All events are free!!
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On December 4th at the New School, the
2012 Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry, Tracy K. Smith, will join David Lehman to read her poems and discuss her work. A former
student of Lehman, Smith is the author of the Pulitzer winning Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), and two previous volumes, Duende, and The Body’s Question.
Along with her Pulitzer Prize, Smith’s awards and honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2008 Essence Literary Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, a fellowship from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and a 2005 Whiting Award.
She has taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University, and is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.
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On December 4th at the New School, the
2012 Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry, Tracy K. Smith, will join David Lehman to read her poems and discuss her work. A former
student of Lehman, Smith is the author of the Pulitzer winning Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), and two previous volumes, Duende, and The Body’s Question.
Along with her Pulitzer Prize, Smith’s awards and honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2008 Essence Literary Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, a fellowship from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and a 2005 Whiting Award.
She has taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University, and is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Quick question: where and when will John Ashbery read from his new book? The short answer is the New School's Tishman Auditorium at 66 West 12 Street in New York City on Saturday evening December 8, 2012, at 7 PM.
John Ashbery, "the grand master and universal genius of American poetry, now eighty-five" (P. Brunst) will read from his brand-new collection, Quick Question, in the Tishman Auditorium of the New School on Saturday, December 8, at 7 PM. A dialogue between the poet and David Lehman, poetry coordinator of the School of Writing, will follow the reading.
John Ashbery has won nearly every major American award for poetry -- and numerous honors in foreign lands. A Wave (1984) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, he Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. The title of Officier de la Legion d'honneur was conferred on him by the French government in 2002. His other books include Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), April Galleons (1987), Flow Chart (1991), Hotel Lautréamont (1992), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), Wakefulness (1998), Girls on the Run (1999), Your Name Here (2000), As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001) Chinese Whispers (2002), Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007). and Planisphere (2009). He has also published Three Plays (1978), Reported Sightings (a selection of his art criticism) (1989),Other Traditions (revised versions of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1989 and 1990, and Selected Prose (2004). In 1988 Ashbery edited the inaugural volume in The Best American Poetry series. The evening will be introduced by Robert Polito, director of the School of Writing, with faculty member Tom Healy.
Here's a very brief Ashbery sampler:
The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing. -- from Three Poems
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other. -- from "Just Walking Around"
"I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough."
So one can lose a good idea
by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides
it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations
are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does
recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier. -- from Flow Chart
" I feel that poems are going on all the time in my head and occasionally I snip off a length."
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.
My guide in these matters is your self,
Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same
Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon
Much later, I can know only the straight way out,
The distance between us. -- from "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
“I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.”
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here. -- "This Room"
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On December 4th at the New School, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry, Tracy K. Smith, will read from her award-winning Life on Mars (Graywolf Press). She will then sit down with The New School’s Poetry Coordinator, David Lehman, to discuss her work and answer questions from the audience. A former student of Lehman, Smith is the author of two other books of poetry, Duende and The Body’s Question.
The time: 6:30 PM. The place: Lang Cafe, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11 Street, ground floor. You can enter there or at 66 West 12 Street.
In addition to her Pulitzer Prize, Smith has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2008 Essence Literary Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, a fellowship from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and a 2005 Whiting Award.
She has taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University, and is currently assistant professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.
Event moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The School of Writing, The New School for Public Engagement.
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This week we welcome Sholeh Wolpé as our guest blogger. Sholeh was born in Tehran,
Iran, and has lived in Trinidad, the UK, and the United States. Her publications include Keeping Time With
Blue Hyacinths (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen, 2008),
The Scar Saloon (2004), and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad
(2007) which awarded the 2010 Lois Roth Translation Prize. Find a complete list of titles here. Wolpé is the editor
of The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its exiles (Michigan State
University Press, 2012), Breaking the Jaws of Silence--Sixty American Poets
Speak to the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), and a regional
editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East
(Norton 2010).
