Wednesday

Poet, singer, farmer, yodeler, banjo-picker, Buddhist-practitioner, Allen Ginsberg’s lifelong-companion, Kerouac’s Simon Darlovsky in Desolation Angels & George in The Dharma Bums, the generous & wonderfully whimsical Peter Orlovsky, (July 8, 1933 – May 30, 2010), was an unforgettable & hugely colorful presence in the East Village, and in and around the Poetry Project. Please join us in a night of music, video, song and poetry, as some of his closest friends pay tribute to him including: Chuck Lief, Philip Glass, Ed Sanders, Steven Taylor, Hal Willner, Janine Pommy Vega, Andy Clausen, Patti Smith, Anne Waldman, Gordon Ball, Rosebud Pettet, Simon Pettet,  Bill Morgan, Anselm Berrigan, and John Godfrey.

This event will take place in the Sanctuary. Admission is FREE.

Monday

This reading launches the inaugural issue of Vlak, an international magazine with a broad focus on contemporary poetics, art, film, philosophy, music, science, design, politics, performance, ecology, and new media. Vlak is edited by Louis Armand, Edmund Berrigan, Carol Watts, Stephan Delbos, David Vichnar and Clare Wallace. The reading will feature contributors Pierre Joris, Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Gross, Marjorie Welish, Vincent Katz, Arlo Quint, Stacy Szymaszek, John Wilkinson, Jess Fiorini, Joshua Cohen, Stephanie Strickland and Louis Armand.

Wednesday

Joseph Donahue‘s most recent collections of poetry include Incidental Eclipse and Terra Lucida. This fall, Talisman House will publish Dissolves, Terra Lucida IV-VII, the second volume of an ongoing sequence. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Laura Moriarty’s books include A Tonalist an essay poem from Nightboat Books,  the novels, Cunning and Ultravioleta. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975 – 2007 came out from Omnidawn in 2007.  She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She has taught at Mills College and Naropa University, among other places, and is Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. For more, see the blog A Tonalist Notes.

Monday

Sign-in at 7:45

Wednesday

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. She is the author of Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), Men in the Off Hours (Knopf 2001), Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 2005), NOX (New Directions, 2010), and many other works.

David Shapiro has written many books since his first, January, emerged in l965 from Holt, Rinehart and Winston with poems written when the poet was l3-l6. He was a violinist in his youth and was educated at Columbia, Cambridge University, and has taught at Columbia, Cooper Union, Brooklyn, Bard, and Princeton, both as art historian and as poet. Currently tenured at William Paterson University, he wrote the first book on John Ashbery’s poetry, the first volume on Mondrian’s flower studies, the first on Jim Dine’s paintings, and the first monograph on Jasper Johns’s drawings. He has won many prizes such as the NEH, NEA. He collaborated with John Hejduk on many operas, masques and books, and their Palach project was dedicated by President Havel at the  Castle in Prague. He has been much translated and appears in many anthologies here and abroad. His play with Stephen Paul Miller, Two Boys on a Bus, was performed at the Kitchen with music by Laurie Anderson and stared Taylor Mead. He collaborated extensively with Rudy Burckhardt on films and photographic pamphlets, and at 24 was the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the National Book Award. His ten books of poetry include Poems from Deal, A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel, The Page-turner, Lateness, House (Blown Apart), Burning Interior, To an Idea, After a Lost Original, and the recent Selected Poems. He has a one-man exhibit of his collages at Turtle Point Press this Fall.

FRIDAYS AT 7PM: 10 SESSIONS BEGIN OCTOBER 8^TH

So much of how we think of history comes to us in the form of narratives. What happens to our understanding when that text from the past is poetry or is re-visioned into poetry? How do poets work with historical texts or different kinds of older disciplinary narratives? For a brief period early scientific texts were poems, and yet our culture seems to have mostly forgotten that poetry has the capacity to be wide in what it attempts to do or think through. Lisa Robertson writes in the poem “Palinode/”: “Though my object is history, not neutrality / I am prepared to adhere to neither extreme.” My hope is that we can explore our own writing as it comes out of a reading practice, considering history without feeling inclined to “adhere” to its formulations. We will look at pairings made up of contemporary poems and the works (or historical subjects) they converse with, seriously engaging both texts on their own terms and together, while writing poems that make use of the past to open new vistas of inquiry.   Some texts will include selections from: A Key Into the Language of America by Rosmarie Waldrop and A Key Into the Language of America by Roger Williams; Fred Moten’s Hughson’s Tavern and Jill Lepore’s New York Burning; and Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat and William James The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. ; Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat and Rousseau’s “Fifth Walk”; Elizabeth Willis’s Meteoric Flowers and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden; Susan Howe’s “Thorow” and Thoreau’s Walden. Karen Weiser’s first book of poems, To Light Out, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in the Spring of 2010. She is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center studying early American literature.

