We invite poets, writers, scholars, artists, and readers to submit proposals for presentations of any kind about, in response to, or in dialogue with The Tennis Court Oath and/or Ashbery’s work now and going forward. One may propose presentations for either or both. These may include papers, performances, readings, or showings, and should be conceived to be approximately five to ten minutes in length.

Submit proposals HERE.

DEADLINE: April 15, 2022 

MORE INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/gathering