The Poetry Project
Program Calendar
Will Alexander & Edwin Torres
| November 4, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday
Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, artist and educator who lives in Los Angeles. His poetic works include Exobiology as Goddess, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain and The Stratospheric Cantacles. His philosophical essays, Towards the Primeval Lightening Field, were published by O Books in 1999. His novel, Sunrise in Armageddon, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2006. His visual art has been shown in collections in Berlin, Los Angeles and other locales. Alexander has performed throughout the country, and has taught courses at the University of California at San Diego, Naropa University, Hofstra University, and Mills College. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. His new books of poems THE SRI LANKAN LOXODROME is just out with New Directions Publishing.
Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. His poetry fellowships include, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at St. Marks Poetry Project, Naropa University, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD “Holy Kid,” (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s inventor of a noh-boricua inspired non-movement called NORICUA, and has performed its non-ideologies with Spanic Attack in the Bronx, Berlin and Loisaida. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD “Rattapallax.” His books include, I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books) and The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books). This reading will launch his new book, In The Function of External Circumstances, forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
José Felipe Alvergue & Patrick Lovelace
| November 6, 2009 | ||
| 10:00 pm |
Friday
With an MFA from the Cal Arts School of Critical Studies, José Felipe Alvergue is currently a student of the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program. His writing on the poet/artist Cecilia Vicuña & the architect Toyo Ito, and the Tijuana based art collective Torolab & the philosopher Martin Heidegger have been presented at academic conferences at home and internationally. He has been published in Nocturnes, Black Clock, P-Queue, Jacket Magazine, and has written a definition of “Impermanence” for the Dictionnaire International de Termes Litteraires (International Dictionary of Literary Terms in criticism). He is the author of us look up/ there red dwells (Queue Books 2008).
Patrick Lovelace resides in Brooklyn. His publications, through Patrick Lovelace Editions (PLE), include books and other media with Jarrod Fowler, Marie Buck, Brad Flis, Seth Kim-Cohen and Danny Snelson. The Collective Task, a project featuring a dozen poets and artists, edited by Rob Fitterman and designed by Dirk Rowntree, is due in the fall. His most recent endeavor is an executive production collaboration with the CLEVELAND TAPES collective. Forthcoming projects are numerous and dubious.
Rockpile Symposium
| November 7, 2009 | ||
| 2:00 pm | to | 5:00 pm |
Saturday, Free Admission
Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer host a discussion on Art and Activism; Poetry, Music and The Troubadour Tradition; Censorship and The Academy; Community and Collaboration. Open discussion with Ammiel Alcalay, Teresa Carrion, Jim Christy, Marty Ehrlich, Michael Franklin, Murat Nemat-Nejat, Wanda Phipps, Robert Priest, Harris Schiff, Suzi Winson and Bill Zavatsky. We welcome audience participation. Moderated by Jim Feast. Refreshments and admission are free. Read more about ROCKPILE on the road at bigbridge.org.
George Albon & Karl Gartung
| November 9, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Monday
George Albon’s most recent book is Momentary Songs (Krupskaya). Other books are Step (Post-Apollo), Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric&), and Empire Life (Littoral). (Text from Brief Capital of Disturbances has been used by American composer Mischa Salkind-Pearl in a piece called “American Temple,” which can be heard at the composer’s website). Work of his has appeared in Hambone, O Anthology 4, New American Writing, 26, The New Review of Literature, Poetry Salzburg Review, Crayon, and elsewhere; and in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, and Bay Poetics. Pieces on Morton Feldman and Otis Redding have appeared in Shuffle Boil. His essay “The Paradise of Meaning” was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. Presently, he’s working on a “big prose book” called Café Multiple: Life, Work, Love, and Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.
Karl Gartung is the author of Now That Memory Has Become So Important (2008, MWPH, Fairwater, Wisconsin). He has also collaborated with Elizabeth Robinson on a privately printed chapbook, Speak (2009, Boulder). Gartung was born in Liberal, Kansas in 1947. He received a B.A. from Hastings College, in Nebraska, in 1969. He married artist Anne Kingsbury in 1970. In 1976 he was hired to run a small press bookstore (Boox, Inc.) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Gartung says this was the beginning of his serious apprenticeship to contemporary literature. He is a co-founder, with Karl Young and Anne Kingsbury, of Woodland Pattern Book Center. At Woodland Pattern he has been involved in the planning and presentation of hundreds of poetry readings, music performances, art and book exhibits. He feels that these activities are as centrally artistic as writing or publishing could have been. This was (and is) really his education. He works as a truck driver at what has become UPS Cartage Services. After several layoffs, Gartung helped organize his workplace into the Teamsters Union in 1993, and has served as a union steward from the ratification of the first contract to the present.
A Tribute to George Schneeman
| November 11, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday, free
Friends -artists, poets, dancers, filmmakers- as well as family, will gather to salute the life and work of George Schneeman, a major artist and friend to the downtown community over 40 years. The example and ethos of his humanity in his own art is radical in these times. A beautiful ornery light radiates from all the works I know, the compositional power and wit and variety is unique- from fresco to oil to paper to collage to exquisite pottery to furniture & clocks to collaboration. One weeps and laughs. George was probably the greatest and most extensive collaborator with poets in the annals of this genre. The Poetry Project was his extended family. We miss him profoundly and delight in celebrating his indomitable spirit, art & grace. -Anne Waldman
With Bill Berkson, Sandy Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Jacob Burckhardt, Douglas Dunn & Grazia della Terza, Larry Fagin, John Godfrey, Ted Greenwald, Leon Hartman, Odetta Hartman, Camilla Hartman, Yvonne Jacquette, Steve Katz, Doris Kornish, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Harris Schiff, Peter Schjeldahl, Emilio Schneeman, Katie Schneeman, Paul Schneeman, Anne Waldman and Charles Wright.