Her Persian translation and reading of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (co-translated with Mohsen Emadi) was launched by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in October 2012, in celebration of Whitman’s work. Find out more about Sholeh Wolpé here.
Welcome, Sholeh
In other news . . .
This week we begin our Year in Review. Beginning Monday, November 5 and continuing through the end of the year we will post selections from each of this year's wonderful guest bloggers. We're sure you will be inspired to look for more work by our contributors and to buy their books as holiday gifts.
Tonight: Thursday, November 8, 7-9 PM Mill Valley Library, Mill Valley, CA: BAP 2012 West Coast Launch with star-studded lineup of readers! Find more information here.
-- sdh
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The Oklahoma-born Padgett is a poet, a renowned translator from the French (with versions of Apollinaire, Cendrars, Larbaud et al), a tireless literary collaborator (with such as Ted Berrigan, Jim Dine, Tom Veitch, Trevor Winkfield), an assiduous editor, and the author of affecting memoirs of Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, and his own bootleg dad. With Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, Maureen Owen, and others, Padgett may be said to have renewed or even reinvented the New
York School of Poetry in the mid-1960s with St. Mark's Church in the Bowery as its center. (See the epilogue of The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets.) He has published more than fourteen books,
including Great Balls of Fire, Toujours L'Amour, Tulsa Kid, How to Be Perfect, and You Never Know.
Padgett studied with Kenneth Koch at Columbia College. He taught poetry writing to schoolchildren and became publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. He was also the edtor-in-chief of Full Court Press, which published Edwin Denby's Collected Poems and Joe Brainard's I Remember. He won a Guggenheim Fellowshiop in 1986. His poetry has been translated into fourteen languages and has appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he edited The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, which the Library of America published last spring. He lives in New York City and Vermont.
Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator at the New School of Writing.
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David St. John and Anna Journey stopped on their book tour at the New School on Tuesday, October 9th to read from their respective new books of poetry, The Auroras (Harper) and Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press).
The Auroras is David St. John’s first collection of new poems in eight years, and the book begins with an exploration of the poet’s sensuous, almost brooding relationship with nature. St. John is interested in revisiting the past — indeed he later told moderator David Lehman about his love of discovering new things when re-reading poetry — and in the middle section of the book he looks back at California as it was not too long ago. Most of the poems St. John read on Tuesday night were from this section, and they’re at once dark and curious. This is from "Hungry Ghost":
Your ghost
your own ghost
Had already
come
She sat by
you at the small table
& she
was so hungry
At one
point she reached over
Reached
right inside you
&
slowly twisted of a moist
Wafer of
your hear
In the final section of the book, St. John’s poems turn their attention to death and are best characterized by their ephemeral quality, like a strong but distant note of music.
After her extraordinary debut, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, from which she also read a few poems, Anna Journey strikes a new, strange and harmonious chord with Vulgar Remedies. In one poem, the well-named Journey travels through time via the shapes and textures of the insides of a fistulated cow to unknown and known realms. Her long, intriguing titles pull the listener into the context of the poems, an influence of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, she said. With a strong sense of rhyhtm and clever use of language, Journey builds upon the peculiarity that her titles immediately establish.
The readings were followed by questions from David Lehman as well as from the audience, stimulating much discussion on the musicality of language and the devil. -- Philip Brunst
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Laura Cronk will be the guest of honor at the New School Poetry Forum on Tuesday, October 16. Come to room 510 of 66 West 12 Street at 6:30 and hear her read selections from Having Been an Accomplice, her first book. A graduate of the New School's MFA program and former co-director of the famed KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series, Cronk has had poems in a number of magazines and been featured in both the 2006 and 2008 editions of The Best American Poetry
Laura Cronk and
David Lehman. Photo (c) Star Black 2008
Laura Cronk's Having Been an Accomplice won Persea Books’ 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in poetry. She is the associate director of The School of Writing at the New School in New York City.
Moderated by Honor Moore, faculty, the School of Writing, The New School for Public Engagement.
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