As we are wont to do at this time of the year…
Let’s face it: the bloom is off the rose. That is self evident;
haven’t seen a legit post here in years, outside of the obvious one or two. Nature
of the beast.
However, it is good to keep up some traditions even when the
habit has become a memory, an odd quirk, that not even a knee-jerk will work. And
so the big day of NYC at what I have come to call Downtown Abbey.
Major improvement this year is the sound system. No longer do
you have two fat boxes atop tripods to boom out into the room in basically
diminishing cones of aural fade to the sides. The new set-up has two very
discrete columns, almost like obelisks, as Brendan Lorber would later note, to
some temple or portal to another world. Very good use of effective imagery and
tap into pop culture (“Stargate”) too. These are state-of-the-art mini systems
that spread an even 180- or maybe even 270- if not full 360-degrees around
their surface and are so slim and neat they really could be design elements.
As for attendance, think a lot of the star-followers passed on
this one as Patti was absent. But also, Dael Olandersmith, Emily XYZ, Bob
Holman, Denize Lauture, Edwin Torres, Sharon Mesmer and Ed Friedman, to name a
few. Not that this detracted from the 100+ but who are noted for their absence
from the line-up.
It must be noted, it took almost a week to get the notes
straightened out on this one. Truly, the wrong day to screw up something as
primal as sequencing, where the numbers are the only help available to attach
authorship to the ragged little scrawl of ink across a teeny tiny page. Which
is all the more surprising considering the fact that this particular marathon
went off with only a few hitches, reverses, or drop outs. Its just that all it
takes is one or two out of place turns the rest into a hunt through the
short-term cortex for keys to hints to codes to possible impressions…
[FYI: the TBD below indicates video which may or may not be posted, but certainly will require viewing before any summary can be drawn]
[oh yes: and these brackets are, of course, post-facto remarks of a personal nature]
So, that noted, with one or two cavils you will find in the text
below: Here we go again!
1
Katy Lederer - something on “factory farming
of chickens” (am unsure if she missed the use of “yolked” for a great embedded
pun, or simply thought better of adding in such a groaner) something with
triplet syllables (also, something of a “foodie”, one gathers) and was there
some Dr. Seuss-like cadences too?
2
Tracey McTague - Must state: completely
upstaged by daughter Aurora dancing
about like dervish x’ed w/Isadora Duncan
3
Alan Gilbert - “Outpatient Procedure”
“…my favorite bartender on the decline of western civilization while cleaning
the empties…”
4
Kiely Sweatt - “New York”
“…sometimes everything IS everything…” & “Venus” “…is a big bowl of
heroin…”
5
Simone White - notes she is also doing
the social media for the event, but as she just had a baby, zip writing for
2014 except “the only one: ‘A Secret Text’” (which, in retrospect, makes one
wonder if that might be Anti-Social Media?)
6
Alii Warren – new book “Don’t Go
Home With Your Heart On” (takeoff of famous Leonard Cohen title, and w/o
inherent eros) “…shouldn’t they do horoscopes on the nightly news/maybe after
sports?” & “…what does Aristotle say about beauty at the bottom of the
ocean” & “I want to be an immortal hydroid/call me polyp…”
7
Ursula Eagly – stands stationary and holds up a canvas w/a black dot on an
orange square…then drop new page down w/just a black dot.(period?)
8 Brandon
Brown – “Last year was fuckin’ terrible…” (so the poem title is something which
might be like the Hollies title “King Midas in Reverse”…) “I think Janet Jackson
is coming back…/I have been making a list of 20 reasons to live/She is 9th”
9 Ali
Power – might be “translation of Petrarch’s (Patriarch’s?) sonnets(?)”: “Gossip…America’s
Pasttime” & “…everybody loves a comeback”
10
Karinne Keithley Syers – “The Topiarist” about communicating with ferns/music,
“with abominable branch” (delicate and sweet)
11
Nicole Peyrafette – the crepe-maker does a lament for Maria Blanca, in Spanish
and French, with guitar accomp., that sounds like a fado or duende or flamenco
but only because she slips into English long enough and clear enough to quote “for
whom the bell tolls”, so if you start to feel Hemingwayesque, like something out
of the Civil War in the Pyrnanees, go ahead!
