I had the good fortune to happen upon a stash of Hoa’s work at Beyond Baroque in LA in 2001. She was at that time a poet I was unfamiliar with.  I left with Dark and Parrot Drum and the sense that these poems contained things I would eventually want and need as an evolving poet and reader of poetry. I’m just going to mention several highlights from my experience as her reader. 1) She knows how toend her poems. For some reason, I get the image of an Olympic gymnast catapulting off the vault. Hoa’s last lines don’t so much nail the landing but keep flying through the air. 2) There are no orchestrated epiphanies in her poems. Knowledge comes through our ability to attend to her empathetic connections. Herein lives poetry’s power to transform, even if it is through enlarging a sense of possibility one person at a time. 3) Reading interviews she has given over the past decade she consistently refers to “her song” being influenced by power pop, punk, and post-punk. Her poems are short and hooky and like a lot of this music, has politics integrated as “active engagement with the forms and structures all around.” (HN) While I was preparing for tonight I read the news that Laura Kennedy, bassist of the Bush Tetra’s passed away this week, and in the past year or so we’ve also lost Poly Styrene, and Ari Up, post-punk women only in their middle age. Hoa shares such a streetwise feminism, keeping the edge and making it something you can dance to, making decisions “from and of the body, issuing from the percussive of the heart, and informed by the unruly twists of experience and urgency.” (HN) Please give Hoa a warm welcome back to the Poetry Project.

 Jesse Seldess is the author of two books, Who Opens (Kenning Editions, 2006) and Left Having (Kenning Editions, 2011), as well as chapbooks from Hand Held Editions, Instance Press, Answer Tag Press, and the Chicago Poetry Project Press. Since 2001, he has edited and published Antennae, a journal of experimental writing and language-based performance and music scores. This isn’t in the bio he gave us but I’m going to add that, in Chicago, he co-curated, with Kerri Sonnenberg, an influential series called The Discrete Reading and Performance Series.  This was 10 plus years ago and the series, along with his journal, really helped galvanize what I like to think of as a Great Lakes poetry scene that is still active and interesting and expansive.

The act of listening to Jesse read his work has been a formative experience for me. Around the time we met he was, I think, working on the poems that would be included in Who Opens. One in particular, “In Contact,” he said grew out of his work, his interactions, with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve since viewed his work through the lens of what poetry can illuminate about illness – from something as serious as Alzheimer’s to daily dis-ease. (My acupuncturist recently told me “we are all inflamed.”) His work seems improvisational and, at the same time, built as carefully as a model. It’s driven by rhythmical actions, where sounds are used as time-makers. The pattern, and sense of created time, is often broken, and the listener is left with the ghost of the past while she anticipates its future existence. His poems are interested in organization of language, semantic access and episodic memory and I venture to say, how rhythm as an ancient force works upon them. Andrew Welsh in his book Roots of Lyric writes, “The melopoeia of song, charm and speech are not intellectualized concepts… they are physical forces that our bodies feel, and they are concerned with power and action.” Jesse’s conscious recombinant poetics plunge beneath the commerce of everyday speech and align us with the wider potential of language’s impact on well-being. Please welcome Jesse back to the Poetry Project.

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. 

I have been waiting for this day, to host Doug at the Poetry Project, since I first met and read with him in DC several years ago, and enjoyed the company of a community where he is integral and even revered. I was stunned by his work, that I had never read it before, and that when I came back to NYC talking him up, a lot of people were like Oh ya, Doug is GREAT. I’m not going to be too hard on myself. His books are hard to find and his collected In the Works, is still in the works – so the optimal thing for the Doug Lang fan to do is to see him

live. I’ve been thinking a lot about the poem’s ability to alter our perception of time, and one thing that impresses me is that Doug’s poems don’t play with pace as much as they are delivered as pure energy. Past present and future aren’t part of his measuring system. The poem is the sequencer of events, and throws the intervals between them into the realm of our own bodies: “Everything I’ve ever imagined / Is in this room.” It’s a room where you can walk out “but your / Reflection will still be there in the mirror looking like, ‘What the Fuck?’” Please give a warm welcome to Doug Lang.

