CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE

CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE is a free, participatory virtual series (taking place via Zoom) features some of our favorite poets leading intimate, virtual group reading-thinking-and-reading-through workshops, usually on single, “challenging” poems. The poets—neither explicitly teaching nor explaining—serve as expert tour-guides for us to explore each featured poem as a group. Whether already well-versed in the “close reading” of poems or having never been quite sure you’ve been "getting it," CLOSE READINGS IN A VIRTUAL SPACE provides a friendly gathering space for us to take a refreshing deep dive into poetry. Each event lasts about an hour and concludes with a brief reading by our special guest poet.

Danez Smith leads a thinking-and-reading through of Nate Marshall

On Thursday, November 21st, 2024, Danez Smith led a thinking-and-reading-through of “Palindrome” by Nate Marshall, followed by a short reading of their own work

Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Homie, Don’t Call Us Dead, and their most recent collection Bluff. Their work has been awarded the UK’s Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Former co-host of the Webby nominated podcast VS, they live in Minneapolis near their people.

Photographer: Hieu Minh Nguyen

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Lee Ann Brown leads a thinking-and-reading through of Sophia Dahlin

On Thursday, November 7th, 2024, Lee Ann Brown led a thinking-and-reading-through of “Life Stuff” by Sophia Dahlin, followed by a short reading of her own work

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Brown University, where she earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She is the author of Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stephane Bouquet as Autre Archere (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015),  In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She has taught at Brown University, Naropa University, Bard College, and The New School,St. John’s University, among others. Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France, the Howard Foundation and is now the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University.

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Tom Healy leads a thinking-and-reading through of Anne Carson

On Thursday, October 24th, 2024, Tom Healy led a thinking-and-reading-through of “O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love” by Anne Carson, followed by a short reading of his own work

Tom Healy is the author of three books of poems, Velvet, Animal Spirits and What the Right Hand Knows, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. His poems and art writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Boston Review, Yale Review, Salmagundi, The Slowdown and other journals and anthologies. Tom is a trustee of PEN America and the chair of the O, Miami Poetry Festival. He also serves on the boards of The Bass Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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Sarah Giragosian leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Reginald Shepherd,

On Thursday, October 10th, 2024, Sarah Giragosian led a thinking-and-reading-through of “A Brief Manual for Swimmers” by Reginald Shepherd, followed by a short reading of her own work

Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press published the craft anthology Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited. In 2024, Middle Creek Press released Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize.  Sarah's writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.

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Deborah Meadows leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Rosmarie Waldrop

On Thursday, September 26th, 2024, Deborah Meadows led a thinking-and-reading-through of “Conversation 23: On Cause” by Rosmarie Waldrop, followed by a short reading of her own work

Deborah Meadows has a new book of poetry: Bumblebees (Roof Books, 2024) and her other works include: Neo-bedrooms (Shearsman), Lecture Notes, a duration poem in twelve parts (BlazeVOX [books]), The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays (BlazeVOX [books]), Three Plays (BlazeVOX [books]), Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems (Shearsman Books), Saccade Patterns (BlazeVOX [books]), How, the means (Mindmade Books), Depleted Burden Down (Factory School), Goodbye Tissues (Shearsman Press, UK), involutia (Shearsman Press, UK), The Draped Universe (Belladonna* Books), Thin Gloves (Green Integer), Growing Still (Tinfish Press), Representing Absence (Green Integer), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya Press),“The 60’s and 70’s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (Tinfish Press). She is an Emerita faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo.

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Tommye Blount leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Atsuro Riley

On Thursday, May 30th, 2024, Tommye Blount led a thinking-and-reading-through of “O” by Atsuro Riley, followed by a short reading of his own work

Tommye Blount (he/him) is the author of the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press) and the full-length collection of poetry Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books)—which was finalist for: the National Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and others. He is the recipient of commendations, fellowships, and grants from: the Whiting Foundation, Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kresge Arts in Detroit, and the Aninstantia Foundation. Just a few miles shy of his hometown in Detroit, Tommye now lives in Novi, Michigan.

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Shira Dentz leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Lyn Hejinian

On Thursday, May 16, 2024, Shira Dentz led a thinking-through of “[A straight rain is rare…]” by Lyn Hejinian followed by a short reading of her own work

Shira Dentz is the author of five books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK Books), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021, and two chapbooks including FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Apartment, Lana Turner, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetrysociety.org, and NPR, and she’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Awards. Her roles have included working as a graphic artist in the music industry, Reviews Editor at Drunken Boat, Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and as an educator. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Utah, and currently works as a Senior Education Specialist at The Research Foundation at SUNY (Albany), and until recently taught in Goddard College's M.F.A. Creative Writing program. More at www.shiradentz.com

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Tan Lin leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Alice Notley

On Thursday, May 2, 2024, Tan Lin led a thinking-through of a section of Descent of Alette by Alice Notley followed by a short reading of his own work.

