Greg Masters has written a new book, A Million Revolutions, which is out now with Crony Books. It's about politics and art, loss and love, and is surprising, and generous, and profound. Please see the attached press release for more details and for review copies.

Daniela Daniele, at the University of Udine, is organising the 8th International Seminar of Modern Anglo-American Poetry in Translation, with the theme: 'Rediscovering Frank O'Hara and his Female Friends: New Editions and Digital Applications'. The seminar has a series of events running between November 12th and December 11th, and features Rosa Campbell, Daniele Pomilio, and Matthew Holman among others. Please see the attached flyer for more information.

Bradley King has interviewed Anne Waldman, in a piece called No Land and Anne Waldman's The Velvet Wire, for the Brooklyn Rail. Anne is reading and in conversation at the Dada Literary Cafe tonight, December 3, 8pm, in an event called 'People Want Peace', alongside Laura Hinton, Neda Zahraie, and Tenaya Nasser Frederick.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative will be honoring Kenneth Koch's work at their second annual homecoming event, on Thursday December 5, at 6 pm, at the Salesforce Tower, 1095 Sixth Avenue, New York City: https://teachersandwriters.networkforgood.com/events/76389-the-2nd-annual-t-w-homecoming-celebration. Teachers & Writers was the organization that supported Kenneth's work in the schools leading to his teaching books, and likewise, Kenneth supported T&W from very close to its beginnings. 

Since the start of the year, Kate Taverna’s short documentary on Donna Dennis's work, The Art of Metaphor, has been making the rounds at film festivals around the world. In September it screened as part of the Seoul International Film Festival. Closer to home, the film was shown as part of FilmColumbia 2024 at the Crandell Theater in Chatham, NY. It premiered in New York City on November 20 at the Big Apple Film Festival and will be screened on December 7 as part of the Hamptons Doc Fest.

The Video Work of Ed Bowes: Language and Light, a four day retrospective of Ed Bowes's career, organized in collaboration with Anne Waldman and Alystyre Julian, is being held at Anthology Film Archives, from December 6-9 (32, 2nd Ave, New York, 10003). The attached press release contains all the relevant details and the program, and showtimes can be found here. An afterparty will follow the final program on Monday Dec. 9th at the Bowery Poetry Club at 9:30pm,, with details to be announced at the screenings.

Over at the Allen Ginsberg Project, there were some reflections this month (and links to more) on Ted Berrigan on what would have been his 90th birthday, and on Lewis Warsh, four years after his death.

Litter has published two great new poems by Martin Stannard which you can read here.

Stephanie Anderson's edited book, Women in Independent Publishing: a History of Unsung Innovators, 1953-1989, is out this month with the University of New Mexico Press.

With all our best for December (you might enjoy this piece, from the Locus Solus blog's archive, by Andrew Epstein on James Schuyler's 'December'). 

Eileen Myles is featured in a new film, Wayfaring Stranger, directed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, which enlists the work of seven performers – all women or non-binary – to embody a lifespan in seven stages.

Some really great books are either out, or are imminent, including:

• Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone 
• Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane (if you missed the launch at The Poetry Project you can watch the stream of the event here)
• Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger, edited by Mary Paniccia Carden and Jane Falk
• Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953-1989, edited by Stephanie Anderson
• Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On), by Paolo Javier.

​Philip Terry and Marina Warner at the LRB Shop, Weds 13 November, 7pm. Terry's Purgatorio (Carcanet) transports us to Mersea Island, where Ted Berrigan leads our author up an artificial mountain to meet with artists Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst, as well as Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Lady Diana, Jean Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ciaran Carson and Anoushka Shankar. Terry will be at the shop to read from and talk about Purgatorio with Marina Warner, acclaimed mythographer, historian and iconologist, who features in the poem.

Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina recently hosted a discussion of The Pleasures of Peace and Other Poems for the Kenneth Koch Book Club.  The third meeting of the Book Club is on Sunday, November 24, at 2 PM ET. Painter Katherine Koch will lead the discussion of The Art of Love, and critic and literary historian Nick Sturm will also present on the instructional turn in Koch's work. If you'd like to learn more please email [email protected]. You can also follow the @kenneth_koch_100 account on Instagram.

Anselm Berrigan's 'Poem Inspired by Everything' (for Charles North) is published in The Baffler no. 76. Anselm is the 2025 Bagley Wright Lecture Series Lecturer.

Betsy Porritt was interviewed by Danne Jobin of Poetology, about her pamphlet Oh Unquenchable Thirst (Distance No Object), in a conversation about poetry and place, tone and voice and choice, and small press publishing.