Ron Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. In the past 18 months, his work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, and a Fact-Simile trading card. His sculpture, Poetry (Bury Neon), was unveiled at this year’s Text Festival and will be installed permanently in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, this fall. Silliman’s Blog has received over 3 million visits & he’s maxed out on permissible Facebook Friends.  In 2012, he will be a Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

I usually don’t write introductions through the lens of my personal experiences with the poets but I had such memorable 1^st encounters with both Ron and Doug that when I sat down this afternoon to write this is just what happened. So, I met Ron when we read together in Chicago in 2003 and I remember our host making a comment in his introduction that we had nothing in common as writers, and people laughed. Well, Ron didn’t feel that way at all (nor did I) and let the audience know. I mention this incident because I can’t think of another poet whose sense of his or her potential as a writer is more panoptic. He uses that word in an interview with Leonard Schwartz when he speaks, in general, about writing long poems where the work is sustained over decades and, specifically to his 1,000+ page book, The Alphabet. He’s invested in the act of writing, and the effects that occur over time. As a younger writer also interested in long works, I felt liberated by his belief, articulated in his short essay “Wild Form,” that the act of writing could make clear its own structure and that the poem didn’t need to adhere to even it’s own conception of form throughout – form should indeed be a generative function and a way to record and not falsify a life. Please welcome Ron Silliman to the Poetry Project.

In a review of Charles’s The Year of the Olive Oil, written by Barry Schwabsky and featured in The Poetry Project Newsletter, he says: “My motto for Charles North’s poetry might be: You can’t step into the same sentence twice.” I like that. After reading What It Is Like, I thought another good motto could be “Everything Keeps on Happening,” the title of one of his new poems in the collection. Reading his work in the context of a collected, I felt energy being organized true to the way humans have experiences, with continuous interchange and acceleration. A poem is a synthesis of information

and in becoming a poem, it is distinguished, at least in becoming a Charles North poem – yet he keeps it from gaining too much distinction (“it feels awkward to be noticing” could be another motto). He presents all the things that keep happening in perfect balance. There is actually no comparison for “what it is like.” To have an unmitigated experience is just that, and it is crucial that humans keep having them. The more integral experiences we have, the more we’ll feel how natural it is that “Callery pear trees are the only trees that can silently read” and to his question “whaddaya say to a cat-fur beer” – well, you’ll at least consider it. Please welcome Charles back to the Poetry Project.

Internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been a member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades, as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. She is the author of more than 40 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry and several selected poems editions. She has collaborated extensively with artists, musicians, and dancers. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre in 2010. She has also been working with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Coffee House Books has just published her monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment.

I have introduced Anne more than any other poet in my decade plus of organizing readings, which works out well because I have an infinite amount of things to say about her work. May be someday I can collect all the paragraphs and it will become an essay, an installation. First, I want to congratulate Anne on the publication of the complete IOVIS, a work she began in the 1980s and brought with her into a new century. The opening piece begins with a question to the potential recruit – “Will you help me build my Ardhanarisvara, the androgynous city?” If you will, you are going to rebuild a psyche through an epic. One of the frequencies I was picking up loud and clear throughout the work is the importance of the archive and its guardianship, especially as it pertains to inscribing psychic process. Derrida states in the beginning of Archive Fever, that the etymology of “archive” coordinates the principles of the commencement and the commandment. Things commence physically, historically and ontologically and according to the law, where men and gods command. In IOVIS the social order is non-repressive. It’s Anne’s body poetic, her archive, where the painful, the dark, the violent are out-maneuvered into an open, “both both” system. She reorders material (the world) in a manner that manifests her discoveries about how to create public and private spaces for outrider life. She uses words and the accumulation of personal data to flay power (reference to something Rachel Blau DuPlessis says of her work) and makes a community of her own choosing, “attentive to language and poetry before language.” Being a political citizen in this new polis translates into energy for global transformation. She’ll be performing with Ambrose Bye – please welcome Anne back to the Project.

-Stacy Szymaszek

Charles Bernstein – The Poetry Project reading (5 Oct 2011) from voiceworks project on Vimeo.

Maggie O’Sullivan Veer Books launch – The Poetry Project reading (5 Oct 2011) from voiceworks project on Vimeo.