Tan Lin is the author of over 13 books. He is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Poetry, a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant. 7 Controlled Vocabularies received the Association for American Studies Award for Poetry/Literature. A novel, Our Feelings Were Made by Hand is forthcoming from Coffee House in 2025.

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Bianca Stone leads a thinking-and-reading-through of Larry Levis

On Thursday, April 18, 2024, Ron Silliman led a thinking-through of "Ghazal" by Larry Levis followed by a short reading of her own work.

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House (501c3) where she is editor-at-large for Iterant magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.

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t. liem led a thinking-and-reading-through of Sawako Nakayasu

On Thursday, March 24, 2024 at 3–4pm (ET)— t. liem led a thinking-through of “Morning Song” by Sawako Nakayasu followed by a short reading of their own work.

t. liem is the author of Slows: Twice (Coach House 2023), and Obits. (Coach House, 2018), which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as well as the A.M. Klein Prize. Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. They live in Montreal, Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.

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Rachelle Rahmé led a thinking-and-reading-through of John Ashbery

On Thursday, February 8th, 2024 at 3–4pm (ET)—Rachelle Rahmé led a thinking-and-reading-through of John Ashbery’s "Sleeping in the Corners of Our Lives" followed by a short reading of her own work.

Rachelle Rahmé is a Lebanese-American scholar interested in collaborative liberation methodologies. She was the recipient of the Poetry Project's 2021-2022 ESB Fellowship, and her poems and translations have been published in Fonograf, Fieldnotes, the tiny, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. Rahmé holds a Masters in Philosophy from NSSR. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Literary Arts at Brown University.

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Funto Omojolla led a thinking-and-reading-through of Myung Mi Kim

On Thursday, February 8th, 2024 at 3–4pm (ET)—Funto Omojola led a thinking-and-reading-through of Myung Mi Kim's "[accumulation of land]," followed by a short reading of their own work.

Funto Omojola is a poet, performer, and visual artist. They have done projects with the Poetry Project, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and their work has been supported by A.I.R Gallery, Cave Canem Foundation, MASS MoCA and Millay Arts. Omojola’s first book is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2024. They live in New York.

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Mark Wunderlich led a thinking-and-reading-through of Diane Seuss

On Thursday, January 25th, 3–4pm (ET)—Mark Wunderlich. led a thinking-and-reading-through of Diane Seuss’ "Young Hare”, followed by a short reading of his own work.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, published by Graywolf Press. His other books include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and elsewhere, and his work has been widely anthologized. He is Executive Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program and lives in Catskill, New York.

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Installations & Exhibitions

Flow Chart Space

The Flow Chart Space (348 Warren Street, Hudson, NY) features artwork at play with language, writing, and reading—more information on exhibitions can be found here.

March 2024 – April 2024: “if recopying is to author”

New Paintings, Fabric Works, and Books by Jill Magi

Exhibition viewing on Saturdays March through April, 11am – 5pm

“if recopying is to author” presents new paintings, fabric works, and books by Jill Magi. “If recopying is to author” is a line from artist/poet Jill Magi’s poetry collection, SPEECH (Nightboat 2019). It also reveals the poetics underpinning the exhibited sequence of paintings, embroideries, hand-weavings, and handmade books. In both her poetry and visual work, Magi’s method is to copy and recopy, juxtapose, and enjamb. This revives the western pre-modern definition of writer as scribe and text as a drawn line that moves, where what’s centered is the physical endurance of writing a page to be read aloud, communally, and presented as a field to wander through rather than a map with a fixed arrival point. In her studio practice, Magi also copies and recopies physical gestures, moving them from one medium to another. For example, a mark made via action painting becomes a pattern for an embroidery; the checkered grid of strip-weaving becomes a template for hand-lettered banners; a bound book gathers handmade weavings rather than paper pages. Presented together, the works—seemingly endlessly citational—foster and celebrate “textility,” a disposition where concerting with materials, words, and humans is privileged over adhering to blueprints, genre boundaries, and pre-set messaging. To this end, Magi will preside in the space for a number of Saturdays (all but March 16th), copying and recopying the texts of others, including John Ashbery, as well as other guest poets (stay tuned for announcements!) who will join Magi in the space, resulting in a new fabric work whose form will invite disruption and emerge over the course of late winter into spring.The exhibition opened on Saturday, March 2nd with a special reading by Jill Magi with poet and Nightboat Books publisher Stephen Motika at 3pm. Video can be found below under “Readings and Performances”

The exhibition opened on Saturday, March 2nd with a special reading by Jill Magi with poet and Nightboat Books publisher Stephen Motika at 3pm.