For those of us who are London-based, Three of Hearts: A Poetry Reading, featuring Steff Huì Cí Ling, Clint Burnham, and James Goodwin, is happening at the legendary Cock Tavern, NW1 1HB, on November 7th, at 7pm. There will be a free pamphlet distributed at the reading featuring work by Steff, Clint and James; also available will be remaining copies from the Nora Fulton, Imogen Cassels and Luke Roberts triple-header from a few months ago. Please spread the word around to anyone you think might be interested, and/or go along!

Love, Joe: The Collected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane, will be published by Columbia University Press this November. You can read an extract at Paris Review. There will be a book launch on October 30th, 7pm, at the Poetry Project. The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach—reading aloud from and discussing the letters included in Love, Joe, with others TBA. Details here.

There's also an interview between Peter Schjeldahl and James Schuyler in Paris Review.

Paolo Javier's Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On) is out on November 1st with Poets of Queens. He's launching the book on November 17th at the World's Borough Bookshop in Jackson Heights, and reading at McNally Jackson on December 6th.

Elinor Nauen and Maureen Owen's gorgeous zine Julebord #4 is out, dedicated to Lyn Hejinian, Tyrone Williams, Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Auster, David Shapiro, Etel Adnan, Marjorie Perloff and Ken Jordan. It features work by poets and artists including Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Michael Lally, Charles and Paula North, Rona Cran, Simon Schuchat, Bob Rosenthal, Hiroaki Sato, and Charlotte Carter among others. You can read more about Julebord on Elinor's blog.

Al Filreis convened Thomas Devaney, JS Wu, and Vincent Katz for PoemTalk (#199) to talk about two poems by Edwin Denby. The two poems are “The Subway” and “Ciampino: Envoi.” You can find out more and listen here: https://jacket2.org/podcasts/not-buy-poemtalk-199.

The first meeting of Kenneth Koch Book Club took place on Sunday October 6, discussing Thank You and Other Poems, led by Andrew Epstein. There's a great upcoming roster of hosts and books through February, when the in-person and international Centenary events get underway:

• October 6 - Thank You and Other Poems, discussion led by Andrew Epstein
• October 29 - The Pleasures of Peace, discussion led by Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister
• November - The Art of Love, host to be announced
• December - The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951, discussion led by Mark Statman
• January - One Train, discussion led by Karen Koch
• February - New Addresses, discussion led by Evan Kindley

All the collections the Kenneth Koch Book Club will be reading between September and Kenneth's 100th birthday (February 27, 2025) can be found in the Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. If you'd like to find out more please email [email protected]. 

Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953-1989, edited by Stephanie Anderson, will be out with the University of New Mexico Press in December. The book is a collection of interviews with and resources about women actively engaged in small-press publishing between the 1950s and the 1980s. The interviewees include Rosmarie Waldrop, Maureen Owen, Alice Notley, Barbara Barg and Rose Lesniak, Patricia Spears Jones, Eileen Myles, Lee Anne Brown, Bernadette Mayer, and many others.

On September 26th Patricia Spears Jones was celebrated at the Schomberg Center, in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards. You can watch the event here. Her collection The Beloved Community is a 2024 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award finalist.

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone is out on October 29th, with MIT Press. There's a book launch on the 29th, featuring Anne Waldman, Tracie Morris, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones and Mónica de la Torre, among others - details here.

Anne Waldman was interviewed by Sandra Simonds for the Bennington Review.

Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy has been shortlisted for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize. Tickets for the shortlist readings, on January 12th, are on sale here.

Rowland Bagnall wrote about Rosa Campbell's The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems by Bunny Lang for the TLS.

Kathryn Scanlan wrote about Alice Notley's Being Reflected Upon for The Nation.

We were really sorry to hear that Beat/New York School poet Michael Brownstein died on September 18th: Brownstein moved to New York in 1965 and was very much a part of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. 1967's Behind the Wheel was published with 'C' press, with cover artwork by Alex Katz, and his 1969 collection, Highway to the Sky, won a Frank O'Hara Award. Here's a poem of his, about/not about dogs and trumpets, that I really love. The Allen Ginsberg Project has put together a set of resources in memory of him.

A memorial for Jerome Rothenberg took place on June 24th: you can view the memorial, and/or listen to it, over at Penn Sound.

Patricia Spears Jones is taking part in Procession of Angels, an initiative conceived by artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons and organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy in partnership with Harlem Art Park, which invites participants to walk from Harlem Art Park to Madison Square Park, retracing historical paths to shape an inclusive future. Patricia is reading on Friday September 20, in the second procession (9am-2pm) at the Gathering Site of the 1917 Silent Parade. Other poets taking part include Willie Perdomo, Major Jackson, and Marina Ortiz, among others. Details here. As Poet Laureate of New York, Patricia is one of the recipients of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets-2024-poet-laureate-fellows. With the award, she will develop and implement a series of intergenerational workshops that will foster conversations about social justice, environmental degradation, systemic oppression, and cultural resistance, and what beauty means.

Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024), a collection edited by Michele Mcdannold, includes memoir, poems, biography, interviews and literary criticism by an array of contributors such as Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders and Nina Zivancevic, among others.

Simon Warner has compiled an Anne Waldman Discography: find out more about this great resource and archive here. Simon's Substack also features a great interview between Anne and Jim Cohn. Jim reviewed Anne's spoken word discography in 2024 based on her catalog available at Fast Speaking Music (https://fastspeakingmusic.bandcamp.com/), the record label she formed with her son, Ambrose Bye, which is hosted online by Bandcamp. The interview celebrates essential works, musical genres and themes from across Waldman's 50-year experimental spoken word and music trajectory and encourages readers to listen along. Waldman and No Land's The Velvet Wire has been published by Granary Books, and is gorgeous. Waldman's Rues Du Monde has been published in French
in Algeria with APIC Press (Gen. Editor Habib Tengour), with translation by Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte. Anne will be reading at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, NYC, on October 3rd.

In the summer issue of Poetry London Joey Connolly revisits his childhood diary and poems by John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop to think about gender identity and desire in modern poetry.

Peter Gizzi read from Fierce Elegy at Foyles in London in mid-July. He wrote a great piece for Foyles that touched on aspects of what was discussed in the Q&A afterwards, about the importance of elegy, the 'I' pronoun in the lyric, and more...

Rowland Bagnall has recently written a review of Oli Hazzard's Sleepers Awake, with references to Bernadette Mayer, John Ashbery, Matt Bevis, Jess Cotton, Stephen Ross, and Peter Gizzi, and a piece for LARB on Bernadette Mayer's Memory.

In June 2024, the papers of Lewis Warsh were made officially open to researchers in The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. You can see the Collective Overview and Description, and arrange to see the papers, here: https://archives.nypl.org/brg/35928.

Trace Peterson's The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep won the Alma Book Award from Saturnalia Books and is forthcoming in 2025.

The new issue of Paideuma contains Nick Sturm's dossier "Jim Brodey: Electrified Prose," with an intro titled  "The Human Shredder," 60-odd pages of Brodey's autobiographical & critical writing packed with his "outsider vibrancy," and his interview w/Vincent Katz from 1983.

Jacket2 is seeking to celebrate Lyn Hejinian's life and work by publishing a collection of microtexts and short videos in her honor. You are invited to submit work to this feature by writing a short critical, reflective, creative, and/or essayistic response to Lyn's work - or by recording a short video commentary or remembrance to share at Jacket2. Submissions will be considered for possible publication in 2025. Please see the attached CFP for details, and contact Laynie Browne ([email protected]) if you need further information.

Joanna Fuhrman's new book Data Mind, a collection of darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is out October 15th with Northwestern University Press. Northwestern UP has an end of summer sale, so any book you order from them by September 3rd is 50% off. Use the code “DOGDAYS.” Order here. More details about the book, including upcoming reading dates, can be found here.

Stephanie Anderson has a new chapbook, Bearings, out from DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, and a poetic essay in the latest print issue of Gulf Coast. She also has an article about Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff's baseball announcing experiments in Textual Practice, in a special issue about the Mimeograph Revolution, edited by Douglas Field and James Riley, and also featuring an article by Daniel Kane and one by Sophie Seita. Stephanie has also written an article about women midcentury small press editor-publishers, including several affiliated with the NYS, in Post45. Finally, All This Thinking is now out in paperback!

Hazel Smith, who many of us will know as the author of the brilliant Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, has recently published a poetry and image collaboration with artist Sieglinde Karl-Spence, called Heimlich Unheimlich --a work about the aftermath of World War 11, intergenerational trauma, migration and belonging. The book, which consists of photographic and textual collages, can be bought from the Apothecary Archive website apothecaryarchive.com/the-apothecary-archive-press-1/ogv0wzzkkjl7bfpnx7hw66n8zs9hr6 . International sales are no problem, if you order from the Apothecary Archive site, copies will in most cases be printed in your own country and will reach you in a very timely manner without additional postage costs. Please see the attached flyer for more details.

