Bill Zavatsky and Paul Violi Reading

Launch for VANITAS 4: TRANSLATION
with Ron Horning, Ron Padgett, Raphael Rubinstein, Paul Violi, Bill
Zavatsky, and others.,
December 4, 6 PM, Bowery Poetry Club, NYC
www.bowerypoetry.com for information and directions

Terence Winch's Stint as Poet-in-Residence

Terence Winch, author of Boy Drinkers and That Special Place, is doing a stint as poet-in-residence for the high schools of Howard County, Maryland, during which he visits all 14 high schools in the county; he's done 6 so far and has enthusiastically promoted HL magazine (and the high school anthologies) to the students and their teachers. The Baltimore Sun did a piece on his high school visits:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/howard/bal-ho.neighbors01nov01,0,2671202.story

Tony Towle's 70th Birthday Reading

Tony Towle’s 70th Birthday Reading

Wednesday December 2, 2009

8:00 pm Poetry Project at St. Mark's 131 E. 10th Street, NYC www.poetryproject.com

If there is a New York School of Poetry, Tony Towle has been involved in it for over 45 years, having taken workshops with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara at the New School in 1963. In 1970, he received the Frank O’Hara Award, in conjunction with the publication of his first major collection, North. The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000 was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2001. Memoir 1960-1963 (Faux Press, 2001) is a chronicle of Towle’s early years as a poet in New York. His 12th book of poems, Winter Journey, was published by Hanging Loose in 2008. Guests will each read a few of their favorite Towle poems, followed by a short reading by Towle. With Charles North, Paul Violi, Ron Padgett, Kimberly Lyons, Bob Hershon, Ed Friedman, Andrew McCarron, Anne Waldman and Jo Ann Wasserman.

Reception to follow.

Hettie Jones and Michael Cirelli Reading

Hettie Jones reading poetry

this Sunday, November 8th

6:45 pm $5

at Zinc Bar

82 West 3rd St.

(south side of 3rd between Thompson & Sullivan)

with Michael Cirelli (of Urban Word)

Elizabeth Swados, Donna Brook and Dick Lourie Reading December 16th

Donna Brook, Dick Lourie & Elizabeth Swados

Wednesday December 16, 2009

8:00 pm Poetry Project at St. Mark's 131 E. 10th Street www.poetryproject.org

Donna Brook was born in Buffalo in 1944 and began to publish her poems in 1968. While she was getting an MA in English at Wayne State University, Red Hanrahan Press published her first book of poems, A History of the Afghan. Hanging Loose Press published her second book, Notes on Space/Time. After two stints as a Poet-in-the-Schools, she moved to Brooklyn in 1979, began teaching middle school, and published two more books: What Being Responsible Means to Me and A More Human Face, both with Hanging Loose. She has written a history of the English language for children (The Journey of English, Clarion), and won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Dick Lourie is a poet and blues saxophone player whose most recent book of poems, If the Delta Was the Sea (Hanging Loose 2009), is the product of both professions. Focusing on Clarksdale, a small city in the Mississippi Delta, this collection draws on oral histories and interviews Lourie conducted with Clarksdale residents, as they tell of their own lives, the town’s history, and racial relations today, along with Lourie’s experiences playing blues with local musicians in the city’s juke joints and annual festivals. If the Delta Was the Sea is Lourie’s seventh book of poetry. His previous works include Ghost Radio (1998), Anima (1980), and Stumbling (1973). Dick Lourie’s readings feature a lively blend of music and poetry, interweaving the spoken word with music recorded by his blues band and live performance on his sax.

Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international hit Runaways, Elizabeth Swados has composed, written, and directed for over 30 years. Some of her works include the Obie Award winning Trilogy at La Mama, Alice at the Palace with Meryl Streep at the New York Shakespeare Theater Festival and Groundhog, which was optioned by Milos Forman for a film. Her work has been performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, at La MaMa, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, and locations all over the world. She has also composed highly acclaimed dance scores for well-known choreographers in the US, Europe and South America. Swados has published novels, non-fiction books, children’s books and poetry to great acclaim, and received the Ken Award for her book My Depression. Her first book of poetry, The One and Only Human Galaxy, has just been published by Hanging Loose Press.

Mort Marcus Dies

On another sad note, Mort Marcus, author of When People Could Fly, published by HL has also passed away. Here is the obituary.

Poet Morton Marcus dies at 73

By WALLACE BAINE
MediaNews
Updated: 10/29/2009 01:38:11 AM PDT

Poet Morton Marcus in his Santa Cruz home in 2006.
Morton Marcus, one of Santa Cruz's most prominent literary figures, died Wednesday at his home after a long battle with renal cancer. He was 73.
Marcus leaves a legacy of influence in at least three separate spheres. He was an internationally recognized poet, having published 10 books of poetry. He was a celebrated film critic and historian. And, for 30 years, he was a mainstay on the English Department faculty at Cabrillo College in Aptos.