As a poet, I think of this Williams quote often: “The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity.” Readers of poetry are offered an expansive opportunity to adopt new mental structures, to refigure. One thing I admire about Charles is that he is a poet who also talks with his poem. By this I mean to say that he recognizes that there is yet more profundity to be manifested in vocal gestures, in performance. In his essay “Hearing Voices” in Attack of the Difficult Poems, he speaks of the ability of performance to “open[s] up the potential for shifting frames…”. Anyone who has read the linguist George Lakoff knows the concept of “reframing” and it’s power to effect social and political change. “Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world.” (Lakoff) I have never left a Bernstein reading with wax in my ears – or without a sense of how potent the vernacular can be, or how metabolically altering tonal fluxuations can be. Through

so-called traditional (or accessible) poetic devices such as end rhyme, anaphora, doggerel and song he reveals the chaos of everyday life. In his letter-poem “Dear Mr. Fanelli,” he addresses the 79th St. Station Manager whose picture hangs on the wall with an invitation for suggestions from the public. The poem probes the gesture for validity, so miserable is the state of affairs in Mr. Fanelli’s domain. The level of candor already poses one level of difficulty, a concern with the complexity of ordinary. Please welcome Charles back to The Project.

Maggie O’ Sullivan is a British-based poet, performer and visual artist. For over thirty years, her work has appeared extensively in journals and anthologies and she has performed her work, often in collaboration, internationally. She is the editor of out of everywhere: an anthology of contemporary linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK (1996) and collaborated with Bruce Andrews on eXcLa (1993). Recently published is Body of Work – which collects her now out of print London-based booklets made between 1975 and 1987 (2006), Waterfalls (2009) and Alto (2009). The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan is now out. murmur is just out from Veer. For extensive online recordings, visit her author page at PennSound.

It’s a highlight of this Fall that Maggie is able to be in NY to read for The Project. Veer Books has just brought her wonderful 1999-2004 work murmur into full-color print for the first time. I approached this text having her appreciation for the artist Joseph Beuys in the back of my mind, but his questions “how does a word become matter? How does it become a real live person?” sprung to the forefront of my thinking about murmur. Maggie’s work goes past the impulse to bear witness to the traumatic in order to manifest it through body-intensive texts. She describes this as: “writing by hand, redrafting the words by hand – bending, sticking, cutting, shaping marks, shaping sounds into the recorder, pain(t)ing and building – all inscriptions of my body’s breathing. This heuristic trans-forming has become paramount in murmur where I am using the sight/site of the ear/page as a foundational textu(r)al, sonic, visual bodily dimension to move out from.” The subtitle of murmur is tasks of mourning. The task of the words in this installation – to give form to absence, but also to know the page as a “savaging salvaging body” – one of the phrases that recurs. In the poet’s ranginess, she seeks natural fissures, figurate language however sutured. The poem is a “cardiac load” (another recurring phrase) – I thought of Beuys publicly amplifying his heartbeat. Maggie O’Sullivan has this depth of believe that human intuitive process is the basis for art that can open up “possibilities for radical changes in and between consciousnesses.” (MOS) Please welcome Maggie to The Poetry Project.

-Stacy Szymaszek

Anselm Berrigan’s newest book, Notes from Irrelevance, was just published by Wave Books. Free Cell and To Hell With Sleep were published in 2009. And Have a Good One was published in 2008. I’m tempted to say that since leaving the job of Artistic Director for the Project, he has become prolific (probably just a wish for my own post-AD life). In fact, Anselm is still prolific, while being a teacher, editor and parent. That’s all the biographical data I’m going to recite, and quickly segue into how Anselm does his own (auto)biography, particularly in Notes From Irrelevance. My intro comments come as a result of the convergence of my reading his book along with Ted Greenwald’s Clearview/Lie and David Meltzer’s When I Was a Poet, all present various ways to construe lived experience or narratives of the

self via the poem. When we think of sharing a memory or a story, often it is told through a series of images, but in Notes From Irrelevance there is, in the poets own estimation, a “willful desire for image dissolution.” With this in mind, I read on and was gripped by the idea of – not the narrator trying to come to grips with himself- but how he invites others come to grips with him – through any and all means. Anselm is generous in his ability to be “influenced, potentially, by anything” and his ideal listener won’t wonder what it’s all about. It’s about that! Or, said in another way that reflects what Philip Whalen’s work does so beautifully, it’s the transformation of consciousness into poetry. Sometimes we’ll get a craved for autobiographical detail, familiar and digestible, but it’s placed in a tangle – the poem thinking aloud, in reverse psychology, clauses, sub-clauses and odd sound combinations. The self as an artifact of language – interior life as sonic activity – the self as a structure that can narrow or expand. He’s one of the most rigorous disruptors of patterns that usually represent some kind of narrowing. It’s always a pleasure to have Anselm Berrigan at The Poetry Project.

