This has been a month of more literary losses, of Jerome Rothenberg and Helen Vendler and David Shapiro and Paul Auster (whose introduction to Joe Brainard's Collected Writings gave rise to Jonathan Lethem's 'I Remember'-structured tribute to Auster in the Guardian). Each, for many reasons, will be missed and treasured.
On Saturday 18th May we will be celebrating Joe Brainard's life and legacy, at the Flow Chart Foundation's annual Gathering. I Remember Joe: A Gathering will feature readings, talks, participatory poem-making, and more, with confirmed presenters including Lucy Sante, Matt Wolf, John Yau, Betsy Porritt, Jeffrey Lependorf, Ann Lauterbach, Tyhe Cooper, and Paolo Javier. Daniel Kane can't make it, but we're looking forward to the publication, in October, of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard by Columbia University Press, which Daniel has edited. In late April I spent a week as a visiting professor at the University of Wroclaw in Poland, at the invitation of Brainard scholar Wojciech Drag. During my time there I was excited to learn about the various translations and Polish versions of Brainard's I Remember, including
In other news, New York School-affiliated/adjacent poets Ann Lauterbach (Door), Ben Lerner (The Lights), and Cole Swenson (And And And) are among the longlisted poets for the 2024 Griffin Prize. On Wednesday 8th May Eileen Myles and Emily Johnson are reading at The Poetry Project, followed by Joyelle McSweeney and Eleni Sikelianos on Wednesday 15th May. Peter Gizzi and John Yau are reading there too on Wednesday 29th May. McSweeney also wrote about Alice Notley for Paris Review. On May 16th, Shira Dentz will lead the Flow Chart Foundation's next Close Reading in a Virtual Space event, in a read-through and discussion of a "[A straight rain is rare...]" by Lyn Hejinian. On May 22nd, 4.30pm, at Keble College Oxford, Poetry at Keble's Adam Phillips Seminar will focus on the work of Peter Gizzi. Join us, and The Flow Chart Foundation, on Saturday 18th May, for Flow Chart's annual Gathering, this year celebrating the life and work of Joe Brainard. I Remember Joe: A Gathering will feature readings, talks, participatory events, and more, with confirmed presenters including Lucy Sante, Matt Wolf, John Yau, Rona Cran, Betsy Porritt, Jeffrey Lependorf, Ann Lauterbach, Tyhe Cooper, and Paolo Javier. More details can be found here.
Patricia Spears Jones has been awarded the Porter Fund's Lifetime Achievement Award, a prize awarded every five years to an Arkansas writer with a substantial and recognized body of work. Congratulations Patricia! You can read more about the award, and Patricia's work, here. Donna Dennis has a solo show, Houses and Hotels, on view until April 28 at O'Flaherty's in New York. The exhibit highlights some of the early sculptures that helped launch her career in the 1970s. On April 19, Bamberger Books will release Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969–1982, which traces the artist's coming-of-age on New York's downtown scene. Alice Notley's new collection, a memoir in verse called Being Reflected Upon, is out now with Penguin. On Wednesday April 10th, Alice will be joined at The Poetry Project by Anne Waldman, to whom Being Reflected Upon is dedicated, for a celebration of the book. Details here. There's an interview with Alice, by Janique Vigier, in Harper's, and one in Paris Review ('The Art of Poetry No. 116'), by Hannah Zeavin. Alice also has a piece on what it feels like to write a poem in the latest issue of Brooklyn Rail. On April 4th, 3pm ET, Ron Silliman is leading The Flow Chart Foundation's latest installment of Close Readings in a Virtual Space, when he will think and read through 'All the Whiskey in Heaven' by Charles Bernstein. More details here. Flow Chart's President, Mandana Chaffa, interviewed the 24th US Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, for Brooklyn Rail, whilst Jenny Wu wrote about Maggie Nelson. PoemTalk #194, 'Hack my name', features Lee Ann Brown and Laynie Browne among others talking about two poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson - you can listen to/read about the episode here. Later this month (25-26 April), John Yau will be in Paris at the latest Poets and Critics Symposium, for an in-depth discussion of his work. There will also be a reading with John Yau and his translator Marc Chénetier, at atelier Michael Woolworth, celebrating the publication of Une autre façon d’écrire sur le sable, Selected Poems by John Yau, edited and translated by Chénetier (joca seria, 2024). There will be a book party at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (see the Jess show too) on Saturday April 6th, 5-7pm, to celebrate three new books: Charles North, News, Poetry and Poplars (Black Square Editions); Joseph Richie, Fathom (Gnosis Press); and Eugene Richie, Only Here, Between (Gnosis Press). Congratulations all! Next month, on Saturday May 4th, Anne Waldman and Gerard Malanga will read at the Flow Chart Foundation. More details here. May 1st will see the launch at The Poetry Project of Breathlehem: The Selected Poetry of Jim Brodey, edited by Peter Valente and with an introduction by Bill Zavatsky, and published by Local Knowledge Press. Lytle Shaw wrote about Lyn Hejinian for Jacket2. Martin Stannard reviewed V. R. 'Bunny' Lang's The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems, ed. Rosa Campbell (Carcanet, 2024). Jaap van der Bent reviewed John Wieners's PENTE: a book of woe, eds. Patricia Hope Scanlan and Libby Musso Dacre (Artery Editions, 2023). We were so sorry to hear of the death in late March, just a few days before Frank O'Hara's birthday, of Marjorie Perloff. We had great fun interviewing her, less than a year ago (an interview you can watch here). Ever generous, funny, and provocative, she'll be much missed. We were so sorry to hear that Lyn Hejinian died on February 24. She will be terribly missed. What a wonderful, important legacy she leaves.