Friday

David Lau‘s first book of poetry, Virgil and the Mountain Cat, came out last year from UC Press.  He is co-editor of Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion. He teaches regularly at Cabrillo College and the University of California, Santa Cruz; for spring 2011, he is visiting faculty in the graduate program in creative writing at St. Mary’s College.  New poems are forthcoming in A Public Space and Columbia.  His other ongoing projects include Laborland, a video documentary on labor and art in California, and political organizing with the student movement in the golden state.

Douglas Piccinnini‘s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Antioch Review, The Cultural Society, EOAGH, Jacket, Lana Turner, Ping Pong, So and So, Supermachine and Verse. A chapbook, S♢FT, is forthcoming from The Cultural Society. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and curates the CROWD Reading Series.

SATURDAYS AT NOON: 5 SESSIONS BEGIN OCTOBER 9th

Although the contemporary trend in poetry tends towards book-length projects and beyond, what is a poet to do when she lives on the fringes of a far-away “up & coming” neighborhood, shares an apartment with 5 other people (three of which are in a band) and juggles a series of poorly paying and widely scattered teaching jobs? This workshop focuses on the art of writing where you happen to be and taking advantage of a few snatched moments in a coffee bar or on a seat in a slowly moving “G” train. Working paradigms include Frank O’Hara ‘s Lunch Poems, written during the noon sup on a stationary store’s chained typewriter (instructor will explain this piece of equipment to those under 30), Philip Whalen’s poetry of notebooks compressed into viable worlds, Paul Blackburn’s subway poems and his open-form Journals project & Joan Kyger’s in-the-moment poetics. Requirements for class are: a notebook, some form of writing device and a Metro Card with some money on it. Joel Lewis travels to work via ferry, light rail subway, bus and goat cart to his social work gig on Staten Island — always with a roller ball pen & Moleskine® notebook at his ready. He is considered the sole member of the 4th generation of New York School Poets, while serving as the poetic conscious for the state of New Jersey. With that in mind, his most recent book is Learning From New Jersey (Talisman House).

Monday

Christie Ann Reynolds is a native New Yorker and holds degrees from Hofstra University, Queens College and The New School. Her chapbook, idiot heart, was chosen in 2008 by Brenda Shaughnessy for The New School Chapbook Competition. She is the co-author of a chapbook, Girl Boy Girl Boy forthcoming with Correspondences and author of Revenge Poems, Supermachine’s first chapbook. Christie Ann was the recipient of a 2003 undergraduate Academy of American Poetry Award. Some of her work has been published or is forthcoming in Blaze Vox, La Petite Zine, The Houston Literary Review, Pax Americana, Maggy, Sub-Lit, and others. She teaches writing at Hofstra University, for The Borough Writing Workshop and is co-curator of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series.

Simone White‘s first book, House Envy of All the World, was published this year by Factory School. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Callaloo, Ploughshares and the exhibition catalog for The Studio Museum’s Flow, among other places. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center, she teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

TUESDAYS AT 7PM: 10 SESSIONS BEGIN OCTOBER 12^TH

This is a movement workshop for writers who want to explore creating movement out of words and writing out of movement. No dance, theater, or athletic ability/experience is required. Dancers or choreographers who want to work with language and with untrained movers are also very welcome.  We’ll start with a physical warm up designed to fire up your senses, center you in your body, and get your creative juices flowing.  We’ll explore ways of writing inspired by movement.  We’ll look at people moving on video (from Jerry Lewis, and Robin Williams to sports to break dancing, from Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Dunn, Bill T. Jones to my own dances) with an eye toward new kinds of writing:  texts to accompany performance, to combine poetry with documentation, that designs movement or is energized by it.  We’ll look at some texts that have inspired or accompanied dance & performance (from Emily Dickinson to Vito Acconci to John Cage, etc.)  And we’ll especially look at our own writing to imagine performing it  & putting it in motion. Through collaborations, talking about videos, writing and editing together and alone, we’ll create performances that spotlight the experiments that start with our bodies. When you stimulate your body, your creative process comes alive in ways that will amaze you.  Let’s open some new horizons for your writing.  Did I already say no movement training or dance experience necessary? Wear or bring comfortable clothes & shoes. Sally Silvers is writer/ choreographer who has been making dances and texts for 30 years.  Her first group work featured non-dancer poets.  She also currently dances for Yvonne Rainer.  Read her interview with long-term collaborator Bruce Andrews by Erica Kaufman in The Poetry Project Newsletter online.