There are three things to consider when the New Year’s Day Poetry Marathon sweeps you into its gracefully uncouth embrace — what it is, what it was, and who you will be when it’s over. An untamed gathering of the heart’s secret, wild nobility — over 140 poets together revealing not just that a better life could exist, but that it already does, sexy and wise, rancorous and sweet, big hearted and mad as hell. An avenging engine of resistance and eager vehicle of the nascent year. The Marathon measures its success through insurrectionist reframings of the universe, an in-it-together courage that crafts a community out of the riot of lineages and traditions we all emerge from. This collective effort also helps fund as many as 85 additional events every year — not to mention The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Recluse and legendary workshops. It’s our largest fundraiser of the year, and arguably the most inspired ongoing literary event in the city. Read more about “the Marathon” here.

Admission at door only. Doors open at 2:30pm; event starts at 3pm. The schedule is made available only at the event.

The 38th Annual New Year’s Day Marathon Benefit will feature over 140 Poets & Performers: 

Ace Mcnamara, Alan Licht with Angela Jaeger, Alex Dimitrov, Amy King, Ana Božičević, Anne Tardos, Anne Waldman with Ambrose Bye & Daniel Carter, Anselm Berrigan, Ariana Reines, Arthur’s Landing, Barry Denny, Basil King, Betsy Fagin, Bill Kushner, Billy Lamont, Bob Hershon, Bob Rosenthal, Brenda Coultas, Brendan Lorber, Brett Price, Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers, Bryn Kelly, CAConrad, Charles Bernstein, Christine Elmo, Christopher Stackhouse, Church of Betty, Corina Copp, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Daniel Kent, David Freeman, David Henderson, David Shapiro, David St. Lascaux, Denize Lauture, Dgls. Rothschild, Don Yorty, Donna Brook, Dorothea Lasky, Douglas Dunn, Douglas Piccinnini, Drew Gardner, Dustin Williamson, Edgar Oliver, Ed Friedman, Edmund Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Elinor Nauen, Elizabeth Devlin, Elliott Sharp, Emily XYZ, Erica Kaufman, Erica Hunt & Marty Ehrlich, Erin Morrill, Evan Kennedy, Evelyn Reilly, Filip Marinovich, Foamola, Frank Sherlock, Franklin Bruno, Genya Turovskaya, Gillian McCain, Greg Fuchs, James Marshall, Janet Hamill, Jess Fiorni, Jim Behrle, Joe Elliot, Joe Ranono, John Coletti, John Giorno, John S. Hall, Jonas Mekas, Josef Kaplan, Judah Rubin, Judith Malina, Karen Weiser, Kathleen Miller, Katie Degentesh, Ken Chen, Ken Walker, Kenny Goldsmith, Kimberly Lyons, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Lee Ranaldo, Lenny Kaye, Leopoldine Core, Lonely Christopher, Macgregor Card, Maggie Dubris, Marcella Durand, Mariana Ruiz Firmat, Mark Nowak, Martha King, Matthew Abuelo, Miguel Gutierrez, Mitch Highfill, Mónica de la Torre, Nada Gordon, Nathaniel Siegel, Nick Hallett, Nicole Peyrafitte, Pamela Sneed, Patricia Spears Jones, Patti Smith, Paul Mills (Poez), Paul Legault, Penny Arcade, Peter Gizzi, Pierre Joris, Reuben Butchart, Rickey Laurentiis, Robert Ashley, Secret Orchestra with Joanna Penn Cooper & J. Hope Stein, Shafer Hall, Simone White, Sinan Antoon, Stephanie Gray, Steve Dalachinsky, Steve Earle, Steven Taylor, Susan Landers, Susie Timmons, Suzanne Vega, Taylor Mead, Ted Dodson, Thurston Moore, Todd Colby, Tom Carey, Tom Savage, Tony Towle, Tracey McTague, Tyler Burba, Valery Oisteanu, Wayne Koestenbaum, Will Edmiston, Will Yackulic, Yoshiko Chuma, Youmna Chlala, Yuko Otomo, Yvonne Meier with Aki Sasamoto, Nicole Wallace, Arlo Quint and Stacy Szymaszek.

Admission: $20, $15 for students and seniors, and $10 for Poetry Project members. 