Anne Waldman has curated Beat Art Work: Power of the Gaze at the Outsider Art Fair in Chelsea (Feb 29-March 3). The exhibit includes visual art by poets such as William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joanne Kyger. Anne will also join Gerard Malanga for reading and conversation at The Flow Chart Foundation on Saturday May 4th at 7pm (ET). Sam Ladkin's new book, Frank O'Hara's New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism, is out now with Oxford University Press. On March 5th, at 5.30pm, at Keble College Oxford, Sam will join Jason Allen-Paisant (Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits) and Conrad Steel (The Poetics of Scale: From Apollinaire to Big Data) for a joint launch of their three new books. Jennifer Soong's new collection, Comeback Death, is out with Krupskaya Books, a text, as Thom Donovan writes, anchored in “dedications to four female poets to whom Soong pays homage (Sappho, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Ingeborg Bachmann).” Tamsin Conde-Noble has reviewed Charles North's new book, News, Poetry and Poplars (Poems/Selected Prose), for Litter. Vincent Katz's poetic 'Essay on the Sky' was published in Paris Review last month (no subscription necessary), and is a lovely read. Rowland Bagnall's second collection of poems, Near-Life Experience, is out later this month. The poems are about time and paying close attention to things, particularly nature, artworks, landscapes and the shape of thinking. To order a copy with 25% off the cover price and free UK postage, go to www.carcanet.co.uk and at checkout enter the code NEARLIFE25. Rowland will be launching the book at Voce Books in Birmingham on March 28th, alongside Isabel Galleymore's Baby Schema. He will also be talking about the book with Luke Kennard, online, on April 3rd, at 7pm. The Flow Chart Foundation will host Rosa Campbell and Alexa Winik on Zoom on March 14th (7-8pm GMT) to talk about the publication of The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems of V.R. "Bunny Lang". Details and registration here. A couple of new books engage the work of Joe Brainard. Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries (Fitzcarraldo) is described by the publisher thus: Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. In the vein of Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries. Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books) is a tribute to Brainard. The first six pages are explicitly about I Remember, while the rest is an autobiographical text only using its formula. Meanwhile Catherine Lacey's Biography of X (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a fictional biography of an enigmatic artist set against the backdrop of alternative-history postwar America, contains an intriguing reference to Frank O'Hara: "Among the few pictures X kept from that time is one of Oleg and herself: a blurry shot from the summer of 1972, taken by the poet Frank O’Hara. She’d gone out to Fire Island with Oleg and a few of his acquaintances to celebrate the anniversary of O’Hara’s 1966 brush with death—when he was hit by a jeep and nearly died at the hospital." Thank you to Wojciech Drag for these observations! Australian poet Ken Bolton talks about I Remember, beginning around the 21:30 mark, in this podcast. And finally, save the date for a collaborative Gathering honoring Joe Brainard: Saturday 18 May, at the Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson. More details to follow, but expect a free daylong celebration of Brainard organized by Flow Chart and the NNYSS, to mark thirty years since his death, featuring talks, readings, workshops, conversation, and an I Remember-themed playlist... Confirmed participants included Lucy Sante, Matt Wolf, John Yau, Betsy Porritt, Ann Lauterbach, Tyhe Cooper, and Paolo Javier. Exciting Lunch Poems news, brought to us by Andrew Epstein's incomparable blog, Locus Solus: O'Hara's 1964 book, along with Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems is at number 2 on GQ's 'hot guy books' list. There's more at Locus Solus - enjoy!
Rowland Bagnall's new collection, Near-Life Experience, will be out with Carcanet in March in the UK, and in May in the US. The poems in Near-Life Experience are curious about the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language, catching it before it vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects and trees, Near-Life Experience offers a world where understanding is subverted by the day’s distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination. On 28th February, 7pm London time, join Carcanet Press to celebrate the online launch of Sleepers Awake by Oli Hazzard. Oli will be joined by Jess Cotton for an evening of readings, discussion and audience Q&A. Register here. Edge Books has just published Simon Schuchat's collage poem sequence The Centos, a book that according to Jordan Davis makes you want to write, re-read it, and 'read everything in the world with a pencil ready to make exclamation marks in the margin.' For Maureen Owen it is a 'brilliant obfuscation', whilst for Charles Bernstein it is ' a grand commentary on the human comedy.' Simon read with Murat Nemet-Nejat and Vyt Bakaitis at the Bowery Poetry Club on Feb. 6th, as part of the New York Poets series of readings, further details of which can be found here. To order your copy of The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems by V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell, with 25% off the cover price and free UK postage, go to www.carcanet.co.uk and at the checkout enter the code: BUNNY25 (offer ends 29th Feb). Alice Notley will be reading at Keble College on February 22nd, for the Poets at Keble series organized by Matt Bevis. Rona Cran will join Forward Prize-winning poet and novelist Luke Kennard at Voce Books in Birmingham, on Wednesday 21st February, to launch (belatedly!) I Remember Kim (Verve Poetry Press). Further details here. Mae Losasso is launching Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space (Palgrave Macmillan, Dec 2023) on Thursday 15th Feb at Ed Cross Gallery, 19 Garrett Street, London, EC1Y 0TY from 6pm. She’ll be in conversation with Matthew Holman, followed by a Q&A and a glass of something sparkly. On February 6th, 6-8.30pm (EST) Patricia Spears Jones, alongside Margo Jefferson, will be in conversation with Courtney Thorsson, at Columbia's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, talking about Thorsson's The Sisterhood: How Black Women Writers Changed American Culture. More details here. CFP: Words and Worlds: Languages and Ecologies symposium – 22 March 2024 ( Royal Holloway, University of London (in person)): The Words and Worlds symposium will explore the possibilities of language as an intermediary between humans, plants, animals, and other nonhuman beings. This event responds to the themes of the Words from the Wild exhibition of visual and material ecopoetry currently on show at Royal Holloway’s Egham campus. Professor Simon Morris (Leeds School of Art; Inscription Journal) is confirmed as a keynote speaker. Papers (15 minutes), lightning talks and readings/showings of creative practice are invited on subjects including multi-sensory poetics, translation, language loss and diversity. Please see the attached CFP for details. Deadline for abstracts/proposals: Friday 9 February 2024. Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture, edited by Jonathan Najarian, has an essay in it by Nick Sturm, describing Joe Brainard's comics in the 1960s & '70s and the many connections between little magazines, comics, & underground newspapers. We were sorry to note the passing of Lev Rubinstein, the great Moscow conceptualist – a writer whose work has spiritual resonance with the New York School aesthetic. We're really delighted to share a press release for New York Poets, a series of readings that Bob Rosenthal and Ed Friedman have curated (and will be hosting) at the Bowery Poetry Club, beginning this January, with Maggie Dubris, Steve Levine, and Gillian McCain on the 9th, Brenda Coultas, Eliot Katz, and Bob Rosenthal on the 23rd, and Barbara Henning, Elinor Nauen, and Ann Rower on the 30th.
