These events were funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.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 thinking-and-reading-through workshops on “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.

These events were funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

CLOSE READINGS VIDEO LIBRARY [click to visit]

FALL 2022

Featuring poets E. Ethelbert Miller, Henri Cole, Eleni Sikelianos, Wendy Xu, Laura Moriarty, and Zoe Tuck (pictured left to right, top to bottom, below).

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Featuring poets Kimberly Alidio, Charles Bernstein, Norma Cole, Tonya Foster, Aditi Machado, and Jena Osman (pictured left to right, top to bottom, below).

WINTER 2022

Featuring poets Dorothea Lasky, Stephanie Burt, Tyrone Williams, Major Jackson, Rae Armantrout, and Rodrigo Toscano (pictured left to right, top to bottom, below).

PERFORMANCES

FLOW CHART FÊTE: A holiday open house

On December 11 at 2PM, The Flow Chart Foundation hosted a holiday party featuring treats, cheer, the Ashbery Christmas Tree, and a special music + poetry performance by Volker Goetze, Lokí, and Zach Layton. The performances were live-streamed on on WGXC: Radio for Open Ears.

A NIGHT OF NEO-BENSHI: Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema

On July 30 at 7PM, The Flow Chart Foundation returned to Hudson Hall with a new evening of one-of-a-kind neo-benshi fun. Taking inspiration from early Japanese film interpreters, neo-benshi artists choose scenes from popular films and replace the dialogue with their own unique re-inventions, performed live in front of the screen. From re-imagined classics to new takes on blockbuster movies, it was a singular evening of performance, poetry, and dance, ranging rom the sublime to the ridiculousness.

Featuring Madhur Anand, Bruce Andrews, Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), Jeffrey Lependorf, Sheila Maldonado, Tracie Morris, Sally Silvers, and Wayne Koestenbaum. Watch excerpts of A Night of Neo-Benshi below (note; films/performances by Tracie Morris and Jeffrey Lependorf have not been included).

CLEAN SLATE POETRY SLAM

On November 7th, in collaboration with Hudson Catskill Housing Coalition, we presented an evening of poetry performance in the Flow Chart Space by formerly incarcerated individuals and family members to help raise awareness of the housing challenges faced by formerly incarcerated people who have fully served their time.

DESCRIPTION OF A MASQUE at WATERFRONT WEDNESDAYS

On July 13 at 7PM, John Ashbery’s zany modern fairy tale of life came to life in a mash-up of classical mythology and nursery rhyme characters with a touch of noir film banter thrown in: a masque where anything might happen, just like in life itself. Performed by Shanekia McIntosh, Craig Reardon, and Zoe Tuck (“radio play” arrangement of text by Jeffrey Lependorf).

The performance was preceded by an exhilarating drum circle led by Kuumba Dance & Drum / Operation Unite.

Shanekia McIntosh is a poet and performer. Her interdisciplinary work, inspired by the black diaspora, aims to disrupt and confront historical colonial erasure. Utilizing the thematic palettes of dislocation, trauma, migration, climate crisis and afro-futurism.  Her work has been featured in the New Museum, Second Ward Foundation, Charim Galerie, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, NY Live Arts, ICA at VCU, Basilica Hudson and more, with recent work published in Chronogram, Apogee Journal and The TENTH Magazine. More at ShanekiaMcIntosh.com.

Craig Reardon is a poet and the Librarian & Archivist for The Flow Chart Foundation. He received his MLIS from the State University of New York at Albany, where he is also completing an MA in English Literature with a concentration on modernist poetry. A phi beta kappa scholar, he has presented public poetry lectures and presentations. He also tutors in Latin and Ancient Greek, and leads poetry reading groups. 

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches through the Threshold Academy and hosts “The But Also Reading Series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn. She co-curates Belladonna* Collaborative's Close Distances Reading Series and co-edits Hot Pink Magazine. Zoe is the author of Soft Investigations (Daisy Mayhem Books 2019) and Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light 2014). An excerpt of her epic poem, The Book of Bella, is forthcoming in 2022 from DoubleCross Press. Find out more at zoetuck.com.