David Trinidad’s most recent book, Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, has just been published by Turtle Point Press. His other books include The Late Show (2007), By Myself (with D.A. Powell, 2009), and Plasticville (2000), all published by Turtle Point. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011), which we had a great reading for last Spring. Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green.

First, I want to say that Dear Prudence is a brilliantly edited volume. The poems aren’t sub-divided by book, which gave me as a reader the feeling that I was at a party with old friends having new conversations and new intimacies and everyone agrees that specters of the past should be given the space to haunt us, to complicate our sense of peace. This is not a book to ever replace individual Trinidad volumes, not the least of which is its inclusion of 40 new poems. I think one of the delights of reading David’s work is how he can reveal something eyebrow-raising in the most graceful manner. I, as his reader, inevitably have to admit that his revelation is part of my experience, no longer a secret, no longer subject to the structure of shame. While I’ve never had the opportunity to even consider stealing Sylvia Plath’s baby hair, I am among those whose childhood home has another family living in it, and I have searched the address on Google Maps as David does in “9773 Comanche Ave.” Despite modern technologies drive to condense time, arrest the ephemeral, there are no humans to be seen when you zoom in on those windows though his impulse is to look for them. Of this deep sense of attachment to things past, he says, “The hope, I suppose, is that the poem will transform my attachment into something tangible, or will make real that enigma.” Welcome David Trinidad back to the Project.

- Stacy Szymaszek

Wednesday

Edited by poet David Trinidad and published by Nightboat Books, this volume establishes Tim Dlugos—the witty and innovative poet at the heart of the New York literary scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic—as one of the most distinctive and energetic poets of our time.  A host of Dlugos’ friends, as well as his fans, will read from the book.  Readers include Anselm Berrigan, Tom Carey, CA Conrad, Jane DeLynn, Alex Dimitrov, Brad Gooch, Duncan Hannah, Patricia Spears Jones, Erica Kaufman, Michael Lally, Chip Livingston, Jaime Manrique, Stephen Motika, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Aaron Smith, Stacy Szymaszek,  Marvin Taylor, David Trinidad and Terence Winch. Reception to follow.

Wednesday

Paul Blackburn gave a reading on September 22, 1966, and so began the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-In-the-Bowery. The Project has been a major force in contemporary poetry for 45 years, and run by poets for all of those years. Please join us as we celebrate this aspect of our history by hearing from the poets who filled the role of Artistic Director with a short panel followed by a reading. With Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Ed Friedman, and Anselm Berrigan. We will also listen to recordings from founder Paul Blackburn and first Director Joel Oppenheimer. Talk moderated by MacGregor Card. Reading hosted by Stacy Szymaszek.

Talk (6:30 PM) & Reading (8 PM)

We have just added this special event to our December line-up! Please join us for a reading by John Coletti, Stacy Szymaszek and Karen Weiser followed by an improv performance by Thurston Moore’s quartet.

Thurston Moore + Bill Nace – guitars

Samara Lubelski – violin

Mary Lattimore – harp

The quartet will play an improvised piece composed on the heart.

Thurston Moore is a founding member of NYC weird rock groop Sonic Youth. He also releases records and publishes books under the Ecstatic Peace rubric. His writing has been published through various small presses. Bill Nace is a visual artist and contemporary experimental noise guitarist with releases on various small labels. He oversees the Open Mouth imprint which publishes limited art books and recordings. Samara Lubelski is a musician, native New Yorker, solo recording artist. She has played  with MV/EE, White Out, Metal Mountains a.o. She has recorded with Thurston Moore for his ‘Trees Outside The Academy’ reocrding ans well as his forthcoming 2011 release ‘Benediction’. Mary Lattimore is a harpist from Philadelphia who has a long history with the music scene there playing with Fursaxa, Jack Rose, Kurt Vile a.o. She has recently recorded with Thurston Moore for his forthcoming 2011 release ‘Benediction’.

John Coletti is the author of Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books 2010), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further 2008), and Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005). He recently served as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-edits Open 24 Hours Press with Greg Fuchs. Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships, Hyperglossia (both published by Litmus Press, 2005 & 2009), Orizaba: A Voyage With Hart Crane (Faux Chaps, 2008) and from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009), among others. Karen Weiser‘s first full-length collection, To Light Out, is out this year from Ugly Duckling Presse. She is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center studying early American novels and she currently teaches a poetry workshop right here at the Poetry Project.

This event will be in the Parish Hall. No advance purchase of admission.