network news - may 2023

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!