Butch Morris Memorial
Angel Orensanz is located at 172 Norfolk Street (LES) New York, NY
Please contact Tribes info@tribes.org or 212-674-8262 for more information.
Special ONE DAY Poetry Workshop with Dorothy Friedman
SPECIAL ONE DAY
POETRY WORKSHOP
with Dorothy Friedman August
Dorothy August is an award winning poet, teacher and editor. She is author
of 3 books of poems, Family Album, Liberty Years, and NIGHT poems. Ms.
August studied with John Ashbery and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer at
BrooklynCollege where she received her M.F.A. She’s won prestigious
awards, including a 1997 N.Y.F.A. fellowship and has published in The
Partisan Review, Hanging Loose, The California Quarterly, The Centennial
Review, Mudfish, Tribes, Orbis, Mobius, The Long Islander, Big Bridge,
Sinister Wisdom, The New York Arts Journal, Kayak, spinybabble, etc.
Anthologies include Speaking The Word, Ikon, Two Unbearables collections:
Worst Book and Sex anthology, as well as excerpt from a memoir in A Jewish
Theatre Breaking Through Barries Presents: According to Goldman
We are excited to announce that in our 33rd season Theater Breaking Through Barriers will be presenting the New York City premiere of According to Goldman, a play by Bruce Graham, opening Off-Broadway on April 6th and continuing through May 5th.
Theater Breaking Through Barriers is the only Off-Broadway theater, and one of the few theaters in the country, dedicated to advancing actors and writers with disabilities and changing the image of people with disabilities from dependence to independence. The cast includes Stephen Drabicki, Pamela Sabaugh and Nicholas Viselli, mixing able-bodied, hard-of-hearing and visually-impaired actors.
The New York Times calls us “an extraordinary troupe designed to defy expectations”. The New York Post says we are “quite simply one of the most enjoyable companies in the country,” and The Village Voice touts us as “long purveyors of quality drama.”
According to Goldman tells the story of Gavin Miller, a former Hollywood screenwriter, who has left the industry to teach a college-level screenwriting course in the northeast. Jeremiah, a student in the class from Africa with an affinity for old films and Fred Astaire, proves to be a promising writer. Gavin and Jeremiah begin working on a Hollywood screenplay about Jeremiah’s life with the hopes of making it big. Gavin’s wife Melinda is less than thrilled to hear that her husband wants another shot in Tinseltown.
Out of town reviews:
“Entirely fresh and captivating”– Talkin’ Broadway
“It’s a pleasure to experience.”– Central Record
“Savvy and insightful…”– Courier Post
To purchase tickets, learn about discounts or more information please contact us at:
Hope to see you at the show,
Samantha Plakun
This Red Door/Kunsthalle Galapagos January 30th
Le Scale By Robert Mueller
Le Scale
It felled me with a twist
along the heights
amongst rancorous rocks
she was there
she was not there
what longings have I mixed
My Poets by Maureen N McLane: A Review
by Elisabeth Watson
The single “illustration” in Maureen N. McLane’s 2012 book, My Poets, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2012) is a reproduction of page 200 from her undergraduate Norton Anthology of English Literature: Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”, surrounded by a college freshman’s cloud of marginalia, or as McLane calls it, “a series of failed attempts, graspings, and gropings.” The immediate impression that the one “image” makes is very much the same as that which My Poets builds over the course of the book. To revisit the “painstakingly bubble-written marginalia is to revisit not only a prior self but a prior reading self–which for me, as for many whose subjectivities were formed in dialogue with literature, have long been close to identical.” McLane undertakes to interrogate and critique her own voice as it has existed beside those other Voices, and yet to realize, in wonder, that, had it not risen to answer–however wrongheadedly–those other voices, her voice as she knows it would not exist at all.
The memoir-as-reading list is certainly no innovative project. But in reading McLane’s memoir, I began to suspect that the distinction between books that shape a life and writers who shape a life is not an insignificant distinction and one worth preserving. My Poets is defined by being just that and not My Poems. Most of the book’s chapters are devoted to a single poet or group of related poets as seen through the lens of one poet (“My Shelley/ My Romantics”), and each essay is relatively dependent upon the sprawling messiness and transformations that characterize a lifetime of writing poetry (as opposed to any completion sought out in a single poem or even a published collection of poetry). The line between written works and writing lives–McLane’s very much included–is necessarily blurred when one chooses to wrestle with poets’ voices as expressed across years and decades as opposed to the deceptively timeless and more portable form of beloved poem.
Most notable in McLane’s prose style throughout the memoir is her attempt to echo those “voices” she’s discussing in her own writing. This is obviously a risky business: who, for example, has not read an attempt to vetriloquize Gertrude Stein, and who, having done so, ever wants to repeat that experience? But, working through McLane’s project, I came to admire this occasionally embarrassing risk she took, if only because how true such a risk is to her project as a whole: when we find ourselves, over years and lifetimes, bound to specific poets, are we following anything so much as specific voices, even as those voices change? And beyond any objective appreciation or benefits, what does the reading “ear” take in that doesn’t somehow enter the writing “voice?”
I was made to consider what exactly I’ve been clinging to ever since I stumbled across a copy of The Wild Iris as a teenager in the public library, and in the decade since that has never found my nightstand without a changing cast of Louise Glück’s books keeping Iris company. It’s not so much that I want to write “like” Glück, as I want my own writing always to be changed by whatever runs through her voice and her vision. McLane’s willingness to change her voice with the voices she’s evoking might at times be tiresome, but her motivation feels true to the always imperfectly met desire to hear our own voices transformed by the voices we’ve heard and loved.