If you're UK-based, Kirkby Lonsdale Poetry Festival is returning September 13th-15th with a vibrant programme of performances, open mics, workshops, theatre, typewriter busking, and so much more! All with the stunning backdrop of the Yorkshire Dales. Headliners include: Amelia Loulli, Bróccán Tyzack-Carlin, Rachel Mann, Elizabeth Train-Brown, Ray, Sharena Lee Satti, Hazel Mehmet, and Teague. You can find out more and get a ticket here.

Jenn Soong has a new essay in Critical Inquiry on the pronoun "it" and lyric - the essay engages with examples by Wieners, O'Hara, Dickinson, and R.S. Thomas, among others. You can read it here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/PNSGUFDFAN3M9CCH3RGS/full?redirectUri=/doi/epdf/10.1086/731567

​2023 marked the centenary of James Schuyler’s birth. To celebrate, a series of events, Always More Roses, was organised in New York, by Matthew Bevis in collaboration with Dia, NYU, and The Poetry Project. It featured a symposium and readings, some of which were livestreamed and/or recorded. More information about the events and speakers, and the organizations that supported the series, is available here. Following on from these events, future plans include a collection of essays on Schuyler’s work (as poet, novelist, dramatist, diarist, correspondent, and art writer), and an exhibition of his photographs. 
 
Elinor Nauen's new chapbook, The Alphabet's Dilemma, and Bob Rosenthal's new chapbook, Here I am, are both out with CCCP Chapbooks from Subpress Collective - you can get your copies here.

David Beaudouin's beautiful new letterpress collection, Afters, is out with Bowerbox Press.

John Steen wrote a wonderful review of Peter Gizzi's (also wonderful) Fierce Elegy for The Poetry Project Newsletter. Peter will be reading from Fierce Elegy, and in conversation with Anthony Anaxagorou at Foyles in London on Tuesday July 16th (more details here).

Laynie Browne's Everyone and Her Resemblances is out now with Pamenar Press and is gorgeous.

Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone's edited collection of essays, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry, is coming out in October with MIT Press. The book contains a stunning array of poets archiving their own lineage through incredibly imaginative essays (including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Brenda Coultas, Mónica de la Torre, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Erica Hunt, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Patricia Spears Jones, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Anne Waldman, and Rosmarie Waldrop). See the press release for more details.

In more exciting Marcella Durand news, her book A Winter Triangle is the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Book Prize winner, selected by Srikanth Reddy, and will be published fall 2025.

Tausif Noor wrote about Alice Notley for the Summer 2024 Criticism issue of Yale Review. Andrew Epstein has written a great round-up of Alice's recent reviews, interviews, and books, in case anyone has lost track or wants to catch up, as well as a brilliant piece on Frank O'Hara and skateboarding.

Friends of Bernadette Mayer are asking for donations to help open her home, library, and archives to poets, artists, and researchers by spring 2025. The Poetry State Forest project will preserve and restore Bernadette Mayer’s home in East Nassau, NY. The house, and the surrounding woods known as the Poetry State Forest, has served as the site of poetry workshops, readings, and gatherings for over twenty years. Repairs to Bernadette’s house and library will make sure that it remains a space for writers and artists to visit, stay in residence, and honor the legacy of Bernadette. Further details can be found here.

A Marathon Reading of Memory by Bernadette Mayer: on Sunday, July 14, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—in the heart of the Berkshires where much of Memory takes place—over forty poets, writers, and artists, from near and far, will read the entirety of this monumental and groundbreaking work. Free and open to the public, the reading takes place at the superb Familiar Trees with all 1153 images projected in rotation throughout the day/night. Join Siglio Press to celebrate this singular work, its inimitable author Bernadette Mayer, and the passionate community she nurtured—anytime from 11 a.m. through late into the evening.

The PBS series 'Poetry in America' devoted a recent episode to Frank O'Hara's iconic poem 'Steps', featuring Eileen Myles, Terrance Hayes, Todd Colby, and Robert Pinsky. You can listen to the episode here (with thanks, as ever, to Andrew Epstein for the heads-up).

The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems by Violet Ranney Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell, was John Yau's Summer 2024 recommendation for Hyperallergic. Mark Ford also wrote about Bunny Lang, for the LRB. 

Phong Bui wrote about Willem de Kooning for the Brooklyn Rail.

Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about The Poetry Project for The Nation.

Charles Bernstein's celebration of the radical poetics of invention, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies, is available to pre-order from Chicago University Press.