Jill Magi is a poet and artist based in southern Vermont after eleven years living in and learning from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. She has had solo exhibitions at Abu Dhabi’s 421 gallery (formerly known as Warehouse421), Grey Noise gallery in Dubai, Tashkeel in Dubai, the Southern Vermont Arts Center, and the New York University Project Space in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of six full-length books of poetry, and her handmade books are collected by the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection. Jill has held residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center, and her visual work is in the permanent collection of Art Jameel and in private collections in Boston, New York, Kentucky, and elsewhere. For ten years she ran Sona Books, a community-based chapbook press, and she is a co-founder of JARA Collective, an Emirates-based publishing project. For her work in publishing, she was named as among the most inspiring authors in the world by Poets & Writers magazine. A dedicated educator, Jill has taught writing, art, cultural studies, and theory for over twenty-five years at public and private universities, small liberal arts colleges, and art schools. She is currently at work on a dissertation at the European Graduate School: a poetics that reframes “literature” and “experimental poetry” via textile practices, specifically, and via textility, more broadly.

Stephen Motika is the author of the book of poems, Western Practice, and the chapbooks Arrival and at Mono, In the Madrones, and Private Archive. He is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman and coeditor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday. His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, the Brooklyn Review, the Constant Critic, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, and Vanitas, among other publications. He has held residencies at the Lannan Foundation, Marfa, TX; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace; Millay Colony for the Arts; and ZK/U in Berlin, and taught at the Indiana University Writers Conference, Lehman College of the City University of New York, Naropa University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the director and publisher of Nightboat Books.

OF THE SIGN: Paintings/Artists Books/Provocations by Marjorie Welish

November 2023–January 2024

This exhibition—“Of the Sign”—featured the work of artist and poet Marjorie Welish, including selections from an ongoing series of diagrammatic works that address the questions: “Can the sign of barrier tape be an actual prohibition that shifts to that of permission? What is the semiotic of this undoing and remaking?” The show also included artist books and a set of “provocations” created for the exhibition. A video of an event featuring Welish in conversation and in performance with musician David Grubbs can be found in the 2023 Events Archive.

Readings & Performances

Sonic Meditations, featuring Ghost Ensemble

Friday, November 22nd, Flow Chart Space

On Friday, November 23rd, 2024, The Flow Chart Foundation presented members of Ghost Ensemble—Margaret Lancaster (flute), Ben Richter (accordion), Chris Nappi (percussion), and James Ilgenfritz (contrabass)—along with special guests Jeffrey Lependorf (shakuhachi) and David Rothenberg (birbynė & bass clarinet) in a music program rooted in the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros.

The program included:

• Three Paths to Animal Music — David Rothenberg

• Laramidia — Ben Richter

• Outline — Pauline Oliveros

• Hudson Air (Arctic Air) — Pauline Oliveros

Note that the final work was only partially recorded.

Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is its primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has performed over 100 works and commissioned dozens of new compositions by a diverse range of highly original composers who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often draws from contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, environmental sound art, and territories in between. Ghost Ensemble has also maintained close engagement with the work of ensemble mentor Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening practice, collaborating on events including the release concert for her Anthology of Text Scores at Eyebeam (2013) and releasing premiere recordings of Angels and Demons (2018) and Mountain Air (2021). Critics have praised Ghost Ensemble performances as “prodigious … a thrilling listen” (Christian Carey, Sequenza21), “wonderful work … both exhilarating and a bit scary” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily), “beautifully performed and recorded … a body-felt sound mass … a multifaceted texture that evokes the primeval” (Meg Wilhoite, Sound Meets Sound), and “cloudy, mysterious, and dark … Beckettian in its slow spread … certainly a group to keep an eye on” (Brian Olewnick, Just Outside). The group's newest album, ensemble director Ben Richter's Rewild, was released October 2024 on New World Records.

IF I GATHER HERE AND SHOUT: Funto Omojola & Samiya Bashir

Saturday, November 16th, Flow Chart Space

On Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at 5pm in The Flow Chart Foundation's Flow Chart Space, we celebrated the publication of IF I GATHER HERE AND SHOUT (Nightboat Books) by Funto Omojola with readings and a discussion by Funto and Samiya Bashir.

Samiya Bashir is a multi-media poet, writer, librettist, and artist whose solo and collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, exhibited, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Bashir lives in Harlem, NYC.

Funto Omojola is a Nigerian-American poet and artist based in New York State. They’ve received fellowships from MacDowell, the Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Arts, and the Poetry Project, among others and their work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pigeon Pages, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. If I Gather Here and Shout is their first book.

CONTEXT COLLAPSE: with Ryan Ruby & Bianca Stone

Saturday, November 13th, Flow Chart Space

On Saturday, November 13th at 6:30pm in The Flow Chart Foundation's Flow Chart Space, we celebrated the publication of CONTEXT COLLAPSE (Seven Stories Press) by Ryan Ruby with a reading a discussion by Ruby and Bianca Stone on poetry, history, and legacy.

Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His debut novel The Zero and the One (Twelve Books 2017) subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse (Seven Stories 2024), a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux. He is the recipient of the 2023 Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and the 2019 Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers' Workshop and has been an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House, where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.

COWBOY NOCTURNE: a concert on the Ashbery piano

Saturday, September 21, Flow Chart Space

On Saturday, September 21 at 7pm in Flow Chart Space, we presented an evening of music by Robert Savage & Robert Schumann—including works composed on John Ashbery’s piano—performed by Daniel Baer, with a talk and poetry reading by Dylan Zavagno.

