John Ashbery Poetry Series Presents Readings by Renowned Poets
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The John Ashbery Poetry Series at Bard College presents a series of three readings by internationally acclaimed poets this fall. Free and open to the public, the readings begin at 5:00 p.m. in the Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center.
On Thursday, October 25, Bill Berkson and Jennifer Moxley read from their recent work.
Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He is associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies of the San Francisco Art Institute. A poet, art critic, editor, and curator, Berkson has been active in the art and poetry worlds for many decades. He is the author of 18 books and pamphlets and poetry, including, most recently, Gloria (with etchings by Alex Katz) and Our Friends will Pass Among You Silently, as well as an epistolary collaboration with Bernadette Mayer titled What’s Your Idea of a Good Time? He is a corresponding editor for Art in America, and his criticism has appeared there, in Artforum, and other journals. A collection of his essays, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, appeared in 2004, and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures was published in 2007. He was Distinguished Paul Mellon Fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for 2006.
Jennifer Moxley received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rhode Island and an M.F.A. from Brown University. From 1992–95 she edited The Impercipient, a stapled and photocopied magazine dedicated to publishing the work of her contemporaries.Following this venture she coedited, with Steve Evans, The Impercipient Lecture Series, a monthly poetics pamphlet. Moxley is the author of The Middle Room, The Line, Often Capital, The Sense Record and other poems, and Imagination Verses, as well as several chapbooks, including Enlightenment Evidence, which was translated into French as Evidence des Lumières, and Wrong Life. She translated French poet Jacqueline Risset’s 1976 book The Translation Begins, and her translation of The Powers of Sleep is forthcoming in 2008. In addition to French, her poetry has been translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Farsi, and Czech. Her poem “Behind the Orbits” was chosen by Robert Creeley for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2002. In 2006 she won the PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English 2005–06; in 2005 she received the Lynda Hull Poetry Award (Denver Quarterly), given for the best poem (or poems) published in a volume year; and in 2003 The Sense Record (Salt edition) was picked by Tony Frazer in Stride magazine (U.K.) as one of the five best poetry books of 2003. She is adviser to The Modern Review, poetry editor for The Baffler, and a contributing editor of The Poker. Moxley is associate professor in the English department of the University of Maine, Orono.
On Tuesday, November 6, Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature, reads from his recent work.
Robert Kelly has been a member of the Bard faculty since 1961. He is the author of more than 50 collections of poetry, including The Common Shore, The Loom, The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence, Red Actions—Selected Poems, The Time of Voice, The Garden of Distances, and most recently Lapis, Threads, Sainte Terre, and May Day. His fiction includes The Scorpions, A Transparent Tree, Doctor of Silence, Cat Scratch Fever, and The Queen of Terrors. He has just finished a novel on alien abduction, The Book from the Sky. In recent years Kelly has been concerned with writing-in-collaboration with artists living (Birgit Kempker: Scham/Shame, and Brigitte Mahlknecht: The Garden of Distances) and dead (P. B. Shelley, Mont Blanc). Forthcoming are a long poem on the discourse of psychoanalysis, The Language of Eden, and a cycle of poems of linguistic speculations, Opening the Seals. Kelly has received the Los Angeles Times Prize for Poetry as well as awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, CAPS, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the founding editor of Chelsea Review and Trobar, and a contributing editor of Conjunctions. Kelly is the founding director of the writing program of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
On Thursday, November 15, poet and novelist Eileen Myles is joined by poet Bob Perelman.
Eileen Myles’s latest book is Sorry, Tree, in which she describes “some nature” as well as the transmigration of souls from the East Coast to the West. Bust Magazine calls Myles “the rock star of modern poetry,” and Holland Cotter in the New York Times describes her as “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde.” She has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, fiction, articles, plays, and libretti, including Hell (an opera with composer Michael Webster), Skies, on my way, Cool for You, School of Fish, Maxfield Parrish, Not Me, and Chelsea Girls. She is a professor of writing at the University of California, San Diego, and a recipient of the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writing fellowship. She contributes to a wide number of publications, including Bookforum, Believer, and Cabinet; has written catalogue essays about Sadie Benning, Peggy Awesh, and Nicole Eisenman; and blogs weekly on art at openfordesign.msn.com.
Bob Perelman, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, has published more than 16 volumes of poetry, including The Future of Memory, Ten to One: Selected Poems, and Playing Bodies, a painting/poem collaboration with his wife, the artist Francie Shaw. His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. He has edited two collections of poet’s talks: Hills Talks and Writing/Talks, a collection of talks by poets.
Since 1995, the John Ashbery Poetry Series has brought leading contemporary poets to Bard for readings and discussion in an intimate setting. For further information about the series, call The Bard Center at 845-758-7425.
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(10/12/07)