John Ashbery Poetry Series Presents
A Reading by Roberto Tejada
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Chapel of the Holy Innocents
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The celebrated poet and art critic Roberto Tejada, author of works including Mirrors for Gold and Exposition Park, reads from his work Thursday, April 14th, at 6:00 p.m. in the Bard chapel, introduced by Ann Lauterbach.6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.
“Full Foreground composes a musical sequence whose desire is for lyric discourse to voice bodily sensation in the shadow of global command. It speaks of discontinuous times and locations on the borderlands of Mexico, the United States, and beyond, from 1997 to the present. The prologue poem was written in the weeks prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq; the afterword, on the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks, with language lifted from N. R. Kleinfield (New York Times, 12 September 2001, p.A1). From that duration and geography is reflected a language of current events, journalism, state demagoguery, the ethnographic account, and the pathologies of violence and massacre; extensions of a self “myself”—in spaces of public address.” — Roberto Tejada, Notes to Full Foreground (2012)
“Crisscrossing languages, geographical borders (the Mexican-United States border is only one of several), and cultural taboos, Exposition Park is, in the most literal sense, a transgressive text, one of those books that rewards reading after reading.” —Tyrone Williams
“Tejada’s work is with dismantling borders and upsetting classifications. The result is a layered poetry that finds its form in dense stanzas composed of lines that frequently veer toward a kind of fractured prose.”—Alan Gilbert
“You walk through his world as a voyeur, a traveler of mirrors, witnessing your own reflection in the masses of flesh, simultaneously aroused and disturbed at the same time. Tejada’s work is an invitation, a window into another world, unabashedly erotic, and succinct.” —Christine Lark Fox
For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Chapel of the Holy Innocents