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered in Columbia County by the Greene County Council on the Art (dba CREATE Council for the Arts)

DISCUSSIONS & GATHERINGS

A DOUBLE DREAM OF JOHN ASHBERY

On September 16 at 6PM, we hosted a reading, listening and discussion of Something Close to Music: Late Art Writing, Poems, and Playlists by John Ashbery (Zwirner Books), and John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre (LP from Fonograf Editions)

About John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre: In May of 1976, shortly after being awarded the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror—a triple crown which, to this day, only he has—John Ashbery returned to his alma mater, Harvard University, to read new and selected poems. John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976 is forty-seven minutes of poems from Houseboat Days, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and The Double Dream of Spring. The record includes a 16-page liner notes booklet with essays by Douglas Crase, Dara Barrois/Dixon, and John Yau, along with archival material such as photographs of Ashbery’s annotated manuscripts and original artwork by R. B. Kitaj, Larry Rivers, and Ashbery himself. John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976 is the first in a series of archival LPs released by Fonograf Editions in collaboration with Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.

About the Artists:

Dara Barrois/Dixon’s thirteen books include the In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, and Reverse Rapture. Her most recent book is Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina. She was awarded The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives Book Award in 2006, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Lannan Foundation. Her poems are included in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. 

Jeffrey Lependorf serves as Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, an organization that explores the interrelationships of poetry and various art forms as guided by the legacy of John Ashbery. He served formerly as Executive Director to both Small Press Distribution and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. A composer and visual artist, he is also most recently the editor of Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists by John Ashbery (David Zwirner Books).

Mónica de la Torre is a poet and essayist. Her most recent book of poems and translations is Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat). Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse)—a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika—and Public Domain (Roof Books). With Alex Balgiu, she co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information). The recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant, she teaches at Brooklyn College

This event produced in partnership with Hudson Hall.

ASHBERY BIRTHDAY READING AND BOOK LAUNCH FOR SOMETHING CLOSE TO MUSIC

On July 28 at 7PM, we celebrated the release of Something Close to Music and John Ashbery’s birthday with Jeffrey Lependorf and Mónica de la Torre, joined by Lucy Ives, Shiv Kotecha, Emily Skillings, and John Yau. The event was presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, and video live-streamed on PCG Studio.

John Ashbery—Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists, edited by Jeffrey Lependorf, with an introduction by Mónica de la Torre. (Published by David Zwirner Books-ekphraisis series, 2022)

This book places poetry by Ashbery, gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the “playlists” here present samplings of music from these same years, culled from his own library of recordings.

Ashbery’s poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem “based on” or “inspired” by the content of an artwork or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many observations from Ashbery’s art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry. Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases—qualities which are mimicked in his poetry.

In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another. In Mónica de la Torre’s introduction, she explores the connection between the three muses of music, art, and poetry, and the ekphrastic experience of reading Ashbery.

Mónica de la Torre is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her most recent book of poems and translations is Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat, 2020), and she is the author of Something Close to Music’s introduction. The recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant, she teaches at Brooklyn College.

Lucy Ives is the author of Impossible Views of the World, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, Cosmogony, and the forthcoming The Word is Everything. Ives’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, frieze, Granta, and Vogue, among other publications. She received a 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Shiv Kotecha is a writer and the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now Press, 2015). His criticism has appeared in 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, MUBI’s Notebook, and frieze, where he is a contributing editor. He is based in New York where he co-edits Cookie Jar, a forthcoming pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Jeffrey Lependorf, a composer and visual artist, serves as Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation, and was the editor of Something Close to Music.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017). She is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2021) and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, and currently teaches at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.

John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and publisher of Black Square Editions. His reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Bookforum, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail from 2006–2011 and is an associate editor of the online arts magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. The author of over fifty books, his recent is the poetry collection Bijoux in the Dark, and the essay collection, Foreign Sounds. Forthcoming in the fall are a book of poetry, Genghis Chan on Drums, and two monographs, Liu Xiaodong and William Tillyer. His current project is a monograph on Joe Brainard. He lives in the Garment District neighborhood in New York City.

THIRTEEN MILLION PILLARS OF GRASS

On July 31st from 9AM to 7PM, The Flow Chart Foundation marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Ashbery’s seminal The Tennis Court Oath and what would have been Ashbery’s 95 birthday with an inaugural Gathering of poets, writers, scholars, artists, performers, and readers.