A collaboration between Bill Berkson and George Schneeman called TED BERRIGAN has just been published in a limited edition by Cuneiform Press. It will be available at a discounted price at the tribute.
This event is free, and in the Sanctuary. Reception to follow.
Mensa & AMJ Crawford
| November 13, 2009 | ||
| 10:00 pm |
Friday
We are mensa ::gong:: there is no tao for this sort of thing. there are no cults or team sports or nature retreats that fix this for us. each day is a buffet of choice, have you been eating well today? we’ve been communing with nature and so far what we’ve heard is that a vast fleet of insects have gone into rebellion. rogue warriors. manifest destineee! we’re working on our fun skills. Prescriptions for your mother gurus for your friends. Fun fun fun it’s where the sidewalk ends.
Mensa is a performance collective formed by the installation artists Ariele Affigne and Sarah Maurer, previously known for work that may be described as nested architectures: built spaces which make physical the personal within a larger area. Synthesizing the structural conceits of a magician’s theater with the discourse charged trans-identitarianisms (and object mutation) of alchemical practices, their performance for the Poetry Project will seek to enact this prescriptive fun within the spaces and sensoria made available by their audience.
AMJ Crawford is the author of Morpheu (BlazeVOX 2009), editor of zenSLUM, & co-editor of Le Dodo. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Portugal and currently studies at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Talk Series: Lytle Shaw on The Source of the Hudson – A Dutch Landscape of American Prospects
| November 16, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Monday
Keyed to the Hudson Quadricentennial, this talk will be Shaw’s first from a book in progress on the politics of time in landscape painting—and more generally on what happens to American history and aesthetics when the Dutch, not the English, get read as forbears. He begins with nineteenth-century America’s uses and abuses of seventeenth-century Holland, especially romantic historian John Lothrop Motley’s celebration of the Dutch revolt as a phase freedom took on its inexorable path to the United States and his suggestion that Dutch struggles with elemental matter in land reclamation conditioned the nation to subdue much more tractable human beings in the course of empire. Looking at some vivid images of this muck, Shaw will try to suggest, first, how the ongoing Dutch relation to provisional land was shown otherwise by the century’s best painters (esp. Ruisdael, Van Goyen and Hobbema): not as a heroic and final sorting in service of social domination and economic productivity, but rather as a necessarily contingent arrangement of fluid and mutable substance—all staged in an equally fluid temporality, a non-instrumental “now.” Why have such models of composition and time been illegible to historians (and art historians)? He’ll try to answer this in part by exploring the relation between historical narration and the different painterly genres of landscape and history. But rather than resolve this dilemma in a neat historical frame, Shaw wants instead to push on the conceptual resources latent in landscape painting until they spill out and become an attractive if slippery mound in our own moment of samplings, performances and installations.
Lytle Shaw’s books of poetry include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, and several collaborations with artists. His essays and reviews have appeared in Cabinet, Artforum, and Parkett and in catalogs for the DIA Center for the Arts, the Drawing Center, and the Sculpture Center. He lives in New York City, where he is assistant professor of English at New York University.
Ted Greenwald & Kit Robinson
| November 18, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday
Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous books of poetry, including In Your Dreams (BlazeVOX, 2008), 3 (Cuneiform, 2008), Two Wrongs with painter Hal Saulson (Cuneiform 2007), The Up and Up (Atelos, 2004), Jumping the Line (Roof Books, 1999), Word of Mouth (Sun & Moon, 1986) Common Sense (L Publications, 1978), and You Bet (This, 1978).
Kit Robinson is celebrating the publication of his new book The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009). His recent collaborations with Ted Greenwald have appeared in SHINY 14, onedit 12, and Antennae 11. A co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980 (Mode A, ongoing), Robinson is also the author of Train I Ride (BookThug, 2009), 9:45 (The Post Apollo Press, 2003), and The Crave (Atelos, 2002). He works as a communications consultant in the business software industry, plays the Cuban tres guitar with a Latin music group and lives in Berkeley.
Poets’ Potluck V
| November 20, 2009 | ||
| 10:00 pm |
Friday
All ye gather ‘round, for it is time for thanks & communal turkey (or tofurkey) burgers at the Poetry Project Friday Night Series’ (precariously annual) Thanksgiving potluck. Come join us for a warm thanking of friends & good times with food, drinks, music, poetry, & other forms of shareable merriment.
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Program Calendar
Unless otherwise noted admission is $8 / Students & Seniors $7 / Members $5 or Free
Latest News
- HOWL Opens in NYC September 24th
September 1st, 2010 - An Afternoon with the Arts Projects of St. Mark’s
September 1st, 2010 - Eileen Myles read an excerpt from INFERNO (a poet’s novel)
August 21st, 2010 - Hiatus!
June 22nd, 2010 - Matvei Yankelevich’s & Rob Fitterman’s Poetry Project readings featured on WNYC’s “Talk To Me”
June 17th, 2010