Note, this video does not include the Schumann performance, but a complete audio recording can be heard here

The New York Times has hailed Daniel Baer as a pianist who plays with “fluidity, warmth, and sparkle” who “achieved the often elusive…goal of putting virtuosity at the service of bigger ideas.” Daniel Baer is an active music educator and performing artist throughout the United States. He was the artist-pianist for the 2020-2021 LYNX Project, premiering new compositions for voice and piano and recording songs for an anthology celebrating four years of its autism advocacy series. He has also served as the Music Director for Queer Poem-a-Day, a poetry podcast for pride month hosted by the Deerfield Public Library. Daniel earned his Masters of Music from the Juilliard School and his Doctorate from the Eastman School of Music. He is currently the on faculty at Illinois State University and the Music Institute of Chicago where also he directs the Chamber Music Program.

Dylan Zavagno is a writer and humanities educator and he works at the Deerfield Public Library as the Adult Services Coordinator. Dylan hosts award-winning conversations with authors, artists, and academics on the Deerfield Public Library Podcast and is the co-founder, in 2021, of Queer Poem-a-Day, a daily poetry podcast and program series that runs each June. In 2019, he led the program series The Fight to Integrate Deerfield: 60 Year Reflection, which won the prestigious John Cotton Dana Library Public Relations Award from the American Library Association. Dylan lives in Chicago with his husband, pianist Daniel Baer.

Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema: A Night of Neo-Benshi 2024

Friday, September 30th, Hudson Hall

We again joined forces with Hudson Hall in Hudson, NY on Friday, August 29th, 2024 for our annual "Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema: A Night of Neo-Benshi."

This year, Charles Bernstein, Samantha Hunt, Paolo Javier, Dorothea Lasky, Kamikaze Jones, Jeffrey Lependorf, and Dawn Lundy Martin offered newfangled poets theatre re-imaginings of clips from films.

The Lineup (in alpha order):
Charles Bernstein—It Happened One Night
Samantha Hunt—Eyes Without a Face
Paolo Javier—Monty & Turtle (Be Kind Rewind)
Dorothea Lasky—The Shining
Jeffrey Lependorf—Edward Scissorhands
Kamikaze Jones—Can’t Stop the Music
Dawn Lundy Martin—Get Christie Love

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS: Dawn Lundy Martin & Ariana Reines

Saturday, July 13th, Flow Chart Space

On the occasion of INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS being published by Nightboat Books, poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Ariana Reines presented a discussion and poetry reading in The Flow Chart Foundation’s Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY on Saturday, July 13th, 2024.

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. The author of five books of poems—Good Stock Strange Blood (2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry); DISCIPLINE; A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering; and Instructions for The Lovers—her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was a 2022 USArtist Fellow, inaugural Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, and founding Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Currently, she is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Ariana Reines is the author of A Sand Book, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize in 2020, Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize in 2006. Her Obie-winning play "Telephone" was produced by the Foundry Theatre in 2009 and has been translated into Norwegian, Turkish, and French. Reines translated TIQQUN's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl and Jean-Luc Hennig's Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal, both for Semiotext(e), and wrote extensively for Artforum in its earlier incarnation. She has taught poetry and art as Mary Routt Chair in Creative Writing at Scripps College, Holloway Lecturer at UC Berkeley, as a visiting critic at Yale, and in community workshops at The Poetry Project and Poets House. In 2020, while she was a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines founded Invisible College, a lab for the study of poetry and the sacred. Wave of Blood, an auto-epistolary essay in poetry and talks, is forthcoming from Divided Publishing this fall, and The Rose, a new book of poems, will be out from Graywolf in April 2025.

THE INTIMACY: a first person plural performance by Kate Kremer

Saturday, June 29th, Flow Chart Space

On Saturday, June 29th, 2024, Kate Kremer performed THE INTIMACY, a “first person plural performance” at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY.

Kate Kremer is an interdisciplinary artist, playwright, and publisher whose work is characterized by a commitment to strategies of autobiography, collaboration, and bricolage. Frequently using archives as sites for addressing the ways that our ethics, feelings, and intimacies are conditioned by the systems that we live and love within, her work has been described by Mac Wellman as “way ahead of the curve.” Kate’s plays have been produced at JACK in Brooklyn, the Public Theater, Dixon Place, SFX Fest, the Motor Company, the Wild Project, Brooklyn College, and Stagefemmes. Charlatans was selected for the Bushwick Starr Reading Series and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. She has been a finalist for the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Award, shortlisted for the Tom LaFarge Award and the Leslie Scalapino Award, and received an honorable mention for the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers. Her performance installation uncollected trash collection premiered at the Figge Art Museum in Iowa and was published in 2022 by 53rd State Press. She received her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She is the editor of the experimental play publishing organization 53rd State Press and currently teaches playwriting at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.

