The Poetry Project
Program Calendar
Tony Towle’s 70th Birthday Reading
| December 2, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday
If there is a New York School of Poetry, Tony Towle has been involved in it for over 45 years, having taken workshops with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara at the New School in 1963. In 1970, he received the Frank O’Hara Award, in conjunction with the publication of his first major collection, North. The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000 was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2001. Memoir 1960-1963 (Faux Press, 2001) is a chronicle of Towle’s early years as a poet in New York. His 12th book of poems, Winter Journey, was published by Hanging Loose in 2008. Guests will each read a few of their favorite Towle poems, followed by a short reading by Towle. With Charles North, Paul Violi, Ron Padgett, Kimberly Lyons, Bob Hershon, Ed Friedman, Andrew McCarron, Anne Waldman and Jo Ann Wasserman.
Reception to follow.
Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand
| December 7, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Monday
Jules Boykoff is the author of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). His political writing includes Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (co-authored with Kaia Sand) (Palm Press, 2008), Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007), and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge, 2006). His writing has appeared recently in The Nation, The Guardian, and Wheelhouse Magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Kaia Sand’s book, Remember to Wave, is forthcoming this winter with Tinfish Press. This collection investigates political geography in Portland, Oregon, and contains a poetry walk she guides. She is also the author of a poetry collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). Sand has created several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv, which also published her wee book, lotto. Her poems comprise the text of two books in Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008). She is currently working on The Happy Valley Project, multi-media collaborations investigating housing foreclosures and finance.
Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover
| December 9, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday
Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. With Paul Hoover, she edits the long-running literary journal New American Writing, now in its 28th issue. She is the author of six books of fiction and nine books of poetry, most recently The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008). Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Both her novel American Heaven and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends… were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Wiith Paul Hoover, she has translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, which won the PEN USA 2009 Translation Award.
Paul Hoover lived in Chicago from 1968 to 1994 where he was a founding board member of The Poetry Center of Chicago and long-time poet-in-residence at Columbia College Chicago. Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University since 2003, he edited the widely adopted anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and currently curates the poetry reading series at the de Young Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco. His most recent poetry collections are Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number, Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award.
Lonely Christopher & Rebecca Nagle
| December 11, 2009 | ||
| 10:00 pm |
Friday
Lonely Christopher writes across forms; he is a poet, playwright, director, editor, and unpublished novelist. His poetry has been collected in the chapbooks Satan (Small Anchor) and Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? (No Know) and the first two installments of his Gay Plays, a trilogy of dramatic explorations into the queer situation, have been released together by Small Anchor. Withal, the Gay Plays have been staged internationally and published in China in a Mandarin translation. He is a founding member of the Corresponding Society, the manager of its blog, and an editor of its biannual literary journal Correspondence; he is the curator of the press’ second series of poetry chapbooks What Where (forthcoming in winter). He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
Rebecca Nagle is a performance, new media and community artist. She grew up in Kansas. After attending Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is an internationally exhibited and collected artist with works in the New Museum, NY and Ssamzie Art Warehouse, South Korea. Nagle has shown at Current Gallery, Art in General, Site Santa Fe, Artscape, and Conflux Festival. She was hailed by Baltimore City’s Paper’s senior arts editor Bret McCabe as “Baltimore’s very own life-is-art-is-life performance maven…mingling the internet and performance into a fresh and vital new thing”. Rebecca’s performative, interative and community art projects challenge people around issues of intimacy, the body, power, boundaries and efficacy. She is currently trying to make the world a more open, equitable and creative place through community organizing and radical performance art.
Eugene Lim & Justin Sirois
| December 14, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Monday
Eugene Lim is the author of the novel Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008). He is the fiction editor for Harp & Altar and the managing editor of Ellipsis Press. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives in Jackson Heights.
Justin Sirois is founder and codirector of Narrow House, an experimental writing publishing collective. He received Maryland State Art Council grants for poetry in 2003 and 2007. His books include Secondary Sound (BlazeVOX Books) and MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius). Currently, Justin is trying to find a publisher for his first novel written in collaboration with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy about displaced Iraqis living in Fallujah in April of ‘04. He also is a designer for Edge Books in Washington, DC.
Donna Brook, Dick Lourie & Elizabeth Swados
| December 16, 2009 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday
Donna Brook was born in Buffalo in 1944 and began to publish her poems in 1968. While she was getting an MA in English at Wayne State University, Red Hanrahan Press published her first book of poems, A History of the Afghan. Hanging Loose Press published her second book, Notes on Space/Time. After two stints as a Poet-in-the-Schools, she moved to Brooklyn in 1979, began teaching middle school, and published two more books: What Being Responsible Means to Me and A More Human Face, both with Hanging Loose. She has written a history of the English language for children (The Journey of English, Clarion), and won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
Dick Lourie is a poet and blues saxophone player whose most recent book of poems, If the Delta Was the Sea (Hanging Loose 2009), is the product of both professions. Focusing on Clarksdale, a small city in the Mississippi Delta, this collection draws on oral histories and interviews Lourie conducted with Clarksdale residents, as they tell of their own lives, the town’s history, and racial relations today, along with Lourie’s experiences playing blues with local musicians in the city’s juke joints and annual festivals. If the Delta Was the Sea is Lourie’s seventh book of poetry. His previous works include Ghost Radio (1998), Anima (1980), and Stumbling (1973). Dick Lourie’s readings feature a lively blend of music and poetry, interweaving the spoken word with music recorded by his blues band and live performance on his sax.
Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international hit Runaways, Elizabeth Swados has composed, written, and directed for over 30 years. Some of her works include the Obie Award winning Trilogy at La Mama, Alice at the Palace with Meryl Streep at the New York Shakespeare Theater Festival and Groundhog, which was optioned by Milos Forman for a film. Her work has been performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, at La MaMa, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, and locations all over the world. She has also composed highly acclaimed dance scores for well-known choreographers in the US, Europe and South America. Swados has published novels, non-fiction books, children’s books and poetry to great acclaim, and received the Ken Award for her book My Depression. Her first book of poetry, The One and Only Human Galaxy, has just been published by Hanging Loose Press.
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