Poets in the Galleries: Anselm Berrigan Responds to Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore
Thursday, December 29, 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 pm, 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 A small publication for the series will be created, in which each of the poets present a new or previously unpublished work that addresses the themes of Detroit Disassembled, and which we will make available to gallery visitors.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 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 29:
Anselm Berrigan
Anselm Berrigan is the author of five books of poetry: Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is the current poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). He has collaborated with musician David First, visual artist Kiki Smith, and poet John Coletti on various projects, and is a member of the subpress publishing collective, through which he published Selected Poems of Steve Carey (2009) and Your Ancient See Through by Hoa Nguyen (2002). From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and also currently teaches writing at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received two grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City.
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.