Edwin Denby will be the subject of a PoemTalk, hosted by Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, featuring Vincent Katz, Thomas Devaney and JS Wu discussing Denby’s poems “The subway flatters like the dope habit” and “Ciampino: Envoi”. The talk will be recorded on January 11th and will be available in the coming weeks. Watch this space for an update. Charles North's News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems + Selected Prose is out with Black Square Editions this month. Charles and Ron Padgett will be reading together in person in the Segue Series at Artists Space in NYC, March 2, 5-7 p.m. (EST). This event will also be streamed live. Maureen Owen's new book, everything turns on a delicate measure, is out with BlazeVOX [books]. Described by John Godfrey as 'a quietly intense pagan attention to a pastoral, not urban, space of four dimensions', and by Anne Waldman as 'a reason to celebrate and continue' on account of Owen's 'measured gnosis, wild head space, craft, beauty and wit', this book is about being alive in the present moment in history and about our relationships to each other and to our earth. An image of the cover, by Linda Norton, is here. Lee Ann Brown is reading for the Segue Series on Saturday 27th January, 5pm ET. Details here. Paolo Javier will be reading at Hanging Loose Press's poetry series, There's a Lot to Unpack Here, alongside Joanna Fuhrman, D. Nurkse, Montana James Thomas, and Gina Anderson, on Thursday, January 25 · 7:30pm EST, 884 Pacific Street Brooklyn, NY 11238. More details here and on the flyer above. Elinor Nauen and Maureen Owen's Julebord #3, a retro zine in the tradition of the Lower East Side mimeos published in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, will be out in a couple of weeks. Why Julebord? Literally, 'Christmas Table' in Norwegian, the julebord is now known as an 'anything goes' party. The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems by V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell is out with Carcaent next month. This Carcanet Classics edition marks the rediscovery of a forgotten poet, who was as eccentric as her poetry is excellent, and introduces a vital addition to the canon of the New York School. I may be a little late to the party on this one, but I was recently watching Reservation Dogs, a gorgeous show about the lives of four indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma, and in season 3, episode 3 - 'Deer Lady' - Joe Brainard's I Remember is diner reading material for the eponymous Deer Lady, a Residential School survivor. There were lots of ways of thinking about Brainard's little moment in the episode, which was animated by themes of remembering and forgetting (and wanting/not wanting to do both). Sterlin Harjo, the show's creator, called 'Tulsa's own Joe Brainard ... one of [his] favorite poets'. 'these little oases': a gathering - you can now listen to the recording of this event, which took place at the end of October, as well as see some photos, via our website: https://www.nnyss.org/nyc-2023-media.html. Thanks again to all involved for a really special day.
We're thrilled to share the press release for The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems (Carcanet, February 2024) by V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell. This Carcanet Classics edition marks the rediscovery of a forgotten woman poet, who was as eccentric as her poetry is excellent, and introduces a vital addition to the canon of the New York School. Charles North's News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems + Selected Prose is due out with Black Square Editions in January. Charles and Ron Padgett will be reading together in the online Brooklyn Rail series, January 17th at 1:00 p.m. Black Lodge, composed by David T. Little, directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken, and with libretto by Anne Waldman, has been nominated for a 2024 Grammy Award in the category of Best Opera Recording. You can watch the trailer here. All fingers crossed for February! Poets at Keble – as part of Matt Bevis's Poets at Keble series, there will be a reading by Alice Notley on Thursday 22nd February, 6 pm: https://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/teaching-research/poetry-at-keble/poets-at-keble/. Patricia Spears Jones discussed her poem 'Saturnine', from The Beloved Community, with Kenneth Salzman. Read it here: https://kennethsalzmann.substack.com/p/reprise-mercy-walks-down-a-different?r=el29f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. There's a review of The Beloved Community by Rona Cran in the latest edition of The Brooklyn Rail. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno has written a tribute to Kenward Elmslie for Cable Street - you can read it here. Anselm Berrigan and Kit Robinson gave a great reading on December 2nd for the Segue Reading Series. If you missed it, here's the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1DFShXm6JE. Enjoy! The next Poets & Critics symposium will be held on 25-26 April 2024 with John Yau at Université Paris Cité, organized by Olivier Brossard, Abigail Lang, and Vincent Broqua. This will also be the occasion to celebrate the publication of Une autre façon d'écrire sur le sable, a volume of selected poems by John Yau, edited and translated by Marc Chénetier, which will come out in April with joca seria. All details about the John Yau symposium will be posted in due course at poetscritics.org. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed in some way to "these little oases", our day of poetry that took place on October 28th in Brooklyn: our poets (Anne Waldman, Patricia Spears Jones, Bob Rosenthal, Elinor Nauen, Ayaz Muratoglu, Paolo Javier, Rona Cran, Tilghman Goldsborough, John Godfrey, Edmund Berrigan, and Anselm Berrigan), our scholars (Alexandra Gold, Andrew Epstein, and Nick Sturm), our moderators (Tyhe Cooper, Mandana Chaffa, Patricia Hope Scanlan, Greg Masters, and Lee Ann Brown), our generative audience members, and of course our inspirational co-organizers (especially Tyhe Cooper) at the Rail. Yasmine and I are incredibly grateful to you all for being a part of the day.
