Wednesday, January 6, 2016

St Marks'Poetry Project New Years Day Marathon

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John Godfrey – “…I want to wish you a new year which doesn't exist yet.” “Ink spots for Larry Fagan” (seems to be about tattoos)
Susan Landers - space a poem about a Hollywood actress who bought a mansion in Brooklyn (Michelle Williams) [very sharp and funny!]
Cliff Fyman - “Williamsburg Bridge graffiti” (seems to be a list of things found scratched on the paint, reminding one of nothing so much as old hobo phrases)
Aracelis Girmay - (much ado about reaching the same conclusions as Dr. Manhattan did in “The Watchmen” comic book) ostensibly about science, because of the reference to Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson
Sarah Schulman - from the novel “New York City 1958”, Sweet dreams of the old meatpacking district
The Double Yews - music (rubber knife percussion, “a new/old song, out of Susie Timmins and then by Frank O'Hara…”  [Actually reminds me a little bit of Foamola]
Carley Moore - A poem for the “future perfect”… Uses the refrain of “my future ex-husband and I_____”, and then “my future ex-wife_____”, just to add a little gender confusion I guess…
Wanda Phipps - inspired by the Spike Lee movie “her”
Vyt Bakaitis - wishes for a “happier future for a shellshocked planet” (appears to be about Paris) “no need to burn the past/it does its own damage control”
Farnoosh Fathi - offers thanks to Hannah, who helped with the poem… Phrases, disjointed,… “Overhead of fever leaps like a pawn” [no accounting for homonyms here]
Montana Ray - lengthy description of reconstituting some archive of personal materials reprocessed into hand-crafted paper, I suppose, and offers a group participation bit where she passes out these processed paper postcard products with the question on one side “do you like me?” and on the other side the words yes and no, which said cards are to be returned to her sometime during the evening at the audiences leisure… [Which I do, both: like her and return the card]
Simone White - (director of the poetry project) “a death poem” (about her father)
Kimberly Lyons – “for Noel cold cut(?): Noctilucent” (?)
Bob Rosenthal - (St. Mark's poetry Project chili maker since 1974) “from his poetry book ‘Cleaning up New York’”… Three short ones: “evening wind”, “sentient coming” and “10 things I could get used to”
Karen Lepri - “new food”… “The transformation of an object in a poem is how we step outside of time”
Ramsey Scott - “… Cop hand to ear my friends…”
Sade Murphy - (this person's first new years in New York City) “I get so sad at what's new…”
Julia Alsop - (a poet working in radio) [reads from phone] “outside the diner, Alvin lights up and says I love you…” (Seems to be about nostalgia for new year, and smoking…[but who isn't?])
Amy King - (one of the eco-poets, whatever that is) new poem “drive-by” [it’s not what you're thinking] and “a sexy sci-fi”… “Destiny is a search for imagination…”, “Speech is the something we frame our other outlines with… (?)”, And a poem entitled “the wind is a wandering moon” (from a theme found in the movie “Predator”)
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko - (originally from Detroit) “placed between loss and living, for my brother” and “enemy”… “I don't even recognize the living without battle wounds…”
Andrew Durbin - From “blonde summer” (at airport, overwhelmed by Taylor Swift, and more) [interesting observations about poetry and the Internet]
Martha Wilson - sings a song by Barbara Kruger from 1978, when she was in the all girl group Called Disband, reminding one of nothing so much as a new version of the fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg's infamous song “nothing”
Joanna Fuhrman - (some sort of reinvention of Frank O'Hara's “kerosene”, a critique of modern media communications) “I'm in love with this century for being so complicated, but I still have to weep…”
Karen Weiser - this is her 18th marathon attendance: “oh, not here” and a poem for Frida Kahlo… closes with “I miss you Bill.”
Shiv Kotecha - (off phone) “I made you” (seems to be about dogs, or at least a dog)
Andriniki Mattis -  “how to look between the lines”: “…isn't this what reading is for?”
Betsy Fagin - “neglected ancestors singing songs only ghosts can understand”
Marie Buck - “the public system tree (?)”: “I know how to make a dog look like it's talking - put peanut butter in its mouth” [good tip!]
Jace Clayton - big grouping of people see video
Denize Lauture - makes note of “mass shootings (in America, I think the number is 43) from 1984 to now, and asks the question “where are the poets of our land?” ['s spellbinder!]
