MEDIA
You can view videos of many of our events below, or on our YouTube channel.
INAUGURAL POETRY READING (October 2021)
Screenshot of Anne Waldman
Inaugural Poetry Reading (Saturday 9th October 2021), with Anne Waldman, Maureen Owen, Alice Notley, Elinor Nauen, Patricia Spears Jones, and Eileen Myles. You can watch/listen to the recording of the event on our YouTube channel.
INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW EPSTEIN
Screenshot of Andrew Epstein
"the poetry never stops being fascinating": Interview with Andrew Epstein (Wednesday 13th October 2021). In the first of our series of informal interviews with New York School scholars and poets, Andrew Epstein, Professor in the English Department at Florida State University and author of Beautiful Enemies, Attention Equals Life, and the entertaining and informative blog Locus Solus, explores the origins of his career in relation to the New York School, and reflects on the linguistic and philosophic energy of New York School writing, on working with Kenneth Koch, on coterie scholarship and acts of critical friendship, on new and forthcoming work (featuring David Berman and Wallace Stevens among others), on teaching New York School writing, and much more. You can watch/listen to the interview on our Youtube channel (interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma).
INTERVIEW WITH MAE LOSASSO
Screenshot of Mae Losasso
Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Interview with Mae Losasso (Tuesday 7th December 2021). In the second in our series of afternoon chats with New York School enthusiasts, experts, poets, writers, and artists, Mae Losasso, a Brighton-based writer and academic, joins us for a discussion about the spaces and structures of New York School writing, the shared languages of poetry and architecture, learning and teaching the New York School, and inspirational work by other writers. You can watch/listen to the interview by clicking on the image above or on our YouTube channel (interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma).
INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN GLAVEY |
Screenshot of Brian Glavey
Queer subjectivities, niceness (and meanness), and the poetics of oversharing: Interview with Brian Glavey (Tuesday 1st February 2022). Brian Glavey, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde and several great essays on O'Hara, Brainard, and others, and at work on a new book called The Poetics of Oversharing, joins us from South Carolina to talk about performative niceness; whiteness and the New York School; styles and subjects; shifting conceptions of queerness, confession, and what it means to relate, to share, and to overshare. You can watch the interview on our YouTube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma).
INTERVIEW WITH MANDANA CHAFFA
Screenshot of Mandana Chaffa
A poetics of fun and conversation: Interview with Mandana Chaffa (Tuesday 29th March 2022). Mandana Chaffa is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, and an Editor at Chicago Review of Books; she also serves on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and The Flow Chart Foundation. She joined us from New York City for a conversation about New York(s), conversation and collaboration, playfulness and enthusiasm, delight and difficulty, and poems in public spaces. You can watch the interview on our YouTube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran.)
INTERVIEW WITH ROSA CAMPBELL
Screenshot of Rosa Campbell
Process and small epiphanies, refusing the canon as benchmark, lateral influences, and the manifold possibilities of gender: Interview with Rosa Campbell (Tuesday 14th June 2022). Rosa Campbell, Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St. Andrews, and author of Pothos (Broken Sleep, 2021), talks about her forthcoming 're-vision' of the so-called New York School ('in six poets' - V.R. Lang, Barbara Guest, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles), a conversation about canon-formation, gender, connection and generative dissolution, schools, time, and generations, the interactions between moments of a poem and the poem itself, and academic joy and acts of attention. You can watch the video on our YouTube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran.)
INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW HOLMAN |
Screenshot of Matthew Holman
"a very effective administrator (also a poet"): Interview with Matthew Holman (Monday 4th July 2022). Associate Lecturer at UCL and incoming Terra Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Courtauld, Matthew Holman is the author of a forthcoming book on Frank O'Hara's life and work as a curator. Our conversation touched on ideas or questions of being a New York (school) poet out of New York, collaboration, care, friendship, and closeness with/to artists, cold war politics and its intersections with O'Hara's work in Europe, institutions, and artists as texture for poems (as well as poetry as as texture for art critical writing). You can watch the interview on our Youtube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran.)
What We Talk About When We Talk About the New York School: Online Symposium (September 2022)
Screenshot of Rona Cran
For pandemic-related and other reasons, several of our members were unable to travel to Paris for our spring symposium. We held an online symposium in late September 2022, 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 below, and can also be downloaded here. You can watch the symposium recording on our YouTube channel.
Programme of Talks and Readings
1. Wojciech Drag: Calais, VT, in Joe Brainard's Life and Work
2. Matt Proctor: poetry reading
3. Jane Hertenstein: Intersections – what we talk about when we talk about the New York School
4. Greg Masters: poetry reading – from It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This (2020)
5. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina: “Universal significance combined with almost universal unacceptability”: New York School ambitions in the making of Locus Solus, 1961-62
6. Libbie Rifkin: Eileen Myles Inside of Institutions*
7. Marcella Durand: Poets and Artists Still Hang Out
8. Molly Murray: ‘So much in this ballet is reciprocal!’: Embodied Intersubjectivity in Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Dance’
* Libbie was unable to attend on the day; we hope to hear this talk at a later date.
