Network March news

We were so sorry to hear that Lyn Hejinian died on February 24. She will be terribly missed. What a wonderful, important legacy she leaves.

Anne Waldman has curated Beat Art Work: Power of the Gaze at the Outsider Art Fair in Chelsea (Feb 29-March 3).  The exhibit includes visual art by poets such as William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joanne Kyger. Anne will also join Gerard Malanga for reading and conversation at The Flow Chart Foundation on Saturday May 4th at 7pm (ET).

Sam Ladkin's new book, Frank O'Hara's New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism, is out now with Oxford University Press. On March 5th, at 5.30pm, at Keble College Oxford, Sam will join Jason Allen-Paisant (Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits) and Conrad Steel (The Poetics of Scale: From Apollinaire to Big Data) for a joint launch of their three new books.

Jennifer Soong's new collection, Comeback Death, is out with Krupskaya Books, a text, as Thom Donovan writes, anchored in “dedications to four female poets to whom Soong pays homage (Sappho, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Ingeborg Bachmann).”

Tamsin Conde-Noble has reviewed Charles North's new book, News, Poetry and Poplars (Poems/Selected Prose), for Litter.

Vincent Katz's poetic 'Essay on the Sky' was published in Paris Review last month (no subscription necessary), and is a lovely read.

Rowland Bagnall's second collection of poems, Near-Life Experience, is out later this month. The poems are about time and paying close attention to things, particularly nature, artworks, landscapes and the shape of thinking. To order a copy with 25% off the cover price and free UK postage, go to www.carcanet.co.uk and at checkout enter the code NEARLIFE25. Rowland will be launching the book at Voce Books in Birmingham on March 28th, alongside Isabel Galleymore's Baby Schema. He will also be talking about the book with Luke Kennard, online, on April 3rd, at 7pm.

The Flow Chart Foundation will host Rosa Campbell and Alexa Winik on Zoom on March 14th (7-8pm GMT) to talk about the publication of The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems of V.R. "Bunny Lang". Details and registration here.

A couple of new books engage the work of Joe Brainard. Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries (Fitzcarraldo) is described by the publisher thus: Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. In the vein of Joe Brainard’s ​I Remember and Edouard Levé’s ​Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries. Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books) is a tribute to Brainard. The first six pages are explicitly about I Remember, while the rest is an autobiographical text only using its formula. Meanwhile Catherine Lacey's Biography of X (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a fictional biography of an enigmatic artist set against the backdrop of alternative-history postwar America, contains an intriguing reference to Frank O'Hara: "Among the few pictures X kept from that time is one of Oleg and herself: a blurry shot from the summer of 1972, taken by the poet Frank O’Hara. She’d gone out to Fire Island with Oleg and a few of his acquaintances to celebrate the anniversary of O’Hara’s 1966 brush with death—when he was hit by a jeep and nearly died at the hospital." Thank you to Wojciech Drag for these observations!

Australian poet Ken Bolton talks about I Remember, beginning around the 21:30 mark, in this podcast.

And finally, save the date for a collaborative Gathering honoring Joe Brainard: Saturday 18 May, at the Flow Chart Foundation in Hudson. More details to follow, but expect a free daylong celebration of Brainard organized by Flow Chart and the NNYSS, to mark thirty years since his death, featuring talks, readings, workshops, conversation, and an I Remember-themed playlist... Confirmed participants included Lucy Sante, Matt Wolf, John Yau, Betsy Porritt, Ann Lauterbach, Tyhe Cooper, and Paolo Javier.