Martha Oatis - “uncovered” [comes to mic still wearing her down coat, with a shoulder bag reading “if you read something say something”]
Christian Hawkey - Poem by Lorenzo Thomas “19 93 _”
Ben Krusling - (from Cincinnati) “man is not a beast” and “the first age of decay”… “How the mind turns around and only sees redacted scenes of history”
Christopher Stackhouse “company” (appears to be all about a block of text?) And “soft as a melting crayon”, and “snow fountain” [extremely pointillist]
Uljana Wolf - in German first, then English, with the title that sounds like a structural linguists dissertation, appears to be like something about the blur of meaning in age of mechanical reproduction… [with no apologies to Walter Benjamin]
Wendy Xu - “Sunday”… “It takes a tree's patients… That year I got drunk”
Marcella Durand - “the world is comprised of various contiguous objects that… [Was going so fast I couldn't get the whole bit down, but I understand the point of that line, i.e.: that there's some things that just can't be broken down into component parts, and though nobody mentions Georg Cantor and infinity that's what they're talking about] the title of which might be “geologic history of Versailles”
Ed Askew Band - music “from a love affair I had around 1970…”: “Crazy angels”: “it's just water under a bridge/at cat's cradle/and passing ships”… “All the crazy angels you gave me”
Philip Glass - Philip glass
CA Conrad - “(In re: most recent birthday) I remember Taylor Mead said to me, when you reach 50 then we can talk about aging”… “Pull him as a storm, not as refuge”… “Life is about choices is what ass holes with the best choices say” [this one really brought the house down]
Lisa Jarnot - an open plea to poets to start the eco-revolution now (“Angry Poem”)… “Not just theoretically”
Evie Shockley - starts by saying “2015 didn't end well for me” and you can see why Interpol am “Supply and Demand”, using a variation on what her father's maximums for frugality feel like when you substitute the term “black boys” for other forms of currency and natural resources
Stephen Boyer - most flamboyant dresser to date, and reads Janet Jackson lyrics, because “that's where I'm at right now”
Todd Colby - Todd
Dan Machlin and Serena Jost- cello and guitar, sounds kind of like the Incredible String Band
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves- calls heself an experimental artist… “We'd tease the inevitable…”, “When you corrected me, I asked, what are you fighting to defend”, “the mission is to create the first draft of a thing, for others to later revise”, “the mission is to perform the first draft and charge admission” [big hit of the night!]
Saretta Morgan - (seems to be reading datebook entries for December off the phone)
Steven Taylor - try to sing off the cell phone, with respect to Ginsberg: try to make a catalog of sensuous impressions, and in this case a church graveyard
Tom Savage - “written on my skin, in memory of Bill” (Notes newly discovered text fragments of the Greek writer Sappho) “I wonder what a night with Rabelais's was like?” (reference Bill)
Don Yorty – [first poem notes indecipherable] and sonnet 56 “love like rain”: “love comes in and comes/lust is one and done”
Emily XYZ - Emily XYZ
Maggie Dubris - “I think we can all be glad you're not on the road to sainthood” (re:: mother Theresa and the effects and affects of same)
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib - (this seems to be about an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement) “I imagine anything we own is borrowed”
Jennifer Bartlett - “the future and past ones” (referring to her placement among the “others” of significant or insignificant others in a person's life) “you Google porn cerebral palsy because you want to see someone like you having an orgasm…”
Steve Cannon - …”1966 the Metropole”(?) “No small matter”
Morgan Parker - “Magical Negirl Number”(?)
Church of Betty – Church of Betty “paella”
Janet Hamill - Janet Hamill, this is a collaboration with John from art crime “I'm addicted to coffee” refrain, lots of references to “Einstein on the Beach” such as “solfreggios of glass” (probably referencing both Philip and the actual way is overlapping, breathless arpeggios seem to echo the poetry term)
Yvonne Meier - improvisation with dancers
Jibade-Khalil Huffman - sounds like app agreement then, a ref to ghetto crime novelist Donald Goines (can't really follow it after that) “the only people that care about Kwanzaa are McDonald's”
Lewis Warsh - “stigmata”-bedbugs, Gregor Samsa,”…something about “wild beasts and poisonous insects…” “It's time to leave the party but I can't find my coat”
Eleni Sikelianos - “they sought to erase from my face all evidence that I had lived” (with cello) “I'm taking man back for woman, mankind” [is that a threat, or promise?]
Nada Gordon - “a little tune about poetry in fighting”
Nurit Tilles - Scott Joplin's “Maple leaf rag”
Dawn Lundy Martin - “our wondering” (off phone)
Joey de Jesus - “an insect poetic” and “catalog” (“this is like the homosexual agenda”)
David Henderson - “citizen Saundra Bland”, also referring to Eric Garner
Heroes are Gang Leaders – “YOUR BOOK SUCKS!
