Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Anne Waldman and Lee Ann Brown
Thursday, February 23, 2012, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea
Thursday, February 23, 2012, 6:30 pm
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City
Introduction by Vincent Katz
Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey, in 1945. Recently deemed a “counter-cultural giant” byPublisher’s Weekly, Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. From 1966 until 1978, Waldman ran the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York, and in 1974, together with Allen Ginsberg, co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of more than 40 books and has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity (all published by Penguin Poets) and the anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011). Her numerous anthologies include Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, and the co-edited collections Civil Disobediences, The Angel Hair Anthology, and Beats at Naropa. She has recently collaborated with artist Pat Steir on CRY STALL GAZE, which will be published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers University in 2012. Her CD The Milk of Universal Kindness, with music by Ambrose Bye, was released in 2011. Waldman is a recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Waldman is the Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired university on the North American continent, and divides her time between Boulder and New York City.
Sprawl
after Danielle Dutton
I serve him from the left hand side
I serve him some cockney and serve him some pidgin English
I serve him some erotics I want him to try the tempo & to sing with me
I serve him in Bahasa Indonesian
I serve him my hybrid narratives
I serve him succulents on a plastic tray, image of a rotating fowl
I fight the hens-in-a-blanket & the pigs-in-a-blanket incarnations
I fight the rubber tread incarnation
I sing three anthems to the cosmos of brane & gravitons & Higgs field vacuum expectation value
I leave my truck keys on in the driveway, revving
I shoot my entropic arrow of time into his meteoric heart
I serve him from the right hand side and serve him my red-state hot sauce, my red-state conglomeration of tendencies, my red-state myopia
I rest his head on my blue knee melancholia, a lone wolf silence
I take off my jaguar swimsuit (it’s still warm here & global weather says 80 degrees in Manhattan) in front of an array of contradictory intentions
I am invisible in front of my vanity, I spool the thread
Smooth skin, smooth as your lines
I lie down as a vegetarian for 500 years.
I serve him from the left hand side
I serve him some cockney and serve him some pidgin English
I serve him some erotics I want him to try the tempo & to sing with me
I serve him in Bahasa Indonesian
I serve him my hybrid narratives
I serve him succulents on a plastic tray, image of a rotating fowl
I fight the hens-in-a-blanket & the pigs-in-a-blanket incarnations
I fight the rubber tread incarnation
I sing three anthems to the cosmos of brane & gravitons & Higgs field vacuum expectation value
I leave my truck keys on in the driveway, revving
I shoot my entropic arrow of time into his meteoric heart
I serve him from the right hand side and serve him my red-state hot sauce, my red-state conglomeration of tendencies, my red-state myopia
I rest his head on my blue knee melancholia, a lone wolf silence
I take off my jaguar swimsuit (it’s still warm here & global weather says 80 degrees in Manhattan) in front of an array of contradictory intentions
I am invisible in front of my vanity, I spool the thread
Smooth skin, smooth as your lines
I lie down as a vegetarian for 500 years.
Ha-Yang Kim
Born in Seoul, Korea, Ha-Yang Kim is a composer, cellist, and improviser whose musical life draws from a range of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, electronic, noise, avant-improv, to non-western musical sources. Her music has been performed/toured in the US, Russia,Turkey, Morocco, Cuba, Bali, Canada, Europe, and Asia. She's performed Balinese gamelan music, studied Karnatic music, and has worked with Meredith Monk, Cecil Taylor, John Zorn, Christian Wolff, Lee Hyla, Kronos Quartet, Gavin Bryars, Evan Ziporyn, Gamelan GalakTika, poet Anne Waldman, The National, Louis Andriessen, Alvin Lucier, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Elliott Sharp, Larry Polansky, ICE, Annie Gosfield, Hahn Rowe, Flux Quartet and Stefan Poetzsch, in addition to collaborations in dance, theatre, film and multi-media. Ama, a CD of her own compositions is released on Tzadik. She's recorded for ECM, New World, Cold Blue, Beggars Banquet, New Albion, Brassland, Karnatic Lab and Bridge Records. Ms. Kim was Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, and at numerous universities and colleges in the US and Europe. Currently, she is preparing releases of her music for several labels, continuing close collaborations with vocalist Philippe Lambert and poet Anne Waldman, and in Fall '12, JACK Quartet will perform/record her epic 40 minute work, Threadsuns. She also makes work in video, collage and mixed assemblage.
Lee Ann Brown
Lee Ann Brown was born in Tokyo, raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and received her MFA in poetry from Brown University. She is the author of Polyverse, The Sleep That Changed Everything, and The Voluptuary Lion Poems of Spring, and is the publisher of Tender Buttons press, publishing experimental poetry by women. Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the Howard Foundation, and the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France. She currently divides her time between New York City, where she teaches poetry at St. John’s University, and Marshall, North Carolina, where she founded and directs the French Broad Institute (of Time & the River).
Acoustic winter
If the year ends a plural spiral
Make it be so what a year is
If the winter begins again here
In the longest darkest place
Of the shortest bluest day
We play the stillness deep
Into the night song beside
All our sleeping family breath
Of the five friends I am holding
Who will last the winter
In their earthly spiral
In their spring trajectory
Move to lovely summer
One more lovely summer
Or further time to foil
Days whirl into nights
I move to see my parents
The ones who have born
Me out have born me up
I move to be with my sister
And her local love her ones
I move to join the circle
I am already in my kith
Acoustic winter sings a summer
A way to stay awake as the light
Brings back its basket its halo
Its wreath of line and berries
Pine hurries to the wind again
Night is here at its most clear
Sound across the zones a weave
I sing this song again for winter
May Venus never sever
Her move across the sun
To come upon the next
Transit the next music
In time to finger to find
The new way to unwind
Skeins of sound in mind
Winter Solstice 2011
Make it be so what a year is
If the winter begins again here
In the longest darkest place
Of the shortest bluest day
We play the stillness deep
Into the night song beside
All our sleeping family breath
Of the five friends I am holding
Who will last the winter
In their earthly spiral
In their spring trajectory
Move to lovely summer
One more lovely summer
Or further time to foil
Days whirl into nights
I move to see my parents
The ones who have born
Me out have born me up
I move to be with my sister
And her local love her ones
I move to join the circle
I am already in my kith
Acoustic winter sings a summer
A way to stay awake as the light
Brings back its basket its halo
Its wreath of line and berries
Pine hurries to the wind again
Night is here at its most clear
Sound across the zones a weave
I sing this song again for winter
May Venus never sever
Her move across the sun
To come upon the next
Transit the next music
In time to finger to find
The new way to unwind
Skeins of sound in mind
Winter Solstice 2011