When first entering Karl Gartung’s condensory, his poems make diversions along a subtle caesura, a space down the middle of the poem, sometimes pliable as breath, other times impenetrable as a reinforced median between two sides of the interstate. Then as you spend time with the poems, it begins to dawn that perhaps it’s the other way around, that’s not the median, but the path, that Gartung has plowed a road or a furrow down the middle of the open field. It’s not often, you read a book which include dictionary and encyclopedia sources in the acknowledgments (outside of Harryette Mullen perhaps), but in Gartung’s poems he takes the concept of linguistic mutability all the way back to the inability to attach stable definition, showing how, even the dictionary, in it’s attempt to reduce and crystallize a term, only serves to complicate it–with numbered meanings, and archaic etymological denotations–leaving you with less a sense of certainty than you arrived with, the way a poem does perhaps. It’s like staring at a single word until it’s form on the page, which you use and take as a given, looks funny, split from speech. In a similar (though perhaps inverse) way the uncertainty of the caesura in his poems, a meeting place at an absence, presents the reader with a challenge. Whereas most short poems exist concretely in static space, forming a single note, or at least single breath, Gartung’s poems buck, jump, and snag over the white space. As a reader you’re always forced into agency, deciding whether a poem moves best across or down, left column then right, or whether any path is every really correct, whether or not the disequilibrium along a sometimes smooth, sometimes overgrown path right down the middle of poem was the point all along. As he writes “the road remains/ the rest is field.” Please welcome Karl Gartung to the Poetry Project.

- Dustin Williamson

George Albon’s most recent book is Momentary Songs published by 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). 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.

My first introduction to George Albon’s work was through his small Meow Press chapbook called King, which I discovered shortly after I started working at Woodland Pattern, the place that served as the site for my first introduction to the work of most of the poets now important to me. In King, Albon writes the phrase, “we have received word” which has since informed my understanding of Albon as a poet who is able to suss out and make use of the network of power lines in the body politic, or as Brian Teare wrote in a review of Momentary Songs in the Poetry Project Newsletter, he “stake[s] out a space within empire for intimacy and everyday acts… .” The “we” who receives word is ruled, but the logic of the poet converts this language reception into agency within a “subliminal polis” (Teare) of resistance. Last week Will Alexander quoted Bob Kaufman during his reading, which I’m remembering as – Poets work 24 hour a day shifts. – That’s what living in this subliminal polis takes – continuous absorption and seepage. George Albon leaves the community lush and informative signs on the reading post where receiving word is forwardness to giving. Please give him a warm welcome to the Poetry Project.

-SS

Micah Ballard lives in San Francisco and is co-editor for Auguste Press. Recent books of his include Absinthian Journal, Bettina Coffin, Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners, Evangeline Downs, Parish Krewes, and the collaborations Death Race V.S.O.P. and Easy Eden.

Micah Ballard’s poems are always welcoming you into their confidence. Most of them mention “we” or “us”, which functions as the speaker of the poem to an other, a friend, accomplice, lover, as well as to the reader, as a mode of putting trust in the reader really, to say, that these are also the scenes you share with me. It’s not a leader/led position, but a mutual going forth. Beyond the personal whisper is a universal we, that the we in the poem speaks for an all, a human shadow that glides through the prayers, benedictions, invocations, and odes of Ballard’s poems. The poems are often solemn, but not necessarily mournful. In fact, in their solemnity there is a celebratory acceptance, of the place the living and the dead occupy in relation to each other, as well as, accordingly, the continuous present and the irrevocable past. In Ballard’s collection Parish Krewes it seems apt, and not just because of its recent history, that New Orleans serves as a geographic and psychological muse. New Orleans exists in the poems as both carnival ground and mausoleum, a place at once full of celebration and ever-accumulating ghosts. What I’m about to say might seem somewhat incongruous, since Ballard lives in San Francisco, but New Orleans represents in many ways our living present, though not so much Mardi Gras, but a funeral march during a life-long celebration of the Day of the Dead.

Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips for her manuscript, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is the author of The Morning Hour, selected in 2003 by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Among her many honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grants for Poetry in 2002 and 2006 and the 2008 Academy of American Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared many journals including Tuesday Journal, Callaloo, FENCE, nocturnes and Encyclopedia. Excerpts from her new manuscript, Discipline, can be found in the forthcoming issues of Hambone, Deadalus, and Jubilat. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets; co-editor of a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: Young Activists And The New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004); and a founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, a national young feminist organization. She is an assistant professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

In Dawn Lundy Martin’s A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering there is a concern with language as a deceitful liquid of sorts, as a syntactic and lexical fluid that is supposed to fill a variety of containers (or forms), whether race, gender, sexuality or self. I say deceitful, because Martin’s poems question whether or not language can ever really “fit” any container or give any fixed meaning, let alone really reflect both social otherness, or even the otherness, wrought in part by language, of the estrangement of one from the self. Of all the spaces she attempts to speak from, the body is the least inhabited by the conscious self of language. In Martin’s poems there is plenty of writing about the body as having agency, but the language is always from the outside making observation, instead of from within speaking out. Even saying “making observations” in the previous sentence feels a little too definite, since many of the moments in the poems that carry the most thorny emotional observation weight are also the most unintelligible. Once you accept the inability to speak from within the self, the ability to be able to speak out from any fixed point or identity is called into question. In her poem “Negrotizing in Five; or How to Write a Black Poem” Martin takes the form of the tutorial and shows every step along the way how, paradoxically, a socially recognized form, in this case a poem speaking to and being of African American experience, is simultaneously so entirely restricting, as to be silencing (historically and linguistically) and so open as to never run out of possibility. It’s as if all identity structures exist as these limited/limitless voids, which through definition can be bound down, but no amount of language can fill up. Please welcome Dawn Lundy Martin to the Poetry Project.

Last Friday night, the Poetry Project celebrated the release of Jack Spicer’s collected poems, My Vocabulary Did This to Me. The room was packed (well both rooms, but I’ll get back to that) and, though Mercury was in retrograde, disrupting communication all over New York City, the Martian signal at St. Mark’s was coming in crystal clear. In addition to celebrating the release of the new collected poems, participants and audience members alike paid tribute to the memory of the recently passed Robin Blaser, who, besides being a terrific poet in his own right, edited the first widely distributed selection of Spicer’s work, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which introduced thousands of readers to Spicer’s poetry and revolutionary poetics.

The night got off to a crowded start. To say it was standing room only for the panel in the Parish hall would be a gross understatement, as a steady stream of over 125 people poured into the room, while the staff and interns scurried to make space for all of the warm bodies. Kari (my spouse) and I sold books at the card table in the back. The “breathing room only” crowd was treated to short statements about Spicer’s poems by a panel that included George Stanley, Samuel Delany, Dodie Bellamy, and Jennifer Moxley, and was moderated by Kevin Killian. There was also some good gossip about the publication history of the book, but I’ll leave that nugget for those who were there.

Stanley mused on Spicer’s investigation of the difference between “good” and “power,” saying that Spicer often saw power masking itself as good, manifest in poets such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Bellamy read a piece on Spicer’s preoccupation with pulp fiction, particularly detective novels. Delany recalled his first encounter with Spicer, which was as a young teen, when he read the famous “San Francisco Scene” issue of the Evergreen Review. He compared the poem “The Dancing Ape” to the “Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” by Delmore Schwartz, a comparison I’m not sure people quite bought. Surprisingly, Delany was also the first (and only) participant to raise the specter of East Coast v. West Coast poetry, saying West Coast poetry is more interested in objects, while East Coast poetry focuses on the poet’s experience. I always thought it had to do with the difference between the poem and the serial—the little and the big P. I also thought those distinctions were meaningless in the age of total mobility and internet connectivity. Whatever, the guy wrote Dahlgren—I’m not going to argue (although Douglas Rothschild looked ready to—he even left his sleeves at home).

Moxley presented a three-part micro essay, tracing her ambivalent (correct me if I’m wrong) appreciation of Spicer’s poetry. She began by discussing how she felt Robert Duncan has been underappreciated, while Spicer’s stock has continued to climb. She told a story about how a younger “established” poet had told her that Spicer was more important because people want “shit” not “alas,” then explained how that interpretation was based on a misreading of the letters in After Lorca. In her second and third parts she examined, what she reads as, Spicer’s foregrounding of the poet over the poem—that the act of correctly being a poet (read: following the rules) was more important than the poems themselves—and how she developed a renewed appreciation of his work while she prepared for the panel.