Anne Waldman + Gerard Malanga—conversation and poetry

Saturday, May 5th, Second Ward Foundation

On May 4th, 2024, The Flow Chart Foundation, in collaboration with Second Ward Foundation, presented poets Anne Waldman and Gerard Malanga in conversation and reading their work.

Archived audio livestream from WGXC/Wave Farm.

Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineages of the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. But has raised the bar as a feminist, activist and powerful performer. She has read in the streets as well as numerous larger venues such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the USA and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, the T.S. Eliot Memorial Foundation at Harvard University, and continues to teach poetics all over the world. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is prophetic, multidisciplinary, energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times.

She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with—Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima—the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere. She is the author of more than 60 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco; a new collection of essays, interviews, letters, and poems entitled Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023); as well as her classic, Vow to Poetry. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Manatee/Humanity, Marriage: A Sentence, and Trickster Feminism.

Recent publications include Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish, (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021), New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, co-edited with Emma Gomis (Nightboat, 2022), and The Velvet Wire with No Land (Granary Books, Forthcoming 2024).For more info: annewaldman.org / naropa.edu

Gerard Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, and archivist. He worked closely with Andy Warhol from 1963-70, helping Warhol create his most important paintings, publications, and films. In 1969 they co-founded Interview magazine, and it was during this time that Malanga again started taking pictures. The New York Times called him “Andy Warhol’s most important associate.”

Malanga appeared as a “superstar” in dozens of Warhol classics including Vinyl, Bitch!, and Camp, which coincided with his own movies like Andy Warhol, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (1964–65) In Search of the Miraculous (1967), and Preraphaelite Dream (1968). His photographs have appeared in countless books and magazines, including the New York Review of Books, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Lid, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among others.

Two full-length books of Malanga’s photography have been published: Resistance to Memory (Arena Editions, 1998) with a preface by Ben Maddow, and Screen Tests Portraits Nudes 1964-1996 (Steidl, 2003). He also compiled the first photographic study of voyeurism, Scopophilia: The Love of Looking (Alfred Van Der Marck Editions, 1985).

Malanga’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Raritan, Yale Review, Harvard Review, Southwest Review, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker. He is the author of 14 books of poetry spanning a 50-year period, including Cool & Other Poems (2019) and The New Mélancholia & Other Poems (2021). A new collection, Odie Is Being Called Back & Other Poems is forthcoming from Bottle of Smoke Press in 2024.

Gerard Malanga’s Secret Cinema, a monograph documenting his movies and notes on film, is forthcoming from the Waverly Press in 2024. Malanga recently completed his memoirs, In Remembrance of Things Past.

In 2023, the Republic of France by an Order of Decree through the Ministry of Culture awarded Malanga the Chevalier of Arts and Letters, in recognition of his lifelong contributions to poetry and photography. For more info: gerardmalangaofficial.com

Jill Magi and Stephen Motika—“if recopying is to author” Exhibition Launch

Saturday, March 2nd, Flow Chart Space

On Saturday, March 2nd, Jill Magi and legendary poet/publisher of Nightboat Books, Stephen Motika, had a conversation the occasion of “if recopying is to author” New Paintings, Fabric Works, and Books by Jill Magi at the Flow Chart Space.

Jill Magi is a poet and artist based in southern Vermont after eleven years living in and learning from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. She has had solo exhibitions at Abu Dhabi’s 421 gallery (formerly known as Warehouse421), Grey Noise gallery in Dubai, Tashkeel in Dubai, the Southern Vermont Arts Center, and the New York University Project Space in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of six full-length books of poetry, and her handmade books are collected by the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection. Jill has held residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center, and her visual work is in the permanent collection of Art Jameel and in private collections in Boston, New York, Kentucky, and elsewhere. For ten years she ran Sona Books, a community-based chapbook press, and she is a co-founder of JARA Collective, an Emirates-based publishing project. For her work in publishing, she was named as among the most inspiring authors in the world by Poets & Writers magazine. A dedicated educator, Jill has taught writing, art, cultural studies, and theory for over twenty-five years at public and private universities, small liberal arts colleges, and art schools. She is currently at work on a dissertation at the European Graduate School: a poetics that reframes “literature” and “experimental poetry” via textile practices, specifically, and via textility, more broadly.

Stephen Motika is the author of the book of poems, Western Practice, and the chapbooks Arrival and at Mono, In the Madrones, and Private Archive. He is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman and coeditor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday. His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, the Brooklyn Review, the Constant Critic, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, and Vanitas, among other publications. He has held residencies at the Lannan Foundation, Marfa, TX; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace; Millay Colony for the Arts; and ZK/U in Berlin, and taught at the Indiana University Writers Conference, Lehman College of the City University of New York, Naropa University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the director and publisher of Nightboat Books.