Participants include:

Madhur Anand & Bruce Andrews & Dara Barrois/Dixon & Charles Bernstein & Antonio Sergio Bessa & Lee Ann Brown & Mandana Chaffa & Stephen Cohen & Todd Colby & Brandon Downing & Rachel DuPlessis & Marcella Durand  & Justin Geyer & Melissa Ginsburg & Michael Gottlieb & Susannah Hollister & Elisabeth Joyce & Vincent Katz & Charles Kell & Ann Lauterbach & Lesle Lewis & Meghan Mercier & Tracie Morris & Charles North & Robert Polito & George Quasha & Anna Rabinowitz & Evelyn Reilly & Joan Retallack & Eugene Richie & Eléna Rivera & Emily Setina & Chiara Shae & Ravi Shankar & James Sherry & Sally Silvers & Emily Skillings & Sparrow & Patricia Spears Jones & Adriana Tampasis & Deborah Thomas & Edwin Torres & John Emil Vincent & Bernard Welt & Rebecca Wolff & . . . 

Visit HERE for details, videos, and audio-archive of the event.

The audio of this event was live-streamed through WGXC Hands on Radio. Click HERE to directlyt access the archived live-stream.

COLLECTIVE ASHBERY:

A Group Reading-Through / Thinking-Through of THREE POEMS

From December 1 through December 13, The Flow Chart Foundation welcomed scholar Daniel Kane to lead us in a group reading-through, thinking-through of John Ashbery’s book-length metaphysical masterpiece THREE POEMS via Twitter and Instagram. On Friday, December 16th at 1pm EST, we hosted a live, concluding celebration discussion, led by Daniel Kane.

COLLECTIVE ASHBERY:

A Group Reading-Through / Thinking-Through of FLOW CHART

Full details about how to take part, as well as a detailed reading schedule and links to each day’s recordings can be found HERE.

From January 3 to February 10, The Flow Chart Foundation organized a group reading-through, thinking-through of John Ashbery’s book-length poem “Flow Chart.” Emily Skillings, a former assistant of Ashbery and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, will lead our online discussion, taking place over Twitter. We will read all of Flow Chart as a group over 38 days, from January 4th through February 10th. Each days reading is accompanied by a recording read by a cavalcade of literati, so you can listen along as you read!

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

On February 15, 7-8PM via Zoom, The Flow Chart Foundation hosted a concluding celebration of our 38-day Twitter "slow reading" of John Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart. Twitter-read leader, poet and editor Emily Skillings, poet and translator Marcella Durand, and scholar Andrew Epstein shared impressions, questions, revelations, and conundrums, with input from participants. Moderated by Flow Chart's Executive Director, Jeffrey Lependorf.

Full details about the #CollectiveAshbery Twitter reading can be found HERE.

Marcella Durand is the author of To husband is to tender, Black Square Editions, 2021; The Prospect, Delete Press, 2020; Area, Belladonna* Books, 2008; and Traffic & Weather, Futurepoem, 2008. She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Earth's Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, was published by Black Square Editions in 2020.

Andrew Epstein is a Professor of English at Florida State University.  He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, and the Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945 (forthcoming). His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, American Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications, and he blogs about the New York School of poets at Locus Solus.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.

INSTALLATIONS & EXHIBITS

TENTACLE Projection: The Master’s House

December 3rd, 2022

For Hudson’s 2022 Winter Walk celebration, we projected an animated text featuring the final paragraph of Audre Lords’s seminal essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” A complementary Incident Report installation, up through the entire month of December, featured a scrolling LED text and giant typeset early poem by Lorde.

Incident Report Viewing Station

The Flow Chart Foundation’s “Incident Report Viewing Station” storefront windows offered changing installations throughout the year. Click HERE for the archive.

Amtrak Poetry

Poetry placards installed throughout the year in the Hudson, NY Amtrak Station featured poetry published by New Directions, Wave Books, Archipelago Books, and poems from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath. All of the designs can be seen HERE.

TEXT KITCHEN WORKSHOPS

The Flow Chart Foundation offered workshops online and in-person in the Flow Chart Space. These included “New Writing, New Languages,” with Kimberly Alidio; “Interior Portraits,” with Sheryda Warrener; and “Images In Between Images,” with Sylvina López Medin. Details on all can be found HERE.

AUCTIONS & GALAS

#ASHBERYAUCTION

From Nov. 1-10, The Flow Chart Foundation hosted its very first online auction via eBay, where buyers bid on covetable rare books and hard-to-find John Ashbery publications and ephemera.