12
Gina Myers – “each year the insurance company knows how much my life is worth…”
& “Don’t Be Busy! That’s The Enemy Of Art!”
13
Tom Savage – book he’s been trying to publish for over 40 year has finally come
out! “In 1971 I spent two months in Afghanistan
and Pakistan…” and
reads elegy to that long-ago time
14
Mike DeCapite - “Joe was sitting at his locker still red from the steam”
conversational exchanges of men, totally naked, discussing cooking pasta
15
Marcella Durand – collab w/husband, “Linden”
seems to be about trees [unless its “Lyndon” and I’m totally lost] and ordinal
numbers(?)
16
Karen Weiser – “2 sections from a birthday poem for Evan Kennedy [who reads
later]”, that ends with “…a souvenir of your idea…or mine/or theirs”
17
Joanna Koetze – with Jonathan Allen(?) dances to poem about virtues of being
lost, includes riff from Walter Benjamin “to be lost is to be fully present”
18
Miriam Atkin – “The List of Unknown Positions (after Ann Hamilton)”: “…ascending
to first place in the pageant of personas…”, “if you want to make sense, clean
your face…” [almost painfully downer delivery, exhausted, for such neat
aphorisms]
19
Maryam Parhizkar – “astonishment”: “I am a finger…”, “I am a fighting machine…”
20
Brendan Lorber – “Sobriety and its discontents”
21
Katy Bohinc – just arrived last nite in from Ohio, with “New New 2015 New Poem”
written on the phone on the plane with the flu in her head, in incantory
cadence, “water/I wanted nothing but water for days”
22
Sara Jane Stoner – “a prayer called ‘head’”: “I repeat my mantra of unknowing…”
23
Elinor Nauen (w/Annabelle Lee on guitar/vocals) – her “MMXV” is to do a remix
of lines from Emily Dickinson to “Yellow Rose of Texas” [fun stuff, this
recontexturalization]
24
Anselm Berrigan – says he is going to “read 5,000 poems” [which doesn’t augur
well for the rest of the day] but does “one poem with two titles: ‘degrass’ and
‘re to presto de’” [no idea] with refrain “Who _________” [fill in the blank]”
in one question after another
25
Nat Otting – call himself “a cardboard poet” and style is panting a lot, it
seems; poem for Amiri Baraka [I think]
26
Farnoosh Fathi – “Good barber of the pea (that lives inside a vagina)”
27
Dorothy Friedman August – dedicated to Taylor Meade: “As If – a prayer for
peace” “As if _________ [fill in the blank] was the answer”
28
Bob Rosenthal – “I have finally reached my curmudgeon years…’an apologia for
parents’”: “I’m sorry luck can’t be bought in a baby supply store…” [very
funny]
29
Cliff Fyman – “Yellow Taxi Poems”, ethnic fun and jewish stereotypecasting &
something about Yankees fans and Met fans
30
John Kruth – of the band Tribecastan, goes on to expand on the disrespect of
moderns detailed in “The Night they boo’ed
BB King” [lotsa cheers from audience for this one]
31
Kristin Prevallet – brings up Chinese astrology as this is the year of the
sheep, and so “Year of Green Wooden Sheep” goes on and feels like a fortune-telling
preacher
32
Christine Kelly – “the Body as Technocrat” & “The power of choice in the
Time of Plenty”
33
Tommy Pico – native American poet says “this is from a much longer piece called
Nature Poem”: “if you’re Indian today you can’t write a nature poem…”
34
Charity Coleman – “A church poem for the church on the Book of Hours for the
Last Days”: “I’ve half a mind to attend a black mass/or start one of my own”
35 Norman
MacAfee – “The last time I read here was 1984.” “…In Vienna,
during WWI, Karl Krauss wrote ‘The Last Days of Mankind’—an 800 page play to be
read on Mars…” and relates this is from that reading Plus “Walking the streets of the astral plane…”
36
CAConrad – today is his 49th birthday and he resolves to visit PACE
actions in campuses across America as much as possible this year [sounds like a