A former Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year (1999), Marcus just last year published his 500-plus-page memoir "Striking Through the Masks," which served as both autobiography and re-evaluation of poets and writers of his generation. His final book of poems, "The Dark Figure in the Doorway," is slated for 2010 release.

"He was larger than life," said Santa Cruz poet Joe Stroud, who knew Marcus for more than 40 years. "Mort loved nothing more than to have a meal and to have a conversation. I think of him as a conductor almost, eating and drinking and driving the conversation this way and that. It was an unforgettable experience."

Marcus' fingerprints are everywhere in Santa Cruz literary circles. He led a free-wheeling film discussion group twice a month at the Nickelodeon, up to his last days. He was the co-host of a popular public-access TV program on film called "Cinema Scene." Until recently, he hosted KUSP's "Poetry Show." And he influenced hundreds of students over the years at Cabrillo College.

Marcus was born and raised in New York City. As he outlined in "Masks," his early life was a time of severe emotional trauma. His father left when he was 3, and Marcus was shuttled back and forth between boarding schools, between bouts of watching his mother endure abuse at the hands of a stepfather.
"He began his life in such an unpromising way, with so many strikes against him," said Mark Ong, a long-time friend and student who helped design many of Marcus' books. "It's a real testament to what was inside him that he became the man he did. I used to call him up and say, 'Why are you not insane?'"

After a youthful flirtation with boxing and a stint in the Air Force, Marcus came to California in the early 1960s, and to Santa Cruz in 1968.

"When Mort came to Santa Cruz, there was no poetry scene whatsoever," said Stroud. "He developed the reading series at Cabrillo and in various restaurants and bookstores, bringing such poets as Vasko Popa, Michael McClure and Al Young among many others."

He began publishing in the 1960s and achieved a wide readership with his volume "The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems," which, said Stroud, seemed to capture a distinct back-to-nature essence of the period.

"Mort was a master of so many different kinds of poetry. Lyric poetry, comic, cosmic, prose poetry. In fact, during the last part of his career, he really became one of the finest in the world at prose poems."

At Cabrillo, where he also served as the president of the Teacher's Union, Marcus was known as a great lecturer, and those public speaking skills carried over in his discussions at the Nickelodeon, which attracted a loyal core audience for years. He traveled widely, reading his poetry in workshops and serving as poet in residence at universities across the country.

In his later years, he wrote poetry, translated work from the Serbian poet Vasko Popa, and composed a libretto for an opera. He also helped edit a history of the Croatians in the Pajaro Valley written by his wife Donna Mekis and his sister-in-law Kathryn Mekis Miller.

"Mort was a giant, loving intellect where you could have rich, very in depth discussions about almost any subject," said longtime friend George Ow Jr. "If you wanted to discuss any movie subject, Chinese poetry over the last 3,000 years, Greek and Roman mythology, hiking paths of Greece and Crete, best places to stay in Prague or Croatia, the history of Cabrillo College, New York City baseball, the San Francisco 49ers or anything else, you would have a good time and learn a lot."

Mark Ong said that Marcus, both as a teacher and a friend, demanded excellence but recognized the difficulty in achieving it.

"He was a person of integrity and great dignity and lived what he espoused," said Ong. "(His was) a life of inquiry, a life of rigor, a life devoted to excellence."

"He was a man of incredible energy," said Stroud. "He had enormous passions and he pursued them with zeal. He lived the life of the mind, and he lived the life of the heart as well."

Albert York Dies

HL is sad to announce that Albert York, cover artist for Hanging Loose 94, has died. Here is the obit from The New York Times.

Albert York, a painter of small, mysterious landscapes who shunned the art world yet had a fervent following within it, died Tuesday in Southampton, N.Y. He was 80 and lived in Water Mill, N.Y.

Roy Davis

Mr. York in 1989.

Enlarge This Image

Davis & Langdale

Albert York's “Porch Bench With Seated Figure,” around 1967.

The cause was cancer, said Cecily Langdale of Davis & Langdale, the gallery that, first as Davis Galleries and later as Davis & Long Company, has represented him since 1963.

In a 1995 New Yorker magazine profile of Mr. York, Calvin Tomkins said he was perhaps “the most highly admired unknown artist in America.” He described a shy man who avoided anyone connected to the art world, who worked slowly and who was perpetually dissatisfied with his work, prone to scraping down his wood panels and starting over.

Ms. Langdale said Mr. York usually wrapped his paintings in brown paper and mailed them to the gallery. She said that when one arrived, unannounced and “practically still wet,” she often felt that Mr. York “had to get it out of the house in order not to destroy it.”