January at the U.S. Capitol: Mark Nowak & Stacy Szymaszek

Friday, January 12th, Flow Chart Space

This event featured Stacy Szymaszek presenting a talk on birds of prey—along with images of her drawings—as a prelude to Mark Nowak reading from “Winter,” an abcedarian poem confronting the January 6th insurrection, which features a great number of birds of prey throughout the text. The reading was following by a conversation between Mark and Stacy.

Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School (https://www.instagram.com/workerwritersschool/).

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Her most recent chapbook, Three Novenas, was published by auric books in 2022. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007-2018 she was the Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. She currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School (https://www.instagram.com/workerwritersschool/).

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Her most recent chapbook, Three Novenas, was published by auric books in 2022. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007-2018 she was the Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. She currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Discussions & Gatherings

LE LIVRE ET SUR LE TABLE: Challenges of Translating Poetry

Sunday, September 8th, Flow Chart Space

On Sunday, September 8th at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY, The Flow Chart Foundation, in collaboration with Words Without Borders and Art Omi: Writers, presented four exceptional translators of poetry—Kathleen Heil (translating from German, John Keene (translating from Portuguese), Yolande Schutter (translating from French), and Yasmine Seale (translating from Arabic)—reading poetry translations in multiple languages, and discussing the art form, moderated by translator Eric M.B Becker, the Digital Director and Senior Editor from Words Without Borders.

Eric M.B. Becker is a writer and literary translator, as well as digital director and senior editor of Words Without Borders. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the NEA, Fulbright Commission, and Louis Armstrong House Museum, he earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of a collection of short stories from the Portuguese by Neustadt Prize for International Literature and 2015 Man Booker International Finalist Mia Couto. He has published translations of numerous writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Literary Hub, Freeman’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications.

Kathleen Heil is a writer/translator and choreographer/performer originally from New Orleans living in Berlin since 2015. She is the translator of The Loveliest Vowel Empties, Meret Oppenheim’s collected poems (World Poetry Books, 2023), and the recipient of grants for her work as a literary translator from the National Endowment for the Arts, Berlin Senate, and German Translators’ Fund. Her translations also appear in The New Yorker, BOMB, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Her debut poetry collection will be published by Moist Books in the UK later this year.

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015), both published by New Directions. Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

Yolande Schutter recently completed her PhD at the University at Albany with a focus on postcolonial Algerian poetry and translation. Her poetry and her translations have been featured in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, Eleven Eleven, Rattapallax, and CELAAN Revue du Centre d’Études des Littératures et des Arts d’Afrique du Nord. She was co-Editor of the University of Oxford book Marivaudage: théories et pratiques d’un discours. She is currently teaching creative writing.

Yasmine Seale's work includes poetry, translation, criticism and visual art. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books, 2023). She is the co-author of Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022). She has held fellowships at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She currently teaches at Columbia University.

Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings of Dick Higgins

Thursday, August 15h, Zoom

On the occasion of ALCHEMIES OF THEATER: PLAYS, SCORES, WRITINGS by Dick Higgins, edited by Bonnie Marranca (University of Michigan Press, 2024) being published, Bonnie was joined by Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Jessica Higgins, and George Quasha, moderated Jeffrey Lependorf, to present readings from and images from the book and discuss the work of the protean Dick Higgins, publisher of Something Else Press, a founder of Fluxus, and a remarkable contributor to avant-garde theater and performance.

[L–to–R, top–bottom: Alchemies of Theater, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, Bonnie Marranca, Jessica Higgins, and George Quasha]

Susan Bee is an artist living in Brooklyn and Valatie, NY. “Susan Bee, Eye of the Storm: Selected Works 1981-2023,” curated by Johanna Drucker, will be at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA from Aug. 23-Nov. 17, 2024. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-length catalog. She is represented by A.I.R. Gallery in NYC. Bee has published eighteen artist’s books. She has collaborated with: Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee’s artwork is in many public and private collections and has been widely reviewed. Bee was the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G from 1986-2016. Her archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive are at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. She has a BA from Barnard College and a MA in Art from Hunter College. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014.

Charles Bernstein first met Dick Higgins in the mid-1970s. Bernstein is the author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (Chicago, 2024), Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, April 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016), along with dozens of other books. Coming in November from Chicago: The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies.

Jessica Higgins, b. 1964, is an American artist living and working in New York. She took formative dance studies at Juilliard and Joffrey schools of dance, later joining the dance company of Elaine Summers. She is the twin daughter of Fluxus Founders Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles. Jessicahas direct experiential knowledge of Fluxus, having early formation in that culture performing with its original members and by direct participation in historic Fluxus events. She is a member of The International Artists Museum, a correspondent for Artist Organized Art and the former Creative Director of SWITCH a nationally syndicated, artist produced, local access television series of performance and intermedia out of Western Massachusetts. As an intermedia artist, improvisational dancer, performance and visual artist with a B.A. from SUNY who also attended The Art Students League and Parsons School of Design, her works and performances have exhibited in numerous countries, galleries, site specific venues, major museums, and in traditional and online media.

