network news: july 2023

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!