Rarely measuring more than 12 inches on a side, Mr. York’s paintings evoke a world in which time and art seem to stand still or even move backward through history. His trees had the symmetry of those in Renaissance paintings. His images of a single cow or dog evoked the manner of Dutch or English painters. His occasional figures might be robed or turbaned as in earlier times, or accompanied by a skeleton signaling life’s brevity. He frequently zeroed in on small vases of flowers, recalling late Manet, and even went so far as to do his own rendition of Manet’s “Olympia.”

But his paintings’ geometric simplicity, flatness of form and workmanlike brushwork exuded a quiet modernity, as did their wholeness of composition and feeling. In the catalog to a 1975 York exhibition at Davis & Long, the critic and painter Fairfield Porter wrote, “Certainly part of the strong emotional appeal of these paintings” is that Mr. York “is not clever, and in no sense superior to the nature of his medium or the nature of the subject, but that he is at one with both.”

Albert Edward York was born in Detroit in 1928. His parents were not married, and he was raised by his father but lived mostly in boarding schools and foster homes while his father worked as an electroplater in the automobile industry. In his teens he lived with an aunt and uncle in Belleville, Ontario. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and then at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit; after serving in the Army during the Korean War, he moved to New York in 1952.

He studied briefly with Raphael Soyer until Mr. York’s life was taken over by odd jobs and he stopped painting altogether. Things eased in 1957, when he found a steady job as a gilder with Robert Kulicke, the innovative frame maker who died in 2007 and was also a still life painter.

Mr. York returned to painting in earnest in 1960, after four months spent in France with Virginia Mann Caldwell, whom he had met at a loft party in 1959, and her two children. They married later that year. He is survived by his wife; two stepchildren, Jonathan Caldwell of Santa Fe, N.M., and Kristin Caldwell of Carlisle, Pa.; and four step-grandchildren.

In 1962 he reluctantly showed his paintings to Mr. Kulicke, who enthusiastically recommended them to Roy Davis, Mr. Kulicke’s art school friend and business partner, whose small gallery began as a showroom for Kulicke Frames. Mr. York had his first exhibition at the Davis Galleries in 1963 and his last (at Davis & Langdale) in 2007, for a total of 16 exhibitions there. Because Mr. York worked so slowly, some paintings were exhibited repeatedly, but that seemed to fit Mr. York’s sense of time.

He painted only about 200 to 250 works in his lifetime. Most are in private collections and museums. A rare auction of his work took place after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who owned six of his paintings.

Mr. York and his family moved to the East End of Long Island in the early 1960s, and he earned money painting houses and doing rough carpentry; financial need was an important incentive to make paintings. When his mother, who he had been told was dead, reappeared in his life in the early 1970s and set up a trust fund for him, he worked even more slowly.

Mr. York had a small solo show at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., in 1993, and his paintings appeared in numerous group exhibitions, about which Mr. Davis kept him uninformed for fear he might refuse to participate. In 1989, when the critic and curator Klaus Kertess organized an exhibition of landscape paintings by Jane Freilicher, April Gornik and Mr. York at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, he did so without meeting Mr. York and was never sure if he even saw the show, since no one knew what he looked like.

Ms. Langdale said Mr. York did go to the show with her and Mr. Davis; she took a rare photograph of him on the occasion. In his New Yorker article, Mr. Tomkins wrote that after seeing his work at the Parrish, Mr. York said he was “pretty upset about what I’d been doing for these last years.”

Robert Kulicke offered an explanation in the New Yorker piece: “What Al doesn’t understand is that in art you never hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.”

Sherman Alexie Reading at Symphony Space

Sherman Alexie will be reading at Symphony Space on Wednesday December 2nd @ 7PM.
Address: 2537 Broadway @ 95th Street, NYC.

http://www.symphonyspace.org/event/5927-sherman-alexie-stories-and-conversation

www.shermanalexie.com

R. Zamora Linmark Reading November 1st

for the launch of 2nd Avenue Poetry’s* Inaugural Print Chapbook Series**

The Filipino Exiled Poet Channels Montgomery Clift and Other Poems by R. ZAMORA LINMARK

Poetry Barn Barn! (That let it roll where you want it.) by JILL MAGI

Sunday November 1st
5 pm @ Unnameable Books (in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn)
600 Vanderbilt Ave (between Dean St & St Marks Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11238

the event is FREE & open to the public

R. ZAMORA "Zack" LINMARK is the author of the novel Rolling The R's, which he's adapted for the stage, and two collections of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions and The Evolution of a Sigh (both published by HL). He's also completed his second novel, Leche, and a new play, But, Beautiful. He currently lives in Manila, where he is at work on his third collection of poetry and a novel.