​Joe Brainard: A Gathering took place at The Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson, on Saturday 18th May, to mark thirty years since Joe's death. The day began with a screening of Matt Wolf's film I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard (2024), followed by a reading, by Lucy Sante, of her 'I Remember the Fabled Rat Man (Apologies to Joe Brainard)' (2016). Sante and Wolfe then talked to each other about these works, and about Brainard, and how they found themselves immersed in his work. Poet and art writer John Yau then gave an illustrated talk about Brainard's life and work, before being joined in conversation by Tyhe Cooper, poet and poetry curator at the Brooklyn Rail. After lunch, poet and scholar Rona Cran gave a talk called 'I Remember Collage: Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, doing and making', and fellow poet-scholar Betsy Porritt led a collage-poetry writing workshop. Poets Paolo Javier and Ann Lauterbach closed out the day with two beautiful talks, the former on Brainard, poetry, and comics, and the latter on her friendship with Joe, as well as a reading of her 'Seven Songs for Joe Brainard'. You can watch video footage of the event here and see photographs here. Huge thanks to Jeffrey Lependorf for putting this event together, assisted by Ryan Cook.

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. David's loss is tremendous.

Olivier Brossard's new poetry collection, Let, is out with P.O.L. : https://www.pol-editeur.com/index.php?spec=livre&ISBN=978-2-8180-6021-6. You can hear Olivier talking about the book here.

Patricia Spears Jones will be reading as part of the Bryant Park Reading Room series, hosted by Jason Schneiderman, on June 11th at 6pm.

Charles Bernstein remembers Paul Auster (and others, with others), for LitHub. You can also read five new poems by Charles, here.

Ann Lauterbach was interviewed by Griffin Prize Trustee Mark Doty, ahead of the Griffin Awards later this month.

​Betsy Porritt's new pamphlet, Oh Unquenchable Thirst, is just out with the wonderful small press Distance No Object (get yourself a copy here).

Michael Shorris wrote about Joan Mitchell and James Schuyler's poem-pastel Daylight (1975) for the Brooklyn Rail.

The new Black Bart Quarterly contains thoughts on Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Pat Nolan, Anselm Hollo, Julebord #3, No Placebos #7, a new Pierre Reverdy translation by Tinker Greene, Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium newly updated by Andrei Codrescu, and more.

Anne Waldman's Tendrel: A Meeting of Minds is out now with Trident Press. Anne talked about the book, and Naropa, for Boulder Weekly.

John Burnside died earlier this month, and Andrew Epstein reminded us of his gorgeous (among many) poem 'The Day Etta Died', an elegy written after Frank O'Hara, whom the poet also names.

​In some places, it's summer, so here's Frank Lima's 'Summer    (a love poem)'.

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 

• I remember, translated by Krzysztof Zabłocki (Lokator, 2014): https://lokatormedia.pl/i-remember-joe-brainard (The translator retained the original title.)
• Wrocław. Pamiętam, że [Wrocław: I remember that...], by multiple authors (Fundacja na Rzecz Kultury i Edukacji im. T. Karpowicza, 2015): http://dolnoslaskosc.pl/pamietam-wroclaw/ (A collaborative project with contributions from ca. 250 residents of Wrocław, cataloguing memories of the city from the post-war period to the present day.)
• Szczecin, Pamiętam, że [Wrocław: I remember that...], by multiple authors (crowdfunded project, 2016): https://www.facebook.com/szczecinpamietamze/ (An analogous collaborative project devoted to the city of Szczecin. The second volume is about to be published.)
• Pamiętam, by Piotr Stankiewicz (Relacja, 2021): https://relacja.net/product-pol-859-Pamietam-Piotr-Stankiewicz.html (The Polish title is the Polish word for "I remember". Most of the book is concerned with growing up in Poland in the 80s and early 90s. At the back of the book, it says, "The content is mine, although it is not really mine - it is ours. It belongs to all of us, born in Poland in the 1980s." The author was born in 1983.)

Talking to scholar Joanna Orska, who is writing a book about the influence of Polish poet-translators from the "Literatura na Świecie" circle, I also learned about the rich interest in Poland in translating the poetry of the New York School more widely. This includes three editions of an anthology prepared by Piotr Sommer with a wide choice of American poets in it (Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch - no Guest); individual books of poems by O'Hara, Ashbery (Three Poems as the individual publication, translated by Andrzej Sosnowski), Schuyler, and Padgett (not so much of the second and third wave generally, and no women), and "Nest of Ninnies" (translated by Sosnowski and Pióro) and "One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays" (by Sommer).

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'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 [email protected] 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.

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:

• Saturday 4th November, 9-2pm – NYU – James Schuyler: A Morning for The Poet
  
  
• Saturday 4th November, 5pm – Dia Chelsea – It Goes, It Goes: James Schuyler Centenary Celebration
  
  
• Monday 6th November, 8pm – The Poetry Project – Hymn To Life

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: [email protected].

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. 

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] (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: [email protected]. 

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 [email protected] 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.