Bill Hayward sends along this link and photos from The Port Authority, where poets Jeff Johnson and Claire Donato are live blogging poetry every day during the performance's 10-day run. Check it out!
Continue reading "This Just In . . . Live blogging from Bill Hayward's Intimacy Project" »
I hadn't planned to go anywhere in New York. It was Sunday, September 27th. Monday was Yom Kippur and the city was quiet. I decided to walk downtown with my new camera and photograph whatever I saw, and since I like to photograph people, I headed for Broadway. I had been in hiding during the summer, swimming every day in a lake near Sag Harbor and reading thick biographies by the lakeside. I decided to replace swimming with walking, and my dog-eared copies of James Atlas' Bellow and Deirdre Bair's Jung with a camera. I got hungry and found a Chinese eatery in SoHo where I photographed a gorgeous couple having coffee at the table behind me, and then was drawn to a nearby art gallery.
The exhibit on view was tiny and consisted of black and white photos of Russia in the l960s. Much to my surprise, I found myself looking at the work of one of Joseph Brodsky's closest friends, the photographer Lev Poliakov, who had taken the last picture of Joseph in Leningrad on the morning before he went into exile in l972. Joseph had written the introduction to one of Lev's books of photos: Russia, A Portrait. His essay, "In Praise of Grey," contains this beautiful passage: "For grey is the color of time and time's wardrobe here knows very few changes."
Poliakov's photographs were in the
old-fashioned 8" by l0" size and depicted, in a 50-millimeter
straight-on lens-way, ordinary scenes of people: in an alley in a small town,
with farm supplies on roads between farm fields, or gazing out of windows. It
was up to the viewer to slowly comprehend what these scenes revealed, a harsh
yet dignified survival or maybe, more accurately, a survival without the
ability to compare itself to other survivals, a locked-in life, a given.
Brodsky's essay continues: "A great mistake for a photographer is to bring
his color film here. The net result would be like Turner'd talkies..." I
knew Joseph and remember him telling me that his father wanted to join the navy
but was prevented from doing so by the state because he was Jewish and that he had
worked, upon occasion, as a news photographer.
Clearly, judging from the essay, Brodsky knew the craft. Writing on Poliakov,
he adds: "A quarter of a century ago this photographer himself was part of
the landscape he was depicting, and the material he had at his disposal was
manufactured by this country's equally gray extension: Agfa, in the DDR."
The exhibit included a magnificent 1964 photograph of Anna Akmatova in Kamarovo, printed in 1974 as a silver gelatin print, as well as a wonderful 1981 photograph of Brodsky in Maine. I wanted to photograph the photographs and post them but Andrew C. Sarewitz, the gallery director whose family is from Russia, said I should ask the photographer first and that Poliakov would probably be stopping by soon. While waiting, Andrew mesmerized me with his knowledge of Russian Noncomformist Art. He brought out from storage a small drawing by Boris Sveshnikov, made at the Vetlosian camp, near Ukhta, 1,200 kilometers northeast of Moscow in the "Komi Autonomous Region," a place that sounds eerie and very cold. Rather than lines made by a single sweep of the pen, Sveshnikov, who was an art student before he was sent to Stalin’s gulag at 19, broke his lines into tiny feather-marks so that a scene emerged as if it were almost shaking. Andrew gave me a book: Painting for the Grave: The Early Work of Boris Sveshnikov, (image, right) a catalogue from the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lev Poliakov didn't return to the gallery that afternoon. When I left the Mimi Ferzt gallery I wanted to "see" the streetas Lev Poliakov might had seen what was right before him in 1960s Russia.
Star Black is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Ghostwood. Her photographs are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Her collages have been exhibited in various galleries in New York City and Long Island. She lives in New York City.
The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 featured prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.
The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50. means gesundheit in esperanto.”
David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:
“Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”
John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprised of movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2) Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi
In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.
It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening!
-- Liz Howort
Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft. John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist. Poet Star Black shares these photos:
l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)
Continue reading "The Gala Launch: A Report [by Liz Howort]" »
Mark Doty reading at the gala launch reading
for The Best American Poetry 2009
at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in NYC
September 24, 2009
photo credit: Bill Hayward
From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.
From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.
From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.
From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.
From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.
