Poets in the Galleries: Mariana Ruiz Responds to Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore
Thursday, December 8, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm, 2011
Thursdays, 6-8 PM Dec 1 -29 (with exception of Dec 22)
Stefani Barber – Dec 1
Mariana Ruiz Firmat– Dec 8
Kostas Anagnopoulos – Dec 15
Anselm Berrigan – Dec 29
Poets in the Galleries: Writers Respond to Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore is a series of four events that utilizes the galleries as invigorating sites of exploration, investigation and interactive readings and discussions. Lively presentations and provocative intellectual and artistic exchanges will allow audiences new ways of accessing the resources of the museum, while simultaneously presenting visitors with various inroads into the exhibitions’ offerings. Moore’s large-scale photographs record both dignity and tragedy in the city’s decline, depicting postapocalyptic landscapes of windowless grand hotels, vast barren factory floors, collapsing churches, offices carpeted in velvety moss and entire blocks reclaimed by prairie grass. For this edition, we invite poets and participants to take on the role of a post-industrial flâneur, to stroll through the “arcade” of Moore’s images of the metropolis as a keen urban and social observer, a walker in a city whose lifeblood and rhythms depended on the automobile and the assemblyline.
The Poets in the Galleries events will take place on consecutive Thursday evenings (except Dec 22). There will be a complimentary cocktail hour at 6:00pm, followed by an hour or so of the interactive tour/reading. Each participating poet has been asked not only to read his or her own work, but to actively engage with art works from the exhibit in which ever way they choose as well as to engage with the attendees to create a truly interactive experience. A small publication for the series will be created, in which each of the poets present a new or previously unpublished work that addresses the themes of Detroit Disassembled, and which we will make available to gallery visitors.
The Poets in the Galleries series was born out of conversations between Prerana Reddy, the Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art and Amira Parsa, poet, artist, instigator and educator. This edition was guest curated by Paolo Javier, currently the Queens Poet Laureate. Javier is the author of The Feeling Is Actual (creature press, 2011), Megton Gasgan Krakooom (Cy Gist Press, forthcoming), LMFAO (OMG!, 2008), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books, 2007), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books, 2005), and the time at the end of this writing. (Ahadada, 2004), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He recently completed Lunatic, a full-length play, with excerpts appearing in War & Peace 3 (O Books), Aufgabe, and EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts. His short theater pieces FYEO, A Play, A Play, and Ladies and Gentlemen…Mr. Bob Harris! have all been produced by The Poets Theater in San Francisco as part of their annual Poets Theater Jamboree. A 2007/8 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Writer-in-Residence, he recently served as a 2008/9 Visiting Associate Professor in Poetry at the University of Miami. He publishes 2nd Avenue Poetry, a small press devoted to innovative language art. Javier states “I am incredibly grateful for the honor of curating this year’s PinG Series. I’ve always admired the series, now in its third season, for recognizing poetry’s vital and ongoing relationship with the visual arts. The four poets I invited to participate this season-Stefani Barber, Mariana Ruiz Firmat, Kostas Anagnopolous, and Anselm Berrigan-share a body of poetry whose restless forms and probing content will, I hope, serve as ideal guides into, and not simply through, the complex spaces of Detroit Disassembled.”
About the Featured Poet of Dec 8:
Mariana Ruiz Firmat
Mariana Ruiz Firmat is a Brooklyn based poet who moved to NYC 12 years ago after riding her bicycle from Oregon to Washington D.C. Though she no longer longer rides ocean to ocean she does attempt to ride her bike on the perilous Brooklyn roads. Since moving to New York Mariana has taught poetry to young people through the Bronx Council of Arts. She has published work in Tool A Magazine, Ixnay, The Boog Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, Fell Swoop and has work forthcoming in Brawling Pigeon. Her chapbook Another Strange Island was published by Open 24hours Press. In 2010 she founded 3 Sad Tigers Press. 3 Sad Tigers Press is a small press that publishes experimental poetry, written primarily by women and people of color. 3 Sad Tigers press has produced three chapbooks and is currently working on the fourth. Mariana is currently on the editorial board of Lungful Magazine. Mariana was a union organizer for 5 years and is currently a Lead Organizer at MoveOn.org. She was the Politics Editor at Clamor magazine for three years. Her non-fiction can be found in Make/Shift Magazine and online on Alternet. She toured with Make/Shift on their East Coast recLAmation tour.
Detroit Disassembled public programs are made possible through support from the Charina Endowment Fund and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Additional funding provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.