Those more “purely” poetic projects that interrupt the book’s essays certainly fit into this theme of “voice,” but are, perhaps, the least effective parts of the whole. In particular, the two centos, lines taken both from those poets who have essays dedicated to them in the book and those who do not, are, among other things, confusing because of how obvious they seem–a poem whose voice is composed of the mingling of other voices…but then what? In contrast, the poetic interlude of “My Translated: An Abecedary” is specific enough, and clearly necessary, angle on the theme of the whole as to be effective on both an rhetorical and emotional level. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the power and ache of translation so perfectly evoked by something so simple, little more than a list of names: “My Dante is Dorothy Sayers, still. / My Mahmoud Darwish is Fady Joudah and also Catherine Cobham and Sinan Antoon. /…My Fredrico Garcia Lorca is a vast field of devotion, including W.S. Merwin, Stephen Spender, and Lysander Kemp.” And on and on.
The story of her life that McLane weaves through her exploration of the poetic voices that have shaped it is fractured and tantalizing. If I could have increased any aspect part of this book, it would have been the author’s own story. But if the tale she tells of herself, refracted through many other voices, is not always compact, its own kind of clarity emerges, always vivid. Most memorable to me, months after I read a preview version of the chapter “My Marianne Moore” in Poetry, was McLane’s winsome whiplash of rhetoric, no matter what her topic, by which she shows mercy toward a thing she has just damned, or, more accurately, toward that which she has just tempted the reader into damning:
“My great vocation was not to feel ambivalent. This was, of course, childish. It bespoke the vain purity of the child. Which I should have honored.”
Or, “Wholehearted, wholehearted! That is all you longed to be. Everything would be sacrificed for that. Not least your marriage. And rightly so. You thought. And still think.”
And again: “late twentieth-century boosters who look to poetry to ‘save us,’ as if we could be saved, as if we were designed to be saved, and perhaps we are–”
“Life is surprising like that so is poetry,” she writes. “Most people do not wish to be surprised especially once they have announced their team and bought their team uniforms.” With characteristic playfulness, McLane never undermines the sometimes-devastating stakes of that surprise. But only the return to past difficulties, an act inherent to both autobiography and re-readings of difficult poems, grants access to what surprise has the power to do: “To make visible my presumptions: this is what breakdowns and impasses allowed.” And, one would certainly add, what poetry allows as well.
Lee Klein on Back to Blood
That Miami is not an easy place for harmony to take effect is correct and another point one could flag him on is that the status one feels one feels one has obtained and who one sees oneself as is for Wolfe the defining factor of America. However late in the game here imperceptibly our characters transcend as the African American police chief goes out on a limb for the Cuban Rookie cop seeing not his race but a fellow man in blue.
Lee Klein
George Spencer on Poetry Thin Air
Wed@ 8:30 PoetryThinAir …Ch.67
Manhattan… on Time-Warner 12/26/12
George Spencer
interviewed by
Robert Roth
writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction,
author of Health Proxy and publisher of
the literary magazine
AND THEN
video: mitch corber
edit: george spencer & mitch corber
If you can’t catch George and Robert on cable
go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxG7JiGO8II
Howard Pflanzer on Arts(Performing)@Tribes
The Arts(Performing)@Tribes presents:
Howard Pflanzer…Multimedia Artist
on Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Tue, 12/25 at 8:30 PM, channel 34
Tue, 1/8 at 8:30 PM, channel 34
Tue, 1/15 at 4 PM, channel 56
You can also see the documentary at
HOWARD PFLANZER FINAL MNN from george Spencer on Vimeo.
Please note that the first 60 seconds of the video
on Vimeo is black. The documentary starts at 1 minute.
Poetry Thin Air with Ron Kolm tonight
FIRE ESCAPES, WATERFRONTS & ROOFTOPS AS URBAN LANDSCAPE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
“FIRE ESCAPES, WATERFRONTS & ROOFTOPS AS URBAN LANDSCAPE,” A SOLO EXHIBITION BY EUGENE HYON, A NEW YORK-BORN ART PHOTOGRAPHER
New York, December 5, 2012—Emerging artist/photographer Eugene Hyon
will exhibit sepia tone and digital color photographs for one week in Steve Cannon’s art gallery at A Gathering of the Tribes, located at 285 East 3rd Street, 2nd floor, between Avenues C & D. After January 25, 2013, this exhibition will be extended to February 1, 2013. Closing Reception Party will be held Saturday, February 2, 2013 between the hours of 5:00PM-7:00PM.
The theme of the exhibit is a photographic series that calmly observes those features that make buildings part of an urban landscape, which on the surface is man-made in structure, yet is made physically natural and spiritually alive in its use and occupation by people.
I create with a painter’s eye for composition. Each photo is evidence of the patience required to get things just right and my attention to craft and detail is what holds a viewer’s attention. Stillness, elegance and classical proportion are the stylistic characteristics that make my photographic compositions. A viewer never senses overweening intention or manipulated intervention. What is uplifting occurs simply and as a result of patient witness in which that kernel of hope ultimately shines through. Soulfulness is that crucial element that prevents my photography from becoming lost in the noise of the temporary and trivial.
The gallery at A Gathering of the Tribes was chosen for its strong sense of history, artistic neighborhood atmosphere and relevance to the exhibit’s photographic subject matter. The popularly known “Tribes” on the Lower East Side was founded by Steve Cannon, author, well-known mentor of emerging contemporary artists and an iconic figure of the Lower East Side art scene.
For further information about the art photography of Eugene Hyon:
80 La Salle Street, Apt. 7G
New York, NY 10027-4713
1.646.388.2962 (cell)
E-mail address: eugenehyon@hotmail.com
Web site: http://local-artists.org/user/9203
