Poets in the Galleries: Kostas Anagnopoulos Responds to Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore
Thursday, December 15, 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 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 take place on consecutive Thursday evenings (except Dec 22). A complimentary cocktail hour at 6:00pm is 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 A small publication for the series is available to visitors, in which each of the poets present a new or previously unpublished work that addresses the themes of Detroit Disassembled.
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 Amir 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 to Prerana Reddy and QMA for the honor to curate 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 15:
Kostas Anagnopoulos
Kostas Anagnopoulos is the founding editor of Insurance Editions, and his chapbooks include Daydream, Irritant, and Various Sex Acts. Moving Blanket, his first full-length book was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. His new chapbook, Some of My Reasons, is forthcoming from Insurance. Kostas was born and raised in Chicago, and he now lives in Queens, New York where we he works a salesman and is the style director for Aesthetic Movement, a design firm and showroom.
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.