We will share recordings and photos in due course, via our website and YouTube etc., and will keep you posted on that. On Friday November 10th, you'll be able to listen to the recording of "these little oases" via The Brooklyn Rail (12am ET/9pm Pacific). If anyone has any photos or videos of the day that they would be happy to share, please could you email them to yasmine.shamma@reading.ac.uk and put NNYSS in the subject line? In the meantime Elinor Nauen's wonderful blog (https://www.elinornauen.com/blog) contains some of her thoughts on the day (and is well worth reading regularly too). We're also so grateful to (and delighted by!) Tony Torn for staging the by turns hilarious and moving Try! Try! Twice! by way of a prelude to our day of poetry, and to Lee Ann Brown and Emmitt Joe George for starring in it, alongside Tony; and to Rosa Campbell for talking with us about Bunny Lang and her role in Poets Theater/the plays afterwards. You can see a film of the Sunday night performance here. On Saturday Matt Bevis organized two events in honour of James Schuyler's centenary, one at NYU ("A Morning for the Poet"), and one at Dia Chelsea ("It Goes, It Goes"), featuring talks and readings from Wayne Koestenbaum, Chad Morgan, Eileen Myles, Funto Omojola, Tony Towle, Teline Trần, Simon Pettet, Rona Cran, Stephanie Burt, John Koethe, Nathan Kernan, Kamran Javadizadeh, Tonya Foster, Peter Gizzi, Emily Skillings, Tracie Morris, Andrew Epstein, and Jeff Dolven. A third event, "Hymn to Life", took place on Monday at The Poetry Project, with readings by Alexis Almeida, Douglas Crase, Will Farris, t’ai freedom ford, Mary Manning, and Charles North, and music by David Grubbs. On Thursday 9th November, Schuyler's birthday, at 12 noon ET/5pm UK (Zoom), Mae Losasso, author of Poetry, Architecture and the New York School: Something Like a Livable Space (Palgrave MacMillan 2023), will present a talk—"Precarious Parentheses"—on James Schuyler's architectural and idiosyncratic use of parentheses, and then be joined by Jeffrey Lependorf, the Flow Chart Foundation's Executive Director, for a chat about New York School poets, poetry, and architecture. Details and tickets here. Martin Stannard interviewed Charles North about James Schuyler for Litter magazine. The interview will be in Litter later this month. Charles was also recently interviewed for Hanging Loose Press: https://www.hangingloosepress.com/news-events/catching-up-with-charles-north/. A Possible Epic of Care, a collaborative poem by Andrei Codrescu and Vincent Katz, has just been released by Black Widow Press. Join Vincent and Andrei for a reading, book signing, and reception at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation on November 30th at 6.30 ET. Andrei also has a new play, The Second Oswald, about the JFK assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald, opening on November 13th at 7pm at the Bowery Poetry Club, followed by a discussion with Jesse Walker about conspiracies in the USA. Details and tickets here. Yeah, No by Jordan Davis is out now with MadHat Press. Also with MadHat Press, a little way off yet but exciting nonetheless, is David Shapiro's You Are The You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School (due Spring 2024). The volume is edited by Kate Farrell and David Lehman has written the introduction. A Turkish translation of Bun, a longish poem by Tom Clark and Ron Padgett, originally published by Angel Hair books, has just come out in Istanbul, translated by Efe Murad & Selcan Peksan. Pente, a Book of Woe by John Wieners is out with Artery Editions. There's footage of Pente's launch at Unnameable Books on October 26th here. This tribute to Joe Brainard by Eric Eric may be of interest: https://internationaltimes.it/i-forget/. Matt Wolf's movie, I Remember: A film about Joe Brainard, is currently available on the Criterion channel. Nick Sturm wrote about Calvin Hernton for the Poetry Foundation. Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, edited by David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer, with a foreword by Ishmael Reed, is out with Wesleyan University Press. Kenneth Salzmann wrote about Patricia Spears Jones's pandemic poem 'Saturnine'. Rona Cran wrote about Lindsay Turner's The Upstate for LARB. Annabel Lee and Tony Towle will be reading in the Brooklyn Rail Wednesday-at-1-pm reading series on November 15th. Anne Waldman will be reading at The New School on November 30th from 5:00-7:00 pm. Also on November 30th, at 7pm at the Giorno Foundation, Tonya Foster will share her thoughts on the work of three poets who sustain her: Marcella Durand, Erica Hunt, and Leah Souffrant. Interspersed throughout Foster’s lecture are contributions by Durand, Hunt, and Souffrant, who perform live readings of their own work. Details and tickets here. Finally, just in from Paris, please save the dates for the 2024 Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris, on the work of John Yau: Thursday 25th and Friday 26th April. This is just a short post to confirm details of our upcoming day of poetry in Brooklyn, titled These Little Oases, on Saturday 28th October, 12-8pm. Organized in collaboration with The Brooklyn Rail, the event takes place at their space in Sunset Park, 900 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11232.
The day primarily consists of a series of short poetry readings, by Anne Waldman, Edmund Berrigan, Ayaz Muratoglu, Paolo Javier, Elinor Nauen, John Yau, Jordan Davis, John Godfrey, Rona Cran, Tilghman Goldsborough, Bob Rosenthal, Kay Gabriel, Anselm Berrigan, and Patricia Spears Jones. There will also be a roundtable discussion on 'the New York School now', featuring Andrew Epstein, Alexandra Gold, Libbie Rifkin, and Nick Sturm, chaired by Mandana Chaffa. We are very grateful to all of our participants - thank you in advance for sharing your work and your time with us. These Little Oases is free, and everyone is welcome. Please register here. We will record as much of the day's proceedings as we can, and share those recordings in due course on our website and YouTube channel, for those of you who can't attend. By way of a prelude to the event, on the evening of Friday 27th October, 7-8.30pm, we're delighted to present, via Torn Page, a performance of Try! Try! Twice! Directed by Tony Torn, Try! Try! Twice! stages two versions of Frank O'Hara's play, accounting for the 1951 version, inspired by O'Hara's friendships with Violet Lang and John Ashbery, and the 1953 rewrite, informed by his intimate relationship and artistic collaboration with Larry Rivers. This production presents both plays back-to-back with identical casts, navigating the tonal shift from 1951's surreal Sirk-ian melodrama to 1953's screwball sex comedy, much like Rock Hudson would navigate from the world of a film like Magnificent Obsession to that of Pillow Talk. The performance features Lee Ann Brown, Emmitt Joe George, and Tony Torn. You can get tickets here. **Please note that this is an exclusive preview performance for attendees of the NY School Symposium event. Tickets are also available for the public performance on Sunday October 29th, here.** We look forward to seeing some of you very soon! Our New York symposium takes place later this month, on Saturday 28th October, 12-8pm, at The Brooklyn Rail, Sunset Park, 900 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11232. There's more information (including the line-up and details of how to register) here. Everyone is very welcome, and the event is free. It will consist primarily of an array of short poetry readings, plus a round-table discussion.