political statement]: “I’m going in for a CAT scan…”, “Jesus didn’t need [a
sense of] balance/he had nails…”, “Ed Dorn says faggots should drink directly
from sewers/I want to dress special for this…”
37
Murat Nemet-Nejat – “The Wall (to a political exile)” & “No one home”
38
Philip Glass
39
Andrew Durbin – “Warm Leatherette (for Lou Reed)” speaks of “endlings”—the tail
ends, last of species before extinction, and something else about how Selena
Gomez ruined Lil’ Wayne [no idea]
40
Jennifer Bartlett – her latest book: “The New Poetry of Disability”. Last year
she was still on a cane; this year she’s on a walker and needs an assist
getting up the stairs. Her voice is getting more slurred, which only means she
has to be more powerful, and is. “I wa born dead…it was merely a story told to
me…” & “to be crippled means_________” [fill in the blank], to close with a
torrent of freak show comparisons. [gutsy lady]
41
David Berrigan – seems to be quoting directly from a text or white paper on
obesity epidemic in America with a particular focus on rapid growth rates in
poor and urban communities [dry, technical, but makes the point]
42
Bill Kushner – “Bad Boy”
43
Don Yorty & Daniel – “In 200 I wrote a love song,. In 2009, I fell in love…
Try it.” Variation of “sweet lil’ angel” that sounds like vintage Tom Rush, but
is later given thanks of Roosevelt Sykes
44
Evan Kennedy – “St. Francis is a servant to the birds” and actually moves very
avain, like a crane or other stilt bird in a marsh
45 R.
Erica Doyle – “I’m anAmerican/I like to be happy/I want to feel good, even when
it is not…part of that culture where we watched Andy Griffith until we felt
nothing but candy canes” and into some very good approx. of Gulla/creole accent
speech
46
John S. Hall – everything is “fuckin’ A!”
47
Steven Taylor – sings Wm Blake lullaby acapella, and the guy’s pipes are as
good as ever!
48
Monica de la Torre – “Two Chairs – one digital; one not”
49
Cori Kresge – “Collaborative thought in stretched time” & “Blasphemy (for Annabelle)” [his
daughter, I think, because he goes on to compare…] “God is whatever you want
he/she/it to be…like an American Girl doll…” [nice anthropo throw there]
50
Ray Brown – guitarist/songwriter does a tale of when he was on leave in Berlin
51
Kim Rosenfield – “I want to take you way back to 1982 and a little New York
wisom I’d offer to my 15 year-old self…”
52
Yuko Otomo “one way poem with delmore”(?)
53
Alan Licht – instrumental acoustic strummer: “Dems Da Breaks”
54
Rob Fitterman – “…there’s no way out of misery, but I still hate myself…” may
or may not be the title of a depressive Xmas reverie, but turns the concept
from self pity to anger at those who are supposed to be pitied for all the
stress they’re undergoing at the holiday where they are mere amateurs next to
him [more or less, quite funny]
55
Simon Pettet – “…let the sage be like the bee in the town and _________” [fill
in the blank]
56
Matthew Shipp & Steve Dalachinsky – the renowned pianist accomps. Steve (I
think, wasn’t clear on the stage announcement) (or vice versa) who read the
text
57 and
there were probably two performers who went on in this gap but there were calls
to make at other parts of the facility as well as having the Social Media poet
[see above] help me find the Twitter page on the event. So the only sure thing
is on return—
58
Adeena Karasick – “You’re a leaky day” basically taking the concept of
“leaking” into a lot of places and things that aren’t/won’t/hasn’t can’t/etc.
59
Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers
60
Foamola – the redoubtable only remaining poet’s band in the EV these days is
nonetheless a highlight of the day, as usual for “Here I Am in Co-op
City, Looking Donw on Toys R Us”
and two others.
