The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in the Bowery 131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY 10003
What counter-geographies and subterranean archives does the poet assemble? In their recent works – Village and Bard, Kinetic, both out with Coffee House Press – LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs and Anne Waldman trace related constructions of place and memory, the imperiled and essential wavelengths at the edge that propel and hold our communities across time. Voices full of voices travel ecstatic distance in these poems and records of friends and generations.
Featuring a guest introduction by Jennifer Firestone
We hope you can join us at 7:00PM for a reception before the event. The reading will begin at 8:00PM. Masks will be optional while enjoying drinks and company during the reception but will be required once the reading begins.
Masks are required at all Poetry Project events unless otherwise specifically noted. If you forget to bring your mask, we are happy to provide you with one. We also encourage all event attendees to take a rapid test the day of the event before heading to the church.
This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project’s YouTube. Livestream captions will be available via a StreamText link or the CC button on YouTube’s player.
Open CART captioning is scheduled for most in-person events.
This year’s Eliot Memorial reading honors poet, performer, cultural activist and literary life-force Anne Waldman—author of more than 40 books of poetry; co-editor of the recent collection NEW WEATHERS: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat, 2022); and a co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
On the occasion of ‘Pat Steir. Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls’, the artist’s inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, and first show in New York City since 2017, please join us for a performance by poet Anne Waldmanand visionary composer and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, in response to the works on view at Hauser Wirth New York 22nd Street.
This event is free, however, reservations are required.
About Pat Steir Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Pat Steir first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s storied five-decade career continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation.
About Anne Waldman Poet, curator, professor, performer, and cultural activist Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University. She is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism, among five others. Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery. Waldman is most recently the author of Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, (Nightboat, 2022). Waldman was the keynote speaker for the Bob Dylan and the Beats Conference in Tulsa in the Spring of 2022, and she wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera/movie “Black Lodge” with music by composer David T. Little that premiered at Opera Philadelphia in October of 2022. Publishers Weekly has called Anne Waldman a “counter-cultural giant.”
About James Brandon Lewis James Brandon Lewis is a critically-acclaimed composer, saxophonist, and writer. He has received accolades from NPR, ASCAP Foundation, Macdowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He has released several critically-acclaimed albums, most recently highly touted 2021’s Jesup Wagon, and is a member and co-founder of American Book Award winning Ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders. James was recently voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist by Downbeat magazine’s 2020s International Critics poll, and most recently named top Tenor Saxophonist for 2021 by Jazz Times Magazine. Lewis was recently named the Inaugural recipient of the Phd Fellowship in Creativity by the University of the Arts in collaboration with The Balvenie, drummer and Academy Award-Winning Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
A collection of lectures, transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. New Weathers asks us to consider how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world. Collected from the alternative education zone founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg with the aim of opening up discourse and fostering political engagement, these texts invoke issues of gender and race-based injustice, the global climate crisis, and our possible extinction. They weave through our poetic community, the conversations we are having, the issues we are facing—our “new weathers” to posit strategies of resistance.
Music by David T. Little Libretto by Anne Waldman Story & Screenplay by Michael Joseph McQuilken World Premiere Film Screening with Live Performance Part of Festival O22 and the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival Saturday, October 1, 2022, 9 pm Sunday, October 2, 2022, 8 pm What does it take to face ourselves? Enter the darkness in search of something beautiful, transcendent. But be very careful what you need to know…
Drawing on the disturbing and complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
Part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert, this world premiere event features glam opera band Timur & the Dime Museum alongside musicians from the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra.
Music by David T. Little Libretto by Anne Waldman Story & Screenplay by Michael Joseph McQuilken World Premiere Film Screening with Live Performance Part of Festival O22 and the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival
Saturday, October 1, 2022, 9 pm
Sunday, October 2, 2022, 8 pm
What does it take to face ourselves? Enter the darkness in search of something beautiful, transcendent. But be very careful what you need to know…
Drawing on the disturbing and complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Black Lodge uses dance, industrial rock, classical string quartet, and opera to take viewers through a Lynchian psychological escape room.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
Part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert, this world premiere event features glam opera band Timur & the Dime Museum alongside musicians from the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra.