On Wednesday 18th October, Patricia Spears Jones will launch her newest work, The Beloved Community, at the Poetry Project. Details and tickets here. On Friday 20th October, Charles Bernstein will be reading, with a special introduction from Erica Hunt, at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, 87 Eldridge Street New York. More details and tickets here. ModPo are hosting a Bernadette Mayer Memorial with Lee Ann Brown & others, hosted Laynie Browne, on October 25th: https://modpo.org/2018/09/04/modpo-2018-enroll-here-now/. On 26th October, 4pm, join Artery Editions at Unnameable Books (615 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn) for the launch of Pente, A Book of Woe by John Wieners (a second edition of Ace of Pentacles). Michael Seth Stewart, Robert Dewhurst, Raymond Foye and Patricia Hope Scanlan will read in celebration. See the attached press release for more information and for the contact details of Artery Editions and Unnameable Books. On the evening of Friday 27th October, the night before our symposium and by way of a prelude to it, there will be a performance of Frank O'Hara's Try! Try! at Torn Page in Chelsea (huge thanks to Tony Torn and Lee Ann Brown). Also on Friday 27th October, Vincent Katz and Paul Vangelisti will be reading at Beyond Baroque in LA. Details and tickets here. Dia, NYU, and the Poetry Project present Always More Roses: Schuyler at 100:
Andrew Epstein has written about these upcoming events at his blog, Locus Solus. Mae Losasso's Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space is out later this month with Palgrave Macmillan. Mae will be talking online with The Flow Chart Foundation, in celebration of James Schuyler's centenary, about Schuyler's architectural and idiosyncratic use of parentheses, on Thursday November 9th, 5-6pm GMT (register and more details here). If you missed The Flow Chart Foundation's 2023 Gathering event in Hudson, NY, you can now watch video of every presentation and performance here. Flow Chart is also currently running an auction of Ashbery Collage Collages, new, original works containing John Ashbery ephemera by artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Susan Bee, Star Black, Todd Colby, Brandon Downing, Julie Evans, Lucio Pozzi, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ben Gocker, Elizabeth Hazan, Wayne Koestenbaum, Joyce Kozloff, Richard Kraft, Jeffrey Lependorf, Guy Maddin, Debra Pearlman, Archie Rand, Frank Tartaglione, and Stephen Westfall. Details and the auction link are here. New York School of Poetry Networking Project: Elisabeth Joyce (Pennsylvania Western University) has received a fellowship hosted by the Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA) in Madrid to conduct a study on networks in the New York School of Poetry. To prepare for this work, she needs to create a dataset. She is hoping that it will include presses, magazines and sites/dates of readings. She is reaching out to this group to see if anyone has any dataset portions, such as information on one author or one press, that she can combine for a larger set of data. Among other things that she is doing to create it are: John Ashbery’s FlowChart Foundation has offered to provide their complete information on where all of Ashbery’s poems ever appeared; she has requested permission from PennSound’s website to use their information about dates and places of readings; and she plans to go to the Library of Congress to access the archival materials on the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Please let her know if you have any material that you are willing to offer and/or if you have suggestions for other sources. (Names of all persons who assist me with this data gathering will be included on any publications that result from this research.) Contact: ejoyce@pennwest.edu. Pejk Malinovski curated I Remember Joe Brainard, a BBC Radio 3 montage of memories of Joe Brainard's I Remember, featuring Ron Padgett, Ann Lauterbach, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Alice Notley, Nathan Kernan, Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Paul Auster, as well as archival recordings of Joe himself. You can access it via this link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qvsj. Martin Stannard has a new piece up at Stride Magazine. Tyhe Cooper wrote about Anne Waldman’s Bard, Kinetic and New Weathers for The Brooklyn Rail. John Yau wrote about Mario Schifano for Hyperallergic. Anne Waldman wrote about John Giorno for Artforum. On October 28th and 29th she presents The Genius of Others at the John Giorno Foundation. Houses and The Night Sky: The Art of Donna Dennis opens on Saturday, October 14th at Hudson Hall, the beautifully restored old Opera House in Hudson, New York. The exhibit will feature new and earlier work including drawings, sculpture, studies of past projects, studio ephemera, and selected writings. There will be a gallery talk at 2pm on Sunday November 19th. The work will be on view through November 26th. Rona Cran's I Remember Kim, a poetic memoir about their sister, modeled on Brainard's I Remember, is out now with Verve Poetry Press. I missed this when it came out, but in July Smoke Specs Press published A Time When Not Very Much Happened by Tetra Balestri, a fascinating account of Larry Fagin's last trip to Europe (Paris and Salzburg), at once a travel journal and a memoir of friendship. Alice Notley will be giving the inaugural Poetry London Annual Lecture on October 11th, at Goldsmiths University in London. You can get tickets here. Dia, NYU, and the Poetry Project present
Always More Roses: Schuyler at 100
The date of our New York City symposium is Saturday 28th October, 12pm - 8pm, preceded on Friday 27th October by a performance of Frank O'Hara's Try! Try! at Torn Page in Chelsea. You can register here: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2023/10/28/network-for-new-york-school-studies-symposium/. We're organising this event in collaboration with the wonderful people at The Brooklyn Rail, who will be hosting us at their space in Sunset Park in Brooklyn (900 3rd Ave). More details will follow soon as to line-up, but for now do save the date/register.
Save the date(s) too for some Schuyler centenary celebrations (not organised by us - we're just spreading the word!) - Saturday November 4th at NYU and Dia (https://www.diaart.org/program/calendar/it-goes-it-goes-james-schuyler-centenary-celebration-poetry-reading-11042023), and Monday November 6th at the Poetry Project... In other events and publications news... Laynie Browne's Practice Has No Sequel, a collection of prose poems that meditate on time, perception, loss, and bafflement, is out with Parmenar Press; and Laynie's Intaglio Daughters, an homage text for the poet Lyn Hejinian, is out with Ornithopter Press. Rona Cran's new book, I Remember Kim, a poetic memoir about their sister, modelled on Joe Brainard's I Remember, is out with Verve Poetry Press at the end of September. There's a review by Martin Stannard here: https://www.littermagazine.com/2023/08/review-i-remember-kim-by-rona-cran.html. Jordan Davis’s third collection, Yeah, No, is forthcoming from MadHat. Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy, a reminder that elegy is at once a lament and a work of love, is out with Wesleyan University Press. Anselm Hollo's Collected Poems came out in August with Coffee House Press. Patricia Spears Jones's new book, her fifth poetry collection The Beloved Community is out with Copper Canyon on September 26th. You can read about it (and other 'beloved communities') in this piece by Ned Balbo: https://www.literarymatters.org/15-3-beloved-communities/. Four of the poems from the collection will be in the October 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine. Save the date - October 18th - for her book launch at The Poetry Project. Patricia is also the new New York State Poet for 2023-2025 - congratulations Patricia! Lindsay Turner's The Upstate is out with Chicago University Press in October. Paolo Javier's True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside (Roof Books) is a finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Poetry. In July, Olivier Brossard joined us for a conversation about the creativity of translation and poetry organising, forms of generosity and forms of making, exchanges and cross-pollination across borders and languages and time, and questions of process, experiment, and the unpredictable. You can watch/listen to the interview on our website or our YouTube channel. Canteloupe Music (from the creators of Bang on a Can) has released the score of the opera Black Lodge with music by David T. Little and libretto by Anne Waldman. Waldman will also be