March 18, 2008—Poetry is brimming in the city this spring as the Academy of American Poets presents readings and events in celebration of National Poetry Month:
Poetry & The Creative Mind
April 1
Kick-off National Poetry Month with Meryl Streep, Liz Smith, Dianne Reeves, John Guare, Philippe de Montebello, Jonathan Demme, Katie Couric, Graydon Carter, Robert Caro, Candace Bushnell and more as they read some of their favorite poems in the sixth-annual benefit for the Academy of American Poets.
Poetry & The Creative Mind
Tuesday, April 1
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center
10 Lincoln Center Plaza (Columbus Ave at 65th St)
New York City
6:30 p.m.
Tickets ($40-$75) are available by calling (212) 721-6500 or visiting lincolncenter.org
Jorie Graham at the New Museum
April 3
Jorie Graham reads from her new collection, Sea Change, at the first poetry reading held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Jorie Graham at the New Museum
Thursday, April 3
The New Museum
235 Bowery, New York City
7:00 p.m.
$5 includes admission to the museum. Seating is limited; doors open at 6:30 p.m
Co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, Ecco / HarperCollins, and the New Museum.
Alan Shapiro & Mark Yakich
April 15
Alan Shapiro, author of Old War, and Mark Yakich, author of The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, read from these new spring poetry collections.
Alan Shapiro & Mark Yakich
Tuesday, April 15
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street, New York City
7:00 p.m.
FREE
Co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin, and Housing Works.
Poets in the Garden
April 16
Lloyd Schwartz discussed Elizabeth Bishop's influences from the garden and Cole Swensen reads from new work inspired by French baroque gardens.
Poets in the Garden
Wednesday, April 16
The Arsenal, Central Park
Fifth Avenue & 64th Street, New York City
6:00 p.m.
FREE. Reservations required: call 212.274.0343 ext. 13 for tickets.
Co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the Library of America, and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.
Poem In Your Pocket Day
Thursday, April 17
Celebrate the first national Poem In Your Pocket Day by carrying a poem and sharing it with friends, family, and others throughout the day.
Present a poem from your pocket on April 17 and receive FREE admission to:
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street
New York City
10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
mcny.org
The Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th Street
Bronx, New York
12:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
bronxmuseum.org
On the web at: poets.org/pocket
Joanna Klink, Marie Ponsot, & Christopher Stackhouse
April 21
Celebrate the launch of the spring issue of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets.
Joanna Klink, Marie Ponsot, & Christopher Stackhouse
Monday, April 21
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street, New York City
7:00 p.m.
FREE
Co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and Housing Works.
Julie Agoos, Richard Kenney, & A.B. Spellman
April 23
Julie Agoos, author of Property, Richard Kenney, author of The One-Strand River, and A.B. Spellman, author of Things I Must Have Known, read from these new spring collections.
Julie Agoos, Richard Kenney, & A.B. Spellman
Wednesday, April 23
Mulberry Street Branch, New York Public Library
10 Jersey Street, New York City
6:30 p.m.
FREE
Co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, Ausable Press, Alfred A. Knopf, Coffee House Press, and the New York Public Library.
Ann Lauterbach & John Rybicki
April 29
Ann Lauterbach, author of Hum and The Night Sky, and John Rybicki, author of We Bed Down Into Water, read from their new work.
Ann Lauterbach & John Rybicki
Tuesday, April 29
Peruggi Room, Marymount Manhattan College
221 East 71st Street, New York City
7:00 p.m.
FREE
Co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, Northwestern University Press, and Marymount Manhattan College.
About the poets:
Jorie Graham’s new book, Sea Change, will be published this April by Ecco / Harper Collins. Born in New York City in 1950, Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Overlord (Ecco, 2006); Never (2002); Swarm (2000); The Errancy (1997); The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Materialism (1993); Region of Unlikeness (1991); The End of Beauty (1987); Erosion(1983); and Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980). Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Alan Shapiro is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His collections include, most recently, the newly published Old War (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Tantalus in Love (2005); Song and Dance (2002); and The Dead Alive and Busy (University of Chicago, 2000), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has written two memoirs, The Last Happy Occasion and Vigil, both published in 1997 by the University of Chicago; a work of criticism, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination, Essays, 1980-1991 (Northwestern University Press, 1993); and a translation of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia (Oxford University, 2004).