61
Charles Bernstein – “It’s not my bag, man” & “the view of Chekov
Angiellere”(?)
62
Elizabeth Willis – “Survey” & “I worry that_________” [fill in the blank]
63
Avram Fefer – saxist with bass acc. To something called “BC Reverie”, which may
be riffing on Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” for all the digeridoo-type
warble-bubbles of the reed at the bottom range of a C clef and the low blows to
the big fiddle
64
Lee Ann Brown – “Any Arc of Love” “..to be each others mentors are enough?”
& a memoir of a family trip to Mexico
65
Steve Earle - TBD
66
Beth Gill – dances to Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” [awe-strikingly
beautiful moment]
67
Nick Hallett- TBD
68
Patricia Spears Jones – “2014 couldn’t leave fuckin’ fast enough… Welcome to
one of the greatest space in the world!” “Lyric”; “…the 1st line
should be ‘Where are the shadows/’” & “Zud” “…the Mongolian word for the
die-off of livestock (due to climate change)” & “life lessons”: “…what can
you make of tragedy?”
69
Callers – Brooklyn duo does music/song [bit of problem
with bad ground lead was distracting]
70
Tonya Foster – exhorts all to make some noise “in memory of the blind puddle
that was the blind boy’s blood…” that was “red as_________” [fill in the blank]
71
Anne Waldman with Fast Speaking Music – “Good evening to all the luminous
ghosts!” and prefers to call this the year of the ram as opposed to the sheep,
in her ovine opine. Read/incants/conjours “Off Worlds”, one of which is
tantamount to Sun Ra’s “Rocket 99 take off for the Planet…VENUS”—the wild witch
of the East Village
rides again!
72
Yoshiko Chuma – feeaks out on piano with accompaniest before hoofing into one
of her more frenetic freestyles [apparently in honor of Palestinian dancer
friend taken into custody during the recent troubles there]
73
Tammy Faye Starllte & Steve Earle – the chameleon has now become semi-Mary
Hopkins, one gathers, in the white dress to talk about how good things are for
white people in America today, and lead the audience in sing-along to “where
Have all the Flowers gGone?” while passing out white roses and working the
room.
74
Edmund Berrigan – “100 years for Maria Sataavia”(?)
75
Rachel Levitsky & Susan Bee – Bee is the artist whose painting inspired
Levitsky to write “The Island (after Robert Creely)”
76
Erica Hunt & Marty Ehrlich – “Lately I find myself writing poems as
instructions for the future…” w/Erlich on bass clarinet(?) w/terrif deep burble
over her read, ends with: “Be the wind that lifts the draft” and launches a
paper airplane of her text into the audience—clever gal!
77
Pierre Joris – “one poem from Balzac on the Arabic letter N which is ‘nun’”
78
Penny Arcade & Chris Rael – she smoked so much weed last night she wondered
how she would make it, as she said, but nevertheless turned in a solid reading
of her writing on her life, w/particular attention to nostalgia not being all
that it is cracked up to was, with Chris on guitar and vox doing a greek chorus-type
thang [incidentally, he is giving away a song a day for the next year at
website—check it out]
79
Thomas Sayers Ellis & James Brandon Lewis – this was an ensemble with TWE
as poet (probably), also with sax and bass and female singer, which may or may
not have been entitles “In the tradition of Amiri Baraka) but might as well
have been; very old skool free-styin’ between musicians and incantors and less
Black Power than Dark Matter
80
Maria Acconci – “When I was young/murder, carnage was my middle name…” and then
breaks into a mantra of “SAY IT SAY IT SAY IT” in a few permutations, to end
with “I woke up from a dream/and only then could understand my middle name”
81
Vito Acconci - TBD
82
Jason Hwang - TBD
83
John Giorno - TBD
84
Lenny Kaye - TBD
85
Janet Hamill & Lost Ceilings – [insert youtube video of “Bearing Witness”]
86
Jonas Mekas – [on quick break missed all but his immaculate vampire voice
talking about “the white dove”]
87
Todd Colby – “Taking the Bull by the Horns” was “Written so long ago I didn’t
need glasses” and is every bit as good as the last time he went into fits and
paroxysms to describe just what the implications of this are in their entirety
88
Eileen Myles - TBD
89
Justin Vivian Bond - TBD
90
Joseph Keckler - TBD
91
Tony Towle – “…when the hands falter at the keyboard/that’s when it’s time to
bring in the marketing team…”
92
Yvonne Meier – the choreographer provides a bit of late evening fun by calling
out bizarre concepts for a trio of dancers to improve on
93 Anne
Tardos - “Beginingless” “…everyone I have ever been I am now…I don’t have any
better place to start from”
94
Edgar Oliver – one of the last of the laureates of the ‘80s reads “Lost”
95
Filip Marinovich – “Self in Capricorn”
96
Morgan Parker – “all I want is my money, my pussy and my blood”
97 JD
Samson & Colin Self – from the band Le Tigre, she says lines and then has
male echo in odd, operatic tones, ends with both on same note: “DO NOT BE
ASHAMED OF YOUR CRAFT!” [right on, sister!]