curating two days for Giorno Poetry Systems (222 Bowery, Oct 28th (6-8pm) & 29th (4-9pm)), including presentations on Etel Adnan with Sarah Riggs and others, the cine-poetics of Natalia Gaia, No Land and Ed Bowes, a Vincent Katz talk on Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt & Yvonne Jacquette, and free jazz legend Charles Gayle with Cisco Bradley & William Parker, with performance. Jess Cotton's John Ashbery (Reaktion) was reviewed by Martin Stannard for Litter Magazine. Eileen Myles's A 'Working Life' (Grove Press UK) was reviewed in The Guardian. Alice Notley's Early Works and The Speak Angel Series were reviewed together in the LRB by Andrea Brady. There's also an interview between Alice Notley and Nick Sturm in the latest Poetry Project Newsletter. Boog City Arts Festival is happening September 8th-12th at various locations in Brooklyn and featuring NYS-linked poets including John Godfrey, Harris Schiff, Marcella Durand, Patricia Spears Jones, Oliver Katz, Nathan Kernan, Matt Proctor, and Tony Towle, among many others. A new website dedicated to Kenward Elmslie has just gone live: https://www.kenwardelmslie.org/ For anyone UK-based, Alice Notley will be giving the inaugural Poetry London Annual Lecture on October 11th, at Goldsmiths University in London. A way off yet but likely to be popular! You can get tickets here. And Lee Ann Brown is reading at the ICA on September 6th, alongside Dodie Bellamy and others, to celebrate the republication of Kevin Killian’s Argento Series. Tickets here. Jordan Davis is organizing a reading of Chilean poetry, in remembrance of September 11th, 1973, on Sunday September 10th, 4-6pm, 1141 Park Place #2 in Brooklyn. ModPo are hosting a Bernadette Mayer Memorial with Lee Ann Brown & others, hosted Laynie Browne, on Wednesday October 25th: https://modpo.org/2018/09/04/modpo-2018-enroll-here-now/. This call for papers, 'Insignificant Notations: Thinking Surplus with the New York School', may be of interest... Finally, we were so sorry to learn that Keith Waldrop, legendary and loved poet, mentor, teacher, and publisher, died on July 27th. He will be so missed. There's a piece about him in the Poetry Project Newsletter, by Ben Lerner. Jane Hertenstein reviews Stephanie Anderson and Kristen Tapson's All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (University of New Mexico Press, 2022) here.
Charles North has five new poems in the July/August Brooklyn Rail. Andrew Epstein's blog, Locus Solus, has been full of treats recently, in celebration of its tenth anniversary, with recent posts including 'Triple Your Pleasure: Parul Sehgal on Wayne Koestenbaum on James Schuyler', '“A Life in Boxes: The Kenneth Koch Archive at the Berg Collection” with Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina', and '“Close Readings” of New York School Poets — Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch (and Much More)'. If you're not subscribed already, you can read the blog here. On June 14th, Andrew joined critic and publisher Mandana Chaffa, Board President at The Flow Chart Foundation, to celebrate in conversation. You can watch their conversation at the Flow Chart Foundation website. Olivier Brossard joined us for a conversation about the creativity of translation and poetry organising, forms of generosity and forms of making, exchanges and cross-pollination across borders and languages and time, and questions of process, experiment, and the unpredictable. You can watch/listen to the interview on our website or our YouTube channel. On July 28th John Ashbery's birthday (he would have been 96), The Flow Chart Foundation presents a very special illustrated talk on the "Ashbery Bridge," located across from the Walker Art Center. One of John Ashbery’s finest poems is strung across a pedestrian bridge located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Designed by the renowned Iranian-born American sculptor Siah Armajani, the bridge dramatically inserts poetry into the public sphere, inviting the user to contemplate where they are even as they move toward somewhere else. In this talk, poet/critic Eric Lorberer, editor of Rain Taxi, offers a multimedia “guided tour” of Armajani's structure and an innovative analysis of Ashbery’s poem, showing how they work together as public art. More details and tickets here. Flow Chart's 2023 Gathering also takes place later this month, on July 22nd and 23rd, titled The Ingenious Mode: Expanding the Experimental Impulse of Poetry. Line-up and details are here (it looks amazing!). Between July 12th and August 9th Anselm Berrigan is running an online Summer Writing Course, on Wednesdays, 7-9pm EST. Anselm writes: "This five-session weekly writing course is meant to be generative -- to get us writing -- to roam the outskirts of sense so as to say what can't otherwise be said -- to read looking for ways to begin -- to build or rebuild our own senses of routine -- to dig with humor -- to go long if one would like -- to define and reinvent what perspective, in poetry, might be -- and to practice listening as a skill anyone might be able to build upon. We'll write in class and read things out loud, and I will provide reading materials as we go. Poets whose work we'll spend time with will include, but not be limited to: Joseph Ceravolo, Simone White, Courtney Bush, Hoa Nguyen, Fred Moten, John Ashbery, George Albon, Harryette Mullen, Douglas Oliver, Claire Hong, Cedar Sigo, & my brother -- plus a lot of folks whose work has recently appeared in the poetry section of The Brooklyn Rail -- I would especially recommend reading the pieces by Jaylen Strong, Dahlia Damoiselle, Lloyd Swartz, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis in the current issue of the Rail, as different examples of what going long can be." Cost: $35-$50 per class — each class will have its own focus — the last class will be a reading of work by the various participants who want to read what they’ve come up with. Contact Anselm at anselmgb@gmail.com if you'd like to take part. Jordan Davis's pamphlet Noise (above/ground press, 2023) and Martin Stannard's pamphlet Postcards to Ma (Leafe Press, 2023) were included in Billy Mills's 'Basket of Small Delights' June 2023 Pamphlet Reviews. Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life (Nightboat, 2023), translated by Lindsay Turner, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Anahid Nersessian. Eileen Myles's new book, a "Working Life" was reviewed at On the Seawall: read the piece here. Patricia Spears Jones's archive is now at the New York Public Library. Read an interview with her, and learn more about her archive, and her forthcoming collection of poetry, The Beloved Community, here. Alice Notley will be giving the inaugural Poetry London Annual Lecture on October 11th, at Goldsmiths University in London. A way off yet but likely to be popular! You can get tickets here! On Saturday 27th May, we hosted our London symposium, featuring a gorgeous mix of poetry readings and talks, loosely themed 'Around and Beyond the New York School'. We heard about Barbara Guest, from two perspectives (Will Montgomery's and Dell Olsen's), about Robert Creeley's ecological thinking from Nick Selby, about Brainard as forgetter-as-well-as-rememberer from Martyna Szot, about John Ashbery's 'creases in forgotten letters' from Heleina Burton, about poetry with an accent and the Newham Poetry Group from Sonia Quintero, about hip hop in the fells and the Kirkby Lonsdale Poetry Festival from Matt Sowerby, and about tentacular poetry-making with Small Birds and Osmosis presses from Briony Hughes and Caroline Harris. Jeremy Over uncorked Kenneth Koch via his music box, Betsy Porritt took off her shoes while reading Bernadette Mayer and visiting Graceland, Rona Cran remembered their sister, Peter Robinson quoted Rilke at the Co-Op, Mark Ford evoked the light attic dust of Jules Laforgue, Agnieszka Studzinska's undeclared kisses blew apart, Robert Hampson bid a ceremonial farewell to Soho, Karenjit Sandhu read documents from the Irritating Archive, confident that this is what Yoko Ono would want, Denise Riley dreamed on revolution and the St. Mark's Seraphim, Charles Bernstein turned topsy-turvy because magic is to poetry what yoga is to birds, and Alice Notley sat on the porch with her baby in the warm autumn light. To make (some!) sense of all this, please enjoy the audio recordings from the day, which you can find on our website and our YouTube channel. There are also some photos on our Twitter account (@NYSSNetwork). Thank you so much to all our wonderful readers, presenters, and audience members. Our New York symposium will be held during the last week of October 2023 (exact date(s) TBC) - more details will follow soon.
