Archive for the ‘Readings’ Category
Mark Nowak
Seeds of Fire
Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA, edited by Jon Andersen, appeared earlier this year from Smokestack Books in Middlesbrough, UK. Mike Alewitz’s stunning mural from the Roosevelt School in New Brunswick, New Jersey (“Temporary Sanity”) graces the cover (and those not familiar with Alewitz’s work should check out Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz). Epigraphs from June Jordan and Paul Robeson open the book—so take your cures from there. (And in full disclosure, an excerpt of a verse-play from yours truly appears in the collection.)
Alan Gilbert
Switch it up
Last week’s public performance component of Urban Word’s Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was a fairly formal affair. As I described in my previous Harriet entry, Theodore Harris presented work from his Our Flesh of Flames artist book, and Amiri Baraka read poems. The Bowery Poetry Club was packed, there were lots of older people in attendance, and the q&a was relatively brief.
Alan Gilbert
Art or propaganda? Both.
I just spent two late evenings at Matthew Barney’s massive studio in Long Island City watching grindcore and death metal bands play, along with a bizarre and hilarious “diarrhea humiliation” performance. (Not sure if coverage of this might turn up, though I don’t have a sense Artforum.com was there.) I also had to write two short reviews over the weekend: of Takahsi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut for The Believer and Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman for Modern Painters.
Alan Gilbert
My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part II)
So my second favorite poetry reading is one I never would have predicted: Clayton Eshleman reading the entirety of his translation of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. There was a reading series in the late ’90s held in a gallery in New York City at the corner of Broadway and Houston that was dedicated to a single poet reading from her or his work for an hour or more. The series lasted for a couple years, although I can’t remember who ran it, and the only other poet I recall reading in it was Bernadette Mayer.
D.A. Powell
Accessible Poetry
By which I mean “easy enough to get there.” Especially from anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This Friday, 18 July, at 7:30 p.m., a stellar line-up of poets will be reading in San Francisco to benefit the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
Alan Gilbert
My top three favorite poetry readings, like, ever! (Part I)
It’s hard to estimate how many poetry readings I’ve attended in my life, but it must be somewhere in the hundreds and hundreds. If I’ve been going to poetry readings regularly for eighteen years, and I’ve averaged about fifteen to twenty a year, that would put the total at around 300. That doesn’t sound right, especially since I have very little recall of at least 200 of these, but it’s a reasonable ballpark estimate. (I’m guessing I’ve seen double that many gallery and museum shows. Music concerts might be closer to 100.)
So it’s probably ridiculous to try to list my top three (plus a few more) poetry readings ever (and my apologies in advance to any sensitive friends), but here goes (in order of most memorable):
Alan Gilbert
Different kinds of messages
Saturday night’s reading concluding week three of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program traced a large arc. It featured Eileen Myles, Daisy Zamora, and Anne Waldman. Myles read from a forthcoming work entitled The Inferno: A Poet’s Novel. Much more than a novel, the manuscript is part ars poetica, part memoir, and part underground cultural history, rescuing from oblivion poets such as Rene Ricard and Bill Knott, along with Myles’s own wild, East Village bohemian past. “The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste,” she read at one point, invoking both a pre-gentrified New York City and the way in which some of the best personal poetry is a version of time shaking out its detritus through the mind. It’s also a reference to the fact that despite being “of all the art forms . . . the most economical” (to quote Audre Lorde), poetry seems strangely dependent on lots of unproductive free time.
D.A. Powell
The Turn of the Thumbscrew
The late William Talcott, editor of Thumbscrew Press, quite infrequently published a magazine called Carbuncle. The magazine was mostly devoted to poetry, along with artwork by poet Mark Neville, and the occasional interview and review.
One of the most provocative pieces of prose I’ve ever read appeared in Carbuncle #3, in 1991. It was a scathing review of a reading by Robert Creeley. Certainly the tone is critical and perhaps even, at times, mean. But the last line of it has stayed with me.
It doesn’t have to be about Creeley. It describes a feeling that so many of us might have had at a poetry reading, at one time or another. Good to remind ourselves that no poet should rest on his or her laurels, and that young poets need for older poets either to inspire them or to encourage them, but they rarely need to be bored (despite recent claims that poetry doesn’t need to make any bid for the attention of the reader).
Alan Gilbert
Haunted America
A Public Space is a quarterly literary magazine launched in 2006 by former Paris Review executive editor Bridget Hughes. It features poetry, fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and art. Produced in downtown Brooklyn out of a beautiful office that may have once been a garage but with its wide wooden front doors feels more like an old stable, the magazine’s view extends from its Dean Street address outward to the international. Previous issues have contained features on various countries and continents (Antarctica). Unlike many literary magazines, A Public Space is relatively agenda-free, though of course it has its preferred styles and writers—MFAs figure prominently in its authors’ bios. In fact, the magazine as a whole seems less interested in proposing a literary or political program than in seeking to provide a shared space for others to fill.
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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