Mark Yakich is an associate professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans. His new collection,The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in the Ukraine, will be published by Penguin Books this April. His previous books include Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), chosen by James Galvin for the National Poetry Series; and the chapbook The Making of Collateral Beauty (Tupelo, 2006), chosen by Mary Ruefle for the Snowbound Chapbook Award.
Lloyd Schwartz is the co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems Prose, and Letters (Library of America, 2008). In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his classical music criticism. His poetry collections include Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Goodnight, Gracie (1992), and These People (Wesleyan University Press, 1981). Schwartz is currently the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He is also the classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix and a regular commentator on NPR's Fresh Air.
Cole Swensen’s new collection, Ours, will be published by University of California Press this April. She has published numerous works of poetry, including The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007); The Book of A Hundred Hands (University of Iowa Press, 2005); Goest (Alice James Books, 2004); and Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her translations of contemporary French poetry include Olivier Cadiot's Art Poetic (Green Integer,1999) among others. Swensen currently teaches at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
Joanna Klink has published two books of poetry: Circadian (Penguin, 2007) and They Are Sleeping (University of Georgia Press, 2000). In 2003, she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She teaches poetry at the University of Montana-Missoula.
Christopher Stackhouse is the author of Slip (Corollary Press, 2005) and co-author with poet John Keene of the collaborative book Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), which features Keene’s text and Stackhouse’s drawings. He is Cave Canem Writer Fellow and a 2005 Fellow in Poetry New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marie Ponsot was born in New York in 1921. She has published numerous works, including Springing (Knopf, 2002) and The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of the 2005 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Ponsot, who also translates from the French, has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University, and New York University. Marie Ponsot teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City.
Julie Agoos is the author of a new collection, Property, published by Ausable Press in March 2008. Her previous books include Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987) , selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; and Calendar Year (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). She is associate professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and lives in Nyack , N.Y.
Richard Kenney was born in Glen Falls, New York, in 1948, and is the author of The One-Strand River recently published by Alfred A. Knopf. His three previous books of poetry include The Invention of the Zero (1995); Orrery (Atheneum, 1985), and The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1983. In 1987 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently professor of English at the University of Washington and lives with his family in Port Townsend, Washington.
A.B. Spellman's new collection, Things I Must Have Known, will be published by Coffee House Press this April. Spellman began his thirty-year tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975. Before that, he was an active poet, radio programmer, and essayist in New York, the poet-in-residence at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and a visiting lecturer at Emory, Rutgers, and Harvard universities. He has also been a regular jazz commentator for National Public Radio and has published numerous books and articles on the arts, including The Beautiful Days, a poetry chapbook published by Diane di Prima, and Four Jazz Lives (University of Michigan, 2004.)
Ann Lauterbach is the author of six collections of poetry: Hum (Penguin, 2005), Of In Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (2001), On a Stair (1997), And for Example (1994), Clamor (1991), Before Recollection (1987), and Many Times, But Then (1979). Her collection of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, was recently reprinted. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation. Since 1991 she has taught at Bard College, where she co-directs the Writing Division of the M.F.A. program.
John Rybicki’s third collection of poetry, We Bed Down Into Water, was published by Northwestern University Press this February. He is also the author of Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues, 2003) and Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider (March Street Press, 2002). Rybicki lives in his hometown of Detroit and is associate professor of English and writer in residence at Alma College.
About National Poetry Month
Inaugurated by the Academy in April 1996, National Poetry Month brings together publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools, and poets around the country to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. www.poets.org/npm
About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1934 to foster appreciation for contemporary poetry and to support American poets at all stages of their careers. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the most popular site about poetry on the web, presenting a wealth of great poems, audio recordings, poet biographies, essays, and interactive discussions about poetry; the Poetry Audio Archive, capturing the voices of contemporary American poets for generations to come; American Poet, a biannual literary journal; and our annual series of poetry readings and special events. The Academy also awards prizes to accomplished poets at all stages of their careers. For more information, visit www.poets.org.