Alexandra Gold, author of the brilliant new book The Collaborative Artist’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art (University of Iowa Press, 2023), joined us on Zoom for a conversation about belaboring poetry, how friendship happens, pleasure in the material, imagining materiality, why and when we start caring about friendships between poets and artists, sketching as a form of poetry, and taking pop culture (but not ourselves) seriously. You can watch/listen to the interview on our Youtube channel. (And, with thanks to Alexandra, we learned that Marvelous Mrs Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino are developing a drama series about female abstract artists for Amazon Studios based on Mary Gabriel's great book Ninth Street Women.) On June 7th , 6-7pm BST, Jess Cotton joins Jeffrey Lependorf, The Flow Chart Foundation's Executive Director, for a conversation about Jess's new biography of John Ashbery, recently published by Reaktion Books as part of their prestigious "Critical Lives" series. Join them on Zoom to hear about creating this work that offers "a legible and accessible map of Ashbery’s work that draws connections between the poetry, the New York art and literary world, and the political climate of the middle decades of the twentieth century." Info and tickets here. Rachel Schenberg's Certainly (certainly), written with Jordi Infield, will soon be out with no more poetry. The book has come out of a collaborative project where Jordi and Rachel woke nightly at 1:53am throughout October to write in a semi-wakeful state. This idea came from The 3:15 Experiment, where, for several years, a group of poets (including Bernadette Mayer, Lee Ann Brown, Jen Hofer, and Danika Dinsmore) would write every night in August at 3:15am. On June 9th Matthew Rana is organising an event at the University of Amsterdam celebrating Bernadette Mayer. With presentations by Kay Gabriel, Divya Nadkarni, Matthew Rana, and Mia You followed by a discussion moderated by Marija Cetinić, this roundtable addresses questions of poetic form and experimental writing as well as issues surrounding labour, motherhood, trans and queer desire, and the unconscious. A Life in Boxes: the Kenneth Koch Archive at the Berg Collection: on June 13th (6pm) NEH Long-Term Fellow Susannah Hollister and scholar Emily Setina discuss their biography-in-progress of Koch and show select items from the Berg's vast and varied holdings. Speaking with the Berg's curator, Carolyn Vega, Hollister and Setina will describe how the archive has helped them discover the charismatic, prolific artist in the fullness of his life and reflect on how we can come to know writers through the records they leave. Details and tickets here. Nick Sturm's edited cluster of essays on little magazines has just been published at Post45, and features pieces by Rosa Campbell, Sophie Seita, Edric Mesmer, Rona Cran, Stephanie Anderson, and others, as well as an introduction by Nick, in which he presents the cluster as 'an immersive resource for writers and researchers interested in little magazines and periodicals, [essays that] will instigate new conversations about how we approach, write with, and teach these incredible primary sources'. Read and enjoy here. Last month Vincent Katz gave a great lecture at the New York Studio School, entitled Big Sky: Possibilities Within Poetry & Visual Art and focusing on journals edited by Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bill Berkson and Larry Fagin. You can watch the lecture here.
Donna Dennis's Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky, an immersive environment inspired by the giant ore docks on Lake Superior, opened at Private Public Gallery in Hudson in late April, and runs until May 28th. The piece suggests the passage of time and our collective journey into the unknown. The Spring 2023 issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter is now out, and is, as editor Kay Gabriel writes, 'a kind of Festschrift' for Bernadette Mayer, featuring writing by Marcella Durand, Matthew Rana, Rona Cran, Lisa Jarnot, Shiv Kotecha, CA Conrad and more. You can read it here: https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/newsletter/272-spring-2023-for-bernadette-mayer. Islands & Rivers: Poetry and the Art of the Possible in the Age of Climate Change, featuring Anne Waldman and Patricia Spears Jones, among others, is taking place May 17th and 18th at the CUNY Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College. Details and registration here. The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation presents a reading by Lee Ann Brown on Thursday, May 18th. She will be introduced by Charles Bernstein. The reading will begin at 7:00 pm. Doors open at 6:30 pm. Tickets are available online now for $7 (+ fees) or $10 at the door the day of the reading. Seating capacity is limited to 50: https://www.resnickpasslof.org/upcoming-events. Tony Towle has a poem in Terence Winch's weekly series in the Best American Poetry Blog, which you can read here. On Sunday May 28th The Poetry Project is hosting Pathetic Happening, a read and performed version of the entirety of Pathetic Literature (edited by Eileen Myles) from Grove Press, a nearly 700 page volume of poets and fiction writers and playwrights and nonfiction from all over the world, and all eras. This event — conceived and curated by Tom Cole and Eileen Myles with ten guest curators including Ama Birch, Sadie Dupuis, Marcella Durand, Will Farris, Jack Halberstam, Mary Reilly, Sophie Robinson, Lucy Sexton, and Sangeeta Yesley, is an afternoon and evening devoted to enacting literature in all its dimensionality. Details and tickets here. Mark Ford has been nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry - congratulations Mark! Rona Cran's poetic memoir, I Remember Kim (written in the aftermath of a bereavement, and modeled on Joe Brainard's I Remember) is available for pre-order from Verve Poetry Press, here. It's out later this year. Alexandra Gold's The Collaborative Artist's Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art, which offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is out now with the University of Iowa Press. Andrew Epstein joined Kamran Javadizadeh on his Close Readings podcast to talk about John Ashbery's beautiful, haunting poem 'Street Musicians'. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. On Wednesday10th May Ed Friedman curated The Brooklyn Rail's 133rd Wednesday Poetry Reading with Brenda Coultas, Steve Levine, Gillian McCain and Bob Rosenthal, and Anselm Berrigan as host. Lynne Sach's 2022 beautiful film Swerve, in which Paolo Javier's sonnets move viewers in and around a food court and playground in Queens, was featured at the 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and was written about here. On May 13th Anne Waldman participated in the Kerouac Festival Reading in NYC, at the Gene Frankel Theatre with her nephew Devin Brahja Waldman on sax, and guest poet Rocio Ceron of Mexico. On May 17th she will be a featured speaker at the CUNY Skylight room celebrating recent books by Mary Norbert Korte (former nun and environmental activist) and a library inventory of the mystic books of Diane di Prima; she's also participating in an event on May 18th at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in NYC celebrating poets of The Poetry Project. New Books and pamphlets include: Rue du Monde /Streets of the World, translations into French by Pierre Joris, Nicole Peyrafitte (Apic Press, 2023, Algeria, published by Habib Tengour) and PECADOS PARA TRAGAR COHETES / Sins to Swallow Rockets, translation into Spanish by Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola, Madrid 2023. The Summer Writing Program, 'Cri di Coeur', runs at Naropa University in Boulder, June 11-July 3. Finally, our Spring Symposium is taking place at the end of the month, and we're looking forward to welcoming poets and scholars from near and far for a day of conversation, poetry, ideas, and listening. We will record the talks and readings and share them with the Network in due course. We are in the process of planning our Fall Symposium in New York City, which will take place in late October 2023 - more details on that will follow soon. Have a happy May! Happy April New York School-ers!