JILL MAGI works in text and image and is the author of SLOT (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), Threads (Futurepoem), Torchwood (Shearsman), and Cadastral Map (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). She teaches at Eugene Lang, City, and Goddard Colleges, and runs Sona Books, a chapbook press, from her apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

Joanna Fuhrman Readings

Joanna Fuhrman, author of Freud in Brooklyn, Ugh Ugh Ocean and Moraine (all published by HL) is reading from her new book, Pageant, which won the Kinereth Gensler Prize.

November 20th
Earshot Reading Series
With Steven Karl, Brittney Inman, Kate Hall and Lynne Beckenstein
7:30
Rose Live Music
345 Grand Street (b/w Havemeyer & Marcy)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 599-0069


December 5th
Book Party for Pageant
7-9 (with special guest readings by Adeena Karasick, Sharon Mesmer and
David Shapiro)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(at upstairs at erikas, email jofuhrman@gmail.com for details)

December 8th
(with Yerra Sugarman)
6 pm
Labyrinth Books
122 Nassau Street
Princeton, NJ 08542

Sherman Alexie Reading from FACE on News Hour

Sherman Alexie was on News Hour on Thursday October 22nd reading poems from his new collection of poetry, Face.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/profiles/poet_alexie.htm

Erica Miriam Fabri Celebrates the Release of Her New Book

Erica Miriam Fabri celebrates the release of Dialect of a Skirt, November 22 at the Fat Black Pussy Cat, 130 W 3^rd Street between McDougal and 6^th, NYC, November 22^nd, 7 – 10.

Hettie Jones and Tony Towle Read

The next Poets@Pace event is taking a new direction. Titled “An Evening of Frank O’Hara,” the event will feature two poets who knew the legendary O’Hara. Hettie Jones, Doing 70, and Tony Towle, Winter Journey, will read from O’Hara’s celebrated work and talk about his life.

Hettie Jones and Tony Towle will be reading on November 18 at 6:00 p.m. in the Schimmel Theatre lobby. The event will feature a Q&A session and books for sale by all three poets. Admission is free and open to the public.

Schimmel Theatre is at 3 Spruce Street. 4, 5, 6 to Brooklyn Bridge, City Hall.

Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles Reading

Maggie Nelson, author of Latest Winter and Shiner, will be reading with Eileen Myles at Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn, New York on Sunday, November 1st, 7 PM.

Sherman Alexie Reading

Sherman Alexie, author of the recently-released Face, will be reading from his new collection of short stories, War Dances, at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, 33 E 17th Street, NYC, Tuesday October 27th, 7 PM. Get there early for seating!
www.shermanalexie.com

Congratulations to Rackstraw Downes

Congratulations to Rackstraw Downes who won a 2009 MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.5458009/k.8D03/Rackstraw_Downes.htm
Rackstraw's work was featured in Hanging Loose 89.

Liz Swados and Robert Hershon on the Radio

The program will be live on WBAI 99.5 FM on 6/22/09, streaming live at www.wbai.org, archived for 90 days at www.wbai.org and archived forever at www.catradiocafe.com.

News from Arnold Mesches

Arnold Mesches, FBI Files, has been awarded an HONORARY DOCTORATE by the University of Florida.

Buy Julia Cohen's New Chapbook

Former HL intern and author, Julia Cohen has a new chapbook out, The History of a Lake Never Drowns.
Available for the affordable price of $7.00.
http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/history.html

Congratulations to Jen Hadfield

Scottish poet Jen Hadfield, who was published in Hanging Loose 79 & 82 and in the anthology Word Jig: New Fiction from Scotland, has won the most prestigious British poetry prize, the T. S. Eliot Award. Congratulations Jen.

From the Independent

Rising Star: Jen Hadfield, poet

By Katy Guest
Friday, 16 January 2009

As the youngest winner of the T S Eliot Prize, at 30, Jen Hadfield is also a relative newcomer. The £15,000 cheque that she collected on Monday has previously been awarded to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes – though never to Andrew Motion, the chair of this year's judges.

Announcing her win, Motion described Hadfield's poetry collection, 'Nigh-No-Place', as "a revelation; jaunty, energetic, iconoclastic – even devil-may-care". Born in Cheshire, with an English father and a Canadian mother, Hadfield studied English at Edinburgh University, where she worked with the novelist and poet Robert Allan Jamieson.

In 2002 she received a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary, and in 2003 she won an Eric Gregory Award which she used to fund a year in Canada. Four years ago she moved to Shetland, a place and dialect which informs much of her poetry. A stint in a fish-packing factory to makes ends meet resulted in a poem about haddock and their "gut worms".