Programme of Talks and Readings
1. Wojciech Drag: Calais, VT, in Joe Brainard's Life and Work
2. Matt Proctor: poetry reading
3. Jane Hertenstein: Intersections – what we talk about when we talk about the New York School
4. Greg Masters: poetry reading – from It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This (2020)
5. Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina: “Universal significance combined with almost universal unacceptability”: New York School ambitions in the making of Locus Solus, 1961-62
6. Libbie Rifkin: Eileen Myles Inside of Institutions*
7. Marcella Durand: Poets and Artists Still Hang Out
8. Molly Murray: ‘So much in this ballet is reciprocal!’: Embodied Intersubjectivity in Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Dance’
* Libbie was unable to attend on the day; we hope to hear this talk at a later date.
Get the Money! Book Launch Event with Alice Notley, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm
Get the Money! Collected Prose (1961-1983) by Ted Berrigan, Edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm (City Lights Books, 2022)
An online conversation with Nick Sturm, Alice Notley, Edmund Berrigan and Anselm Berrigan, the editors of Get the Money!: The Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan, 1961-1983, which was published by City Lights on September 13th 2022. Watch by visiting our Youtube channel, for an hour or so of contagious knowledge, generous seeing, and coincident life and art.
INTERVIEW WITH PAOLO JAVIER
Screenshot of Paolo Javier
"experiences with language": Interview with Paolo Javier (Tuesday 11th October 2022). 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, next month!). 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 or on our Youtube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran.) If you want to find about more about O.B.B. and the comics inspirations for it, check out this nightboat blog. And if you want more, there's a great interview with Javier here.
INTERVIEW WITH STEPHANIE ANDERSON AND KRISTEN TAPSON
All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, Edited by Stephanie Anderson and Kristen Tapson (University of New Mexico Press, 2022)
Stephanie Anderson and Kristen Tapson, editors of All This Thinking: the Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (2022), joined us for a conversation about the book, which explores the deep friendship and critical/creative thinking between the two poets. Our conversation touched on the editors' own friendship and correspondence in relation to the friendship and correspondence of Mayer and Coolidge, from the houses, dinners, and poetry that brought them together to the writing of the book's introduction. Along the way, we talked about the ways in which Mayer and Coolidge work out a poetics in the space of the letters, as they use them to carve out time to think; about the translation of dailiness, and letters as means of self-correspondence; about being 'independently together' and 'ideal readers for each other's work'; about the imperfect vehicle of an index and the preservation of the mysteries of friendships. You can click on the image above to access the interview, or watch it on our YouTube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma.)
INTERVIEW WITH NICK STURM
Screenshot of Nick Sturm
'Someone who uncovers things for people': Interview with Nick Sturm (Monday 6th February 2023). Nick Sturm is a Lecturer in English at Georgia State University and Visiting Faculty in Creative Writing at Emory University, as well as a co-editor of Get the Money!: Collected Prose, 1961-1983 by Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) and editor of Early Works by Alice Notley (Fonograf Editions, 2023). Nick 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 by clicking on the image above, or on our Youtube channel. (Interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma.)
INTERVIEW WITH MARJORIE PERLOFF
Screenshot of Marjorie Perloff
'poetry is news that stays news': Interview with Marjorie Perloff (Tuesday 11th April 2023). Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She’s also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She’s a leading critic of contemporary poetry, and her work has been especially concerned with experimental and avant-garde poetry and relating it to the major currents of modernist and postmodernist activity in the arts, including the visual arts and cultural theory. Marjorie 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. (Interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma.)
INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRA J. GOLD
Screenshot of Alexandra J. Gold
Tndulging and resisting categorizations: Interview with Alexandra J. Gold (Monday 5th June 2023): Alexandra J. Gold is is head preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program. She received her PhD in English from Boston University. Her first book, The Collaborative Artists’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Poetry & Art is recently out with Iowa Press’s Contemporary North American Poetry Series. It highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, looking at creative partnerships between Frank O’Hara and Mike Goldberg, Robert Creeley and Robert Indiana, Anne Waldman and George Schneeman, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith, and Erica Hunt and Alison Saar – so much that’s of interest and of significance to our Network. She wrote a wonderful blog post for us a while back now called ‘On Seeing Kim Kardashian’s Naked Portrait (not at the Museum of Modern Art)’, which read a Kardashian Instagram nude in dialogue with Larry River’s famous 1954 portrait of Frank O’Hara, Nude with Boots. Our conversation touches on 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 here (or click the image above). (Interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma).
INTERVIEW WITH OLIVIER BROSSARD
Screenshot of Olivier Brossard
Forms of making: Interview with Olivier Brossard (Tuesday 18th July 2023). Olivier Brossard teaches American literature at Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris. He is editor at joca seria where he has translated poetry by Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson, John Ashbery, and Joe Brainard into French; along with Abigail Lang and Vincent Broqua he runs the Poets and Critics Program, and he is also part of the Double Change collective, which brings together the poetries of France and North America. He is the editor of the Bibliography of United States Poetry in French Translation, 1786-2023 and of Lovers of My Orchards: Writers and Artists on Frank O'Hara (2017). Olivier joined us for a conversation that explored 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 YouTube channel, or click the image above. (Interview by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma.)
A Memorial for David Shapiro
David Shapiro
Joanna Fuhrman has shared with us a memorial for David Shapiro, with some beautiful tributes from over thirty people, including Joanna, Ron Padgett, Rodger Kamenetz, Alicia Jo Rabins, Joseph Lease, Phil Kline, Kate Farrell, Timothy Liu, David Lehman, Trace Peterson, Renata Hejduk, Jordan Davis, Stephen Paul Miller, Elaine Equi, Vincent Katz, and many others. You can view this via our Youtube channel or by clicking the image above. David's loss is tremendous.