After a short break, we reconvened in the sanctuary for the reading. Jim Behrle stopped by the transported book table, sculpting the tomes into a proper display and “accidentally” leaving an anthology of lesbian vampire erotica (Daughters of Darkness)  in Kari’s bag. Then the reading began before a sizable audience, proving, as if there are any doubters, that New York poets don’t only remember Spicer for his cameo in Frank O’Hara’s poem “At the Place.”  Harris Schiff led off the reading with a multi-voiced rendition of the “Imaginary Elegies”  parts I-IV. Dodie Bellamy and Douglas A. Martin read excerpts from The Book of the Death of Arthur and “A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud” respectively. During Lewis Warsh’s reading of “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” I was reminded what a pleasure it is to hear him read. He always sounds like he’s telling you the most exciting news in the world, but just because it’s exciting doesn’t mean that he has to rush the delivery.

Rod Smith read a grab bag of poems, including a selection from “Homage to Creeley.” Rod’s choice of poems, two of which took digs at Ginsberg and Ferlingetti, echoed George Stanley’s earlier comments on masks of goodness. Rod is a poet, who in his own work, takes some of Spicer’s poetics and puts them to good use, if only to brutalize and twist (lovingly!) into his own shapes. After Rod, Peter Gizzi gave some thanks and read some poems (including “Poem without a Single Bird in It”).

Just before the mid-way break, Kevin Killian conducted a wonderful interview with Deborah Remington, a former student of Spicer’s and one of the founders of the 6 Gallery(!). She talked about how, as her communications teacher (how fitting, right?), Spicer made the class perform exercises, during which they examined the relationship between the constitutive parts of language and their impact on communication. For instance, she told the audience that Spicer had a policy that his students would not receive their final grade unless they were able to get a “letter to the editor” published in a newspaper. Before Deborah went on, I saw Stacy Szymaszek writing a note, saying that Deborah had to go on soon because she had a surprise party to return to. I think everyone was glad she stuck around to talk.

Kevin Killian began the second half by giving his respects to Robin Blaser. Like I wrote earlier, Blaser was in the thoughts of all, but reverence doesn’t always mean somber, and in this case, it allowed everyone to simultaneously celebrate both the book and Blaser’s life.

Basil King went “off program” and read the poem “Narcissus,” dedicated to him, from Spicer’s first dictated book, After Lorca. Planned move?

Julian T. Brolaski gave one of my favorite readings, presenting work from a number of places, including Admonitions and Billy the Kid. One of the questions I pondered throughout the reading was how individual voices interact with Spicer’s poems. Spicer’s use of deadpan, irony, and rhetorical shiftiness, can make it difficult to read his poems out loud (especially aided by mechanical amplification), without flattening them somewhat. Julian did a great job of clearly articulating the poems as they exist on the page—that is, taking the individual out a bit and letting the poems into the air on their own terms.

Everyone was really fantastic, and with every reader, the audience got the privilege of experiencing Spicer’s work in different tunings. Karen Weiser gave an excellent reading from A Red Wheelbarrow, making me believe that “love ate the red wheelbarrow,” then passed the poetry bat to George Stanley, who like an experienced baseball player, adjusted to the room’s pitch, before knocking sections from Language out of St. Mark’s, clear across the East River. His pacing and tone was just incredible, allowing each word to ring out of the feedback just long enough that it didn’t get muddied by the rest of the line. Stanley’s new book, Vancouver is excellent, by the way.

The last three readers provided a great cap to the night. After Anselm Berrigan read from A Book of Music, CA Conrad gave an expressive reading of “The Unvert Manifesto,” which, whether a reflection of Spicer’s personal philosophy or not, is a complicated, and devastatingly witty psychosexual treatise (Mertz!). Samuel Delany ended with two of Spicer’s letters from After Lorca. It felt fitting to turn the transmission off at the point where it really began in Spicer’s work, with the letters from one dead poet to another, concerned with the life of language, which outlined the course Spicer would follow throughout the rest of his work.

After the reading, participants lingered and chatted, taking pictures and planning the night’s next move, while the staff, interns, and volunteers, “rearranged the furniture” in the sanctuary (no joke), though according to the church’s floor plan, instead of Martian communications.

-Dustin Williamson