Bonnie Marranca is publisher and editor of the Obie Award-winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art which she co-founded in 1976. She has written four collections of criticism: Timelines: writings and conversations, Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Among the many anthologies she has edited are: New Europe: plays from the continent, Plays for the End of the Century; American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard; and The Theatre of Images, one of the seminal books of contemporary theatre. Her writings have been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, has taught at universities here and abroad, and is Professor Emerita of Theatre at The New School/Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts.

Poet and artist George Quasha’s most recent of seven books of his ongoing serial poietic work of “preverbs” include Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole (2020), Waking from Myself (2022) and the forthcoming Hearing Other. Three essays in the poetics of thinking appear in Poetry in Principle (foreword Edward Casey, 2019), and his art in Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (2006). A Guggenheim Fellow in video art, he received the T-Space 10th annual Poetry Award (2022). His work is discussed by sixteen writers in Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha’s Axial Art (ed. Burt Kimmelman, foreword Jerome McGann). With Susan Quasha he is co-founder and -publisher of Station Hill Press.

I Remember Joe Brainard: a gathering

Saturday, May 18th, Flow Chart Space

On the occasion of 30 years since his passing, The Flow Chart Foundation, in collaboration with the Network for New York School Studies presented a daylong Gathering celebrating the legacy of New York School artist and writer Joe Brainard. It featured talks, readings, screenings, participatory events, and fun designed to engage all by welcoming us into the world of this joyously generative and collaborative artist.

For more information and to watch videos for the day click HERE!

Bios

Rona Cran is a London-based writer and scholar. They are the author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture (2014) and I Remember Kim (2023), and the founding co-director of the Network for New York School Studies. Books in progress include an oral history of the New York School of poets, a study of everyday rebellion, dissident reading, and alternate worldbuilding in New York poetry, and a poetic history of sharks. They are Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham.

Tyhe Cooper is a writer working in experimental prose and poetry. Their work has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. They are the Production Editor and a poetry events curator at the Brooklyn Rail, and the co-editor and co-creator of Leak magazine, with Erin Pérez. 

Paolo Javier is the author of O.B.B. (Nightboat Books, 2021) and a recent book of paraliterary and hybrid poems, True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside (Roof Books, 2022), and has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason). He is the recipient of grants from the Rauschenberg Foundation, NYFA, Queens Council on the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts, Javier was a featured artist in Greater New York 2015, and in Queens International 2018: Volumes. He lives with his family in Jackson Heights, Queens. 

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry is Door (Penguin Poets, 2023). A recipient of numerous awards, her work has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. She is Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Jeffrey Lependorf is the Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation.

Betsy Porritt is a poet and literary scholar from Devon. She currently teaches interdisciplinary theory and practice at the University of Birmingham. Her poems, collages, and sound works are online and in a wide variety of print journals. She has a pamphlet of poetry with Guillemot Press and a cowritten chapter coming out in a Routledge collection in which she discusses, with Dr. Declan Wiffen, the possibilities of teaching the anecdote as a space of queer, feminist refusal.

Lucy Sante is a Belgium-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991) and Call I Hear Her Call My Name: a Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press, 2024). She was publicly named Luc Sante until 2021, when she announced her transition.

Matt Wolf is a filmmaker in New York. His feature documentaries include Wild Combination about the musician Arthur Russell, Teenage about the birth of youth culture, Recorder about the activist Marion Stokes, who recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years, and Spaceship Earth about Biosphere 2, a controversial experiment where 8 people lived quarantined inside a miniature replica of the planet. The Criterion Channel is currently presenting a survey of Matt’s films, and he is finishing a multi-part film for HBO about Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman.

John Yau three most recent books include: Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal (Rizzoli, 2022); Tell It Slant (Omnidawn, 2023); John Pai: Liquid Steel (Rizzoli (2023). An exhibition, Disguise the Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations, opened at the art museum of the University of Kentucky in Lexington in January 2024, curated by Stuart Horodner.

Creating the Collection: Treasures & Stories from the Ashbery Resource Center

Saturday, May 11th, Flow Chart Space

A panel discussion on the Ashbery Resrouce Center exhibition at The Flow Chart Foundation's Flow Chart Space, featuring a conversation between three Flow Chart Foundation trustees: Ashbery Estate Executor and bibliographer David Kermani and poets (as well as close Ashbery friends) Dara Barrois/Dixon and Eugene Richie, moderated by Archivist Nina Boutsikaris.

