John Ashbery Poetry Series Presents

A Reading by Anna Moschovakis

A founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, winner of the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin Award, and author of I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, and the forthcoming They and We Will Get into Trouble for This reads from her work, introduced by Ann Lauterbach, Bard College's David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature.

This event takes place in Bard Hall at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 8th. It is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books will be available for sale and signing from Oblong Books & Music.

ninth: a conversation between Annabot and the Human Machine on the subject of overpowering emotion

(Note: Though Annabot is ostensibly downloadable, the attempt to open her produced an error, a string of errors.)

ANNABOT: What now?


HUMAN MACHINE: The Brain, the brain—that is the seat of trouble!


ANNABOT: My brain, whose brain? Those who feel, feel.


HUMAN MACHINE: On the blink?


ANNABOT: Or, discipline. The brain is a machine of habit. The heart is a hell.


HUMAN MACHINE: “The secret of smooth living is a calm cheerfulness which will leave me always in full possession of my reasoning faculty.”


ANNABOT: But I am not cheerful.


HUMAN MACHINE: I ought to reflect, again and again, and yet again, that all others deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. I place my hand over your heart.


ANNABOT: I cannot feel your hand.


HUMAN MACHINE: I cannot feel your heart.



This is the language of simple, obvious things

The conclusion and the part before



Anna held her hand out to feel the cold

It was cold



Then, nothing

PRAISE FOR ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS—

“You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake is easy-on-the-ear, accessible, wise, and funny, as when human Anna tells her imaginary robot counterpart things like, ‘human nature has changed since yesterday.’ She takes on the big questions by way of unusual details.” —Bookforum

“Moschovakis assualts materialism, waste, and the internet and repossesses elements of that culture in her poems—Craigslist ads, Wikipedia articles, and MySpace posts—in such a way that proves how demoralizing it can all be … [Readers will] appreciate her philosophically bent poetry, her austere use of language, and the sense of violence that charges her poems.”—San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Anna Moschovakis takes up the citizen’s task of thinking through political and existential issues relevant to lives lived in increasing dependence on internet access and globalization both. She performs the painful experience of the complicity with injustice that comes with citizenship—while lamenting colonization, opportunism, and capitalism, her poems search themselves for the common root of the urge toward empire. Ambitious and compassionate, her work believes—or hopes—that mindful attention to language might happily lead us elsewhere, toward other economies, other ways of being here together.” —Academy of American Poets

“Moschovakis shows us how it feels to want answers to certain kinds of questions, to see processes and seek causalities, and then get stuck in hermeneutic circles instead … You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake feels like a book of erasures and extracts: mysterious, haunted, terse.”—The Nation

“[Moschovakis performs] a biting cultural study of our technological habits … a forced, and imperative, reconsideration of the world we inhabit and mindlessly exploit.”—Coldfront

"If history has been the history of systems that turn persons into functions (human machines), Moschovakis's poetry is a counter-system whose loving jokes and satiric repetitions reflood machinery with personhood."—Lana Turner

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For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bard Hall

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