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 A Picnic Cantata is an unpublished vocal chamber piece with music by Bowles and a libretto by Schuyler, and NYFOS Records recently released the first recording of the piece since its debut in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.