David Kermani was born in Albany, NY in 1946. An Iranian-American, he received a BA from Brown University (American Civilization), and an MA (Middle East Languages and Cultures) and MLS (specializing in archival management) from Columbia University. He was Director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York from 1977 until 1982, when he joined his family’s oriental rug business in upstate NY. Soon after meeting John Ashbery in 1970, he began work on a comprehensive bibliography of Ashbery’s work, including his writing about art, which was published in 1976; he has managed Ashbery’s business affairs for many years. He has been on the Board of Friends of Olana (now The Olana Partnership), serving as Treasurer, Vice-President, and President. Along with Dara Wier, James Tate and Ashbery, he was a founding member of The Flow Chart Foundation in 1998, helping to develop the Ashbery Resource Center and its online catalogue as a continuation of the earlier bibliography, and the “Created Spaces” concept. [Board member since 1998]

Dara Barroir/Dixon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised south of New Orleans in Naomi, Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Her thirteen books include the In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, and Reverse Rapture, awarded The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives Book Award in 2006. Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council and Lannan Foundation Fellowship have supported her work. Her poems are included in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Limited editions include (X In Fix) and The Usual Ratio Between Banality and Wonder in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm series. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke: The Author’s Annotations, Commentary, and Note of Reference for a Millennium’s Teardrop. She's held the Richard Hugo Chair at the University of Montana, and The Louis Rubin Chair at Hollins University and been a poet-in-residence at University of Texas, Emory University and the University of Utah; she served as the Associated Writing Program's President in the early 1980s. She is a member of the University of Massachusetts Amherst poetry faculty, director and co-founder of the Juniper Initiative for literary arts and action and the Juniper Summer Institute and Workshops, editor and publisher of factory hollow press and publisher of the literary journal jubilat, she lives and works in North Amherst, Massachusetts. [Board member since 1998]

A cofounder, with the poet Rosanne Wasserman, of the nonprofit Groundwater Press, Eugene Richie is Director of Creative Writing in the Pace University English Department, in New York. He has published five collections of poems and three books of translations, as well as articles and reviews, on translation and on the work of various poets. He has edited Ashbery’s Selected Prose (University of Michigan Press / Carcanet, 2004) and, with Wasserman and Olivier Brossard, three bilingual collections of Pierre Martory’s poems, translated by Ashbery: The Landscape Is behind the Door (Groundwater, 1990); Oh, Lake / Oh, lac (Artery Editions, 2008); and The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow / Carcanet, 2008), a London Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and a National Book Critics Circle Award poetry finalist. With Wasserman, he also edited Ashbery’s Collected French Translations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Carcanet, 2014), a London Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and a finalist for the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. [Board member since 1998]

Nina Boutsikaris is a creative writer and archivist who earned her MSLS in Archival Management at Simmons University. She is the author of the memoir I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych, winner of the 2021 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Her essays have been published in numerous literary magazines, anthologized in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Fiction, and twice named Notable Essays by the Best American Essays series. She has taught at The University of Arizona, The New School, Catapult, and Gotham Writers Workshop. As an archivist she is interested in helping to facilitate "archive Interventions," or relationships between the arts, lives, and the archives.

MODERN POETRY: Diane Seuss reading and in conversation with Jeffrey Shotts

Tuesday, March 19th, Zoom

On Tuesday, March 19th, we presented poet Diane Seuss on the occasion of her newest collection, MODERN POETRY, reading and in conversation with Graywolf Press poetry editor Jeffrey Shotts.

This event was made possible by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and through support from Friends of The Flow Chart Foundation.

Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Voelcker Prize, and a finalist for the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan. Photo credit: Gabrielle Montesanti

Jeffrey Shotts joined Graywolf in June 1996. He completed an M.F.A. in Poetry at Washington University in Saint Louis and rejoined Graywolf in 2002. He is currently a Poetry Editor for Post Road and is on the advisory boards of the Literary Arts Institute at the College of Saint Benedict, and a national advisory board member of Essay Press and Whit Press. He has served as an adviser and on informational panels for the Bush, MacArthur, Poetry, and Vilcek Foundations, as well as the Minnesota State Arts Board. A published poet, essayist and critic, Shotts has taught or lectured on poetry and editing at a variety of colleges and universities across the country.

BUNNY! Poetry of V. R. "Bunny" Lang—a reading and discussion

Thursday, March 12th, Zoom

In recognition of the Violet Ranney "Bunny" Lang (1924–1956) Centennial, and the publication of The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems of V.R. "Bunny Lang," edited and with an introduction by Rosa Campbell (Carcanet, 2024), we invited writer/scholar Rosa Campbell will read from the collection and be joined in conversation by poet/writer Alexa Winik.

This event welcomed us to (re-)discover and discuss an important and too long overlooked figure of the New York School, a founder of Cambridge's The Poets Theatre, an accomplished playwright, and a poet.

Rosa Campbell lives in Edinburgh, and is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where she also teaches modern and contemporary literature. Her poetry has appeared in various places, including Oxford Poetry, fourteen poems, Perverse, Ambit, Gutter and SPAM. Her first book, Pothos, a memoir-ish lyric essay about grief and houseplants, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. She tweets as @rosaetc.

Alexa Winik (she/her) is a Canadian-born poet and writer living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of the chapbook Close River (Magma) and her poetry and essays can be found in various places, including The Ampersand Review, The Awst Press, The Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, Gutter, and Footprints: an anthology of new ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books). In 2020, her hybrid sequence 'Winter Stars Visible in December' won the 2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award in Poetry, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada.

Auctions & Galas