'Dear March-Come in-', as Emily Dickinson says...

Dear NYS and adjacent friends,

Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration: Monday, March 17th, 7 pm, The New School Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street. The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate and the New School are holding a celebration of the life and work of Kenneth Koch. The event is the first to celebrate Koch’s work following what would have been his 100th birthday in February. Participants include filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, critic Lucy Sante, artists Jim Dine and Alex Katz, legendary editor of Paris Review Maxine Groffsky, essayist Phillip Lopate, and poets Ron Padgett, Charles North, Tony Towle, John Keene, and Jeffrey Harrison. Poet and editor Jordan Davis will host the event, with a general introduction by Robert Polito of The New School. The event is free and open to the public.

The New York Poets at the Bowery Poetry Club series continues, with, this week (Tuesday March 4th, 7:30 pm) Ed Friedman, Bob Holman, and Bob Rosenthal. Bob H & Bob R, assisted by Rochelle Kraut, will be reading from the plays they wrote and performed together in the 1970s. Ed's reading will be quasi-retrospective with some examples of his 50+ years of friendship and collaboration with Bobs H & R. 

There's a really great new issue of Paideuma (Vol. 50), arising from the symposium called 'Poems We Live With', and including work by John Yau, Kate Colby, Jordan Davis, and Josh Kotin (who has written a gorgeous piece on Schuyler's poem 'Back').

Ron Padgett has written a memoir about Dick Gallup, and it's out with Cuneiform on March 12th. Dick: A Memoir of Dick Gallup, is, according to Phillip Lopate, 'a master class about how to convey the complexities of friendship'. You can order the book here.

Yasmine Shamma has written about Joe Brainard's letters (Daniel Kane's recent edition of them) for the Poetry Foundation.

Matthew Holman is presenting a talk, "Also a Curator: Frank O'Hara at the Museum of Modern Art," in The Modern and Contemporary Art Seminar Series at Cambridge University on March 10th, 17:30-18:30. The location is Lecture Room 2, Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, Scoope Terrace, at the University of Cambridge.

A reminder to save the date if you're NYC-based: Alystyre Julian's film Outrider, about Anne Waldman, premieres at Anthology Film Archives in New York, April 1-3, at 7pm each night. The 90-minute film, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, is immersed in the poetry communities constellating around Waldman’s life and legacy, from her “hearthome” in Greenwich Village and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and outwards to Big Sur, Morocco, and Mexico. Details of screenings and tickets here.

Next month also brings a celebration of John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror at fifty. There's an event taking place at Yale, 11.30-4.30 on Friday April 4th, featuring speakers including Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Karin Roffman, Susan Howe, Sam Huber, and Ann Lauterbach. Details are here. The event is free and open to the public.

Laynie Browne is visiting the UK in March, launching Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024) in London for the first time. She's giving readings in London at Senate House (March 6, in conjunction with Pamenar and the Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre) and at Soho Poly (March 7), before heading up to Scotland where she'll be at the University of Glasgow on March 10, Fruitmarket in Edinburgh on March 11, and St. Andrew's University on March 12. Catch her if you can - her work is fabulous.

Finally, Conversations with New York School Poets, a collection of 25 interviews carried out by Yasmine Shamma and edited by me with support from Nick Sturm is coming out in May. The interviewees are: Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Lewis Warsh, Edmund Berrigan, Anselm Berrigan, John Godfrey, Bob Rosenthal, Clark Coolidge, Tony Towle, Charles North, Ed Friedman, Maureen Owen, Jordan Davis, Elinor Nauen, Kimberly Lyons, David Shapiro, Vincent Katz, Patricia Spears Jones, Harris Schiff, Greg Masters, Lee Ann Brown, and John Yau. We are immensely grateful not just to the poets for their thoughts and conversation, but to, in many cases, their friends and families as well, who have helped us assemble this book, often under difficult circumstances. It's 400 pages long and, sadly, prohibitively expensive, but it's a wonderful resource full of both poetry and gossip that we hope will find its way into libraries and onto bookshelves around the world. 

'Put down your hat,'

Rona