NNYSS Newsletter: July 2025
Hi friends,
Here's some NYS poetry news for your Julys...
Kamran Javadizadeh was joined, in June, on his wonderful poetry podcast, by Nick Sturm, Lindsay Turner, and Joyelle McSweeney for a series of conversations about Alice Notley's poetry. You can listen to these conversations here.
Another great poetry conversation took place in early June, at Kelly Writers House, between Al Filreis and Kate Colby, about Laynie Brown's poem 'Thermodynamic Sonnet for Bernadette' (about Bernadette Mayer). You can listen/watch here.
And there's one more conversation over at Best American Poetry, where David Beaudouin has interviewed Elinor Nauen. Read it here. Be sure to read all the way to the end of Elinor's bio for an important note about her cat.
Nathan Kernan's much-anticipated biography of James Schuyler, A Day Like Any Other, is out in August. Evan Kindley reviewed it for The Nation, here.
Anne Waldman's Mesopotopia is out next month with Penguin. Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century, Waldman crafts a singular, radical investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. “To understand the radiance of the poetry world," writes Eileen Myles, "you have to look at Anne".
Tony Towle's fourteenth collection, Late Sketches and Studies, is out in the UK with Kulvert Books. It's about time, New York life, and the influence of the city's culture, politics, architecture and art world on the individual. Martin Stannard has written about it for Litter and Best American Poetry: you can read his piece here.
We're thrilled that our book of wonderful interviews, Conversations with New York School Poets, has been published and is out in the world. If you have an institutional library that could get a copy, we'd love for you to ask them to do that (but if you'd like the PDF please just get in touch...).
Details TBC, but just a heads-up that the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art has plans for an exhibition of David Wojnarowicz's Arthur Rimbaud photo series, David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York. Nicholas Martin, Curator for the Arts and Humanities at NYU Libraries' Special Collections, is writing a essay for the exhibition catalogue called 'Rimbaud Downtown: An Archival Exploration,' focusing on Rimbaud as an influence on NYC poetry, performance, music, conceptual and visual art in the 1960s through 90s; he also talks about and will be using a couple of images from KOFF magazine, 'a publication of the Consumptive Poets League,' which was edited by Elinor Nauen, Maggie Dubris, and Rachel Walling (and which Eileen Myles called 'the punk magazine').
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iconic Loewe Puzzle Bag, Loewe released a limited-edition collection, which includes a special re-edition bag inspired by Joe Brainard. The bag features embroidered pansies. Bergdorf Goodman celebrated the launch with a dedicated Loewe pop-up and Fifth Avenue window display featuring Brainard’s designs (see attached photo courtesy of Ron Padgett). Meanwhile Joe Brainard: Love Nancy was showing at the Craig Starr Gallery until the end of June - there are some slides from the exhibition here.
Still on Joe Brainard news, Daunt Books here in the UK is reissuing I Remember, with a new introduction by Olivia Laing. Louis Rogers wrote about the new edition for The Telegraph (a paper which despite its otherwise dubious politics seems to really like the New York School, having including Ron Pagett's Pink Dust in its 'Best Poetry of 2025' list earlier this year).
The newsletter will be taking a break in August - back with lots more poet-y things in September, and all my best in the meantime,
Rona
