The Best American Poetry

Tonight at KGB Bar: Ted Jonathan and David Mills

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Ted Jonathan + David Mills

 

Oct. 15, 2012

Hosted by Matthew Yeager, Megin Jimenez, and John Deming

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

TED JONATHAN  is a poet and short story writer. Born and raised in the Bronx, he now lives in New Jersey.  Bones & Jokes, his most recent full-length collection of poems and short stories, was published by NYQ Books (2009).  His first collection Spiked Libido was published by Neukeia Press. Ted's work has appeared in New York Quarterly, Web Del Sol Review, Pedestal, Hiram Poetry Review, and many other magazines. Translations of his poetry have appeared in multiple Russian magazines.

 

DAVID MILLS is the author of The Dream Detective, currently on the small press bestseller list.  He has a master's in creative writing from New York University and is a cum laude grad of Yale University. He is a 2010 Queens Poet Laureate Finalist. He has won NYFA, Breadloaf, Henry James, Brio, PALF (to travel to a writer's conference in Ghana, West Africa) and Soros Fellowships to travel to Poland to write poems about the Holocaust. Mills is the 2003 recipient of the Chicago State University Langston Hughes Poetry Prize. His dramatic works have been commissioned by the Juilliard School of Drama and the Urban Stages Theater. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, Jubilat, Callaloo, Rattapallax, and many others.  He has also recorded his poetry on RCA records with jazz artist Steve Coleman.  He has written book reviews for the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Rolling Stone and New York Post. .

Tonight at KGB Bar: Ben Lerner and Sampson Starkweather

 

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Ben Lerner + Sampson Starkweather

 

Oct. 8, 2012

Hosted by Matthew Yeager, John Deming, and Eric Conroe

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

*****

 

BEN LERNER is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. His sonnet sequence, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), won the Hayden Carruth Award, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the year’s 12 best poetry books. His poetry has been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry, New Voices (2008), and 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (2009).  Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, he earned a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid.  His acclaimed novel Leaving the Atocha Station, draws on this experience abroad.  Lerner is a member of the MFA Program faculty at Brooklyn College.

SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is  is the author of five chapbooks, most recently Like Clouds Never Render from O’clock Press. His city-destroying mechabook The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather is forthcoming from Birds, LLC in early 2013. He lives in Brooklyn and is a founding editor of Birds, LLC. He is the starting shooting guard for the Williamsburg Crunchers, the world’s most famous poetry basketball team.

Tonight at KGB Bar: Cathy Park Hong and Craig Morgan Teicher

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Cathy Park Hong + Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Monday Oct. 1, 2012

Hosted by Matthew Yeager and John Deming

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

Cathy Park Hong's first book, Translating Mo'um, was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, was published in May 2012 by WW Norton. Hong is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and other journals. She is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and is regular faculty at the Queens MFA program in Charlotte, North Carolina.

 

 

Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, and freelance writer.  His latest book, To Keep Love Blurry: Poems, is new from BOA. His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry.  His collection of short stories and fables, Cradle Book, was published in spring 2010 by BOA.   His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, Jubilat, Seneca Review, Forklift Ohio, Octopus, La Petit Zine, Fairy Tale Review, Verse, and Colorado Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2009.  His reviews of poetry and fiction, and profiles of poets, appear widely in places like NPR.org, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, Time Out New York, Boston Review and Bookforum.  He is Director of Digital Operations and Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly, a poetry editor of The Literary Review, a contributing editor of Pleiades, and a Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle.  He also teaches at The New School and New York University and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and children

Tonight at KGB Bar: Erin Belieu and Brenda Shaughnessy

Hosted by Matthew Yeager and John Deming

Tonight! September 24

Reading starts at 7:30 pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

 

 

 

 

The KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series debuts tonight with readings from Erin Belieu and Brenda Shaughnessy.

ERIN BELIEU was born and raised in Nebraska.  Her first book, Infanta (1995), was a winner of the Nationa Poetry Series and named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Library Journal.  Her second collection, One Above & One Below, was the winner of the Midland Authors Prize in poetry and the Ohioana prize, and her most recent collection, Black Box, was a finalist in 2007 for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is presently Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.  With Cate Marvin, she is the co-founder and co-director of VIDA, a literary organization that seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities. 

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY is the author of Our Andromeda, brand new this Fall from Copper Canyon.  Her earlier books are Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award, and Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.  Her work has appeared in the Yale Review, the Boston Review, McSweeney’s, and the Best American Poetry.  Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship.  The poetry editor at Tin House magazine, she currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Here is the full fall schedule:

Sept 24: Erin Belieu + Brenda Shaughnessy

Oct 1: Cathy Park Hong + Craig Morgan Teicher

Oct 8: Ben Lerner + Sampson Starkweather

Oct 15: David Mills + Ted Jonathan

Oct 22: Mark Leidner + Nate Slawson

Oct 29: Dorianne Laux + Cornelius Eady + Joseph Millar

Nov 5: Wayne Miller + Jerry Williams

Nov 12: Nat'l Book Award Judges - Laura Kasischke + Dana Levin + Maurice Manning + Patrick Rosal

Nov 19: Henri Cole + John Koethe

Nov 26: Ana Bozicevic + Fanny Howe

Dec 3: David Lehman + Mark Doty

Dec 10: Mark Strand + Malachi Black + Season Finale Party

Matt Hart's Heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

Matt Hart is one of the readers at the season finale of the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry series next week. Here's an excerpt from his review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out.