London Symposium and Poetry Reading: we're looking forward to seeing familiar and fresh faces at our gathering in London at the end of next month. Details continue to be posted on our website (https://www.nnyss.org/london-2023-symposium.html) as our plans take shape. You can now register to attend the event here. Due to the size of the venue, tickets are quite limited. It's not going to be a hybrid event, unfortunately, but we will record as much of it as we can, and share that in due course. We are also thrilled to share the full tranche of recordings from last year's Paris Symposium and Poetry Reading, with huge thanks to Olivier Brossard for putting them all together. You can view them on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWXV8S47xVYUbZtJuMcdwU-h2qlzx7ZvH. The Flow Chart Foundation will be hosting their next Gathering on July 22nd and 23rd, at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson. This event focuses on the New York School’s influence on and reverberations through work that engages race, gender, sexuality, and disability—and the poets embodying these identities—and will also explore and celebrate work in this lineage being created now. The 2023 Gathering will again feature a combination of talks, hybrid presentations, performances, and conversations. You can find their Call for Presentations on the website - proposals will be accepted until April 28th. Email info@flowchartfoundation.org with any questions. Earlier this week, Marjorie Perloff joined us for a conversation that took in analysis, structure, and gossip; writing poetry, writing about poetry, and publishing; New York nostalgia, making connections and gaining distance; taste, subjectivity, and opening out the poetry world; starting late and staying longer; and gender, teaching, and turning students into 'little Gertrude Stein-lets'. You can watch/listen to the interview on our YouTube channel. On Thursday 6th April Paolo Javier led an intimate, virtual group thinking-and-reading-through of "Riddle Me" by John Ashbery, as part of the Flow Chart Foundation's CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE series, the video library for which you can find here. Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions is out April 19th with The Monacelli Press. Dennis's first monograph, this is a full career consideration of her work as an architectural sculptor, installation artist, and long-time collaborator with the New York School of poets, including Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, and Kenward Elmslie. There's more info here. Eileen Myles's first collection since Evolution, entitled a 'working life', is out April 18th with Grove Press, a booked rooted in the everyday, and exploring the many dualities of human life. They're on tour, too, throughout April and May. Dates and locations here. Douglas Dunn + Dancers presents Garden Party, a new dance by Douglas Dunn with design by Mimi Gross and Lauren Parrish, April 24-30. Garden Party is a series of vignettes, each with its own elegant and playful interaction of movement, visual art, music, and language. Dunn partners with longtime collaborator Mimi Gross to transform his loft space into a verdant haven. Ten members of Douglas Dunn + Dancers, including Dunn himself, frolic within this lush garden landscape while lighting and projections by Lauren Parrish illuminate each scene and its interruptions. In this hour-long work, Dunn’s steps are interwoven with poetry (John Keats, Anne Waldman, and others) and music (Robert de Visée and John Lennon, to name a few). There's more info, and tickets, here. Olivier Brossard has completed a comprehensive bibliography of US poetry in French translation, from 1786 to 2023 (among which quite a few New York School poets feature). You will find it at www.poetscritics.org. In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O'Brien has a great review of a new book by the poet and art critic John Yau, Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal; Joe Brainard and Frank O'Hara (and Mark Ford) also feature in the Guardian's LGBTQ+ Lit List: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/09/lgbtq-lost-classics-books-chosen-by-authors. On Wednesday 26th April, please join The Poetry Project in celebrating the life and work of beloved poet, librettist, novelist, editor, performance artist, and friend Kenward Elmslie. The event will feature readings, songs, and remembrances from WC Bamberger, Lee Ann Brown, Maxine Chernoff, Donna Dennis, Serena Devi, John Godfrey, Ann Lauterbach, Ron Padgett, Vivien Russe, Steven Taylor, Cindy Tran, Anne Waldman, and Trevor Winkfield. RSVP here. On Friday 12th May, The Project will honour the memory of Bernadette Mayer, with remarks, readings, and performances from Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Charlotte Carter, CAConrad, Brenda Coultas, Helen Decker, Bill DeNoyelles, Barbara Epler, Peter Gizzi, John Godfrey, Bob Holman, Fanny Howe, Colter Jacobson, Annabell Lee, Erica Dawn Lyle, Greg Masters, Grace Murphy, Maureen Owen, Morgan Ritter, Ed Sanders, Sarah Steadman, Anne Waldman, and Don Yorty. More details, and RSVP here. POETS @ PACE are hosting A Celebration of John Ashbery, on Wednesday April 19, at 6:00 pm, in the Pace University Bianco Room, 3 Spruce St (a block east of City Hall). Charles North will introduce the celebration, and there will be readings by poets Marcella Durand, Eugene Richie, Rosanne Wasserman, and John Yau. 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. Patricia Hope Scanlan's 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); 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. |
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