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

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

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 Lindsay Turner then read from Songs & Ballads, A Fortnight, and from new and unpublished work; she also read a translation of a poem by Stéphane Bouquet.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

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

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

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