Patricia Spears Jones - “my book didn't suck…” And “the face of ferocity That”: “there are no perfect storms” (re: 2016 getting ugly)
Christine Elmo - dance: semaphore is as semantic as something to remember [too fast probably wrong]
Wo Chan - “permanent alien”, really fun and spacey, with a chant of “resistance is fertile/resistance is fertile/resistance is fertile/hail Hydra” is a pop cultural closer
Felix Bernstein – [no connection whatsoever]
Jennifer Blowdryer - “standing on Avenue a with crazy Jay from Avenue a…” Very sassy
Foamola - foamola
Joseph Keckler - Joseph Kegler
Yoshiko Chuma - Yoshiko Juma
John S. Hall - John S Hall
John Giorno- John G Arno
Penny Arcade        80 - Penny arcade
Ernie Brooks with Peter Zummo and Jeannine Otis        81 - Ernie Brooks ensemble doing another Arthur Russell composition
Jenny Zhang - “I think you might be gay” (like a a Valley Girl porno phone sex worker with a kinky sense of humor)
Purvi Shah - re: Texas and birth certificates, “when we mark documents by a series of erasures how can we trust them?”, Also refers to Dred Scott, and the 3/5 of a person statute, etc.
Anne Waldman and Fast Speaking Music        84 - Annie Waldman
Pamela Sneed - “I don't want to write a great poem about Seikou Sundiata”
Steve Earle                86 - Steve Earle
Thurston Moore        87 - Thurston Moore
Jonas Mekas        88 - Jonas Nika's
Reno                89 - Reno, Trojan war rap
Edwin Torres with David Brown        90 - Edwin Torres, groovy Latin rapine to conga
Eileen Myles - her expression to the audience of being extremely happy that 2015 ended so well for her because “I think I got to fuck everybody” (more than likely she meant sexually, if the grin on her face meant anything) …and her poem was even shorter
Erica Hunt and Marty Ehrlich        93 - Hunt and Ehrlich
Anselm Benigan - “This One Time (for someone else… ‘and D. Boon’ [which is probably not the American folk hero and likely the deceased leader of seminal hardcore outfit, The Minutemen])” [turns the page a lot leading to the suspicion that this poem was written circularly around the page perhaps in a spiral, but who knows?]
Lonely Christopher - “All Good Years”
Tonya Foster - “May this day and each day hereafter carry some joy, despite_____” and “to shake Or Be Shut down”
Morgan Bassichis - “I don't do resolutions historically. I don't like to pursue disappointment.” This one sounds more like a comedy routine about daily terrors, with the refrain “I'm the door you forgot”
Ryan Sawyer - very funky drummer plays a song “You’re dead and Out Of This World”, which I first recall hearing on the record album by Norma Tanega, with the hit song as “Walking with My Cat Named Dog”
Rijard Bergeron - “weeknights”
Tracie Morris with Jerome Harris and Marvin Sewell - “Wade in the Water”
Valery Oisteanu - “The Immortal Anarchist (for Judith Molina)”
Stephanie Gray - “what we heard”
Trace Peterson - a self-described “transwoman” does poem for Jennifer Bartlett entitled “everyone is a little_____”
Lee Ann Brown - she has been doing some work with ballads down south and sings one collected over 100 years ago entitled “The Cherry Tree Carol” and get the audience to sing along on the repeated chorus, if diffidently
Mitch Highfill - this is an uncompleted poem written for this day entitled “Living for the Island of Misfit Toys”
Diana Hamilton - “God was right, we were wrong” (about cats, it appears)
Aldrin Valdez – about Philippine restaurant called “Jeepy”? At any rate a paen to same
Brenda Lijima - described in her own introduction as “a fully fledged animal” it should come as no surprise that her greeting from the lectern was “Good Evening, Great Apes”
Edgar J. Ulloa - someone and Sebastian something? - - Sure looks like his son though, if not a nephew: cute little boy banging away at abstract arpeggios on the electric piano, as he does a memory of Mexico City
Danniel Schoonebeek - “The Likes of You” appears to be him versus society and, of some significance, the West Bank of the Delaware River
Christina Strong - “The Invisible Hand” (re: Adam Smith as conservative archetype, for the central mystery of laissez-faire capitalism at the core of everything wrong with the world - more or less)
Emily Skillings - “Champion Flowers” (dedicated to Jane Froehlich?)
Edmund Berrigan - sings Emily Dickinson sent to ukulele, very peppy for the Amherst laureate
Ariel Goldberg - “your edges have to be very good, like a certificate hanging on a doctor's office wall”