Dream Pairing: Laura Cronk and Marie Ponsot tonight at KGB

Laura Cronk and David Lehman.  Photo (c) Star Black 2008

April 23, 2012

www.KgbBar.com

Hosted by Megin Jimenez and Matthew Yeager

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

Laura Cronk's first book of poems, Having Been an Accomplice, won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and is forthcoming from Persea Books. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Barrow Street, Ecotone, WSQ, McSweeney’s, The Best American Poetry, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel.  She is currently on the faculty of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing for Democracy at The New School.

 

Marie Ponsot has published numerous poetry collections, including Easy (2009), Springing (2002),The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Green Dark (1988), Admit Impediment (1981), and True Minds(1957). Ponsot, who also translates books from the French, has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University and New York University. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

-- sdh

TONIGHT! Melissa Broder + Martine Bellen at KGB Bar

Melissa Broder + Martine Bellen

April 16, 2012

Reading starts at 7:30
Hosted by Megin Jimenez and Matthew Yeager 

Admission is FREE 
www.KgbBar.com 
85 East 4th Street

Melissa Broder is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart (Publishing Genius, 2012) andWhen You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, 2010). Poems appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Redivider, Court Green, The Missouri Review online, Barrelhouse, The Awl, and Drunken Boat. She edits La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop in NYC. By day, she is a publicity manager at Penguin. Broder received her BA from Tufts University and is getting a slow, scenic MFA at CCNY. 

Martine Bellen is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Ghosts! (Spuyten Duyvil Press). Her collection Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), won the National Poetry Series. She collaborated with David Rosenboom on Ah! Opera No-Opera, which had its world premiere at REDCAT in L.A. She is currently collaborating with Zhang Er on the libretto Moon Lady: The Story of Chang E.

Monday, March 5, 2012, at KGB Bar

UPDATED: John Deming + Christopher Salerno

 

March 5, 2012

We regret to inform that Sampson Starkweather is unable to read tonight.
Hosted by Megin Jimenez and Matthew Yeager

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

*****

  

John Deming's chapbook 8 Poems was published by Eye For an Iris Press, and his four-song Tugboat EP, which features members of P-Funk, was released in 2011 by BozFonk Music. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, FENCE, Verse Daily, Tarpaulin Sky, POOL and elsewhere. He is Editor-in-Chief of Coldfront Magazine, lives in New York City, and teaches at Baruch College and LIM College.

Christopher Salerno’s books of poems include Minimum Heroic, winner of the 2010 Mississippi Review Poetry Series Award, and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). A chapbook,ATM is available from Horse Less Press. Recent and future poems can be found in journals such as Fence, LIT, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, American Letters and Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Currently, he’s an Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University where manages the new journal, Map Literary.

*****

Upcoming, Spring 2012

March 12         Paul Legault + Christian Hawkey

March 19         Rob MacDonald + Jason Schneiderman

March 26         Eleni Sikelianos + Anne Waldman

April 2             Myra Shapiro + Jennifer Michael Hecht

April 16           Melissa Broder + Martine Bellen

April 23           Laura Cronk + Marie Ponsot

April 30           Rebecca Lindenberg, Neil Shepard + Elizabeth Powell

May 7              Macgregor Card + Matt Hart

 

Michael Robbins, Guest Blogger February 12-18

This week we welcome Michael Robbins as our guest blogger.  Michael’s first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be published by Penguin in March 2012. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He reviews books regularly for the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New York Observer, and several other publications  . Michael received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago.  Read Robert P. Baird's interview with Michael here.

Welcome, Michael.

In other news . . .

Triple bill at KGB bar on Monday, February 13:  Star Black, Louis Asekoff, and Mark Ford (making a rare U.S. appearance). 7:00 pm 85 E 4th Street, NYC.  Details here.

-- sdh

 

 

Tonight at KGB Bar, NYC: David Lehman and Stephanie Brown

We've featured Stephanie Brown's prose and poetry here so often over the years that we've given her her own category. One of our most popular posts continues to be Sex in the Stacks, her piece about the sub genre of pulp erotica that features librarians.  Stephanie's poems have been included four times in The Best American Poetry (1993, 1995,1997,2005). Most recently, David singled out a poem of Stephanie's on NPR as being one of his three favorite poems of 2011.  In short, we're big fans of Stephanie Brown and we think that if you read her work, you will be too. 

And if you happen to be in NYC tonight, February 5th, you can hear Stephanie Brown in person when she shares the bill with David Lehman at the KGB Bar. (7:30pm - 85 East 4th Street NYC - Free)  It's going to be a great evening.   

-- sdh