98
James Gavin – reads from his new book on “The Strange Life of Peggy Lee”,
chapter on her nightclub appearances at Basin Street East here in the
‘50s-‘’60s [looks like a really good read]
99
niv Acosta – [missed, saying goodbye to friend]
100
Adam Fitzgerald – seems to be offering new landmarks on the westward push of
Manifest Destiny or something, in some kind of browser? Refrain: “Press
spacebar to continue”
101
Ernie Brooks (bass), Peter Zummo (trombone/vocals) & Bill Ruyle (hammer
dulcimer) with Walter Baker (guitar) & Billy Fica (dumbeck) – constitute
Arthur’s Landing (a band of bro’s dedicated to keeping alive the musical legacy
of the late great Arthur Russell). The set this year is mostly instrumental,
with Peter doing some words in the first number. Hand it to the band and the
boys on the board—sounded pristine, mid-eastern dreamy and prog-rock.
102
Siobhan Burke – a dance writer/critic has “350 words on Tricia Brown”
103
erica kaufman/Matt Longabucco & Nicole Eisenman – are something called
Triplicate Girl, and rather incomprehensible w/overlapping reads
104 Georgia
Faust – “A$$ET$” “the word is uncomplicated when _________” [fill in the blank]
105
John Coletti – “Ratiocination”
106
David Henderson – “Micheal Ferguson Brown”; two repeated refrains, 1) “The
Emmett Till Equation used to be _________” [fill in the blank], and 2) so many
variations and usages of the word “lynch” is names and places
at
this point the notes once again get out-of-sequence so what happened next is
matter of conjecture:
apparently
there was—
107
Rachel Tractenburg (w/RJ Timmerson?, on vox/guitar) – second song seemed to be
something about the whales at Seaworld
but
then there is an entry between the that and the next which says:
“love
poem “Year after year” (to her GF Flaca?)” which may or may not be –
108
Dia Felix – “This is based on a dream of my being watched by the cops…”
“simply—I was my crime”
but
certainly the next was—
109 luciana
achugar – a choreographer from Uruguay,
breathes into the mike in the joys and
sorrows of undetermined aspiration
110
Ian Felsenthal – “Dorothy Counts”
111
Jess Fiorini – “a poem for the year past and for the year coming up” (didn’t
leave me w/more than impression of nice bias haircut)
112 Arlo Quint – “…the answer to the
‘My-kid-could-do-that’ comment is Chris Burden…” & “…Where is the fun side
of destiny?...”
113
Steve Zultanski – describes his old girlfriend’s apartment roach infestation
problem…then onto class struggle
and I
think I was losing it here, but unless I miss my guess, the printed order was
reversed so that –
115
Billy Cancel – “come on the turbine, darling” (has a ‘60s brit rocker incantory
style)
came
before –
114
Jackie Wang – (taking the stage as I
take my leave…young asian fellow with soft voice, sounded like an apology of
some sort, but, well..better luck next year!)
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